Report: Apple iPhone Could Own 40 Percent of Smartphone Sector

10:58 am, January 13th, 2009, Ed Sutherland

Apple could control up to 40 percent of the smartphone market by 2013, UK-based Generator Research announced Tuesday. The company predicted the iPhone would grab marketshare at a time when Nokia and other cell phone players are battered by poor economic conditions.

Nokia, the current cell phone leader, could shrink to just 20 percent of the market, contends the research firm. The prediction is counter to Nokia’s own outlook. Earlier this month, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told the Financial Times the economic mess could hurt rivals and help the Finnish company known for low-cost phones.

Not to be deterred, the British researchers said Apple could parlay the combination iPhone and App Store into another iPod-iTunes success.

In December, the iPhone’s Mac OS X operating system passed Microsoft’s Windows Mobile for second place behind RIM’s proprietary OS used by BlackBerry phones.

After RIM’s 15.9 percent share of mobile operating systems, Apple’s OS X accounted for 12.9 percent, followed by 11.1 percent for Windows Mobile, according to Gartner.

Symbian-based phones still lead all mobile handsets with 49.8 percent of the market, the research firm said.

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Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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