News
Android Wins, Microsoft Loses, Apple Flat in Latest Mobile Sales Figures
In the Q1 2011 sales figures for mobile devices, released by Gartner today, shows that Android-based devices have taken the lead with 36 percent of the market thanks to the more than 36 million units sold. This is a huge jump from the year-over-year numbers, which had the Google-based OS selling 5.2 million units for 9.6 percent of the market in Q1 2010.
As for Microsoft's mobile OS-compatible devices, the news isn't as good: The company sold close to 3.7 million units in the first quarter of the year, finishing up at the bottom of the list among mobile OSes with 4.4 percent. This also accounts for devices running both Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Phone 7 platforms.
"Windows Phone [7] saw only modest sales that reached 1.6 million units in the first quarter of 2011, as devices launched at the end of 2010 failed to grow in consumer preference and CSPs continued to focus on Android," Gartner wrote in a summary of its findings.
However, Gartner did predict that Nokia's support will help Microsoft's numbers. That's due to the fact that the Finnish device manufacturer lead all competitors with 25.1 percent of the market and 107.5 million devices sold in Q1 2011, despite losing 5.5 percent, year-over-year, and dropping to its lowest market levels since 1997. The first Nokia devices running Windows Phone 7 are rumored to hit the market later this year.
As for the other mobile OS platforms, despite dropping almost 17 points over the same time period last year, Symbian hung onto second place, with 27. 6 million devices sold. Apple gained more than a point to end the quarter with 16.8 percent of the market and 16.9 million devices sold. Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry OS, stumbled in the beginning of 2011, dropping almost 7 points to 12.9 percent and selling 13 million devices.
The overall market continues to grow, with the total worldwide numbers of communication devices totaling 427.8 million units, which accounts for an increase of 19 percent over Q12010. Gartner analysts speculated that the numbers would have been higher if it were not for some "high-profile" announcements of upcoming devices coming in the second half of this year.
Gartner also speculated that those platforms that support a robust developer network and features a high variety of applications will continue to see growth. "Every time a user downloads a native app to their smartphone or puts their data into a platform's cloud service, they are committing to a particular ecosystem and reducing the chances of switching to a new platform," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. "This is a clear advantage for the current stronger ecosystem owners Apple and Google."
Gartner's sales figures for each OS platform is shown below:
Mobile OS |
Q1 2011 Units Sold (Thousands of Units) |
Q1 2011 Market Share (%) |
Loss/Gain over 2010 (%) |
Android |
36,267.8 |
36.0 |
+ 26.4 |
Symbian |
27,598.5 |
27.4 |
- 16.8 |
Apple iOS |
16,883.2 |
16.8 |
+ 1.5 |
RIM BlackBerry |
13,004.0 |
12.9 |
- 6.8 |
Microsoft |
3,658.7 |
3.6 |
- 3.2 |
Other |
3,357.2 |
3.3 |
- 1.1 |
Source: Gartner |