Gartner: Global smartphone shipments reached 144 million units in Q1 2012

Market research firm Gartner recently released global mobile phone market data for the first quarter of 2012. First, let's look at the situation in the smartphone market. In the first quarter of 2012, a total of 419 million mobile phones were sold worldwide, of which 144 million were smartphones. The global sales volume of Windows Phone remained stable from the previous quarter, with 2.759 million units sold in the fourth quarter of 2011 and 2.7125 million units sold in the first quarter of 2012, with a market share of 1.9%. Compared with the same period last year, sales increased, but the market share decreased slightly.

It is worth noting that in the first quarter of 2012, 2 million Windows Phones were sold by Nokia, which monopolized the majority of the Windows Phone platform with a share of 66%.

In addition, Android is now the undisputed market leader with a market share of 56.1% (81,067,400 units), an increase of 20 percentage points over the same period last year. However, due to the chaos in the Android ecosystem, Windows Phone has the opportunity to seize a large number of Android users. iOS's share has risen slightly, from 16.9% in the same period last year to 22.9%, with 33,120,500 units sold.

Symbian and RIM have shrunk significantly, with Symbian falling from 27.7% to 8.6% and RIM falling from 13% to 6.9%.

Let's take a look at the market share of each mobile phone brand. As we already know, Samsung almost dominates the Android platform and replaced Nokia as the global market share champion. Samsung sold a total of 86,567,600 mobile phones in the first quarter of 2012, with a market share of 20.7%, including 38 million smartphones, accounting for 26% of the smartphone market. Nokia's share declined from 25.1% in the same period last year to 19.8%. Apple is the third in the global mobile phone market, with a market share of 7.9%, and ranks second in smartphones, with a market share of 23%. The third largest smartphone brand is currently RIM, accounting for 7%.

Among Chinese manufacturers, ZTE and Huawei both achieved good growth, ranking fourth and sixth respectively, surpassing BlackBerry.

The market share and sales of LG, Motorola, HTC and Sony have declined to varying degrees, and we also know from previous reports that they are all losing money.

Most of Nokia's sales are Symbian feature phones. Its market share may further decline in the next quarter, but it will not lose its second place for the time being. The biggest problem Nokia faces is how to convert users of relatively cheap Symbian phones to Windows Phone users. Symbian users are losing very quickly. If Nokia cannot make a breakthrough in Windows Phone, it will soon be out of cards.

Microsoft's Windows Phone platform's extraordinary experience and excellent development tools are very attractive, but in addition to developers, Microsoft also needs to win the hearts of a large number of users. If Microsoft and Nokia's performance still cannot improve, Windows Phone's chances of becoming a mainstream platform will become smaller and smaller.