Android still the unstoppable force in mobile OS

According to the latest figures just in, the Android mobile operating system was driving just over half of all smartphones sold in the first quarter of this year. That's a big jump from its share of 44.6 per cent of the market in the same quarter last year.
 
The vendor winners and losers don't come as a surprise. The biggest loser is of course Nokia, whose Symbian OS still held a respectable world share in early 2011. That's completely gone with nothing to replace it -  certainly not WP7 on Nokia's Lumia range which, despite the hype about climbing sales and supposedly unstoppable long-term trends, has continued to bump along the bottom. Nokia and the few other vendors now sporting WP7 together constitute around 3 per cent global smartphone share.

In fact the apparently concerted effort to pump up WP7 and Lumia (when there appears to be little of substance to pump) hasn't gone unnoticed.

Tomi Ahonen in his blog 'Communities Dominate Brands' is particularly scathing about this (see - Paging Stats Police - no, IDC, not even close! No! Windows Phone will not pass iPhone by 2016) and if you have a spare hour or so it's worth a read.

The other basket case in this market share drama is RIM which has also hit a well-documented wall  (see - Analysts pour cold water on RIM's chances of survival).

But Android is certainly not a tide which lifts all boats. The winners within the Android camp are still HTC (although still slightly bruised from falling sales in 2011) and Samsung, which now holds a commanding percentage of the Android market and has naturally attracted a slew of patent suits from Apple as a result.  All the other Android adherents - such as Sony, LG, Motorola, ZTE and Huawei - remain minor players on the global smartphone stage.