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Comscore recently published results for smartphone market share in Europe (EU5 countries Italy, Germany, France, Spain and UK) and Google has a lot to celebrate the world over. They’ve taken the number two spot from Apple in the three month period ending July 2011. Google climbed from the lowly depths of 6% of the share in the same period last year to 22% of the share this year, just enough to pass Apple.
Even with that, Apple grew (but only by very little). They held 19% of the share last year and now have about 20%. The constant in Europe has been Symbian, but it’s seen a major, major drop in share over the past year. It’s gone from owning 54% to 38% in just a year. They’ve been on a downward spiral in many parts of the world, now being almost nonexistent in North America (particularly the United States).
As expected, RIM and Microsoft round out the bottom of the pool, though the latter actually saw a slight climb from 8% to 9.4%. Microsoft’s story isn’t as promising, however, as they went from 11.5% to 6.7%. They’re hopeful Mango with another wave of devices will help them rise out of this hole but it will be tough to knock down those ahead of them.
In OEM news, HTC and Samsung seem to be the most popular Android smartphones out there with Sony Ericsson making good on their goal to become the top vendor. Motorola’s still stuck at the bottom with LG. Motorola has gained a rather sour reputation in that part of the world, mainly due slow or nonexistent firmware upgrades and buggy devices. LG’s problems simply stem from lack of inspiring innovation in a sea full of heavy hitters coming from Samsung and HTC almost on a monthly basis.
It’s funny that during the time period, Symbian was almost 1:1 replaced by Android. So many lost opportunities for Nokia+Microsoft by releasing so late.
No, rather so many lost opportunities for Nokia for choosing the wrong partner. Notice that Microsoft kept the downward spiral.
its interesting to see that former symbian owners are almost all choosing androids as their new phone over apple
Is the Symbian OS really that powerful in the EU?
I don’t know for the rest of Europe, but in the Netherlands I jut find that people are late to the smartphone scene. The only succesfull smartphone before android was the iphone and you can see its market share. As more people are adopting the samrtphones, expect to see Symbian go extinct fast ;)
there’s a Nokia advert on every bus, in every train station, in every airport and on every channel on television. They’re going all out on it, so I suppose that’s why. I’d say it’s for middle aged – older men though
Symbian was the most used OS in Europe….i’m Italian.Ops….it’s actually the most used.
I’ve always been puzzled about that too but loads of people I know in the UK have owned Nokia and SE smartphones without realising it. Because of the way the system works here with cheap or even free upgrades many people got N95,N96 etc and didn’t even consider the OS it was running. Nokia and SE really just released their Symbian phones and marketed them as just phones, the first time many people here heard the word smartphone it was regarding the iphone. One of my friends has a fairly recent Nokia, can’t remember which, running Symbian, got it free and thinks it’s great because he can play solitaire lol!
What makes HTC so dominant in the UK?
coz htc phones are nice? and UK happens to import more of them?
OK. So how does that explain that they suck wind in France and trail Samsung in every other EU country. Are their phones “less nice” in those countries??
From what I recall I think they got in early and had a decent range available to all the networks and built a following.
HTC been around quite a long time (used to supply operator branded phones for T-Mobile and O2) and they used to make decent WinMo phones by over laying their own homescreen over the top which made them semi-workable. I think we this, plus the fact that they regularly update their phones in the UK market makes them popular her.
In regards to the Symbian question – go back 4 years and there is no iPhone or Android – just WinMo and Symbian as smart/feature phones – neither were great options – WinMo was very prone to crashing, but did have touch phones. Symbian didn’t have touch phones, software was pretty decent when using a keyboard phone due to shortcuts, however very prone to running out of memory – phones would and most still allow you to install on internal memory using up every KB, the result being no memory to launch meaning the phone will not run requiring and factory restore…
WimMo seems a much better operating system these days, but definitely far too late. Its going to take them ages to pick up share again. Symbian have put out touch opitions, but the software was never really designed for touch and is thus still very klunky to use – and still has the earlier failings I discussed. Which is a pity due to the longer battery life Nokia phones tend to supply.