Gartner:3Q12 smartphones shoot up, feature phones slide
Today, Gartner has released their stats on 3rd Quarter mobile phone and smartphone sales. In line with what we have seen till now, Smartphone sales went up 47% YoY while mobile phone (feature phones) sales went down. Smartphones now account for 39.6% of total cellular phone sales. Android accounted for nearly three quarters of smartphone sales while Samsung has almost a quarter of share (smartphones + feature phones). Thanks to strong Asha series sales, Nokia managed to hold on to second spot in the table. Samsung and Nokia are the only two vendors that registered two digit market share. Apple increased it share slightly but is a distant third as shown below 
“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.”
The story w.r.t smartphone OS though is completely different. Symbian registered largest slide as its marketshare went from 16.9% to tiny 2.6% whereas RIM’s BB OS share is now into single digit (down to 5.5% from 11.6%). Such is the growth of Android that it managed to pull another percentage from iOS share (iOS down from 15% to 13.9%), ending up at 72.4% of marketshare. We just wonder how much revenue this will generated if Google charges paltry amount for Android license. After continuous slide, Microsoft has registered a rise in smartphone OS marketshare (up from 1.5% to 2.4%) and we expect this to increase bit more and take that 3rd spot in coming quarter.
