Apple takes smartphone lead
Top of the US chart in Q4
Apple topped the US smartphone chart in the final three months of 2011, pushing past all its Android rivals. Well, just - and it's losing ground in the tablet arena.
Ask Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, a market watcher, how much of the US smartphone market Apple took in Q4 2011, and it'll put the figure at 44.9 per cent, Reuters reports.
A crushing blow to Android? Not quite - its market share fell, yes, but only to 44.8 per cent. That puts them neck-and-neck in our book.
Indeed, as Nielsen, another market watcher, revealed last week, among new smartphone owners, Android retained the top slot in Q4 2011.
During that period, Android's share to 46.9 per cent - ahead of Apple's 44.5 per cent. Nielsen's numbers come from interviews with consumers rather than shipment figures.
Still, it's a market share reduction of 5.2 per cent - in Q3 2011, Android accounted for exactly half of the market - and comes at a time when the Google OS was supposed to be steadily increasing its market share.
Google was hit relatively likely by the iPhone 4S' success. Microsoft, by contrast, saw its market share plunge below two per cent in nine major territories, the research firm said, including the US, the UK, Australia and much of Western Europe.
In the tablet space, Android increased its global market share, from 29 per cent to 39 per cent, market watcher Strategy Analytics said, those ten percentage points coming straight off Apple's. ®
COMMENTS
Moving goal posts
Used to a time where you measured one companies products against another. IBM sold X boxes, Gateway sold Y boxes, Apple sold Z boxes. The fact that the first two ran the same OS wasn't really part of the headline.
Yet now Apple is so dominant in the smartphone sector the only reasonable comparison is to compare them against the mulititude of companies offering Android devices. These aren't small business's either - Samsing, HTC, Motorola, et al are all giant, multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet Apple still has close to half the global market, and the only meaningful measure is to compare them against all the rest combined (fast-sinking ships like RIM and Nokia excepted). Amazing.
(btw, before I get called a fanboi, I don't like Apple, and I don't own a single Apple product, but I think they're a remarkable company)
Name one phone that was banned for sale in the US during the period covered by the figures.
Apple failed against Samsung (and Samsung aren't pursuing Apple in the US), won against HTC but with that ruling not to come into effect until the 19th of April this year and even then only if HTC don't disable some minor interface features, and Microsoft's attempts to get Motorola handsets banned are still ongoing.
In other words...
One company (Apple) is still selling more smartphones in the US than all the companies selling Android smartphones put together.
That's sort of impressive.
Parochial? Not us.
"US, the UK, Australia and much of Western Europe"
Just love the parochialism - rather a lot of small countries, like Germany, France, Italy, Spain ... lumped together under "Western Europe"; UK, not even the biggest or richest in Western Europe, Australia, not that vast and does NOT include NZ (I assume it was subsumed into "Australia") get individual mentions. As for poor old Canada, wonder if that was included (bit bigger than Australia and a slightly different accent plus extra language from USA.
How about, "N. America, Western Europe and Australasia"? Then again, what happened to little areas, like India, Southern Asia, Japan? Even a small part of their population buying something can dwarf somewhere like UK and even more so, Australia. Does all those S. American couintries not use mobiles?
Anyway, as someone else pointed out, Apple is one firm, Android is any number of firms and (mostly out of date) versions. Nokia mobiles are rather wide spread and one can reasonably argue that any S60 and even the later S40s are as "smart" as Android or IOS.and still being sold in large numbers around the world.
As for tablets: if one maker has got almost 100% of the wider market, it takes very few sales of a new make to reduce its market share.
Who pays for these surveys? How tdo the surveyors make their money? Can any of them count? Thez would do better to walk up and down busy streets, trains, trams and buses and count what they see. Who on earth believes manufacturers or sellers with their rather strong interests?
It is like taking the commentators on The Register as representative. Ugh.
re: .... IBM sold X boxes....
Er, no. Thats Microsoft that sell them.
