Its an Apple V Android battle but look out the Chinese are coming.
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Smartphones are on the up, according to analysts Gartner with worldwide sales soaring to 149 million in Q4 2011, almost a 50% jump (47.3%) from the same time 2010.
Why?
The sell-out iPhone 4S launched in October mainly, propelling Apple to No. 1 smartphone spot in 2011, although Samsung did very well also with 34 million sales of their Galaxy’s in Q4, compared to iOS rivals 35.4m.
Almost one in four smarties sold last quarter were iPhones, meaning Droid has lost its top spot. For now.
Total smartphone sales in 2011 hit 472m and accounted for more than one third of all mobile devices sold (+58%), meaning king Nokia are still ahead of both Apple and Samsung overall, selling a whopping 111.6m devices, although this marked a slight decline on 2010 figures.
Samsung, also strong on basic feature mobiles enjoy 92.6 million mobile sales (including smartphones), putting it behind Nokia as No. 2 maker globally, which corroborates other analysts findings.
Read: iOS Rule: Nokia, Droid Drool – Apple King AGAIN Here
But Apple is now the 3rd mobile phone vendor in the world, even though it doesn’t sell any low end mobiles, overtaking LG, Gartner’s latest figures show. Apple had an “exceptional” fourth quarter, analysts noted.
“Western Europe and North America led most of the smartphone growth for Apple during the fourth quarter of 2011,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.
And Cupertino’s dominations looks set to soar even further as availability of the iPhone 4S widens although Gartner analysts expect sales to decline quarter-on-quarter in 2012.
But look out Apple, low cost Chinese brands ZTE (No. 4) and Huawei (No. 6) in smartphone rankings are on the prowl and were the fastest-growing vendors in Q4, and both “benefited from consumers’ interest in low-cost smartphones,” analysts noted.
“These vendors expanded their market reach and kept on improving the user experience of their Android devices,” said . Cozza.
On the OS battlefront, competition between Google and Apple iOS also intensified and Android’s share declined slightly due to strong iPhone 4S.
Samsung remained the main contributor to Android gains in the second half of 2011. iOS’s market share grew but Gartner expect its share to drop as the upgrade cycle to the iPhone 4S slows.
Nokia’s first Windows Phone smartphones, the Lumia 710 and 800, made their debut, but, sales were not enough to save Microsoft’s market share from falling to just 1.9%
Other loses in smartphone race were LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (No. 7), who again recorded disappointing results as they struggled to improve profits significantly.
But the smartphone industry may have peaked and expectations for 2012 are for the overall market to grow by about 7%, while smartphone growth is expected to slow to around 39 %, says Annette Zimmermann, research analyst at Gartner.
And who will be the leaders next year?
Nokia proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its new Lumia 710 and 800 handsets but have to continue to offer aggressive prices to lure telco’s away from Android, warns Gartner.
The troubled economic environment in Europe and Nokia’s weakened brand status posed challenges that were hard to overcome in just one quarter.
RIM, who dropped over 10% marketshare delay with its BlackBerry 10 platform will further impair its ability to retain users and biggest challenge is still to expand the developer base around its ecosystem and convince developers to work with BlackBerry 10.
