Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
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No, what the study shows is that Android has had the biggest
growth over the last 6 months. That's a different thing from "most popular".
Android's growth seems to have been mostly at the expense of RIM (Blackberry), with Apple holding steady. (Though it's likely that Apple has been hit, too: they haven't
lost market share, but neither have they gained. I suspect people who might otherwise have been tempted by an iPhone have been seduced by the droid side of the force.
)
Worldwide, the leader is still Symbian.
The smartphone market is in a state of flux, and it will be curious to see where it falls out.
Nokia bought the part of Symbian it didn't own from the consortium of cell phone makers that controlled it, and has been busily making it open source. They may have been inspired by the success of their Internet Tablet line, using the Linux based Maemo platform and an open source development model. (The new Nokia N900 tablet is also a cell phone.)
After the Palm Pre has disappointing sales results, Palm put itself on the block, and was acquired by HP, which seems to have plans for Palm's Linux based WebOS.
Lots of folks have Android based devices in the pipeline. The best known is probably the Motorola Droid, which has been a smash hit, and put Moto back in the cell phone race. (There were industry rumors that Moto was looking at exiting the cell phone business after failing to come up with a successful follow up for their popular Razor line.)
Microsoft is supposed to be doing a rewrite of Windows Mobile, so we'll probably see
something based on it, and Access Corp. in Japan has been pushing their Access Linux Platform to Asian hardware vendors.
And it appears that Android has some name recognition on it's own, and will be an incentive for buyers playing the "my phone is cooler than yours" game.
We'll see.
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Dennis