Android on the rise

Gartner just released it’s Q3 report over mobile and smartphone sales. Mobile phone sales are up 35 percent and smartphone sales are up a whooping 95 percent and now totaling 19.3 percent of overall mobile sales.

Hardware wise Nokia is dropping about 10 percent market share. Apple continue to flourish with almost twice as many units sold as last Q3, but only increasing market share slightly. HTC is more than doubling the amount of sold units compared to last Q3, and almost doubling the market share.

Looking at the figures from an OS perspective the rise of Android is clear. Even though some have had very good sales (Apple) and other still doing quite decent (RIM) it’s obvious that Android is the strongest trend. Symbian is loosing almost 10 percent market share, RIM although selling over 3 million units more is still loosing 4 percent market share. Apple gaining about 1 percent market share even though doubling sales. Meanwhile Android sold over 19 million units more than last Q3 and thus increased market share by 22 percent to 25.5 percent.

This changes the placings in the top 5 sold units by OS category making Symbian still no1 at 36.6%, Android second at 25.5%, iOS third at 16.7%, RIM at 14.8% and at fifth place Microsoft Windows Mobile at 2.8%.
I’m predicting that Microsoft will rise considerably from the 2.8% to Q32011 with the sales of Windows Phone 7 driving their sales.

Windows Phone 7 so far is a very good OS, and has great potential with good performance and a steady influx of new apps to it’s marketplace. However, there are still a few things that feel very “v 1.0” about it so Microsoft needs to keep development pace up and start getting patches out there.

I’m very interested in seeing if the WP7 update process will be as good as the regular Microsoft PC OS updates, if so they’ll have a major advantage over competition. However, they need to start using it soon!

More articles about statistics here.