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.
Apple has managed to develop the third-best selling smartphone in the world, according to a new report from Canalys.
The market researcher's latest tally of the "smart mobile device" market found that Apple's iPhone had 6.5 percent of the worldwide market in the fourth quarter. That might not sound like a lot, but it's good enough for third place behind Nokia, which has a whopping 53 percent of the market, and Research In Motion, which has 11.4 percent. And last year, of course, Apple had 0.0 percent of this market.
Canalys doesn't provide an exact definition of what exactly constitutes a "smart mobile device" in the press release touting the research, but said it's talking about smartphones, handhelds, and wireless handhelds. That segment comprised about 35.5 million devices in the fourth quarter, a small fraction of the overall cell phone market's 300 million units in the fourth quarter.
Apple's iPhone is the third-leading smartphone in the world, behind Nokia and RIM.
(Credit: CNET Networks)But it's growing quickly: 60 percent from 2006 to 2007, and 71 percent from last year's fourth quarter to this year's, according to Canalys. Asia and Europe purchase the bulk of the world's smartphones, but shipments to the U.S. doubled last year.
In the U.S., Apple's actually in second place behind RIM's BlackBerry, outpacing Palm and, believe it or not, all Windows Mobile devices combined. The company managed fifth place in Europe during the quarter, despite shipping the iPhone in just the U.K., Germany, and France--and starting almost midway through the quarter.
Don't see 6.5 percent and assume that Apple has already hit CEO Steve Jobs' goal of 1 percent market share by the end of 2008. Jobs was referring to the overall market at the time the iPhone was launched, which was doing about 1 billion units a year. Still, it's excellent progress for Apple in its first year in the market, and shows that even if Apple can't control how people use the iPhone, people want it.
Another interesting tidbit from the release: Shipments of Linux-based smartphones were flat in 2007, despite the strong growth in almost every other segment of the market. That's Google's hope for Android, that it can take the promise of a mobile operating system based on Linux and actually get some traction.
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