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Two new reports have just been published giving us a world-view of just how far Android has come in terms of smartphone market share. While US reports have steadily seen Android pacing and in some cases surpassing iOS and global trends are on the up and up, the latest data gives us a more local idea of where Google’s OS is succeeding.
In Asia, Android has just surpassed surpassed long-time leader Symbian for smartphone supremacy in Q3, according to market research firm GfK Asia. Interesting to note is the rise in overall smartphone sales, up from 1.27 million to over 4.7 million from the same time last year.
In Nordic regions, QAim Oy is reporting that Android is steadily growing. Measuring access requests to Nordic web content, Android holds third place with 9.85 percent, but it is the strong growth compared to an 0.83 percent share earlier this year that has analysts projecting Android to overtake both iOS and Symbian by August 2011.
All is good news for Google and Android users, as continued growth of the platform worldwide can only lead to greater and greater innovations.
[via CellularNews, 2]
The Nordic regions go for Android more than Nokia/Symbian… What a blow to Nokia!
Hey Nokia! I think it’s time for you to consider Android!!!
Yes!!! I am loving this. You guys have no idea how happy this makes me. I love the fact that Android did what apple only dreamed of. Go google!!!!!
Google stole a page from Microsoft’s playbook. Back in the early PC days – PC as in Personal Computer NOT uSoft clone – Microsoft came along with a cheap, easy-enough-to-use, OS and opened the OS up to developers. Android is that open, easy-to-develop-for OS for smart phones. If you can code in Java you can code for Android.
don’t know about asia but nokia is a rare sight here in ireland amongst the nerds i meet.
at the ubuntu launch a few weeks ago and only saw one nokia there. ancient model that is favoured amongst hacker types. the rest was all android and 1-2 iphones.
until 2008 it would have been 95%+ nokia/symbian this is not good for nokia or symbian.
i know 1-2 people who are holding out for meego but overall android is now dominant here as far as i can see.
SonyEricsson being a 50/50 Japanese and Swedish owned company of course swings customer interest in their direction here in Sweden and the X10 series is indeed enjoying brisk sales here, so no surprises there. also Android overtook iOS months ago here.
Mark: Windows has never been an open platform and Microsoft had very little to do with their own success. IBM created the Microsoft near-monopoly by 1. licensing their popular “IBM PC” architechture to other manufacturers and 2. Outsourcing the production of it’s OS to this then small company called “Microsoft”. Microsoft then simply rode on the back of the success of the IBM PC architecture. People developed for IBM PC compatible machines which just indecently ran a MS OS by default.
In Androids case it’s the other way around, hardware manufacturers are bending over backwards to make devices that run the Open Handset Alliances Android Linux OS. It’s the OS that sells the phones not the computer architecture that sells the OS as in the MSDOS/IBM PC case.
@Mark
But they did it with open source
which in effect gives them every linux fanboy ;)
something microsoft will never get regardless of how cheap they sell windows
Bill Gates said a few years ago that the next big OS would not be a Microsoft product.
Little did we all know that the next big OS would be a ‘mobile’ OS
Go Android Go
Attention…Attention…AT&T and Blackberry has teamed up to evolve the smartphone…HAHAHA…I kill me:)
@MW
the blackberry torch commorcials make lol so hard
Right. Let’s have some perspective shall we?
Firstly, it’s not Asia, it’s East Asia – GfK’s survey includes Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
So no India, China and Pakistan which are, of course, the biggest markets and which are dominated by Symbian.
Also would you like to have a wild stab at where HTC and Samsung, the two prime Android handset producers, are based?
Home town companies sells most handsets in hometown. Shocker!
And the Nordic results… a whole 10%. So under a third of what Symbian has. Well ok then.
Microsoft (DOS and Windows) was open from the OEM’s point of view: anyone could get it. That’s not open source, that’s open-but-proprietary. SymbianOS was sold on that model, too, before they went open source. Just like “freedom”, there are different kinds and degrees of “open”.
Of course, on the development side, MS-OSs have always been open to developers. You could write MS-DOS and Windows applications, using MS’s tools or someone else’s, as a developer or totally on your own.
Contrast this with the closed iOS system. You can’t run iOS on your device unless you’re Apple, thus, it’s totally closed from the hardware OEM’s point of view. You can only develop code on a Mac, and only get the tools by joining Apple’s developer program, so even there, it’s somewhat closed. And they exert controls over the applications you can effectively develop (the final approval of whether you can sell your work or not), how you develop them, how you distribute them, etc. They’re about as closed as a platform can be and still have outside developers.
The fact that someone even here wants to defend the POS OS known as Symbian is why Nokia is falling off the cliff long term. They only weakly push Meego which should have been their next big launch. Instead Nokia is focusing on the low end and “feature” phones. They eventually will not be able to compete against asian makers like Samsung, Sharp and a truck load of Chinese manufacturers that are using Windows Mobile or Android.
Not sure of the scene at China but here in India Android is getting popular by the day. Almost every week a new model is announced with much fanfare and the media seems to hv developed quite an appetite for giving prominence to Android related news. Forget abt the HTCs, Nokias and Samsungs the mass market here is with local brands like Micromax and Spice..all of whom seem to be going ahead only with Android … would change the market share significantly in few months.
some perspective…I use Android(HTC) but you can blame me for being in Bangalore and in IT sector who could afford a ‘high end’ device.My cousin , a law student in a Tier III city has shifted to Android (Samsung) courtesy a model launched at India specific price points.
Don’t forget the Huaweis of the world are launching models on Android for Indian market as well.
it’s gonna blow up in android’s face. i can see android going to replace some of the slower and rigid mobile OS but symbian ? come on, how much of a fanboy are you to think that a OS that has been around for so long, has evolved so much and still holds over 47% of the market could cave so easally.
Android is a nice OS, it brings to the market the much needed spark, making old giants like nokia rethink it’s tactics. and from all perspectives, for us, that is a greate thing. it means that they will both invest in developing professional apps, games, themes, and so on.
and for the more cinical reader, mobile OS are a “gizmo”. you don’t really improve anything by upgrading your firmware from month to month. that doesn’t mean that your OS provider is working hard just for you and that you are getting something new for free. it means it’s woking hard because it launched a sh|tty OS and did not test it well enough before launching it.
a new version of firmware does not mean you get new features, at best you get access to features that you paid for, but for various reasons(all bad) did not get to use them.
in 2001 a lot of PC magazines said that within 10 years microsoft will be overtaken by linux due to it’s open source advantage. 2011 and linux holds less than 2% of the market.