World smartphone sales: Apple closes on RIM...
...and becomes US' leading phone maker
Apple has narrowed the gap between the iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry, heating up the battle to be the world's second biggest seller of smartphones.
According to market watcher Strategy Analytics, Apple accounted for 16.4 per cent of world smartphone shipments in Q1 2010 - just 3.3 percentage points behind RIM.
Apple's Q1 tally is two points up on the 14.4 per cent share it scored for 2009 as a whole. RIM's share remained static, at 19.7 per cent. Year on year, it was effectively static too: falling a fraction of a percentage point from the 20.3 per cent share it achieved in Q1 2009.
Apple, on the other hand, saw its share jump from 10.6 per cent in the same timeframe, SA's numbers show.
Neither is yet able to challenge the mighty Nokia, which recorded a Q1 2010 share of 40 per cent, according to SA, up from 38.2 per cent in Q1 2009 and 38.8 per cent for 2009 as a whole.
The gains made by Apple and Nokia came at the expense of the 'others' category, which saw its share fall from 30.9 per cent in Q1 2009 to 23.8 per cent in Q1 2010.
Apple shifted 8.8m iPhones during the quarter. That now makes it the US' biggest phone manufacturer, Motorola having just announced that it sold 8.5m handsets - of all kinds - during the three-month period. As SA's numbers show, Apple is still behind RIM, but the BlackBerry maker is Canadian, don't forget.
During Q1, overall smartphone shipments hit 53.7m units worldwide, up almost 50 per cent on Q1 2009's total, 35.9m. ®
COMMENTS
Nokia
The problem with these stats is that every Nokia Series 60 phone counts as a smartphone. The reality is that's very far from the case. Most S60 phones are just glorified feature phones, and do nothing more than a similarly price Samsung or LG.
Only a few N and E series phones from Nokia can truly be considered smartphones. I wonder what %age of sales these make up? How would RIM, Apple's and others' market share look then?
@Ken
Which s60 device do you not consider a smart phone? Can't think of a definition of SmartPhone that includes the iPhone but excludes any S60 device.
What's a smartphone
@Ken 7: curious what you definition of SmartPhone is.
I would actually go the other other way and say that Nokia's smart phone shipments are underestimated, since a lot of S40 devices are pretty feature-packed, and you can install apps on them as well.
A quick (rather unscientific) look at the Nokia line suggests the iPhone is sort-of equivalent to a mid-range Nokia S60.
a little bit of a bias in your reporting
The second part of your article comes from an idc report where the big news is actually that rim has moved into 4th place in the mobile phone market and yet the only things you mention about that was again about apple.
Most of the N and E phones, I'd say.
There are a lot of N and E series phones that would quallify as smartphones. And they're damn good as well!
