Windows Mobile does better than iPhone in 4th quarter 2008

Even with the current economic situation, it was interesting to see there was an overall growth of 3.7 percent in this quarter compared to the same quarter in 2007. Nokia announced the flagship N97 in this quarter, but the device isn't scheduled for release until sometime in the middle of 2009 so there may be people waiting for the device before making any Nokia smartphone purchases.

Samsung had a strong showing and the availability of their touch screen devices (like the OMNIA variants) did quite well. HTC had a strong quarter too, but as noted on the Gartner charts the devices that are branded by operators appear under the Others category (as I believed and stated in the past) so HTC has an even larger marketshare that is unfortunately not depicted in the charts. I would like to see future data that shows all device from HTC since the Others category is huge and not helpful in showing what is going on.

In the 3rd quarter data Mac OS X was above Windows Mobile (12.9% to 11.1%), but we see this flip flop in the 4th quarter with Windows Mobile at 12.4% and Mac OS X at 10.7%. Linux and RIM went up while Symbian and Palm went down. Palm OS is actually shown as only 0.9% of the worldwide marketshare.

Thanks to jkOnTheRun for the heads-up on the report.