Android market share shoots up

Time to get paranoid

Market researcher Gartner has revealed the worldwide mobile phone market grew by 17 percent year-on-year in Q1 of this year. But the figures for smartphones were much more remarkable, with an almost 50 percent year-on-year increase.

"In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006," said Carolina Milanesi, research VP at Gartner.

"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 per cent year-on-year."

The tables for overall unit sales and for smartphone sales by operating system both make interesting reading. While the market share declines of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola continue, this is less in favour of other big OEMs than smaller, white-label manufacturers like Hong Kong's G-Five and ‘others' (where's HTC? - Ed).

Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Having said that, Apple nearly doubled its market share and RIM continues to make gains. Despite this, the big winner in the smartphone OS battle in the past year has been Google's Android. Almost ten times as many Android phones were sold in Q1 2010 than a year ago, and it effectively stole share from everyone except Apple.

Extrapolating these figures, it won't be long before iPhone and Android overtake BlackBerry and start threatening Symbian, which continues to decline. Microsoft lost a big chunk of market share in the past year, while the absence of webOS from this list shows HP didn't buy much market share with Palm.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 1Q10 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (May 2010)