Android Blitz: Market Share Up By 629%

Google’s Android smartphone operating system has blitzed the smartphone market. Compared to the September quarter last year Android-based smartphones have increased their share of the smartphone mobile phone segment by a massive 629 percent. Twenty million Android-based smartphones were sold in the quarter.

The bulk of the market share taken by Android was lost by RIM and their Blackberry range. RIM have lost a staggering and hurtful 29 percent of their market share.

But even the King of the mobile phone world, Nokia, lost a huge—for them—18 percent of their market revenue in the smartphone space in the September quarter. Nokia have never experienced a drop like this in any mobile phone segment before.

Apple also lost ground, but only by 2 percent.

At this point Android has 25.5 percent of the entire smartphone market and forecasters are predicting that the Android smartphone platform will push through the 35 percent barrier by mid-2011. This will be at further cost to RIM, Nokia, and Apple’s market share.

My question is: What about Microsoft’s Phone 7?

A quick search of the Web shows up a number of forecasts for Android, Nokia, RIM, and Apple, but nobody seems to be recognising that Microsoft’s Phone 7 has been released. Does this mean that they all expect the Phone 7 to fail? Or is it that they don’t expect the Phone 7 to get much market share?

In relation to Phone 7 it seems the view is generally that Microsoft have entered the smartphone market too late and they have some really bad baggage associated with them when it comes to mobile phones: the Windows Mobile operating system and the failed Kin mobile phone. Even so, the Phone 7 interface is getting some very good reviews, and as some of the more astute reviewers are pointing out now, the Phone 7 is unique in one very interesting way. It is a perfectly acceptable and attractive personal-use phone while at the same time being an extremely capable and fully featured corporate-use phone.

I think that if the Phone 7 gets up a small head of steam and if the corporate world ‘discover’ it (and works out how good a corporate phone it is) then some forecasters might be surprised to find that Phone 7 starts to show up as a bar on their market share graphs.

(Shown at right is the HTC 7 Mozart Phone 7 now available from Telstra. Image links to a review by C|Net).