Android Jumps to Second Place in Worldwide Smartphone Market Share 2010

As accurately predicted by research company Gartner in September 2010, Google's mobile platform Android ranked second before the end of 2011. The company has just revealed its latest report regarding worldwide smartphone sales to consumers by operating system in 2010, as well as worldwide mobile device sales to consumers in 2010.

According to Gartner's report, Nokia's Symbian OS is still in the lead with 37.6% of the market share, even though it dropped almost 10% from the last year's 46.9%.

Android comes in second with 22.7% of the market share, which is an incredible shift from 2009's 3.9% very small figure.

Apparently, Nokia had a disastrous fourth quarter in 2010, which allowed for a surge in Android smartphone sales that boosted the mobile platform to second place.

RIM managed to keep its third place by a very small margin, with 16% of market share, while iOS came in fourth with 14.7%.

Microsoft also remained on the fifth position with 4.2% of the market share, steadily declining from 8.7% in 2009.

Gartner is expecting that Android becomes the number-one operating system in the world by 2014.

Regarding the number of mobile devices sold in 2010, Nokia is again in the lead by a healthy margin, owning 28.9% of the market share, followed by Samsung with 17.6%.

“Western Europe and North America accounted for 52.3 percent of global smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010, with smartphones accounting for close to half of all handsets sold in these regions,” Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a statement.

Even though it ranked third with a 7.1% market share, LG is still far behind its Nokia and Samsung competitors.

The rest of the top 10 include Research In Motion (3%), Apple (2.9%), Sony Ericsson (2.6%), Motorola (2.4%), ZTE (1.8%), HTC (1.5%), Huawei (1.5%) and Others (30.6%).

“Strong smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2010 pushed Apple and Research In Motion up in our 2010 worldwide ranking of mobile device manufacturers to the No. 5 and No. 4 positions, respectively, displacing Sony Ericsson and Motorola,” continued Cozza.

“Nokia and LG saw their market share erode in 2010 as they came under increasing pressure to refine their smartphone strategies,” he concluded