Gartner confirms Android ascendancy in 2010

Between a rock and a hard place

Hot on the heels of rival market researcher IDC, Gartner has released its own figures for the Q4 and full-year smartphone and total mobile sales.

Gartner's figures are pretty consistent with IDCs on smartphones - around 100 million units for the quarter and 300 million for the year - but Gartner makes the total mobile market for the year about 200 million units bigger. We spoke to Gartner and confirmed these figures don't include things like tablets and e-readers.

Anyway, one thing Gartner offered that IDC didn't was a breakdown by platform of the smartphone market. Contrary to an earlier report from Canalys, it looks like Symbian just kept ahead of Android as the number one smartphone platform. However this won't be the case for long and was only the case when you include legacy units from vendors other than Nokia.

On the subject of Canalys, in an earlier report they asserted that tablets should be included in the PC category. We don't agree. Not only do they run on mobile chips and platforms, their usage models are not analogous to PCs. But they're not mobile phones either, so we reckon they should be a separate category.

Back to Gartner, we had a look at its Q4 figures. They have Symbian with a 32.6 percent market share, with Android just behind. Apple's iOS is third on 16 percent and RIM fourth with 13.7 percent. Microsoft is lagging way behind on 3.4 percent leaving only 3.5 percent for ‘others'. Here are the full-year ones.

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2010 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (February 2011)

Here's VP Carolina Milanesi's perspective in the figures: "Strong smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010 pushed Apple and RIM up in our 2010 worldwide ranking of mobile device manufacturers to the No. 5 and No. 4 positions, respectively, displacing Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Nokia and LG saw their market share erode in 2010 as they came under increasing pressure to refine their smartphone strategies."

The Q4 figures for all mobile phones are pretty similar to the full-year ones below. The major shift that seems to be happening, however, is an increase for ‘others' at the expense of everyone else, except Apple. The Q4 market share for ‘others' was 33.6 percent, which shows what a challenge the big OEMs have at the lower end of the market.

These figures are especially poignant in the context of the impending Mobile World Congress show and the Nokia strategy announcement immediately before it. Its seems that if you're not Apple, not using Android, or trying to compete in the low-end, the signs are not good.

Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users in 2010 (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (February 2011)