Apple in second place as smartphones surge
The iPhone was the story in the worldwide smartphone market last quarter.
(Credit: Apple)Apple's blowout quarter for iPhone 3G sales lifted it into second place among all smartphone vendors worldwide.
Canalys released market share stats on Thursday showing strong growth for the smartphone market even as the worldwide economic situation takes a turn for the worse. A total of 39.9 million smartphones were shipped during the third calendar quarter of the year, a 28 percent increase over last year's totals.
Nokia is still the leading vendor by a comfortable margin, holding 38.9 percent of the market. But shipments declined slightly, and market share fell 12.5 percent, compared to last year, as Nokia goes through a transition from older models to newer devices that are just getting out into the market, according to Canalys.
Apple was the big story in the smartphone market during the quarter, vaulting over Research In Motion to take second place, with 6.9 million shipments, or 17.3 percent of the market. And RIM had an excellent quarter, increasing BlackBerry shipments by 83 percent and picking up five points of market share.
Canalys thinks that RIM is in good shape to regain the second-place spot with the pending release of several new BlackBerry models, including the Bold, Storm, and clamshell Pearl. It's unclear whether Apple will be able to sustain that level of iPhone 3G shipments during the fourth quarter, given how new the company is to this market.
When the numbers were sorted by operating system, a similar picture emerged. Symbian is the market leader, due to its close association with Nokia, but Apple and RIM are the second- and third-place vendors, respectively. Symbian lost market share during the quarter that was snapped up by Apple, RIM, and Microsoft.
Despite the Apple juggernaut, Microsoft also posted solid gains during the quarter, increasing the number of Windows Mobile handsets shipped by 42 percent. However, Apple shipped more iPhones during the quarter than all the Windows Mobile devices shipped worldwide by Microsoft's partners, according to Canalys.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
When was this ever about mac os x?
I'm betting the MSFT apology choir will have a damned hard time spinning this one, and I'm further willing to bet that a lot of the professional naysayers in the tech punditocracy are about to get really quiet on the subject...
Good luck to RIM and Nokia on catching up in the next quarter or two. That said, the chances of RIM hitting it are the better of the two, and even there it's not looking good.
I think things are about to get very, very interesting in the next few months...
/P
and now you report:
"Apple shipped more iPhones during the quarter than all the Windows Mobile devices shipped worldwide by Microsoft's partners"
How much do those guys get paid again? It's too much.
The test now becomes whether they can sustain at this level. They have raised the bar and the other vendors will inevitably reach it and perhaps pass it. Can they raise it again or will they be a one-hit wonder?
By the way, the iPhone is not a smartphone.
Unless, of course, you can't. And if you can't then you're just talking out your a**.
In no way does it have OS X underneath. It is derived from OS X, in the fact that it uses DARWIN. But saying it has OS X underneath is like saying a bicycle has a motorcycle underneath. They have the same fundametals but are very different.
"That it doesn't have feature X that you or some other vendor thinks defines the SmartPhone category is just hair splitting."
How else would you define things? If a plane doesn't have wings it's not a plane, it's a land speed record setting automobile. Even AT&T says its not a smartphone. "iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone" - AT&T. Enough said fanboys? It's not a smartphone, and it's not a laptop replacement. It's a cool phone or jesusphone or whatever you want to call it, but it's not a smartphone.
That figures. They are also enslaved to the metric system of measurement which is soulless, devoid of poetry, and élan.
Exactly! We wouldn't be in the position of the leading world power had we adopted the metric system. Sure it is fine in scientific and engineering fields, but for every day use nothing beats the the old measurements.
"96,560 Kilometers Under the Sea", it really rolls off of the tongue. :)
Although Apple did raise the bar and lower the price, I think other venders, RIM and T-Mobile, didn't really try to follow the price of iPhone. Both ROM Bold and G1 sell or similar price with only 1G of memory and try to tell thier customers this is as good as iPhone's 8/16 G. So price wise, there still isn't any competitor for iPhone.
"The test now becomes whether they can sustain at this level."
Still doubt? I can tell you that there are still people waiting for their current plans to mature out to move to iPhone. That will be next May for me. Still wait patiently.
Since when can the Iphone send MMS Messages?
Btw: I have a 3G and its NOT a smartphone. You canīt edit excelsheets, you donīt have a good or even decent texteditor - you canīt even send attachments with emails.
ITS A TOY! A good toy and i love it - but its not for work (yet)
Having said that, just because there are features you want that are not included now, doesn't mean its not a smartphone. iPhone is easily the "smartest" phone I've ever had. And you may be surprised to learn that not every business person on this planet needs to edit excel documents on his phone.
And no im not just bashing the iPhone, I have one and I love using but lets stop playing blind to reality. For a phone that brought such a technological jump in a sense, it is missing very basic features of a smartphone. Forget MMS simply not being able to edit, or download a spreadsheet to my iPhone is a lack of it being a smartphone, not being able to attach anything to an email is ridiculous.
Its almost ready for work...the iphone just worked its way up from the stock room to office intern
The iPhone is my primary phone right now because of the music and video experience and the fact that most of my iTunes are DRMed so I can't move my music over to a real smartphone yet. The multimedia on the BB is getting better with every OS. So when I leave DRM purgatory, that is probably where I will go.
OS X: Sleek, user-friendly, currently virus-free, $129, 18%+ market share
Linux: Open Source, some distros user-friendly, FREE, ~7%
Free and Open Source doesn't mean it's going to dominate the market, buddy. Heck, one of the only reasons Linux is so popular among geeks is the Open nature of the platform. Otherwise it would largely be a dead OS (and I have nothing against Linux, don't get me wrong).
Apple, like usual, released and improved a product that is now the #1 selling phone in the US, little more than a year after releasing the first model. Apple is trending upward, and currently shows no indication of slowing that trend. Be realistic.
Still, typing anything more than an SMS or short email is painful unless there is a provision to attach regular keyboard through USB or Bluetooth Interface.
Good to know that Apple with Just One model out for only a few months outsells all Windows Mobile phones from more than a dozen Microsoft partners, that have been selling these models for a few years now.
Congratulations Apple and way to go.
- by Spanwite November 9, 2008 7:54 AM PST
- How many Carrier Apple has in each Country? 1
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (46 Comments)How many different Phone Apple has on the Market?1
How many Years is Apple on the Market?>1
And what have the others?
How many Phones from Rim and Msoft, for how long?
It seems to me they produced Products everyone wants? Like the big three Car maker? Until they get forced to take a new direction showed from a newcomer. Quantity vs. Quality.
By the way I don't have a iPhone nor a Computer from them.