News - Apple leads smartphone race in Q4, but Samsung still on top

[HEXUS]

iPhone 4S spurs on sales for Apple in Q4, but Samsung ahead in 2011.

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[Hicks12]

Love how it shows that loads buy the iphones... considering Samsung sell phones at like every £100 mark they should have been further than apple, the fun fact is that the amount of people complaining " i got not money" "the times are to hard!" etc, seems majority of them have apple iphones which normally on contract cost over £30 a month... maybe they would all have more disposable income if they stuck with the £15 month stuff we used to have!

(Mainly my experience, alot of friends complain lack of funds yet can scrape together an iphone...)

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The iPhone 3GS is the third best selling smartphone! I bet its happy town and champagne corks popping time in Apple HQ just even for that metric alone!!

Love how it shows that loads buy the iphones... considering Samsung sell phones at like every £100 mark they should have been further than apple, the fun fact is that the amount of people complaining " i got not money" "the times are to hard!" etc, seems majority of them have apple iphones which normally on contract cost over £30 a month... maybe they would all have more disposable income if they stuck with the £15 month stuff we used to have!

(Mainly my experience, alot of friends complain lack of funds yet can scrape together an iphone...)

This is why the Apple iTV will do very well. On one hand there are those which have the dosh and can easily afford it,and then there will be a load of people who can barely afford a cheaper £300 set and will buy the Apple set on installments lasting a few years(including interest). TBH,it affects many products(its not an Apple exclusive in this regard) where people will get themselves trapped into longterm debt so they can have them immediately.

[crossy]

Love how it shows that loads buy the iphones... considering Samsung sell phones at like every £100 mark they should have been further than apple, the fun fact is that the amount of people complaining " i got not money" "the times are to hard!" etc, seems majority of them have apple iphones which normally on contract cost over £30 a month... maybe they would all have more disposable income if they stuck with the £15 month stuff we used to have!

Ah, but to your dedicated iFan "this year's model" is an essential purchase. I remember seeing some US-based Jonah Hill look-alike (proudly?) proclaiming on the news last year that he'd cancelled holiday's etc just so he could stand in the queue for his slice of iMagic.

Trouble with the £15/month mark is that the smartphones at that level tend to either be obsolete or the tiny screened "budget" models. An acquaintance of mine kind of summed it up "for £40 a month you get this months model; £30 gets you this years model; £20/month and it's last years; and a tenner a month is any old crap they can't shift".

In the top five list of best-selling smartphones for the fourth quarter, Apple took the top three positions with its Apple iPhone 4S, Apple iPhone 4 and Apple iPhone 3GS. The Samsung GALAXY S II and the Samsung GALAXY S 4G were placed fourth and fifth respectively.

Erm, is the SGS 4G sold in the EU? If not, then surely this is an indicator that the US market has (unfairly?) skewed this survey? Just curious, since like Hicks12, I would have expect Samsung to have had a stronger showing.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Trouble with the £15/month mark is that the smartphones at that level tend to either be obsolete or the tiny screened "budget" models.

In Q2 to Q3 2011 you could get phones such as the Motorola Defy for that sort of budget. It had a 854X480 IPS screen,512MB RAM,800MHZ A8 based CPU,SGX530 GPU,2GB onboard storage,microSD card slot and was waterproof. It also had a 5MP camera.

[Hicks12]

Indeed crossy, new years ifad .

With the £x a month, generally it is i guess which is a shame , me personally i am paying £17 for an optimus 2x since june (a month or two old) and with custom roms it makes it better than the sgs2 ime . Being a bit technical helps loads when making a smartphone purchase now and the key part is that people seem to be forgetting about the haggling, i managed to get phones4u(instore) to beat the £18 a month from another company, i included quidco to get down to that price aswell (like £80 i think, rest discount was redemption), phones4u matched it including quidco and then some .

All about haggling the crap out of them .

[scaryjim]

HTC did well in the fourth quarter too with record growth from 8.7 million units to 10.2 million year-on-year, ...

... RIM, ... saw sales rise from 8.7 million to 10.2 million.

Is that just a very curious coincidence, or has someone copied the wrong figures for one of those companies? And let's be honest neither can consider these results a success - they may have sold more units but both have seen their market share slide.

A graph showing how the operating systems are shared between smartphone owners reveals that Apple's iOS just about has the lead over Android, accounting for 48 percent of the overall market compared to Android's 43 percent for the quarter. ...

Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but as far as I can see the graph shows exactly the opposite - 48% Android (the green bar) to 43% iOS (the white bar) - the same as the other graph where you've (correctly) identified Android as having 57% share amongst first time smartphone buyers...

[Kumagawa]

Is that just a very curious coincidence, or has someone copied the wrong figures for one of those companies? And let's be honest neither can consider these results a success - they may have sold more units but both have seen their market share slide.



Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but as far as I can see the graph shows exactly the opposite - 48% Android (the green bar) to 43% iOS (the white bar) - the same as the other graph where you've (correctly) identified Android as having 57% share amongst first time smartphone buyers...

Yep RIM's data is wrong they sold 13 million Q411 down from 14.6 million Q410.

[crossy]

Big respect to Apple, keeping up with all of the others despite not shipping any budget devices. Impressive.

And don't forget that Apple reputedly have some of the highest profit margins on each of those devices sold. That being the case, it'd be easy to see why they don't want to dilute the brand image by shipping an "iPhone Nano" despite many, many calls for them to do exactly that. But, as you rightly say, kudos to the bitten fruit for being able to keep up with companies having a far wider range than they do.

From the point of balance though, I wish them (Apple) less success in future, purely so that they have less money to squander on meaningless patent applications and global writ flinging. More innovation, less litigation!