14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that around 80 percent of the mobile phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system sold until now were made by the Taiwan-based cell phone manufacturer HTC. According to Andy Lees, an executive of Microsoft’s mobile business, 50 million Windows Mobile-based devices have been sold around the world since the platform first surfaced on the market, the vast majority of which were manufactured by HTC.
“We have sold more than 40 million HTC Windows Mobile phones around the world,” HTC CEO Peter Chou reportedly told a Mobile World Conference audience. As many of you might already know, HTC makes handsets for carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange, while also having on the market devices that bear its own brand name.
According to Microsoft, a wide range of mobile phone makers use its operating system to power their devices, yet these numbers seem to somehow infirm those sayings. At the same time, we should also note that Windows Mobile has lost a lot of market share lately, going down to around 12 percent at the moment, compared to 23 percent it accounted for back in 2004.
From a certain point of view, HTC might be considered to monopolize the Windows Mobile market with its devices, yet we should also take into consideration the fact that other phone makers have outsourced some of their handhelds to HTC, such as Palm's Treo Pro, T-Mobile Shadow, Xperia X1. In addition, not all companies have managed to release to the market highly competitive WinMo devices, so HTC, which, has released a lot of innovative handsets for the platform, might be seen as complementing others rather than as an unfair competitor.
All in all, Windows Mobile is in a rather unfortunate situation at the moment. Although Microsoft recently announced that LG would release more than 50 new phones powered by its platform during the following three or four years, a lot of partners (LG, Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and others) are also moving towards Google's Android platform.
“Without that flag waving distraction, someone in the tech media might have noticed the fact that the top three Windows Mobile vendors (Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Palm) are scrambling away from the platform as quickly as possible,” stated Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted.