Why anyone would want a dumbphone in this day and age is kind of beyond me. Give me the iPhone on Verizon, and I’ll be very very happy (my iPhone has AWFUL coverage in Boston)

[...] by the end of the year.  Smartphones are hot, but currently account for a relatively small share (14%) of the total mobile phone market. We expect the penetration of Smartphones to rise sharply in the [...]

[...] Apple: More Marketshare Than Windows Mobile & Android COMBINED via techcrunch.com [...]

I am not surprised after seeing this, smart phone is going to capture the whole market world wide.

Symbian OS? Curious to know if the Nokia N-Series are still considered smartphones. They were a couple of years ago, but now they are just basic phones. SmartPhones age and become basic phones.

but then you need different terms.

And yet developers ignore 85% of the market when the only build for the iPhone.

Also, this does not take into account the phenomenal momentum that Android now has. Great to have this much competition in the marketplace.
Great innovation.

Solve the fragmentation problem, and developers would.

What Symbian market? What Blackberry market? Smartphone is too loose of a term between the iPhone and anybody else. I would consider Bb a phone and email phone with great reception, but with absolutely horrible internet capabilities.

And Symbian? I can’t even think of a quality phone that runs Symbian anywhere close to the performance of Android or the iPhone.

Perhaps most telling is that the iPhone and Android commands 81% of internet usage for smart phones. If the others had quality “smartphones” these two companies wouldn’t be pulling that large of portion (and that’s a big one).

I won’t shed a tear for Symbian or Bb. It was nice while it lasted

I think you need to add the iPod Touch on this

When will Android units surpass iPhone units? My guess Jan 31, 2011

Nokia smartphones are actually pretty good. I have used the E-series ones and they have very good functionality as a smart phone. I agree that they are not as great as iPhone when you compare screen or web 2.0 apps. But when you see the keyboard and technical details they are a good comparisons. One thing I wish Nokia absolutely needs and that is subfoldering for mail for exchange. I am not sure why they don’t do that yet.

Android is a Linux OS… is Linux really loosing market share if Android usage is increasing?

Any bets on whether or not Windows Phone 7 Series will save Microsoft from being referred to as Other on these charts?

As I’ve said many times before:
the smartphone is the computer!

What’s the definition of linux in the survey?
Because Android is based on linux…..

Raph

At the detail level, iPhone Developers ignore 98% of the entire market based on the line:

The iPhone, for all of its growth, made up only 2 percent of all mobile phone sales last year.

…..

Now, if tech blogs would agree to only dedicate 2% of their real estate to the iPhone and App hype, that would be cool (and proportional).

If we could all just get over this iPhone App thing as having any real world meaning, I’d be happier still…it’s a nice sandbox and great people do it…but, it’s not nearly as big a deal as those who read this (and other) tech blogs make it out to be. I’d be looking out for those who are developing with platform agnostic as their mantra and who remember that phones+text= primary use and reach.

[...] Techcrunch postou hoje o resultado de uma pesquisa aonde mostra as porcentagens de participação dos sistemas [...]

I think they will move up on the charts if they ever release the Zune Phone! :P

Android dint have many phones in 2009, 2010 has droid, nexus one an so many more, maybe android will do much better in 2010

Because of the size and the cost. I use to have a windows mobile smartphone back in 2006. After the first month, I quickly realized the stupidity of having to carry a bulky phone and having to pay the data plan while the only function I used was making phone calls. Now, I am back to a cheap dumbphone with 39.99$ per month plan and without the necessity of staying in the network for 2 years. Do you really need the smart phone functions?

iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone

[...] Read a original: Smartphone Sales Up twenty-four Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner) [...]

Hmm. How do these android numbers square with Eric Schmidt’s spiel of 60,000 android units being sold everyday, @ Barcelona?

The N Series basic phones?

Really?

You’re going to have to explain that one.

You sound like someone that back in the day when the world was moving to Windows 95 would have said we should focus on DOS.

It’s rather obvious the market is moving to smartphones and developers are going to go where the momentum is, not to mention app support on feature phones is just not there.

I think it’s the Symbian market that has download figures of over a million a day and is increasing this at a rate of 25% per month.

