Hirdetés
The market of smartphones has increased by 28 percent to 39.85 billion dollars in Q3 2008 (compared to the same period last year). The market has nearly doubled in the United States, while due to the 43 percent expansion of the Central- and Eastern-European region there has been an increase of 21%. The market leader is still Nokia's Symbian, although their share of 68.1% from last year has dropped to 46.6%, while Apple has increased its share from 3.6 percent to 17.3 and thus they became second. The Canalys Q3 2008 survey has also shown that the market of smartphones is in a continuous expansion, no matter the global financial crisis. 13% of all sold handsets have been smartphones in 2008 Q3. This value has been 11 percent in the previous period. The global launch of Apple iPhone has also been an important factor in the growth of expandable solutions.
Pete Cunningham, market analyst at Canalys, said that Apple has been expected to take over the second position, but the 80% growth of RIM is also notable. Apple, RIM and Windows Mobile handsets have become more powerful at the expense of Symbian, preferred by Nokia. Nokia, although having some serious results with N95 and E66, is loosing more and more share due to the slow launch of touchscreen solutions, even though the manufacturer has gained some experience four years ago with 7710. It still seems that the user interface of Apple iPhone and HTC Diamond are more attractive for the users in this segment. It is clear from the answers of more than thirteen thousand users that they prefer touchscreen handsets when listening to music, browsing the web and navigating. The Finnish manufacturer is a leader in full GPS integration thanks to Maps and Ovi, but other manufacturers are also successful in convincing users about the presence of such features.
Symbian is expected to remain first in 2009, but their advantage might be shrunk to a minimum due to other operating systems, Google Android being one of the possible important factors. The evident advantage of Apple and RIM is that they have full control over the development of their own operating systems. After acquiring Symbian Nokia will be in a similar position, but no serious expansion is expected before the launch of the unified interface. As we know Motorol and Sony Ericsson have backed off from Symbian UIQ. The Japanese-Swedish manufacturer is waiting for the unified and open-source Symbian system, but meanwhile they are using Windows Mobile on the new Xperia series, while Motorola concentrates on WM and Android solution, but they also want to use Linux solutions in some models.
Translated by Szaszati
