Canalys, a market research firm, reports that total worldwide smartphone shipments hit a record 39.9 million units in Q3 2008, a 27.9 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. Smartphones now account for about 13 percent of the total mobile phone market, up from 11 percent from the previous quarter. While global shipments grew, the picture is not quite as pretty when broken down by region. The US market more than doubled and EMEA grew about 21 percent but Asia recorded an 18 percent decline, primarily due to a drop in sales in Japan.
The big winner in all this was clearly Apple. The company grabbed second place behind leader Nokia with 6,899,010 iPhones shipped, an impressive 523 percent growth over the same quarter a year ago. Nokia saw its shipments drop about 3.4 percent (compared to the Q3 2007) to about 15 million units. RIM got pushed down into third position but shipped over 6 million units, an 80 percent increase compared again to Q3 2007. Motorola held down fourth place with 2,313,930 units shipped with HTC nipping at its heels with 2,308,210 units shipped (a 171 percent increase over Q3 2007).
On the operating system side, Symbian continued to hold down the top spot but saw a drop of 12.4 percent in shipments over Q3 2007. Apple held down second, followed by RIM with its BlackBerry OS, Microsoft with Windows Mobile and Linux. While Windows Mobile dropped from second to fourth, its shipments increased almost 43 percent, helped by HTC and Samsung in particular.
Next year, we could see some interesting shakeups with several manufacturers planning to release Google Android handsets.