Thanks to a 906 percent surge in shipments worldwide to 5.21 million phones, Google's mobile OS outpaced Apple's in North America and the United States in particular.
Worldwide, Apple still comfortably outsold the combined Android platform, jumping from 10.5 percent of the market a year ago to 15.4 percent. Gartner however expects Android to overtake the iPhone before long as its worldwide sales grew six times larger over the same space of time, from 1.6 percent to 9.6 percent. Carolina Milanesi, Gartner VP, says the rapidly closing gap is an inevitable result of sheer scale.
"You have one vendor with one model and eight to nine vendors with many models -- of course you get bigger volumes," she said.
Most Android sales came from HTC and Motorola, which shipped 2.6 million and 2.3 million total smartphones each. Samsung has also been a significant contributor.
"In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “This quarter saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points. Android’s momentum continued into the first quarter of 2010, particularly in North America, where sales of Android-based phones increased 707 per cent year-on-year.
In the smartphone OS market, Android and Apple were the winners in the first quarter of 2010. Android moved to fourth position, displacing Microsoft Windows Mobile for the first time. Both Android and Apple were the only two OS vendors among the top five to increase market share year-on-year. Symbian remained in the top position but continued to lose share, primarily based on its weakness at the high end of the market.
Smartphones accounted for 17.3 per cent of all mobile handset sales in the first quarter of 2010, up from 13.6 per cent in the same period in 2009.
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