Gartner has released some figures on mobile handset shipments, predicting that global handset sales for 2007 will grow to 1.15 billion on the back of strong demand in Asia and Africa. That would represent a 16 percent year-on-year rise, which Engineering News notes is higher than the average of less than 10 percent growth predicted by analysts polled by Reuters last month. “Gartner said 257.4 million phones were sold in January-March, up 14 percent year-on-year, boosted by 40 percent growth in the Asia-Pacific region. Western Europe and North America saw only 4 percent and 2 percent annual growth, respectively.” Nokia claimed a 35.7 percent marketshare, followed by Motorola on 18.5 percent, Samsung had 12.5 percent, Sony Ericsson had 8.4 percent and LG had 6.2 percent. These figures were revealed in general in the earnings reports of the companies — Nokia and Sony Ericsson showed growth, Motorola showed a big drop.
On the PDA side “shipments of handheld computers running Windows Mobile soared 64 percent in the first quarter, propelling worldwide shipments overall to 5.1 million units, a 39.7 percent increase over the same period a year ago,” reports TelecomAsia of Gartner figures. Windows Mobile Licensees accounted for more than 60 percent of total shipments, nearly 3.2 million PDAs in the quarter. RIM was the next highest with 18.1 percent of the PDA OS market, with other companies such as Palm focusing on the much larger smartphone market, where Microsoft has “faltered”. (release)
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