Almost non-existent in most western markets, the strength of Samsung's bada OS in Asia has enabled it to surpass the market share of the platform that many analysts believes will go on to become a major player: Windows Phone.
Latest figures released by Gartner for Q2 2011 show shipments of handsets running the OS have more than tripled year-on-year to over 2 million units across the quarter.
That hands bada a 1.9 percent share of total smartphone shipments in Q2.
Windows Phone, in contrast, shipped 1.7 million units a fall from the 3 million Windows Mobile handsets Microsoft shipped in the same quarter last year.
Bada big?
Nonetheless, bada's growth still pales in comparison to both the dominance of Android which shipped 46 million handsets during the quarter and even Symbian, which saw almost 24 million handsets hit the shelves worldwide.
A measure of the growth of the market as a whole, that's little over a million down on the figure for the same quarter last year, when Symbian boasted a market leading near 41 percent share ahead of BlackBerry.
No knocking Nokia
In terms of manufacturers, Gartner claims Nokia remains the top dog with almost 98 million handsets shipped down from more than 111 million phones during the same period in 2010, but still well ahead of second place Samsung on around 70 million handsets.
"The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokias greater concentration in retail and distributors' sales, saw Nokia destock more than 9 million units overall and 5 million smartphones, helping it hold on to its position as the leading smartphone manufacturer by volume," said principle analyst Roberta Cozza.
"However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokias channel is pretty lean."
Both Apple and ZTE's shipments have essentially doubled year on year to 19.6 million units and 13.1 million units respectively while RIM held strong, shipping 1 million units more in Q2 2011 than in the same period in 2010.
In all, sales of smartphones were up 74 percent year-on-year, accounting for 25 percent of all sales across the quarter.
[source: Gartner]
Data & Research
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font.
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