You also might want to consider the 81% figure since it’s based on ads focused on US centric sites. Since Nokia phone default to mobile sites – which are largely ad free – it misses them completely.

Over half of all internet access is now done on mobile devices. The vast majority of that is through Symbian devices.

Or, in other words, you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re writing about, do you?

@josh — BB Users are diversified, think Democratic Party, some use more features than others and have different needs and madates. iPhone users are more Republican and have one narrow view of the world, i.e. “apps are everything.”

Now, I happen to be a BB user who has: Google, Google Maps, Opera, BB browser, Gtalk, Gvoice, Twitterberry, Padora, RSS reader, Gizmo5, CNN, Weather Channel, Facebook, Flickr, Qik, Tag readers, etc. on my “phone call and email” device. I am not the exception, but, for some, they don’t care about all that stuff.

Diversity is a good thing. I won’t shed a tear for iPhone users when App developers start going out of business once ad-dollars realize they are only reaching a tiny percentage of their market.

Why? It’s not a phone.

When the largest storage option isn’t half or less that of the largest iPhone model. It’s currently 16 gb vs 32 gb, soon to be 16 gb vs 64 gb, and the Android only allows specific things to be stored there whereas the iPhone lets you do anything you want with it.

I know at least two people that refuse to buy an Android until this is solved.

Forgot to add: swapping cards doesn’t improve the situation, it makes it WORSE! Now I have to deal with juggling data across two storage locations.

Very curious about that myself. The only Linux OS for phones I’ve heard about is Maemo (now becoming MeeGo). If there are already other alternatives out there I would very much like to know what they are! “Linux” is a seriously vague definition here.

When Nokia finally had some competition was obvious that they could drop few points in smartphone marketshare, but they still rulling the world anyway.
Unfortunately this USA operators boycott to Nokia make Americans blind about the reality of the mobile market. Yes, there is a wold outside USA and Iphone.
If you are a APP developer, see the chart and guess where the opportunity and big $$$ is: SYMBIAN!!!!

Poor analogy. Why? Because DOS was 90%+ of the market so it made sense to move to Windows 95.

The correct analogy would be, why didn’t everyone start buying Macs in ’94-95 and they (if you remember) nearly went out of business and Microsoft invested in them?

Applying the logic today says that mobile web and Android have a good shot at taking over the world. Apple will be what they always are, unique leading edge products that fanboys gather around, but, the rest of the world doesn’t bother with.

LOL…so Symbian has triumphed again.

If the iPhone wants to compete than Apple needs to do the same as Nokia and begin to develop world markets in preference to US ones. As for Android, it will need to be pushed to gain market share worldwide.

The problem for S60 5th Ed Symbian OS (the latest smartphone OS now called Symbian^1) is that it is very dated when compared to the iPhone and Android. But, Nokia is developing Symbian^3 (equivalent to Android 2.0) for handsets to be released this year, and should have Symbian^4 handsets on the market in 2011. Whether the US will see any is unknown!

@danielle

Have tried to develop for Symbian, its market share being so large, but found that its very difficult when compared to the iPhone or Android development and you have to become an incorporated software company for the likes of Nokia to even look at it for their store!

And still over 85% of smartphone users steer well clear. So much for the iphone having the market ‘sewn up’ as many people try and ram down everybodies throat.

When Android phone really start to take a hold on the market, the iphone is going to start losing market share.

Let me tell you who would still want a ‘dumb phone’: Economically lower class and the middle class people around the world.

Atleast in India, Nokia is still the king. An affordable phone that a farmer can use to talk to whole sales distributors and find the best price for his rice.

Here a smart phone is:
1. Not needed.
2. Not affordable

Nokia has done an excellent job of putting a cheap phone-that-works in everybody’s hand in India.

Seeing symbian developing S^3 is just exciting to see. This report sure is a winner. The future of symbian: http://bit.ly/symbian-future-info

S^3’s UI is quite up to date, with the latest pinch-to-zoom features, swiping, scrolling, flicking and picking, you can perform all the fliptastic finger tricks you would expect to on a multi-touch Apple or Android device.

