The mobile phone market in Western Europe grew just 1.5% year-on-year to 43.3 million units in the second quarter of 2010, with smartphone growth offsetting a fall in the sale of traditional handsets. International Data Corporation's Mobile Phone Tracker says smartphone shipments were up 60% on Q2 2009 to 14.6 million units, while traditional phone sales fell 14% to 28.7 million units. That means 34% of all devices shipped were smartphones, up from 28% in the previous quarter.
According to IDC, Android shipments increased 450% year-on-year and its market share jumped from 4% to 15% in the last 12 months, becoming the fourth most-popular operating system among new smartphones. IDC believes Android will become the second most-popular smartphone OS in Western Europe by as early as the first quarter of 2011.
There's a similarly positive note from comScore, which has been looking at total subscribers in five European countries rather than shipments to all of Western Europe (and over a slightly different time period, too). It says the European smartphone market has grown 41% in the past year to 60.8 million subscribers. Smartphone usage is dominated by the Symbian platform, which appears on 54.4% of smartphones in Western Europe.
comScore calculates that Android's total market share in the five countries it surveyed (UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy) has risen from 0.5% in July 2009 to 6.1% in 2010, while Apple's share has risen from 10.2% to 19.2%.
