Samsung has just announced that their Android powered Galaxy S is the first smartphone to sell over 2 million units in South Korea. Considering it launched less than 6 months ago, that’s quite an achievement. They’ve also said that as of last Friday (December 17) they’ve sold 9.3 million units globally and that they should have no problem crossing the 10 million threshold by the end of the year. For the sake of comparison, the iPhone has sold only 1.8 million units since going on sale in November 2009. We’re frankly a little bit shocked that Samsung is slowly becoming the largest manufacturer of Android powered smartphones, surpassing even HTC, who not only made the first Android handset, the G1, but also a wide variety of models, including the Nexus One, all of which have sold surprisingly well.
Mobile World Congress is due to take place in less than 2 months and there’s little doubt in our minds that both HTC and Samsung are going to announce some killer hardware. The recently available Nexus S is nice for being the first handset to run the latest version of Android, version 2.3 Gingerbread, but it’s really old hardware when you sit down and think about it. Time for dual core processors, higher resolution screens, and more, to come to market.
Speaking of Samsung, they’re also going full steam ahead with their home grown Bada smartphone platform and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. The people have spoken, they want Android, so why waste millions of Euros and thousands of man hours building something that isn’t even liked that much? The next version of Bada is due to hit some time in 2011 and it’ll include a totally new SDK for developers, along with support for NFC and even built in handling of operator billing systems. Will anyone care? That’s another question all together.
[Via: Unwired View]