As the mobile device market heats up, different companies are coming to dominate different regions, with no one holding a global upper-hand.
A new market study from Canalys shows a highly fragmented but growing global mobile market. Taking all mobile devices into account (including handhelds, mobile phones, smartphones, and wireless data devices), the market grew 41% from Q1 2003 to Q1 2004. Most of that growth was in the smartphone sector, which grew 115%, while data-centric handhelds and WAN handhelds grew barely at all with 1%.
Which companies did best, however, varied regionally. Overall Nokia is far and away the market leader in Europe and Asia with 48% of the market, keeping it in first place world-wide with 28% of the market even though its marketshare elsewhere is not as strong. palmOne is second place world-wide with 17% of the market, bouyed by its strong first-place position in North America as the #1 smartphone vendor. (The report considers palmOne's Treo 600 a smartphone rather than a wireless handheld.) Number 3 player world-wide was HP, even though it does not even break the 10% barrier.
Palm OS is the dominant smartphone platform in North America by a very wide margin, claiming 47% of the market with just a few models, while Microsoft's Windows Mobile took 28% of the market. Meanwhile, Symbian claims over 90% of the smartphone market in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Linux-based handhelds claimed 14% of the Asia/Pacific market and are climbing steadily, even though they have barely any marketshare elsewhere.
palmOne and Dell both had marginal drops in overall shipments, while Sony saw its shipments plummet 45%. Canalys attributes that drop to Sony's former trademark multimedia features becoming standard fare on most handhelds, while Sony has been unable to capitalize on the increase in business spending on mobile devices due to its consumer-exclusive focus. That likely played a large part in Sony's decision to exit the handheld market outside of Japan, where it is still the market leader.
There has also been a strong shift away from voice-only and data-only devices towards smartphones and wireless handhelds. Smartphones grew from 35% to 63% of the mobile device market in the EMEA market, while traditional handhelds fell from 40% to 29% of overall sales (though still growing in absolute numbers). In North America, however, handhelds are still the number one category despite falling from 83% of shipments to 59% of all devices shipped. Smartphones, meanwhile, grew from 10% to 23%.
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