iPhone sales outstrip Windows Mobile handsets

Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 December 2008 02:17

IT Industry - Market

Apple's iPhone has pulled ahead of Windows Mobile based devices in the smartphone market, according to a leading analyst firm. While the iPhone is also catching up with the BlackBerry, Symbian is still the platform to beat.

A good quarter for Apple has come at a time when the overall smartphone market has slowed, according to figures issued by Gartner.

Worldwide smartphone sales in 3Q08 grew just 11.5 percent year-on-year to a total of 36.5 million units.

"The current economic climate is negatively impacting sales of higher end devices," said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

Cozza predicted continuing slower growth, suggesting that current data plan rates are too high to attract mainstream users.

Leading vendors' market shares for the quarter were Nokia 48.7 percent (down 3.1 percent), RIM 15.9 percent (up 81.7 percent) and Apple 12.9 percent (up 327.5 percent).

Nokia suffered from the lack of a commercial touch-screen device, Cozza suggested. "It is unfortunate that the [N97] will not be available before the first half of 2009 as this is a competitive product in today’s market."

HTC's 4.5 percent market share is understated because Gartner only includes handsets sold under the HTC brand, omitting those made for particular carriers.

Platform figures generally reflect the vendor results.

Symbian still leads with 49.8 percent of the market, followed by RIM on 15.9 percent, Mac OS X on 12.9 percent, and Windows Mobile on 11.1 percent.

In October, Apple announced it had already achieved its target of selling 10 million iPhones during calendar 2008. Total iPhone sales exceed 13 million.

What's happening at the regional level? See page 2.