Apple, Android help smartphone sales double over last year, report says

Watch out dumb phones, the smartphones are piling on.

The global sale of smartphones during the third quarter nearly doubled over the same period last year, to 80 million, said research firm Gartner Inc. in a report Wednesday.

Smartphones comprised about 19% of the 417 million mobile phones sold in the quarter, a jump of 6 percentage points since last year.

At the same time, the standings shifted among smartphone makers, with phones powered by Google Inc.'s Android operating system -- now the main smartphone competitor to Apple's iPhone -- jumping to 26% of all phones sold during the quarter, up from 3% last year. Android runs on nearly 100 phones from most major manufacturers, including Samsung, HTC and Sony.

Apple's iPhone came in second place, with 16.7% of the quarterly market share, down slightly from 17.1% last year. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Inc. fell behind Apple Inc. in North America, with a 14.8% share, down from 20.7% last year.

The leading operating system is still Symbian, however -- that's the softare that runs on phones made by Finnish phone-maker Nokia, still the world's largest phone manufacturer. The company sold 117 million mobile phones (smart and dumb) in the quarter, nearly 46 million more than Samsung, the second-place mobile manufacturer. Still, Nokia's quarterly market share for sales of all mobile phones dropped to 27% from 38% last year, signalling an erosion of the company's longtime dominance.

Source: latimes.com

iPad web browsing overtakes Android

Apple's iPad now accounts for more monthly web browser traffic than all Android-based mobile devices put together, according to data from Net Applications. Despite only being on the market for three months, the iPad comprised 0.17% of browser traffic tracked by Net Applications in June. In comparison Android devices represented 0.14% of web browser usage. The iPad is also outpacing the iPod Touch, which accounted for 0.12% of web browsing in June.
The iPad's share of the market has steadily risen since its launch in April. During the first two weeks after its release, the iPad accounted for the same amount of web browsing as all devices running the BlackBerry OS. After its first month on sale, the iPad hit an average 0.03% of browser traffic despite only being available in the US.
In May, when the device was launched in a further nine countries, that figure tripled to 0.09%, before almost doubling again in June. The highest single day for web use on the iPad was July 3, when it accounted for 0.35% of all browser usage.
Apple says it has already sold 3m iPads in the 10 countries where it is available. However, these figures are well below sales of the iPod Touch and combined sales of Android devices. The high web traffic is due to Apple designing the iPad for consumption of media such as books and video.
The firm has given the iPad a large screen that is suited to browsing the web and long battery life."Browser usage share on the iPad has already surpassed usage share on both the Android platform and the iPod Touch," says Net Applications. "Since Android and iPod Touch units sold vastly outnumber iPad units sold, this is an indication that the iPad is used much more frequently per user for browsing."
Recent figures from Net Applications also reveal that the iPhone OS continues to see strong growth in the mobile browsing market, accounting for 32.8% of all web usage. Symbian comprises 14% while Android's share rose to 6.24%. Java remains the leader with 40% of the market, although it is rapidly losing out to both the iPhone and Android platforms.

Source: StrategyEye