Continued Growth in Smartphone Market
Linux starting to gain momentum.
The IT and telecom analysts at Canalys have been hard at work analyzing the smartphone sales and market share numbers from 2006. You can see the fruit of their labor in a research release that came out a few days ago.
For the most part, it seems like this report contains more of the same info that we’ve been hearing everywhere; continued strong worldwide growth among the few major handset manufacturers. Most of the stats offered in this report seem to back up that trend, but there are a few new and interesting forces at play here that could make the future of this market sound quite interesting. Here’s some of the high points:
Just over 64 million smartphones shipped worldwide in 2006. This is up 63% from 2005 (39.4 million units). Nokia, RIM, Motorola, Palm, and Sony Ericsson are the top 5 worldwide smartphone manufacturers (in that order).
Nokia/Symbian continue as worldwide leaders. Nokia is by far the dominating factor in this market with just over 50% marketshare (next closest is RIM with just over 8%). And, where you find Nokia you’re sure to find Symbian, so it’s no surprise that Symbian owns 67% of the OS market for smartphones (next in line is Microsoft with 14%). However, with all its worldwide dominance, Nokia still isn’t a major player in North America, where RIM and Palm still rule (about 75% of their shipments were in N. America).
Unconnected handheld market dropped 41%. This seems to bolster the fact that the world is moving toward a converged device. Shipments dropped 33% in 2006 (5.6 million units). The days of the vanilla PDA seem to be over as more and more options for converged devices present themselves. Although, as Michael Mace will tell you, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should expect complete mobile convergence anytime soon (maybe ever).
Linux makes some headway. For me this is the most interesting part of the article. Linux has surpassed Palm’s Garnet OS with 6% share in 2006 with continued growth expected. This is largely due to Motorola’s success with Linux based handsets in Asia.
“Shipment volumes of Motorola’s Linux smart phones in Asia, particularly China, still significantly overshadow those of its Windows Mobile ‘Q’ in North America.” – Rachel Lashford, senior analyst, Canalys.
It seems to be a fair assumption that Linux will continue to gain marketshare in 2007.
Read the full article.