IDC said today Smartphones grew nearly 57% in the first quarter.
Apple had the biggest increase for the first quarter of any of the smartphone makers, shipping 8.8 million iPhones globally, up 132% from the 3.8 million shipped in the first quarter of 2009, IDC said. Part of that increase was due to the iPhone’s arrival in areas of the world outside of North America.
Nokia led in volume shipping 21.5 million units, while Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry, was 2nd with 10.6 million. That was followed by Apple (3rd), HTC, 4th with 2.6 million phones shipped, and Motorola, in fifth place, with 2.3 million shipped.
Overall, 54.7 million smartphones shipped globally in the first quarter, up 56.7% from the year-ago quarter. The 2010 numbers include smartphones chipped by the top five companies and 8.9 million shipped by a variety of smaller manufacturers.
HTC’s first Wimax phone, the Android-based Evo 4G, is slated for launch next month from Sprint Nextel. Other HTC Android phones include the Hero, Droid Eris, myTouch 3G, Nexus One and Incredible. HTC is also expected to launch Windows Phone 7 devices later in 2010.
Motorola has launched the Droid, Devour, Cliq and Backflip. IDC said Motorola plans to launch 20 more in 2010, shipping up to 14 million Android smartphones this year.
Nokia and RIM recently announced new operating systems. Nokia will utilize Symbian 3 in new handsets such as the N8, while RIM plans to power future smartphones with BlackBerry 6 in the third quarter of 2010.
The worldwide mobile phone market grew 21.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010, according to new figures from IDC, a strong rebound from the market contraction seen a year earlier. Vendors shipped 294.9 million units in the first quarter of 2010 compared to 242.4 million units in the first quarter of last year, which had seen a 16.6 percent year-on-year decline.
IDC attributed the growth to increasing demand for smartphones and the global economic recovery. Growing demand for smartphones also helped BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) move into the top 5 vendor rankings for the first time, replacing Motorola and tied with Sony Ericsson at fourth place.
In another year or two, Smartphone phone sales are expected to compose about half the U.S. market for phones.
By the end of this month, Apple will likely have sold 1.5 million iPads, said Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe in a post to his company’s blog Wednesday, putting the tablet in the record books for reaching $1 billion in sales faster than any other consumer product.
The 400 million mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide are now generating more data traffic than the voice traffic from the total 4.6 billion mobile subscriptions around the world, said Hans Vestberg, Ericsson’s president and CEO, at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas this year.
Research2guidance, a market researcher, says the worldwide smartphone application market will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013. It’s driven by smartphone growth. They estimate smartphone users will increase globally from about 100 million last year to 970 million by the end of 2013.
