IDC: 3 out of 4 smartphones shipped with Android in Q3

With strong summer releases from Android OEMs and Apple only shipping the iPhone 5 at the end of Q3, the result was by far Android’s strongest showing yet according to IDC. The “market intelligence” company that supplies us with one of the frequently used measures of smartphone market share says that 136 million Android handsets were shipped last quarter, accounting for a whopping 75% of all smartphones.

Apple’s iOS came in a distant second last quarter, accounting for 14.9% of smartphones on the strength of 26.9 million units shipped. Presumably Apple’s numbers will improve substantially in Q4 of this year. The same can’t be said for BlackBerry and Symbian, which saw continued losses in market share this year. RIM’s international market share dropped precipitously to just 4.3%, and will almost certainly fall further in Q4, since RIM has pegged early 2013 as the launch date for their new BB10 devices. Symbian devices fell even further to 2.3% of smartphones shipped in Q3, and IDC notes that all major Symbian OEMs are transitioning away from the mobile OS and expects Symbian shipments to end sometime next year.

Windows Phone 7 is still being lumped in with Windows Mobile, and the numbers aren’t exactly great, at 2% (it’s sort of sad to see it still trail Symbian for phones shipped last quarter), but it isn’t all bad news; Windows market share expanded from 1.3% the previous year, and the vast majority of those sales have to be Windows Phone units. So while they are starting well behind the proverbial eight ball, Microsoft’s nascent mobile market share is at least moving in the right direction.

With a new iPhone, a slew of new WP8 devices, and the launch of BB10 early next year it will be interesting to see how these numbers change in the new few quarters. But for the last quarter at least it’s clear that Android handsets won the day.

source: IDC