Android Dominating Surging Smartphone Market

Compared to a year ago, worldwide sales of mobile phones dropped 3.1 percent to 428 million in the third quarter of 2012, but broken down by category, smartphone sales are surging. According to the latest data compiled by Gartner, smartphone sales are up nearly 47 percent from one year ago. Overall, 4 out of every 10 mobile phones shipped is categorized as a smartphone.
"After two consecutive quarter of decline in mobile phone sales, demand has improved in both mature and emerging markets as sales increased sequentially," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. "In China, sales of mobile phones grew driven by sales of smartphones, while demand of feature phones remained weak. In mature markets, we finally saw replacement sales pick up with the launch of new devices in the quarter."
This is mostly to the benefit of Google's Android platform, which now holds a 72.4 percent of share of the smartphone market, climbing 19.9 percent from a year ago. In second place is iOS (iPhone), which declined 1.1 percentage points in the same period to 13.9 percent.
After that, it's a scrap the bottom between RIM (5.3 percent), Bada (3 percent), Symbian (2.6 percent), Microsoft (2.4 percent), and all others (0.4 percent).
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