It’s time to be ready for rumbling, as the recently released report by Gartner and IDC on smartphones is going to give us a clear idea about the mechanism how things take shape globally. It is to be noted that IDC is involved in measuring vendor shipments while Gartner has counted actual handset sales to end users. So, what information does it reveal to us?
To begin with, if we talk of smartphone devices, as per the claims made by Gartner, there has been an increase of 48.7% in the smartphone sale with total numbers of unit sale touching 54.3 million units in first quarter of 2010 as compared to 2009 figures by IDC which were showing growth of 56.7% with total of 54.3 million unit during the same period. It is clear that both the estimates are far ahead than the estimates provided by Gartner and IDC on global growth rates in sale of mobile phone units with both standing out at 17% and 21.7% respectively.
In the list of IDC’s top 5 smartphone manufacturers, Nokia is leading the tally with total 39.3% of share which is same as its Q1 2009 results. Compared to this, RIM has witnessed a slight depreciation in its share as compared to 20.9% of 2009, it managed to grab only 19.4% of share in 2010. Moving further, other major players like Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) which amazed with its splendid performance grew its device shipment to more than double during last year, and players like HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) also followed the growth story, and raised their shares on higher volumes.
Coming on to statistics regarding smart phone OS market share, it easily gets revealed that Android proved a major success in US if we look at the former’s global numbers with share of Android devices in US rose to 9.6% compared to 1.6% last year. It is the first time that windows mobile failed to make its place in top 5 due to booming year-on-year growth of Android devices touching 707% mark, as claimed by Gartner. The growth story does not end here, and has covered many other players too including Apple’s iPhone OS which jumped to 15.4 % growth rate in Q1 2010, compared to 10.5% for the same period last year. However, the picture is not rosy for RIM and Symbian with former went down to 19.4% from 20.1% last year, while later also dropped to 44.3% than last year’s 48.8%.