Android comes to the front once again. According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), mobile devices running Google's operating system maintained the lead over devices running iOS, Apple's operating system, and others in the global smartphone market in Q3 2012.
Table with data on smartphone sales by companies and OS during Q3
The figures released are surprising, of the 181.1 million smartphones shipped in Q3, Android devices accounted for 75% of total sales, with 136 million units sold. This is a significant improvement over the latest report, which brought the Android market share to 68%.
Apple ranked second in market share. The iPhone maker was able to sell 26.9 million smartphones in Q3, falling from 16.9% in the second quarter to 14.9% in the third. However, we need to wait until the end of the year to add to this percentage sales of the newly released iPhone 5, which should provide a good boost for Tim Cook's company in the last quarter of the year.
Interestingly, Samsung, Apple's biggest competitor, Google's biggest partner, and within five months of launching the Samsung Galaxy S3 has sold over 30 million units of it.
RIM's Blackberry and Nokia's Symbian are next in the list, with 4.3% and 2.3% respectively. Only 7.7 million Blackberry handsets were sold in the quarter, but it was better than 4.1 million Symbian units. Meanwhile, Microsoft's share of Windows Phone 7 has grown to 2 percent with 3.6 million units in the world market.
What can we expect for the last quarter of this year? Does Apple recover part of this market or even unbeatable Android?
Image: IDC
. (tagsToTranslate) Android (t) Google (t) IDC (t) Apple (t) iOS (t) RIM (t) Windows Phone (t) Nokia (t) Marketplace
