Smartphones - which ones are winning?
Jinfo Blog

13th August 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Last week IDC released 2nd quarter statistics on global smartphone sales and if there was any doubt whether Google's Android has achieved traction, it's been dispelled. According to the IDC press release (http://digbig.com/5bcejt), the market for smartphones as a whole continues to boom, climbing 50% in 2Q 2010 over the same quarter last year to reach 63 million units shipped during the quarter. "For the first half of 2010, vendors shipped a total of 118.3 million units, up 54% from the 76.8 million units shipped during the first half of 2009", according to the IDC release. While Nokia remains the dominant smartphone vendor worldwide, with 38.1% market share, suppliers of devices powered by Google's Android operating system including HTC and Samsung are coming on strong, with growth rates at 128% and 173% over last year, respectively. The pie is getting bigger, but these emerging smartphone suppliers who have partnered with Google are definitely eating into the slices traditionally held by Nokia, Research in Motion (currently #2, with 17.8% of market share), and even Apple (#3, with 13.3% of market share). Gartner Research released its own figures on the smartphone market on August 12 and while the market shares differ by a few percentage points, the picture that emerges is consistent: increased competition in the form of Android-powered devices is driving down price points and impacting the market leaders of smartphone devices. According to Gartner figures (http://digbig.com/5bcejs), Nokia lost 2.6% of its market share compared to last year and is under increasing pressure to buttress its platform and branding strategies. Gartner predicts continued growth in the space, fueled in part by the increasingly common strategy of offering tiered data plans to smartphone buyers. This, along with lower device price points, will lower barriers to purchase as well as the overall cost of ownership - good news for info pros seeking to exploit mobile technology in the enterprise. But Android's been in the news for other reasons in the past few days, thanks to the discovery of a Trojan virus aimed specifically at Android-powered phones. It sends SMS messages to premium rate numbers - essentially, co-opting telcos into collecting funds from the phone's owners and depositing them into the bank accounts of the virus creators. With security concerns remaining a potent obstacle to wider enterprise implementation, Google - along with every other supplier of smartphone operating systems - needs to keep security and privacy solutions on the front burner.

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