According to new figures to have come out for the mobile phone business, the future looks bright for the devices based on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms; however, there seems to be bad news for Nokia and its recent mobile partner Microsoft. New data which has been released by the research company Gartner says that the Android mobile OS from Google has become the leader in the smartphone market, overtaking Nokia’s diminishing Symbian OS to dominate 25.1% of the world’s high end phone market in the first quarter of this year, growing over seven times from the figures last year.
According to the figures, the market for smartphones registered a growth of 84.9% in terms of volume as compared to the first few months of 2010, and only Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android had sales surpassing the growth of the market itself, which increased to more than 100.8 million devices. The number of iPhones sold to end users doubled to 16.9 million by Apple, stated Gartner. 23.6% of the total of 427.8 million mobile phones shipped in the quarter constituted of smartphones, a growth from the 15.1% that was seen at the same time last year. While the feature phone space is still dominated by Nokia, both its market share and number of units sold have fallen to their lowest level since 1997.
The data features bad tidings for both Nokia and Microsoft, as their shares dwindled substantially. The Symbian OS, which is used in Nokia and some Sony Ericsson smartphones has collapsed from its dominant position of 44% market share last year to the second place with a market share of 27% in the year’s first three months. Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia, had announced in February that the Symbian OS will be phased out by the company by 2015. Elop had then announced that Microsoft would be Nokia’s new smartphone OS supplier, with its offering of Windows Phone OS; however, even that made a poor run in its second quarter sales according to Gartner. Since Windows Phone 7 was launched from a number of different manufacturers, Microsoft has always declined to declare the figures for the total number of users of the platform. Now, Gartner claims that only 1.6 million Windows Phone devices have been sold to customers in the first quarter (out of a total of 3.5 million Windows Mobile registrations), also adding that the devices which were launched at the end of 2010 failed to gain support of the consumers.
