Open-source handset sales to soar
Android to lead the pack?
Shipments of smartphones running an open-source operating system will grow by more than 100m units a year over the next few years, Juniper Research forecasts.
Sales of devices such as the HTC Hero – a handset based on Google's Android OS - will increase from 106m units in 2009 to a whopping 223m per year by 2014, according to the analyst firm's latest research.
Sixty per cent of the mobile phone OS market is already open source, the market watcher estimates, and the OS and associated applications now play an “increasingly important role in the differentiation of new smartphones”.
Both elements are a key deciding factor that users turn to before choosing which smartphone to buy, Juniper also said. So much so that a manufacturer’s OS choice "is now critical".
Juniper’s research mirrors recent figures from rival market watcher Strategy Analytics, which forecast that Android smartphone shipments will increase a whopping 900 per cent during 2009 over last year.
COMMENTS
@ Eponymous Cowherd
"If the criteria for 'open' was that it must be possible build your own version of the OS and install it on the phone then I imagine the list would be a *lot* smaller.
As far as I know Android is currently the only properly open phone OS in that Google provide full source code and build instructions completely up-front."
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Distributions
SI system
@vincent himpe, in the SI system, m by itself means meter I should say, mm is milli-meter mA is milli-Ampere etc. Also 105mPhone should be 0.105 phones and not 0.15 phones. You wanted to be accurate, at least try to get it right next time. And no, Android sales are not on the 'milli' scale, they are more on the 'million' scale, especially now that there are more offers available.
As for opensource OS's 60% seems a bit high, even for phones. Still, a lot of them are Linux based but that doesnt mean they are open source.
milli ?
According to the SI system 105m is 105 milli ... as in one thousandth ..( 1/1000) so 105m would be 0.15 phones ... 105M would be 105 million.
Oh wait .. Open source os. Never mind. Milli is probably right.
I used to have an Open Sores OS
It was called Windows Mobile 6.1
Symbian ???
Well, Symbian's meant to be open-source by now (I think we can consider we're past the first half of 2009), but maybe they're running a little late!
