After passing Research In Motion to become the world’s No. 3 smartphone maker, Apple’s iOS is in striking distance of another once-great mobile phone maker, Symbian. During the second quarter, iOS rose to 18.2 percent of the global market while the Symbian platform shed nearly half of its 2010 strength.
After dropping to just 22 percent of the global market, down from 40 percent of smartphone sales during the second quarter of 2010, Symbian is likely to soon give up its No. 2 position to Apple. Thursday, Nokia announced Symbian is essentially dead in the United States.
Another once-great mobile brand, BlackBerry-maker RIM, also received bad news from Gartner’s quarterly report on smartphone sales. RIM, which has bad-mouthed Apple all the way to the poorhouse, lost seven percent of its marketshare. The company fell to 11.7 percent of global smartphone sales, down from 18.7 percent during the second quarter last year.
In a sign of the growing strength of Samsung’s new Bada smartphone OS, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 – Nokia’s lifeboat – lost to the new OS; 2 million Bada-based smartphones sold during the second quarter, up from just a bit more than half a million units in 2010. By comparison, Microsoft sold just 1.7 million Windows Phone 7 handsets during the second quarter, down from 3 million in 2010.
If that’s who lost smartphone market share, who’s taking up the slack? The usual: iOS and Android. Apple’s global market share rose to 18.2 percent, up from 14.1 percent a year ago, on twice as many units sold: 19.6 million versus 8.7 million, according to Gartner.
Google continued its dramatic rise as Android-based smartphones controlled 43.4 percent of smartphones during the second quarter, up from 17.2 percent during the same period in 2010.
