News

Android Leads Pack in Global Smartphone Race; Apple's iOS Third

• By Chris Paoli
• August 11, 2011

In the latest report by Gartner, 428.7 million new smartphones have been sold globally in the second quarter of 2011 -- an increase of 16.5 percent over the same period last year.

As for the overall year, sales are up 74 percent over 2010 numbers. However, compared to the first quarter, sales were down 4.4 percent in 2Q2011, but are still ahead of Gartner's previous projected figures.

"Smartphone sales continued to rise at the expense of feature phones," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a press release. "Consumers in mature markets are choosing entry-level and midrange Android smartphones over feature phones, partly due to carriers' and manufacturers' promotions."

Many manufacturers offered deep discounts and promotions in the second quarter due to an influx of units on hand. Companies like Nokia and LG increased their stock at the end of the first quarter in anticipation of a possible hardware shortage due to the earthquake in Japan. However, the natural disaster did not affect new unit shipments as projected, causing manufacturers to offer sales to lighten loads.

As for the mobile OS battle, both Android and Apple's iOS saw bumps in their market share. Google's platform jumped 26.2 percent from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011 to take a commanding 43.4 percent of the wordwide market share.

While Apple's jump wasn't as impressive, it did claim 18.2 percent of the market -- an increase from last year's 14.1 percent claim. Apple found success, even though the rumored iPhone 5 is on its way thanks to its OS spreading to 42 new carriers and 15 new countries.

Both Apple and Android are the fastest groing mobile OS platforms, with its combined market share doubling over the same time last year to finish with 62 percent of all smartphones on the market.

The only other winning OS for the quarter was relative newcomer Bada, found on a handful of Samsung devices. It jumped a whole percentage point to settle with 1.9 percent of the market. While it may not sound too impressive, it was still better than Microsoft's mobile grab, which stumbled 3.3 percent over last year's numbers to finish with 1.6 percent of the overall market share.

Source: Gartner

On the device manufacturer front, Nokia still holds onto the top spot with 22.8 percent of the worldwide market. However, this is a drop over quarter 2 of 2010, where it had 30.3 percent of all smartphone sales. Garner analysts are predicting this downward trend to continue for the device manufacturer for the remainder of 2011.

"The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokia's greater concentration in retail and distributors' sales, saw Nokia destock more than 9 million units overall and 5 million smartphones, helping it hold on to its position as the leading smartphone manufacturer by volume," said Cozza. "However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokia's channel is pretty lean."

For the second quarter of the year, ZTE, HTC and Huawei Device showed positive growth, according to Gartner's market share report.

Source: Gartner