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Comment by danw | Hacker News Reader

"RIM and Apple are much, much stronger than Nokia in the smartphone market"

That's a bit silly. As of Q4 2007 Nokia has 52.9% of market share for smartphones, part of the 65% for Symbian. RIM has 11.4% and Apple has 6.5% (impressive for only a year after launch). See http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm

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They have a 6,5% share in Q4 and not overall, basically all those numbers out there only mention quarters and not overall market shares and that's very misleading. I have seen this on Techcrunch and many other blogs, where they put out 20% market share for the iPhone but if you consider there to be some 300 Mio. smartphones out there you get the real numbers ;).

Well spotted, I hadn't realised these were for Q4 sales, rather than market share in Q4. The 7% for the iPhone makes much more sense in this context.

Could you clarify please?

Apple sold 6 Mio. iPhones till June and the whole smartphone market is about 300 mio. phones, that's 2%.

The percentages mentioned on Techcrunch and all the other blogs mention selling figures per quarter. e.g. 35,522,360 smartphones sold in Q4 and 2,320,840 iPhones that means only 6,5% in this quarter and not in the whole market. I think it was 26% in Q1 2008 and 19% in Q2 2008 but as you see their market share is still only approximately 2% of all smartphones.

Are those US or global figures?

26% and 20% were US figures, that was a little mixed up I think - sorry. The rest was global.

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