“IDC and Strategy Analytics today officially confirmed what was unofficially revealed last week: Apple has ousted Nokia as the largest smartphone maker in the world,” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD.
“The company sold 20.3 million iPhones last quarter, up 142 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, and according to Strategy Analytics that gives it an 18.5 percent share of the worldwide smartphone market — greater than Nokia’s 15.2 percent share, which has fallen by more than half since last year,” Paczkowski reports. “Meanwhile, in a separate report, IDC noted that Apple’s share of the overall handset market more than doubled in the second quarter, rising to 5.6 percent from 2.6 percent a year earlier. That makes it the world’s fourth-largest manufacturer of all mobile phones after Nokia, Samsung and LG.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Apple’s iPhone is a “niche product.” – (Former) Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, April 17, 2008
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mauricio D.” for the heads up.]
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Apple took two-thirds of available mobile phone profits in Q211 – July 29, 2011
Apple ends Nokia’s 15-year reign as king of smartphone unit sales – July 21, 2011
Apple makes roadkill of deer-in-the-headlights CEOs – April 1, 2011
Spanking. Ouch.
I am on my 3rd iPhone. Before that I owned a Nokia N 95. Referring to anything that Nokia makes as a smartphone is a serious misnomer. Maybe not-so-smart phone would be more accurate
I had one of those N95’s, after reading lots of positive reviews. What a crock! Utter rubbish, difficult to navigate UI, almost useless camera that couldn’t even focus on a stationary mountain bike six feet away, GPS that only functioned with the keyboard open, or with an additional BT receiver…
And they wonder why the iPhone ripped their market
Why do people even try to compete with Apple any more. No existing company has the culture to take them on
Query: if you were fresh out if MIT (for example) and Top of your class. How much more would Google or MS or HP have to pay you to turn down a job offer from Apple?
They couldn’t afford me
Nokia makes Dumb Phones, as in dumb to own.
San Jose Mercury News, Nov 20, 2006:
Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.'”
He’s right though. Apple didn’t walk in. They slid in on roller skates. On greased roller skates. On greased roller skates atop banana peels on greased ice on grease!
Nokia got left in the dust for several reasons. One is would you believe a range of choice of too many phones, each with a numerical designation that’s confusing beyond belief. Is the 3350 a better model than the 8850? This confusion still exists to this day even after the appointment of Stephen Elop to the CEO’s office. The first thing that Steve Jobs did upon returning to Apple was to cut down on the number of product lines. That may sound unintuitive to an MBA trained CEO like Elop but it has the effect of clarifying the mind of the consumer as to which product best fits his needs. If someone is confronted by a choice of millions, it introduces brain freeze – in the end you end up not making a choice at all.
The second problem with Nokia is the idea of girth – that the heftier the phone the better it is. This is the Windows fanboy approach where if you pay $5 you want to eat the biggest burger in McDonald’s. This leads to massive plastic encrusted junk from Dell that have 101 useless ports, drives and whatnot. This is otherwise known as confusion by obfuscation – that a longer list of specifications must mean better value. Nokia phones suffered from the same bloat in hardware that left you carrying a 10lb brick that made your pocket bulge out like you had a permanent erection. Apple won customers over by svelte, by cutting waste.
Nokia’s third failing was in not overhauling the user interface when they had the chance, when they were ahead of everyone else in the smartphone market. They wasted billions of dollars developing NGage, a pseudo game platform that detracted from a phone’s function, added no value and was hopelessly unintuitive.
Bad missteps have led to declining market share. We haven’t seen the bottom for Nokia yet. They are at 10,000 ft of a 35,000 ft freefall. There’s a long way yet to go before they land smack on the ground creating a crater the size of Finland. Good riddance to crap I say.
“They are at 10,000 ft of a 35,000 ft freefall”
And their backup is a parachute with a gaping hole called WP7 and there are crocodiles in the bog they’re about to land in to make sure nothing’s left.
“left you carrying a 10lb brick that made your pocket bulge out like you had a permanent erection”.
If that Nokia lasts more than 4 hours please consult Ripply’s Believe it or Not.
Kallasvuo got his ass iCal’ed
I had one of those N95’s, after reading lots of positive reviews. What a crock! Utter rubbish, difficult to navigate UI, almost useless camera that couldn’t even focus on a stationary mountain bike six feet away, GPS that only functioned with the keyboard open, or with an additional BT receiver…
And they wonder why the iPhone ripped their market out from under their feet. The 3G iPhone that replaced the N95 was a breath of fresh air, clear, intuitive UI that didn’t need continual reference to a manual to figure out how to do something that isn’t an everyday function.
Undeniable BloodBath!!
Nokia made a good 1998 – 2003 candybar phones
Apple’s goal was to get 1% of the worldwide cell phone market.
They missed that goal, didn’t they.
{/irony}