Samsung still the world's most popular phone
The latest figures show that more and more people are choosing smartphones over feature phones and that Samsung sold twice as many smartphones as its closest competitor in the third quarter of 2012.
Overall mobile phone shipments might be falling, but smartphone shipments are continuing to grow. A massive 155.5 million were shipped in the third quarter of 2012 alone, a 32.8 percent year-on-year increase and most of these were from Samsung.
According to figures released Friday by ABI Research, Samsung, the South Korean technological powerhouse, is still the world's biggest mobile phone producer, shipping twice as many smartphones as Apple, its closest competitor.
What the data also clearly shows is that the world is transitioning into the age of the smartphone. In Q3 of 2012 alone, smartphones accounted for 40.2 percent of all handset shipments, up from 39.3 percent in the previous quarter.
What is also becoming apparent is that if this trend continues, the premium smartphone market will be dominated by only two companies -- Samsung and Apple. Nokia's smartphone shipments have fallen 38 percent to 6.3 million units over the last quarter (due in part to the fact that its current range of phones will not be upgraded to the Windows Phone 8 operating system), and RIM and HTC have both continued to struggle with year-on-year shipment declines of 37.2 and 54.6 percent respectively.
Much of Samsung's dominance comes from the fact that it produces a range of handsets at each price point from low-cost to premium and this approach will keep it at the top for the foreseeable future. A report published this week by NPD Group predicts that the future growth of the smartphone market will be in the low-cost, sub-$200 sector. Such handsets will represent 29 percent of the total market by 2016.
"Most mobile phone subscribers around the world can't afford to spend more than $200 for a smartphone, on top of their service plans," noted Shawn Lee, Research Director at NPD DisplaySearch. "Low-cost smartphone manufacturers create these new products quickly without much investment, which has allowed them to extend their telecom subscriber base to emerging regions."
This trend could also spell the end for Microsoft. As the low-cost end of the market grows, so will the use of Google's Android as an operating system as it is a cheap, open-source solution that can be easily customized and requires minimum investment. Figures from the latest Gartner research, published on Wednesday, suggest that by 2016, Android will have surpassed Windows as the world's most popular operating system. By the end of 2012 there will be 1.5 billion devices running Windows, compared with 608 million using Android. However, by 2016, Gartner predicts that the total number of computers, smartphones and tablets running Android will hit 2.3 billion units, compared with 2.28 billion running Windows.
