Smartphones by the numbers: WinMo still growing

In business, it's all about doing better. Month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. You need to do better than before. That's growth.

And numbers published today by the analysts at Gartner show that Windows Mobile is far from dead. Specifically, worldwide sales to end users were up 12.2 percent from 2007 to 2008, giving Windows Mobile 11.8 percent of the 2008 market share, behind Symbian and Research in Motion.

OK, WinMo's growth wasn't anywhere near as strong as RIM's (96.7 percent) or Apple's (245.7 percent!) or even Palm's (42.2 percent). But it's positive growth. The Symbian OS fell 6.1 percent from 2007 to 2008 but still has a little more than half of the world's market share. (For more on that, check out Nokia Experts' own Matthew Miller over at ZDNet.)  BlackBerry has 16.6 percent of the market, followed by Windows Mobile at 11.8 percent. The iPhone came in fourth at 8.2 percent.

What's it all mean? The smartphone industry is growing by leaps and bounds. Windows Mobile isn't dead, and there's still plenty of geeky goodness to go around.

JKOnTheRun via ZDNet

Phil Nickinson

Phil is the father of two beautiful girls and is the Dad behind Modern Dad. Before that he spent seven years at the helm of Android Central. Before that he spent a decade in a newsroom of a two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist newspaper. Before that — well, we don't talk much about those days. Subscribe to the Modern Dad newsletter!