If you look at the situation of HTC and then look at the one of Samsung, you will notice a difference such as comparing a Third World country ( never really understood this term – Earth is the 3rd world from the Sun, thus aren’t all countries 3rd world ones? ) to, say, Dubai. Well, maybe not as dramatic, but the fact remains that one can barely stop spiraling out of control in an ever-lower descent, while the other cannot really seem to settle for anything short of global dominion, if it hasn’t already achieved it.
If you look at the US sales charts, you may think that the goal of Samsung is complete, or would be if they didn’t have Apple on their hands to offer some degree of competition. Still, if you add up the two, it is starting to look like a two horse race, at least for the US part of the world. Apple and iOS control more than 88.7% of smartphone operating system in that are. While Apple is slowly gaining ground, Google’s Android is still in its full effect and growing rapidly ( granted, not necessarily in the Jelly Bean department, which may prove worrisome to some if they choose to make it so ).
Still, at least for the US part it is looking pretty good in the last quarter: Google increased by 1.1 points ( now having 53.7% from 52.6% ), iOS increased by 0.7 points ( now being a solid 35% from the 34.3% ). The situation is not so bright for others, however: Blackberry went down a whole point ( now at 7.3% from the 8.3% of before ), Windows Mobile went down 0.6 points ( now at 3% from the 3.6% of before ) and Symbian, barely noticeable as it is, went down 0.2 points ( now at 0.5% from the 0.7% of before ).
As far as mobile devices sold goes ( which includes regular feature phones, not only strictly referring to smartphones ), Apple has made some progress and they passed LG on the US front, thus becoming the 2nd largest mobile OEM for that area. Not to give it too much credit, but its 1.4% point growth from August to September in 2012 was the largest increase recorded in any of the top brands.
Right now we’re looking at a grim situation for some, but a bright future for others. The lucky ones that managed an increase aren’t really the ones that truly needed that increase, but who are we to judge: Samsung has gone up by 1.2 points ( now at 26.9% from the previous 25.7% ) and Apple has also gone up 1.4 points, as I mentioned before ( now at 18.5% from the previously recorded 17.1% ). It doesn’t look to well for others, however, and unless certain measures are taken there will be large repercussions for those manufacturers: LG went down 0.7 points ( now at 17.5% from their previous 18.2% ), Motorola went down by 0.8 points ( now at 10.4% from their previous 11.2% ) and HTC went down by 0.4 points ( now at 5.9% from the previous 6.3% ).
These are all numbers recorded before the holiday season, the next charts releasing somewhere around February. It will be more than interesting to see how well the situation developed. I do hope the ones who have less will do better in the future. It is a sad, sad day when you see someone wiped out by one who has grown too much. I believe there should be a fair equality between these as it would increase competitiveness, and thus productivity.
The users also seem to have changed the way they view smartphones. The people seem to be embracing the smartphones for all their uses. The majority of people using the phone for text messages is just under 76%, while the ones downloading apps and the social networking ones have increased quite a lot in the past months, now at 54.2% and respectively 39.2%.
Heck, all activities aside from playing games seem to have increased by a bit: texting increased by 0.3 points ( now at 75.9% ), downloaded apps increased by 0.8 points ( now at 54.2% ), the ones that used the phone for the browser also increased by 0.1 points ( now at 52.1% ), the ones accessing social networks or blogs experienced a huge 0.9 point increase ( now at 39.2% ) and the ones listening to music on the phone increased by 0.4 points ( now at 28.7% ). The ones using the device for games are the only ones that decreased by 0.3 points ( and they are now at 33.7% ).
