Last December 6th, Europe IDC has announced the statistics on the mobile platform market in their region. Besides the growth of Android and iOS, Windows Phone also began to have a good signal. Francisco Jeronimo, research manager for European mobile devices at IDC, said that in the first quarter of 2012, sales of Windows Phone has increased 156 percent over the same period last year (1.14 million devices) , thereby enhancing its market share from 2.2 percent to 4.1 percent. However, this number is not enough to save Nokia.
“The Nokia Lumia range has performed interestingly but it still below expectations,” Jeronimo said. “Nokia’s new Windows phones to be launched this year will continue to contribute to steady growth for the OS.” He added that Windows Phone would continue to make gains throughout 2012 and that “the new Windows Phone 8 handsets to be launched by manufacturers are drawing attention from operators in Europe”.
In addition, iOS and Android are growing regularly, the most notable is Android. While the market share of iOS has increased slightly from 21 to 25 percent, Google with 15.5 million devices sold has jumped to 55 percent of the market .
BlackBerry and Symbian continues to decline. According to Jeronimo: “BlackBerry OS is losing its shine with consumers. Shipments were down 27 percent year-on-year to 2.5m units and market share fell 9 percent in [the first quarter of 2012] from 17 percent in the first quarter 2011,” In addition to BlackBerry, “Symbian represented less than 5 percent of total smartphone shipments in Western Europe. The operating system lacks operator support and the latest version of the OS, the Symbian Belle, has failed to attract consumers in the region.” Symbian phone sales fell 70% in recent years and Jeronimo also predicted “the last Symbian devices to be shipped by the end of the first quarter 2013″.
Jeronimo also added :”Google’s operating system has been able to compete with Apple’s iOS in the high-end price-tier segment. But more importantly it dominates the lower-end price tiers where Symbian and BlackBerry were traditionally strong”
Android is becoming a new Symbian and it’s probably good news for Windows Phone by when users have “filled” their experience on the poor platform, most will tend to move to a other operators.
With a market share of 4.1 percent in Q1 2012, Windows Phone will soon reach the 10 percent, especially before rapid demise status of BlackBerry and Symbian.
via WMPoweruser
