Since the launch of Windows Phone 7 from a number of different manufacturers, Microsoft has declined to give figures for the number of users, saying only that 2m have been "shipped". Nokia's chief executive Stephen Elop announced in February that the company will be phasing out Symbian smartphones over the next 18 months or so.Įlop said then that Nokia's new smartphone OS supplier will be Microsoft, with its Windows Phone offering - but that made a poor showing as well in its second quarter on sale. The Symbian smartphone OS, used on devices from Nokia and by Sony Ericsson, collapsed from a dominant 44% share a year ago to second-placed 27% in the first three months of the year. Source: Gartner.īut the data contain bad news for Nokia and for Microsoft, which saw their shares dwindle substantially.
Smartphone mobile OS share 1Q 2007-1Q 2011. While Nokia still dominates in the "feature phone" space, both its number of units and market share fell to their lowest level since 1997. Smartphones made up 23.6% of the total 427.8m mobile phones shipped in the quarter, up from 15.1% at the same time last year. Apple doubled the number of iPhones sold to end users, to 16.9m, says Gartner.
The figures show that the smartphone market that grew by 84.9% in volume compared to the first three months of 2010, but that only Apple's iPhone and Google's Android grew sales more quickly than the market, which increased to 100.8m devices. New data from the research company Gartner shows that Google's Android mobile operating system has conquered the smartphone market, vaulting over Nokia's outgoing Symbian OS to capture 25.1% of the worldwide high-end market in the first quarter of 2011 with a sevenfold growth over last year. Nokia in particular faces a period in which "things are going to get much uglier before they get better", one analyst warned. New figures for the mobile phone business show encouraging news for Google's Android and Apple's iPhone but reinforce the bad news for Nokia and its new mobile OS partner Microsoft.