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Winners And Losers In Smartphone Market Surge

As it turns out, the mobile revolution might not be streamed on an iPhone. Despite Apple's cult following and hypnotic marketing efforts, Android phones are now outselling iPhones for the first time on record, Nielsen reported Monday.

Stateside, new smartphone subscribers choosing the Google phones accounted for 27% of U.S. smartphone sales, according to Nielsen, surpassing the 23% share held by Apple. Meanwhile, reseach firm Canalys is now estimating that Android handset sales grew 886% worldwide year-over-over.

"It's easier to show stellar growth in the beginning of a product cycle, but Android is nearly two years old," remarks GigaOm.

GigaOm attributes the growth partly to Android's rapid adoption among handset-makers. "Motorola's Mobile Device division has swung from losses to profits on the back of Android, for example," it writes. "And HTC -- once primarily a Windows Mobile phone maker -- embraced Android even as Microsoft's mobile platform is undergoing a major facelift. The result? HTC revenues were up 66 percent in June from a year ago."

Bigger picture, both the Android and iOS4 platforms still trail the 33% U.S. share held by Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices.

One concern for Google is Nielsen's finding that 71% of Android owners would buy the phones again, which compares unfavorably to the 89% of iPhone owners who say they plan on making their next phone a iPhone. Meanwhile, only half of BlackBerry owners surveyed said they plan on making a BlackBerry their next phone.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Canalys senior analyst Pete Cunningham said that the growth in the smartphone market reflects "the increasing importance of smartphones in device vendors' and operators' handset portfolios."

Combined with the interest from "growing numbers of consumers," Cunningham predicts that by 2013, smartphones will grow to represent over 27% of shipments worldwide, with the proportion in some developed markets in Western Europe surpassing 60% and 48% in North America.

Notes The Next Web: "We knew the smartphone industry has been growing but Canalys' findings have shown the smartphone market grew by 64% annually worldwide in the second quarter of 2010."

Read the whole story at GigaOm et al. »

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