Putting these numbers in context, ABI Research
reported earlier this spring that 70.9 million smartphones shipped in 2006, of which 40 million, or 56 percent, came from Nokia. ABI also estimated that the Symbian OS accounted for 73 percent of the market.
Assuming overall smartphone shipments will exceed 100 million units in 2008, a level Gartner expects
may be attained this year, Microsoft is thus expecting Windows Mobile to grab about 15 to 20 percent of the market. Presumably, much of this would come at the expense of Symbian. In fact, ABI predicts that Symbian's market share will "fall to 46 percent by 2012, due to strong competition coming most notably from Linux, but also from Windows Mobile."
This also turns out to be more or less in line with projections from other market researchers. Last fall, In-Stat reported that Windows Mobile's U.S. market position in the first half of 2006 had
pulled even with those of BlackBerry and Palm, an accomplishment noted by Bach in his
MEDC keynote. Last September
IDC projected that Windows Mobile would capture 32.3 percent of the enterprise market for "converged mobile devices," i.e. smartphones, by 2010, and early last year
The Diffusion Group (TDG) predicted that Windows Mobile would take 29 percent of the 2010 market compared with 26 percent for Linux and 22 percent for Symbian.
Taken as a whole, these numbers point to a bright future for Windows Mobile. Microsoft's substantial investment in this space may finally be starting to pay off.
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