Android and Windows Phone will soon dominate the smartphone market, says a new IDC report. IDC forecasts the worldwide smartphone market will grow by nearly 50% in 2011. According to IDC, more than 450 million smartphones will ship in 2011, up from the 303.4 million units last year.
IDC predicts that Android will account for nearly 40% of all smartphone shipments this year, easily besting Symbian’s 21 percent market share. Apple’s iOS platform is expected to be running on 15.7 percent of the smartphones shipped in 2011.
But by 2015, IDC predicts that Android will have a 45% market share, Windows Mobile will have a 21% share, and Apple will have a 15.3% market share. Symbian, which is being abandoned by Nokia for Windows Mobile, will have only a 0.2% market share compared to its current 21% market share today.
Meanwhile, IDG’s Media Tablet and eReader Tracker reports 10.1 million media tablets were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010. Apple’s share came down from 93% in 3Q10, to 73% in 4Q10, but still reflected Apple’s dominant leadership.
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab was the primary competitor in the holiday season, beating other players to market and capturing more than 17% share. According to IDC, media tablets are tablet form factor devices with color displays larger than 5 in. and smaller than 14 in. running lightweight operating systems (such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS) and can be based on either x86 or ARM processors.
