Mac OS now bigger than Windows in smartphone market

Growing Apples

Market research outfit Gartner has released its figures for the Q3 smartphone market and they won't make comfortable reading for Microsoft.

The figures reveal that, in cementing its position as the third biggest smartphone maker in the world, Apple has also overtaken Microsoft in the smartphone operating system race.

Mac OSX has now overtaken Windows Mobile in terms of quarterly sales to take the number three spot. The iPhone and RIM's Blackberry smartphones have both gained a fair bit of market share at the expense of Nokia, Sharp and, we suspect, Windows Mobile based HTC devices.

Apart from the general popularity of the iPhone, an indication of the causes of this shift was given by Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. "In 2009, application portfolios will become one of the key strategic considerations for smartphone market players and, if successful, they deliver an alternative revenue stream and will improve consumer stickiness," she said.

Table 1
Worldwide: Preliminary Smartphone Sales to End Users byVendor, 3Q08 (Thousands of Units)

Note: Under the name HTC, Gartner counts only the company's own-branded devices. The devices that HTC designs for mobile operators are shown separately under the operators' names in these statistics.
Source: Gartner (December 2008)

Table 2
Worldwide: Preliminary Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System, 3Q08 (Thousands of Units)

Note: The "Others" category includes sales of Sharp Sidekick devices based on the Danger platform.
Source: Gartner (December 2008)