Smartphone sales boom as Android takes off

Smartphone sales increased by 48.7% to 54.3 million units in this year's first quarter, according to research company Gartner, Inc. Smartphones are a small but extremely profitable sector of a mobile phone business that sold 314.7 million units, a 17.0% increase on the same quarter last year. Nokia remained the top supplier in both categories.

"This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android's momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

Gartner also confirmed what NPD had said earlier: in the US, more smartphones shipped with Google's open source Android operating system than Apple's closed proprietary iPhone OS.

Worldwide, Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS, selling 24.1m units for a market share of 44.3%, down by 4.5 percentage points. RIM came second with 10.6m sales and a 19.4% share, ahead of Apple's iPhone OS with its 8.4m sales and 15.4%. (Symbian is used mainly by Nokia, while RIM makes BlackBerrys.)

Sales of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones were almost flat at 3.7m units, which meant its market share fell by 3.4 percentage points to only 6.8%. Linux dropped 3.3 percentage points to 3.7%.

In the phone market, the top three suppliers -- Nokia, Samsung and LG -- took almost two-thirds of the market. Nokia sold 110.1 million units in the quarter for a 35% market share, though this was down by 1.2 percentage points compared with last year's first quarter. Nokia was followed by the two South Korean rivals, Samsung (20.6%) and LG (8.6%), then by RIM (3.4%), Sony Ericsson (3.1%), Motorola (3.0%), and Apple (2.7%).

Although RIM did well to make the top 5, its total sales (10.6m units) were still smaller than Nokia's increase in phone sales (12.7m units). However, Nokia's growth wasn't enough to get it back to its 2008 level, when it sold 115m phones in the first quarter.

Gartner's Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst, said that e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smarter phones. "To compete in such a crowded market, manufacturers need to tightly integrate hardware, user interface, and cloud and social networking services if their solutions are to appeal to users," she said.

Source: The Guardian