You might want to look at those charts again. Microsoft is fourth behind the iphone OS on the first table. It doesn’t appear on the second table, as that is for smartphone hardware manufacturers, and Microsoft don’t make the hardware.

Only if you are a dev should that matter. If you want more space for images, music and videos, put in a larger sd card.

Even as a dev it isn’t that hard to just auto-download.

I agree it is a poor decision that apps don’t install to the sdcard out of the box, but I hardly see this as breaking the system

I kind of see your point, but the bulk of cell phones come with some kind of service contract to offset a free phone regardless, a BlackBerry Pearl is just as tiny as any single-function phone, and data plans are pretty cheap.

I do, indeed, need the functionality of my smartphone. It’s the center of everything I do – my notes, my email, maps, local info, contact info, restaurant recommendations; I use the bejeezus out of my iPhone. It’s also, more often than not, my primary camera, because I can’t bring myself to carry around a camera or Flip.

@Bala – THAT I can totally get. I do tend to be very ethnocentric in my views on technology. The rice farmer’s story makes complete sense. I’ve only ever lived in the US, Korea and Japan, all of which are tech-crazy countries obsessed with their cell phones.

You obviously know nothing of tech beyond what you read in blogs… which is understandable. You gotta start somewhere. But just to clarify, Apple had 1.5 billion in cash when Microsoft made their 100 million dollar “investment.” That announcement was about Office and stock holders satisfaction more than it was cash. Android will suffer the same fragmentation problems Nokia does, where apps are concerned, unless they start iron fisting requirements on devices they get put on. Of course us propeller heads will be up in arms and label it “restrictions”… but Microsoft recognized that when they released 7 phone, their “minimum requirements” are actually pretty strict. Not Apple strict, But strict. It’s a balance between customer choice and customer satisfaction. As a developer, I tend to gravitate towards the latter.

Well at least a year or two from now there will be an excellent version of Flash 10.1 and/or AIR on symbian, android, palm, blackberry, windows mobile. Sure it can’t access the entire device’s API but still offers a ton of capability.

for sure. I’m ditching my iPhone for an android for sure and I know I’m not the only one. A lot of people I’ve talked to are saying the same thing. Apple had the first mover advantage by exploiting a market that was a total mess but it’s changing rapidly.

[...] Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner). [...]

can’t wait when MeeGo (Maebo) will show up in these charts:)

Smartphones are not a well defined criteria. Take a Nokia N95, very heavily used, when it came out it was considered a smartphone, but these days, it has a small screen of 240×320, very mediocre browser, slow and complex UI, has WiFi, but making it use WiFi is a whole different story, no push email, no appstore hook. Would you classify that as a smartphone? Then the N73, classified as a smartphone, but not by my standards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N73. Even less features then the N95.

The N97 of course is a smartphone.

[...] [Graph courtesy of TechCrunch] [...]

[...] percent of total mobile handset sales last year, up from 11 percent in 2008. View original here: Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone's Share Nearly Doubled Last … Posted in Mobile | Tags: and-called, are-the, ericsson, for-all, its-growth, last-year, [...]

[...] http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/smartphone-iphone-sales-2009-gartner/ [...]

95% of apps sold in 4th quarter last year were sold on the iPhone app store. Now if there was that sort of user engagement on other OS’s app stores, it would be worthwhile to spend that sort of effort outside of iPhone OS.

It’s S60 5th edition devices that are ranking the numbers up for Nokia, especially 5800, N97 and few E series devices.

[...] year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures [...]

Yes, if ‘the market’ was ‘all smart phone owners’, but actually ‘the market’ is ‘all iPhone owners’:
http://bit.ly/8YU3qk

[...] TechCrunch VN:F [1.8.1_1037]Classifique:Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast) [...]

[...] modem Five types of prospective clients to avoid like the plague Google under investigation by EC Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner) GPS vulnerable to hacker attacks Mandelson could decide length of penalties for illegal filesharing [...]

