iPhone sales help fuel big smartphone market gains in 2009

Everyone is talking about smartphones these days, and that has translated into a huge increase in the iPhone’s smartphone market share, which in turn has helped boost smartphone sales for 2009. Apple saw its iPhone sales hitting almost 25 million units in 2009, giving Apple a 14.4% share of the worldwide smartphone market. Given the iPhone’s 8.2% share of the 2008 market, Apple’s smartphone increased its slice of the pie by a class-leading 6.2 points.

But, Apple wasn’t the only winner last year. BlackBerry smartphones, made by Research In Motion (RIM), took home an extra 3.3% of the smartphone space, giving it 19.9% share. Android OS expanded its reach 3.4%, bringing the Google mobile operating system into single-digit market share percentages (up from 0.5% in 2008). That’s a big milestone for Android, as it continues to make itself known through headlining new handsets like the HTC Legend, Google Nexus One, and Motorola Droid.

Unfortunately, things aren’t all roses for all smartphone platforms. Nokia’s Symbian phones lost ground to the tune of 5.5% in 2009, leaving the giant Finnish phone maker with just 46.9 of the global smartphone market. Windows Mobile shed nearly a quarter of its share, dropping 3.1% to end the year with 8.7% share.

Meanwhile, smartphones sales hit 172 million units last year, which amounts to a healthy 24% increase in smartphone sales over the previous year. In contrast to that kind of impressive growth, the overall mobile phone market remained stagnant, with 1.2 billion units sold.

In the end, Nokia and Symbian are still the giant Siamese-twin gorillas in the room, with BlackBerry following a distant second. If things keep going in this direction, Android will soon overtake Windows Mobile and give up the No. 2 smartphone spot to the iPhone. But, that’s assuming the newly revealed Windows Phone 7 Series doesn’t stem the exodus from Microsoft’s mobile operating system.

No matter how you slice it, the smartphone pie keeps growing. We like what we’re seeing here.

[Via: Gartner]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

kilari

I hope WebOS takes off a little bit more. However I do like having an awesome phone that not everyone and their moms pet chihuahua have. I’m actually surprised that Android has as low of a overall sales % that it does. Cus I know more people that have bought Android phones than I do people who bought iphones this year. Oh well. I hope Apple dies in a fire.
hary

“Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Symbian phones lost ground to the tune of 5.5% in 2009, leaving the giant Finnish phone maker with just 46.9 of the global smartphone market.”

Isn’t it surprising at the lack of knowledge of the author here?
Is Nokia the only company in the world that makes Symbian phones? (Sure they are the major player, but are they the only ones?)
Nokia’s share of smartphone market is lower than 46.9, but the percentage of lost ground is less than 5.5% than Will Park tries to convey to everyone.
Can you not do fair reporting? Or were you really ignorant of this fact?
hary

Oh and it also seems that Will doesn’t read other author’s post on Intomobile itself.
Simon Sage on page 2 has another article where it is shown Nokia loses 2.4% along with the chart above presented together.

So two authors reporting two different things using the same charts. And surprisingly, 2 different articles using the same chart, which could have been combined into just 1 article. They just carry different heading with this one being more iphone centric to garner more clicks.