By Suzanne Choney
Sales of computers and TVs may be hurting, but smartphones keep the tech economy chugging along: Worldwide, the smartphone market grew 54.7 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2011, and 1 out of every 3 mobile phones shipped worldwide was a smartphone, says IDC Research.
"The launch of Apple's iPhone 4S played a key role in smartphone growth to capture pent-up demand, and smartphone launches from other vendors also provided a broad selection to meet varying preferences and budgets," said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team, in a release.
While the iPhone 4S was certainly the leading smartphone in the U.S., it also helped spur sales worldwide, along with high-profile Android phones, including various iterations of Samsung's Galaxy phones.
Still, "a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google's hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker program.
Here's a snapshot of how each brand (aka "vendor") did in the fourth quarter of 2011:
- Apple "climbed back into the market leadership position with the launch of its iPhone 4S worldwide, and in the process it reached a new shipment volume record for itself and for the entire industry for a single quarter. Although the iPhone 4S disappointed some detractors by lacking 4G LTE connectivity or a different size screen, demand was high for the device. In addition, the combination of holiday seasonality, the delay in product launch from 3Q to 4Q, and the addition of multiple mobile operators helped drive volumes higher."
- Samsung hit some new milestones in the quarter, "breaking the 30 million units mark for the first time, posting the largest year-over-year increase among the top vendors, and finishing 2011 as the overall smartphone market leader." In addition to itse Galaxy line, IDC said, Samsung "updated its Omnia and Focus smartphones with Windows Phone Mango." (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
- Nokia had the "largest year-over-year decrease among the top vendors, but its smartphone strategy took another step forward with the release of its first Windows Phone smartphones, the Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800."
- Research In Motion "finished the quarter with a mixed bag of results." The company's phones with its new BlackBerry OS 7 on them "staved off a fourth consecutive quarter of sequential decline. Still, overshadowing these results was the global network outage in October, followed by announcements that its first BB 10-powered smartphones will not arrive to market until late 2012."
- HTC kept up a "strong pace of device releases during the quarter, with the launch of the Windows Phone-powered Titan and Radar models, the Beats-influenced Rezound, and the LTE-enabled Vivid in addition to multiple other Android-powered smartphones."? Despite lots of "high-profile launches" in the fourth quarter, HTC "still shipped lower volumes compared to the previous quarter."
Overall, the worldwide smartphone market grew 54.7 percent year over year in the last quarter, IDC said. Vendors shipped 157.8 million smartphones, compared to 102 million in the last quarter of 2010. While that growth didn't match 2010's year-over-year spurt of 75.7 percent, IDC "still fully expects continued double-digit growth for the foreseeable future."
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