Gartner: Q1,2010 Mobile Phone and Smartphone market shares

The Gartner Global mobile phone market share data for Q1, 2010 was released a day back and according to Gartner, Global mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010, a 17 per cent increase from the same period in 2009. Smarpthone sales to end users reached 54.3 million units, an increase of 48.7 per cent from the first quarter of 2009. Among the most successful vendors were those that controlled an integrated set of operating system (OS), hardware and services. (Read that as Apple who have registered a 112% growth YOY)

Q1’10 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.

Growth in the mobile devices market was driven by double-digit growth of smartphone sales in mature markets, helped by wider product availability as well as mass market price tags. Increasing sales of white-box products in some emerging regions, in particular India, also drove sales of mobile phones upward. We expect sales of white-box products to remain very healthy for the remainder of 2010, especially outside of China.

The rise of white-box manufacturers from Asia has also helped the “others” section, as a proportion of overall sales, increase its market share to 19.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2010, up 2.7 percentage points. This is having a profound effect on the top five mobile handset manufacturers’ combined share that dropped from 73.3 in the first quarter of 2009 to 70.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2010.

In the smartphone OS market, Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010.Android moved to the No. 4 position displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time. Both Android and Apple were the only two OSs vendors among the top five to increase market share year-on-year. Symbian remained in the No. 1 position but continued to lose as Nokia remains weak in the high-end portfolio.As seen with the iPad and web books based on Google’s Android platform, mobile OS ecosystems are developing and will move beyond smartphones to continue to deliver consumer value and a rich user experience.

Mobile e-mail, rich messaging and social networking will continue to drive demand for smartphones and enhanced phones that feature full qwerty hardware keyboards.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. Just adding a qwerty keyboard will not make a device fit the communication’s habits of today’s various consumer segments.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013