The research report of IDC have recorded a new piece of statistics, which may be nothing short of a watershed in technology. The smartphone makers across the world shipped 100.9 million devices in the last quarter of 2010 which is a whopping 87.2 per cent increase over 53.9 million in the same quarter last year.
There is an another first as well, for the first time, smartphones outsold the personal computers, which recorded sales of close to 93 million sales, an increase of only 5.5 per cent in the same period last year according to Gartner.
Simply stated, smartphones are selling more than the PCs, and that they have become the preferred computing tool for the masses in the year 2010. In the entire year, total 302.6 million smartphones were sold.
Nokia fans are still in majority, though iPhone is consistently gaining market share over it. Nokia is currently going through a major management upheaval, and that’s the reason it’s growth rate half to that of Apple.
Apple also did better than Research in Motion, as it managed to grab the number two spot in smartphones. The Samsung smartphone sales went up four times whereas HTC grew three times. The personal computer sales, on the other hand, have been growing down steadily over the last decade. Linux has not been a huge success in the personal computer segment, but in the form of
Android, it has done surprisingly well in the smartphone segment.
The reason behind success of Linux in smartphones, probably, is the way smartphones work….to the users, it doesn’t matter which operating system the device runs on, it should just work smoothly. Users only think about apps, what the apps do and how they run. The IDC senior research analyst Ramon Llamas says that Android continues to do exceedingly well as it is being supported by several vendors.