Android Numbers Steadily Rise to 43% Market Dominance in Q2 According to Gartner

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The marketing analytics firm, Gartner Inc., has come out with their quarter 2 reports for mobile devices. Android, Symbian Apple dominate the smartphone OS field. Android leads with 43.4% of the global market and iOS trails behind with 18.2%. Between these two companies they held 62% of the total world market leaving their competitors with an increasingly smaller piece of the global pie. Symbian from Nokia still clings to second place with 22% of the world market. This is down from their former dominance at one point of 48%. The only reason they were able to hold on to this position was summed up in the following quote,

Nokia maintained its lead despite its slump because it is working to reduce stock levels and is cutting the prices of older devices. That means the average Nokia phone is sold for less as it liquidate stock, mostly in Europe and China. "The sales efforts of the channel, combined with Nokia's 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 Roberta Cozza, a principal research analyst at Gartner in a press release. "However, we will not see a repeat of this performance in the third quarter of 2011, as Nokia's channel is pretty lean."

Another interesting thing to note from the study is that Microsoft's other mobile OS, called Bada, (which very few people have heard of in the U.S.) is actually outperforming Windows Phone 7. This is bad news for Microsoft, and really both Microsoft and Nokia need to get their "combined offering" to market as soon as possible if they want to compete.

Source: Android.net via ReadWriteWeb.com and Gartner