back to article Apple, RIM profit from Euro smartphone shift

Sony Ericsson's shift to Android proved spectacularly successful during the last three months of 2010, figures show. According to market watcher IDC, the company's unit shipments into Western Europe during Q4 2010 rocketed 3121 per cent when compared to Q4 2009 - all thanks to the Xperia X10 and X10 Mini. But temper that glee …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    On Noes!

    The Fandroids are not going to like this!

  2. scote

    nokia smartphones

    I challenge whether alot of nokia symbian handsets are really smartphones?

    some of them have very small screens and no touchscreen or keyboard - can you call these smartphones?

    1. Mike Hanna

      Hmmm

      Does a touchscreen make a phone smart? I have a BlackBerry, which some people would call a smartphone. But it's 2G and the only thing it's good for is emails. And GPS, although the maps look they've ben drawn by a monkey with a nervous disposition. What makes a phone smart?

      1. hyartep
        Jobs Halo

        i

        small "i" in front of the name :-)

    2. David Beck
      FAIL

      My Nokia E52 has -

      A normal keyboard (like any phone)

      no touchscreen

      and

      GPS and maps with voice nav

      VoIP builtin to the Contacts UI (call them with VoIP or gsm)

      Skype

      push email and calendar to Gmail and google calendar

      voice commands

      voice output of email and SMS

      Opera Mobile

      Opera Mini

      MS Office document read and write

      DLNA client and server

      Bloomberg app

      SlingPlayer app

      Google Maps

      Traffic info from ITIS (uses GPS to locate)

      YouTube app

      Facebook app

      Metro app (public transport routing)

      FM radio (RDS with station population by Nokia server, ie you don't have to find the stations, you just select where you are and the stations pop-up)

      Internet radio (with station directory)

      Some games (for the kids)

      Some video stuff (for the kids)

      MP3 player

      16GB microsd (for the maps and audio-books/music)

      3.2mp camera with flash

      excellent call quality and reception (aerial is in the lower edge if this helps)

      quite a lot of other stuff

      Can be used entirely with the left hand (as I did when the right was in a cast)

      Goes about three days without a charge

      Other than not fit in my pocket and need two hands to use what is it missing?

    3. chr0m4t1c

      Blurred lines

      The smart/dumb phone demarcation line used to be fairly clear a few years ago: most phones were dumb phones and smart phones were essentially PDAs with phone capability.

      Currently we have three broad categories:

      Dumb phones: A "traditional" mobile, does voice, text and maybe some wap and e-mail.

      Feature phones: A dumb phone with added goodies, such as better e-mail, storage for sensible amounts of music, better screen that may or may not be touch and a better browser. May also be capable of loading additional apps. Most Nokia s40 phones probably fit in this category.

      Smart phones: Feature phones taken up another notch. Better support for e-mail, ability to load additional apps, usually a larger screen, more likely to be touch-screen. Most Nokia s60 and Symbian^3 phones probably fit in this category.

      Anyway, you get the picture.

      Unfortunately, placing a particular phone in a particular category can be troublesome and largely a matter of semantics.

      Most Android phones will be in the "smart" category, but there will be some that lean heavily into the "feature" category. WP7 devices (like iPhone 1) are really in the "Feature" category at the moment, despite what the marketing 'droids say, but future OS upgrades will likely change that in the same way that the iOS ones did for Apple.

      I expect that the categories used for this data would be the ones that manufacturers are using, so the Nokia figures won't cover all Symbian handsets, just the ones that Nokia markets as smartphones.

  3. Steve King

    2g 'smartphones'

    Are the RIM 8520 'smartphones' included in these figures? They still seem to be pushing them hard.

    It'd be interesting to see RIM's figures broken down into 2G and 3G offerings.

    1. aahjnnot

      All RIM sales are classed as smartphones

      Analysing the data shown in the original press release from IDC, it appears that all of RIM's phones have been included in the smartphone category.

  4. aahjnnot

    In fact, Android won by a mile

    This is a very strange write-up that conveys very little of the sense of IDC's original press release. Smartphones are now nearly half of the market by volume, and, presumably, 70-80% or more by value. Feature phone sales are now largely irrelevant in commercial terms.

    IDC's conclusion is this: " The Western European mobile phone market will be dominated by smartphones, and Android will be the king of the hill." This statement is supported by Android's share of the smartphone market rocketing to 31% (2009Q4: 4%). Nokia - almost entirely Symbian - lost market leadership but remained in second place with 27.3% (2009: 46.1%).

    Despite the bullish headline, Apple's share actually fell to 20.3% (2009: 24.2%) and RIM's share - Blackberry OS - fell slightly less rapidly to 14.8% (2009: 18.0%). Windows mobile gets lost in the rounding, but, despite the launch of Windows Phone 7, lost market share even more rapidly than Nokia.

  5. ScissorHands

    SE out of the frying pan

    ...and into the fire.

    When sheeple see an "Orange Boston" running Android 1.6 and with 12 hours of standby heavily promoted by the operators as a "smartphone" for the same price as a T715, which is a thoroughly better-quality, less laggy, well-thought-out featurephone, what do you think gets bought in the end?

    Besides, SE stopped developing featurephones. The only difference between the W995 and the T715 is integrated GoogleMaps, FaceBook and Twitter.

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