Touchy Feely
High-tech industry pundit Canalys reports that more than half of all smartphone shipments during the last quarter of 2009 featured touchscreens. According to its figures, for the first time ever 55% of the devices worldwide were touch-powered. It also reports that 43% had keyboards (another record). By supplying separate figures and from observation, it’s clear there must be a hefty cross-over of devices that feature both - my preferred style.
They provided a couple of interesting tables, that are easy to pop into blog posts. How kind!
The first table gives a breakdown for the touchscreen phones in question, and who made them.
No surprise that Apple is at the top (with two models of iPhone), but look at Nokia, increasing sales more than 40 times with the top-selling 5800 and N97 models contributing to the figure.
20% of the smartphone share is allocated to ‘others’, each with less than Samsung’s 6.4%. This shows you how many names are involved in the market. LG and Palm for example, but new players like Garmin-Asus, Acer, and Huawei will all be pushing product to the masses.
Further research by Canalys on the future demands of 4000 consumers revealed 60% wanting touch to feature on their next device. We can expect the 2010 Q2 and onwards phone portfolios of all the big telco’s to be well stocked with touchscreens.
Our second table shows market position and growth among available operating systems.
Symbian remains at the top, losing a little market share but still growing in real terms and still almost shipping as many units as the rest, combined.
Google showed the largest growth, set to continue as manufactures rack up announcements of Android phones for 2010.
The only drop in share fell to Microsoft as Windows Mobile lost out in popularity. A situation the Microsoft team at Redmond will hope to reverse for 2011 as Windows Phone 7 series smartphones become available. It’s going to be a tough 2010 though, with WinMo 6.5 looking less and less glamorous as consumer interest in the new version builds.
It would be very interesting to see the share of touchscreen-only phones, a choice I think that is much more divisive. Give me touchscreen, but give me a physical QWERTY keyboard too.
Like to know more? press release here
