phone

I love the statistics behind an industry, watching trends, and so on. And yesterday saw AppleInsider publish a table from Gartner’s new stats on worldwide smartphone sales in Q1, 2008. It’s only a summary of the top 5 manufacturers, but it makes interesting reading. Nokia are top, of course, with their Symbian-based S60 smartphones selling 14.6 million units in Q1, with a fast-moving RIM in second place on 4.3 million units. And, the point of Apple Insider’s article, Apple are a relatively new entry at number 3, having overtaken all other established smartphone makers to achieve worldwide sales of 1.7 million in the quarter. So that’s HTC, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all beaten comfortably by the new contender from Cupertino.

What’s especially notable from the statistics is that Nokia and Apple don’t market their ‘smartphones’ as such. (more…)