Android smartphone shipments from multiple vendors reached 32.9 million units worldwide in the fourth quarter — topping the 31 million Symbian OS units shipped by former market leader Nokia, Canalys reported Monday. However, Nokia retained its lead as the world’s number-one smartphone vendor with a 28 percent market share.
The global smartphone market overall grew 89 percent year over year to 101.2 unit shipments in the fourth quarter. However, smartphone vendors cannot afford to be complacent as they head into 2011, noted Canalys Vice President and Principal Analyst Chris Jones.
“2011 is set to be a highly competitive year with vendors looking to use new technology, such as dual-core processors, NFC and 3-D displays, to differentiate their products and maintain value,” Jones said.
Astounding Smartphone Growth
The fourth-quarter results for Android devices were boosted by astounding year-over-year growth from a number of vendors. LG Electronics (4,127 percent growth), Samsung (1,474 percent), Acer (709 percent), and HTC (371 percent) accounted for nearly 45 percent of all Android platform shipments, Canalys said.
“The growth of Android has been phenomenal, but so, too, has the number of related devices launched with different hardware and software specs,” Jones observed. “This has led to the market perception of it as a fragmented platform, though we believe that growth will continue [even] as the pace of Android OS upgrades slows.”
For vendors, Research In Motion reclaimed the top spot in the U.S. as robust shipments of the BlackBerry Torch exceeded Apple’s iPhone sales in the quarter. According to Canalys, HTC’s latest Android handset updates and the release of Windows Phone 7 devices enabled the company to claim the number-three position in U.S. smartphone shipments during the fourth quarter.
For operating systems, Android smartphone shipments in the U.S. reached 12.1 million units — nearly three times the number of BlackBerry devices that RIM shipped…