Samsung's Bada outshipped WinPho 7 in Q3
Android ahead of all; Symbian ahead of Apple
Poor old Microsoft. Even Samsung's Bada smartphone OS is more popular than yours.
So the latest figures from market watcher Gartner reveal. In Q3, just under 2.5m Bada smartphones shipped around the globe, it said today.
But only fractionally more than 1.7m handsets with a Microsoft OS shipped during the same period.
It'll surprise no one to learn that Android was pre-loaded on most of the smartphones that shipped during the period: just under 60.5m of them.
World Smartphone Shipments Q3 2011
Source: Gartner
Symbian stayed ahead of Apple's iOS. It was alloted second place by Gartner thanks to shipments of 19.5m units - just ahead of the 17.3m iPhones that shipped in the same timeframe.
Should Apple be annoyed? Nah. Gartner also detailed the smartphone business' most profitable players, and Apple is way ahead of the pack. CEO Tim Cook's company will take a staggering 66 per cent of the profit made by the world smartphone industry in 2011.
If it can do that on just 15-18 per cent of the smartphone shipments, it's laughing. Even if Google's OS takes a considerably bigger share of the smartphone market than it already has. And Apple may yet use that profitability to drive down the cost of its handsets to fight for market share if it feels really threatened.
Second-placed Samsung will take just 15.6 per cent of the industry's profits, rather more than the six per cent it took in 2010. Then, Nokia accounted for 10.7 per cent of the profits - this year it will barely register, Gartner's numbers show.
Back to the handsets and their operating systems: RIM came in fourth place - well ahead of fifth-placed Bada and Microsoft at six - with 12.7m shipments. ®
COMMENTS
Re: not being first might suit apple
With the release of Android 4 code I think there will soon be a bunch of other players jumping in the ice cream sandwich to up the Android share even further. It also likely means the Cyanogen folks are already in process.
Larger margins
High margin, lower volume goods may well be profitable in the short term, but history shows that cheaper higher volume goods tender to win out in the end. Just look at x86 vs ppc/sparc/alpha etc.
Bada is interesting
It will take a few quarters before we know if it is going to be a strong competitor.
Samsung Wave I
Well I bought a Samsung Wave 1,5 year ago mainly because it had great hardware, was considerably cheaper than the Galaxy S and was a tad smaller.
When I do check the application store there's little there that looks interesting. But to be honest I am not really interested in app beyond the stock ones.
There's a bada sdk and IDE based on eclipse. Developer interest in the west seems to be minimal and even waning. Have a look at www.badadev.com
RIP RIM
This looks really really bad for RIM, already worth less than its assets...
