Gartner report on Q3 smartphone market: Android keeps dominating

The market analysts from Gartner have posted their report on the smartphone market in Q3 and have outlined some pretty interesting trends. The market as a whole grew by 5.6% and Android saw its share more than double and its total shipments nearly triple compare to Q3 of 2010.

The Google OS powered more than half of all smartphones sold in the third quarter. That's a total of over 60 million units shipped, which adds up to over 650 thousands for each day of the quarter. The sequential increase in the market share of the platform is quite impressive as well - 9.1 percent points.

Symbian took a distant second place with a market share of 16.9%. Its shipments fell both sequentially and year-over-year and it's pretty certain that this is the last quarter when Symbian is the second best-selling platform.

In third place, iOS suffered a minor setback as Apple missed its regular iPhone refresh pattern and sales of the platform took a rare-to-be-seen sequential dip. Still, the shipments were much higher than in Q3 of 2010 and back then we had a new iPhone in the market. The gap between iOS and Symbian stood at just 1.9 percent points in Q3, which is less than the iPhone 4S sold in its first day of existence.

RIM keeps struggling to match the growth rate of the market as a whole and while it maintained its 4th place and shipment volumes both YoY and sequentially, it keeps losing market share. BlackBerry powered just 11% of the smartphones sold over the past three months and with Windows Phone finally about to mount a serious challenge runs the risk of being relegated to the role of an also-run.
Interestingly though, Windows Phone is still unable to make any kind of serious impact and its sales are decreasing, instead of increasing. With a market share of 1.5% it was even overtaken by Bada, which now sits in fifth place.

Moving on to the other interesting bit from the Gartner report, the manufacturers' ranking, we see that Nokia has retained its top spot, though the gap to the second-placed Samsung is quickly closing.

LG comes in a very distant third and it too is on its way to being overtaken by Apple. RIM already knows how that feels as the company lost to both the Apple and ZTE in Q3 2011 and is now sixth.

And if RIM doesn't improve its performance right away, it risks falling victim to the fast growing HTC and Motorola, too. Even Huawei isn't that far behind.
Sony Ericsson comes last of the major manufacturers with a market share of just 1.9%. The joint-venture, which is on its way to becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony, shipped less than 8.5 million units in the past three months and unless it picks up its game, it might become another member of the dreaded Others group in some of the next reports.

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iPhone 4S sales, already strong to the point of setting records, will see a boost now that the iOS 5.0.1 update has quashed the battery bug which had scared off some potential buyers. That’s set to mark a turning point in smartphone sales this quarter which will see the iPhone and iOS platform return to gaining marketshare as the rival Android platform loses marketshare for the first time since its introduction. Last quarter, the one in which potential iPhone buyers were left staring blankly as Apple let the traditional summer iPhone launch window go by without releasing anything or saying a word, saw the iPhone’s iOS marketshare stay flat from the previous quarter. In other words, Apple failed to launch a new iPhone when it was supposed to, and yet sales still stayed about the same. Meanwhile Android gained a single percentage point of marketshare last quarter…

This quarter Apple released the iPhone 4S which has set early records in terms of preorders, launch day sales, and carrier-specific sales. That alone means that iOS will have increased marketshare once the current quarter’s numbers are reported. Signicantly increased. Those sales have to come from somewhere, and while the iPhone 4S is puling in customers from various competing platforms, enough of it’ll come at the hands of Android to erase the latter’s one percent gain and then some. Factor in Sprint customers who had been on Android because it was all Sprint offered, who have now moved to the iPhone 4S because it launched on Sprint, and it becomes clear that Android marketshare will trend negative in the current quarter. Throw in the additional iPhone 4S sales boost taking place now thanks to the release of iOS 5.0.1 and the end of the overblown battery issue (which only affected a small fraction of users to begin with), and the scales tip even further…

Even after hard numbers are reported which show a decline in Android marketshare, Android cheerleaders will still claim their platform is “winning” by quoting activation numbers, a fuzzy figure which can include everything from the “activations” which take place after an OS upgrade or reinstall to each time a prepaid Android buyer turns on each new disposable phone. But activation numbers can safely be ignored, and once the marketshare numbers for the current quarter are finalized, it’ll be clear that the iPhone 4S has tipped marketshare growth in Apple’s favor, at the expense of Android along with other platforms like BlackBerry. Here’s more on the iPhone 4S.

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