Day: May 20, 2011

“Gartner have released data that allows us to paint a picture of the mobile industry in general during Q1 of this year. So without further ado let’s get straight into those figures! As a whole the mobile phone industry saw a 19% rise in sales year on year for a totalof 427.8 million in Q1. Smartphones, according to Gartner “… continued to outpace the rest of the market …”. Indeed smartphones made up 23.6% of all mobilephone sales during Q1, which year on year is an increase of 85%. As for the individual manufacturers it was something of a mixed bag with the general trend being one of losing market share. Nokia, for example, saw their market share drop from 30.6% in Q1 2010 to 25.1% in Q1 2011. That was based off of sales of 110.105 million in Q1 2010 compared with 107.556 million in Q1 2011. The other major players didn’t do much better though; Samsung fell from 18% to 16.1% whilst LG fell from 7.6% to 5.6%. It wasn’t all doom and gloom though as Apple bucked the trend and increased its market share from 2.3% to 3.9% and saw sales of 16.883 million in Q1 2011 comapred with 8.270 million in Q1 2010. RIM too saw an increase in handsets shipped, 13 million in Q1 2011, up from 10.752 million in Q1 2010. Unfortunately for RIM that wasn’t enough of an increase to see their 3% market share increase, but at least it meant that it didn’t go down either.

When we turn to smartphones we see a healthier picture though. Android’s amrket share leapt up from just 9.6% in Q1 last year to 36% in Q1 this year. That was based on sales of 5.226 million last year and 36.267 million this year. Symbian, by contrast, saw its market share free fall from 44.2% to 27.4%. iOS saw a modest rise from 15.3% to 16.8% and RIM’s increasingly poor receptiona mongst customers continued as it saw its share fall from 19.7% to 12.9%.The smartphone market as a whole is increasingly being dominated by Android as it takes Symbian’s place as the world’s preferred platform. To a lesserextent iOS is also a major player; whilst it has less reach and market share than Android it is still showing growth whereas other platforms are either declining or making little real headway.” via mobile-review.com

“The CEO of ST-Ericsson got chatty in front of Forbes and said that Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 devices will be powered by the U8500 dual-core CPU and its successors will go on to power Windows Phone 8 phones too. So far, Windows Phone 7 devices have been exclusively powered by Qualcomm chipsets (due to Microsoft’s limiting guidelines, which were revised recently). ST-Ericsson’s CEO however says that they will be one of two chip suppliers for Nokia’s WP7 phones (he didn’t say which was the other one).The first Nokia devices will use the dual-core U8500 chipset, which has been seen running at 1.2GHz. Things might change by the time these devices come out, but they may be the first dual-core Windows Phone 7 handsets.The CEO also said that over the course of 2012 Nokia will release 12 Windows Phone 7 devices that will be based on future versions of the U8500 chipset. He also believes that ST-Ericsson will be a key supplier for Windows Phone 8, yep that’s 8.The Mango update is v7.5, so Windows Phone 8 is already very likely in the works (and the rumor mill suggests that it and Windows 8 will be closely related).The U8500 has a powerful Mali-400 GPU, the same as on the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II.” via gsmarena.com