2009 world handset sales ranked, iPhone OS eats WinMo

Technology researchers from Gartner have come up with their annual report on mobile phone sales, 2009 edition. And it's an interesting read.

In short, 2009 phones sales have remained flat despite the economic imbalances but there are some pretty interesting market share shifts.

Unless you've lived in a cave for the past twelve months, you won't be surprised to learn that Motorola and Sony Ericsson took the biggest hits this year, while Apple, Samsung, LG and RIM had one hell of a year.

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Handset Sales to End Users in 2009 (thousands of units)

Nokia also took a dive, dropping two percent of total market share (and 5.5 percent of smartphone market) but their market leadership remains pretty safe. They shipped 440 million handsets - a volume that almost totals that of all other companies from the Top Five (470 million). Things are even more convincing in smartphone terms where Symbian accounts to 47 percent of all sales globally.

However Apple have managed to double their market share, shipping 25 million iPhones, compared to 11 million in the previous year. RIM also noted a healthy 48 percent increase pushing the number of sold handsets to 34 million.

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2009 (thousands of units)

When it comes to smartphone platforms, the open-source Android has the biggest market share growth shipping on nearly 6.8 million devices in 2009. That's more than 10 times better than the 0.6 million in 2008. Another year like that and they might just take the second spot (or even first if Symbian doesn't up its game urgently).

An interesting trend is that the iPhone OS managed to reach a wider user base in 2009 than all the various versions and reincarnations of Windows Mobile. Now that should tell you something Microsoft, you better get your back into Windows Phone 7. We're waiting...

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