Mobile Phone Market Research
Mobile Phones: Market Share by Phone Brand
During the last three months of 2005, more than 235m mobile phone units were sold, the biggest quarter on record since 2001. Demand in emerging markets and falling subscription rates in more developed economies helped boost sales. In more mature markets, such as Western Europe and North America, replacement sales were also a significant growth factor.
Nokia upped its share to 35 per cent in Q4 2005 from 33 per cent in Q4 2004. Motorola consolidated its position in second spot by moving up from 16.3 per cent to 17.8 per cent while Samsung sales were flat at 12.1 per cent (12.2 per cent, Q4 2004). LG (7.2 per cent) and Sony Ericsson (6.9 per cent) both increased their slice of the market. BenQ dropped back from 6.5 per cent in Q4 2004 to 4.7 per cent in Q4 2005.
Mobile Phones: Market Share by Operating System
Operating systems that can be found on mobile devices include Palm WebOS ,Symbian OS, RIM's BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Familiar Linux, Palm OS, The Ångström Distribution, and the iPhone OS. The Open Handset Alliance's Android is a recent smart phone addition touted by Google and T-Mobile (which launched the G1 phone on October 22, 2008). The OHA hopes Android will gain 4% market share by year's end.[14]
The most common operating systems (OS) used in smartphones are in Q3 2008:
Symbian OS from Symbian Ltd. (46.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008 [15])
Symbian has the largest share in most markets worldwide, but lags behind other companies in the relatively small but highly visible North American market.[16] This matches the success of its largest shareholder[17] and customer, Nokia, in all markets except Japan. Nokia itself enjoys 52.9% of the smartphone market.[18] In Japan Symbian is strong due to a relationship with NTT DoCoMo, with only one of the 44 Symbian handsets released in Japan coming from Nokia.[19] It is used by many major handset manufacturers, including BenQ, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.[20] Various implementations of user interfaces on top of Symbian (most notable being UIQ and Nokia's own S60) are incompatible, which along with the requirement that applications running on mobile phones be signed [21] is hindering the potential for a truly widely accepted mobile application platform. It has received some adverse press attention due to virus threats (namely trojan horses).[22]
iPhone OS from Apple Inc. (17.3% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
The iPhone and iPod Touch use an operating system called iPhone OS,
which is derived from Mac OS X. Third party applications were not officially supported until the release of iPhone OS 2.0 on July 11th 2008. Before this,"jailbreaking" allowed third party applications to be installed, and this method is still available.
RIM BlackBerry operating system (15.2% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
This OS is focused on easy operation and was originally designed for business. Recently it has seen a surge in third-party applications and has been improved to offer full multimedia support.
Windows Mobile from Microsoft (13.6% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
The Windows CE operating system and Windows Mobile middleware are widely spread in Asia. The two improved variants of this operating system, Windows Mobile 6 Professional (for touch screen devices) and Windows Mobile 6 Standard, were unveiled in February 2007. Windows Mobile is enjoying great popularity because of the low barrier to entry for third-party developers to write new applications for the platform[citation needed].
Linux operating system (5.1% Market Share Sales Q3 2008)
Linux is strongest in China where it is used by Motorola, and in Japan, used by DoCoMo.[23][24] Rather than being a platform in its own right, Linux is used as a basis for a number of different platforms developed by several vendors, including Motorola and TrollTech, which are mostly incompatible.[25][26] PalmSource (now Access) is moving towards an interface running on Linux.[27] Another platform based on Linux is being developed by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone.[28]
Palm OS developed by PalmSource (now a subsidiary of ACCESS)
PalmSource traditionally used its own platform developed by Palm Inc. Access Linux Platform (ALP) is an improvement that was planned to be launched in the first half of 2007. It will use technical specifications from the Linux Phone Standards Forum. The Access Linux Platform will include an emulation layer to support applications developed for Palm-based devices.
Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW)
BREW was developed in the USA by Qualcomm, Inc and is popular in North America. BREW is a mobile application development platform and end-to-end content delivery ecosystem. BREW has recently gained a foothold in Europe via the 3 Skypephones offered by network 3.
Android from Google (Released 22 Oct 2008)
Android, which was developed by Google, has yet to own even a small part of the smartphone market because of its recent release date. The OS is currently only on the HTC Dream (G1), running on T-Mobile USA's network. Android was developed as a platform that could be run on many devices. Although the Android operating system may be built to run on many devices, it is run exclusively on T-Mobile's G1 at the moment. Sprint also plans to sell an Android powered phone sometime in February or March of 2009.
Market Share data from Canalys report "Worldwide smart mobile device market, Canalys Q3 2008"