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New market share figures show Windows Phone still can't gain traction

22.05.13

IDC is out with figures for worlwide smarphone sales in the second quarter, and it shows Windows Phone still stuck in idle, with only a 3.5% market share of the smartphone market, trailing not just Android and iOS, but Blackberry and Symbian as well. With the new iPhone just announced, the news might not get better for Microsoft.

The IDC report says that 5.4 million Windows Phone devices were sold in the quarter, for a 3.5% market share, up from 2.3% a year previously.

Android, meanwhile had 104.8 million units sold, for a 68.1% market share, up from 46.9% a year previous. There were 26 million iPhones sold, for a 16.9%, down from 18.8% a year previous. 7.4 million Blackberries were sold, for a 4.8% share, down from 11.5% a year earlier. And 6.8 million Symbian devices were sold, for a 4.4% market share, down from 16.9 percent a year previous.

Despite those poor market share figures, the signs look good for Windows Phone heading into the fall and winter. Several device makers, noticeably Samsung , have announced new, high-end Windows Phone devices based on Windows 8 Phone. Verizon will offer new Windows 8 Phones , and so will AT&T and T-Mobile . The carriers will likely push Windows Phone 8 devices heavily, as a way to fight back against Apple, which gets up to $600 in royalties from carriers for each iPhone user, and that's on top of getting hardware sales subsidized by carriers.

Source: Computerworld (blog)