Mobile phone shipments will continue to grow this year, leading global shipments of mobile devices, which also include personal and ultramobile computers, according to Gartner Inc.
Mobile phones are expected to dominate all device shipments, with 1.9 billion handsets expected to be shipped this year, a 5 percent increase from last year, Gartner said in a research note.
Worldwide shipments of all devices are projected to reach 2.5 billion units this year, up 7.6 percent year-on-year, Gartner said.
“The device market continues to evolve, with buyers deciding which combination of devices is required to meet their wants and needs,” Gartner’s research director Ranjit Atwal said in the note.
“Mobile phones are a must-have and will continue to grow but at a slower pace, with opportunities moving away from the top-end premium devices to mid-end basic products,” he added.
Users continue to move away from traditional PCs while the greater flexibility of tablets, hybrids and ultrabooks address users’ demands, Atwal said.
He predicted that ultramobiles will drive the devices market growth starting from this year, with a growth rate of 54 percent.
In the operating system market, Android will continue to dominate across all devices, with 1.1 billion units shipped worldwide, up 26 percent from last year, Gartner estimated.
Devices running on Windows are expected to total 359.85 million units, compared to 344.2 million units on iOS, the report showed.
“There is no doubt that there is a volume versus value equation, with Android users also purchasing lower-cost devices compared to Apple users,” Gartner principle analyst Annette Zimmerman said.
Separately, Taiwanese smartphone vendor HTC Corp (宏達電) continued losing ground to its larger rivals in the US late last year as the company struggled to boost sales, according to a survey released by market research firm comScore Inc. The survey found that HTC’s US market share slid to 6.4 percent in the September-to-November period from 7.4 percent in the previous three months, dropping to fifth place from third.
Google Inc unit Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc and South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc rose to third and fourth respectively, with 6.7 percent and 6.5 percent market shares, comScore’s latest survey showed.
Apple Inc remained the top smartphone vendor in the US with a 41.2 percent market share, up 0.5 percentage points from June-August.
The survey also found that Google’s Android was still the leading smartphone platform in the US with a 51.9 percent share, followed by the Apple iOS at 41.2 percent, the BlackBerry OS at 3.5 percent, Microsoft Windows at 3.1 percent and the Nokia Symbian at 0.2 percent.
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