The mobile phone industry is booming. Smart phone sales to end users grew 41% from Q4 of 2008 to Q4 of 2009. As a year to year comparison from 2008 to 2009, smart phone sales grew 24% to 172.4 million units.
The iPhone share almost doubled. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (#1).
Garner: source data
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2009 (Thousands of Units)
| Company | 2009 Units | 2009 Market Share (%) |
2008 Units | 2008 Market Share (%) |
| Symbian | 80,878.6 | 46.9 | 72,933.5 | 52.4 |
| Research In Motion | 34,346.6 | 19.9 | 23,149.0 | 16.6 |
| iPhone OS | 24,889.8 | 14.4 | 11,417.5 | 8.2 |
| Microsoft Windows Mobile | 15,027.6 | 8.7 | 16,498.1 | 11.8 |
| Linux | 8,126.5 | 4.7 | 10,622.4 | 7.6 |
| Android | 6,798.4 | 3.9 | 640.5 | 0.5 |
| WebOS | 1,193.2 | 0.7 | NA | NA |
| Other OSs | 1,112.4 | 0.6 | 4,026.9 | 2.9 |
| Total | 172,373.1 | 100.0 | 139,287.9 | 100.0 |
Source: Gartner (February 2010)
After a highly publicized service outage for the T-mobile sidekick, T-mobile took the Sidekick off it’s shelves. Customers had been without service for weeks as T-mobile and the Danger unit of Microsoft struggled to repair the service.
The Motorola Droid smartphone on the Verizon Wireless network received some good reviews due in part to the updated Google Android (2.0) mobile OS. The Motorola Droid was the first phone to use Android 2.0. Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA also use Android but have not upgraded to the new software.