No doubt iPhone remarks as most used smartphone over the globe due to its countless apps and amazing featured accessories. iPhone enables users to a new techno world where all is possible either its about calling services or photographic enhancements or amplifying speakers.

where can you see that? according to my sources the n95, n78, n70 outnumber those newer devices by a large margin.

we develop applications and mobile sites for a lot of major brands and I can tell you one thing: Usage and download rate from symbian phones is 50! times lower than iPhone or Android. Somehow it’s just not user friendly enough. These are facts so eventhough there are still a lot of symbian enabled phones it’s better for brands to concentrate on iPhone and Android until the symbian users are getting interested in using the phone other than calling!

[...] Windows Mobile.  The delay in getting Windows Mobile 7 out the door has absolutely killed Microsoft here.  They got caught by the iPhone in much the same way they were caught by the internet, and we’ve yet to see a credible response.  At this point, even Mobile 7 is lights-out fantastic, it’s got a pretty huge uphill battle to gain relevance, let alone dominance. [...]

[...] 25, 2010 at 11:45 pm | In Mobile Computing | Leave a Comment Tags: smartphone market share Great post on TechCrunch about smartphone market share.   Apple share growing – of course Android seems [...]

Android is no more Linux than your TiVo. Android runs ON TOP of a Linux kernel, but has little to do with Linux. They don’t have GStreamer, support for GTK+, Qt, Pulse Audio, etc. Ask Maemo users about Linux. They know the difference…

[...] 2/25/10 –I saw this new Gartner report on TechCrunch.   These world-wide numbers reveal a different market leader – [...]

[...] Fuente: TechCrunch [...]

[...] other big story this week that caught my attention was Gartner’s latest worldwide smartphone sales and marketshare numbers. Overall, smartphone shipments were up 24% from the year before. The iPhone doubled its smartphone [...]

[...] [Graph courtesy of TechCrunch] [...]

[...] original here: here Blackberry News:Apple Sues Google Phone Maker HTC for Patent InfringementNokia Unveils New [...]

Go way back up the comments and find william parker comments says it all. Android taking over and now apple sues almost 2 yrs after debut fing crybabies f jobs f apple its over they rode the wave for 3yrs and now its goona crash android thje future for now

“It’s rather obvious the market is moving to smartphones and developers are going to go where the momentum ”

So what’s a smartphone? The term is ill-defined, and simply means “whatever the most expensive phones are at the moment on the market”.

In 2001, it was “obvious” that we were moving towards smartphones, and by 2005, almost _all_ phones were “smartphones” by the 2001 definition (i.e., one that could run apps and browse the web). Except, here were in 2010, and only an arbitrary section of the market is counted (conveniently including Apple – although I don’t see why the Iphone is a smartphone, when many other phones aren’t).

Obviously the market is moving towards more advanced phones – that’s called progress. But it isn’t moving towards Apple. The 98% of the market that’s non-Apple includes many high end phones, just as good, if not better, than Apple (the Iphone can’t even multitask, run Java, or run apps from 3rd party websites).

[...] might be deal breakers. There are definitely more and better made apps available for iPhone. But as Android phone sales continue to rise I think that will change. They already have the apps I [...]

[...] (ở thị trường Mỹ là BlackBerry và Symbian trên thị trường thế giới, theo Techcrunch.com), nhưng iPhone chắc chắn dẫn đầu về danh tiếng sản phẩm trong lòng người [...]

[...] (ở thị trường Mỹ là BlackBerry và Symbian trên thị trường thế giới, theo Techcrunch.com), nhưng iPhone chắc chắn dẫn đầu về danh tiếng sản phẩm trong lòng người [...]

[...] smartphone (ở thị trường Mỹ là BlackBerry và Symbian trên thị trường thế giới, theo Techcrunch.com), nhưng iPhone chắc chắn dẫn đầu về danh tiếng sản phẩm trong lòng người [...]

[...] was at stake. And in the beginning, what was at stake was not yet known. That is, not until the numbers started rolling in. Quarter over quarter record-breaking sales of iPhones and iPod touches, and [...]

[...] was at stake. And in the beginning, what was at stake was not yet known. That is, not until the numbers started rolling in. Quarter over quarter record-breaking sales of iPhones and iPod touches, and [...]

[...] was at stake. And in the beginning, what was at stake was not yet known. That is, not until the numbers started rolling in. Quarter over quarter record-breaking sales of iPhones and iPod touches, and [...]