The world’s most popular fruit company has topped Nokia to take over the title of World’s Top Smartphone Vendor. I am, of course, talking about Apple Inc. whose iPhone, with its 3GS and 4, its only smartphones, has shipped more units than Nokia in the second quarter of 2011.
Apple announced the iPhone back in 2007. Since then, we’ve seen a true revolution in the mobile industry. We went from dumb smartphones to smartphones that actually lived up to their name. From clunky, menu-within-a-menu based interfaces to clean, user-friendly UIs… from resistive to capacitive touchscreens… from weak first party apps to strong developer ecosystems for powerful native third party apps… we’ve all seen the transformation! And I personally attribute this great change to the iPhone.
The launching of the iPhone brought with itself heavy competition from the likes of Samsung and HTC. Both companies have been successful in their own way, but Apple’s success in the smartphone market (as well as the tablet market) is unmatched.
Today’s news of Apple beating Nokia comes from Financial Times:
Nokia has been overtaken by Apple as the world’s biggest smartphone producer by volume after another sharp fall in sales during the second quarter.
The troubled Finnish mobile phone maker made a net loss of €368m ($524m) during the three-month period as revenues declined 7 per cent to €9.3bn.
Shipments of Nokia smartphones declined by 34 per cent to 16.7m units, compared with the 20.3m iPhones shipped by Apple in its second quarter.
This news was prophesized back in June by a Japanese market analysis firm.
Apple already passed Nokia in terms of profits and revenues sometime ago, but it is only in the April-June time period that Apple went ahead of Nokia in terms of total volume i.e. smartphone units shipped.
The crisis that Nokia faces today comes from their initial confusion of which software vendor should they rely on for their smartphones. At first, the company seemed satisfied with its Symbian OS, later it moved to a much more powerful open-source platform Meego until the Finnish company finally settled with Windows Phone 7 in February.
A beautiful looking Nokia-WP7 device, codenamed Sea-Ray, leaked a few weeks back. The first Nokia Windows Phone 7 smartphone is expected later this year. It will come built-in with the latest version of WP7 i.e. Mango.
Apple’s success with the iPhone series of smartphones continues as the iPhone 4S/5 is expected to launch, according to multiple reports, this September.
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