Samsung Passes Nokia As Biggest Handset Manufacturer

rtfa-troll writes "Tomi Ahonen reports that Samsung has become the largest manufacturer of smartphones (overtaking Apple) and of mobile phones (overtaking Nokia). During the first quarter of 2012 Samsung sold 93.5 million phones, with 44.5 million (48%) of those being smartphones. Apple would still lead on 'smart mobile devices' with 52 million sales including iPads, but not iPods. The last time the lead in mobile phone sales changed was in 14 years ago, in 1998, when Nokia overtook Ericsson. Ericsson never recovered and began leaving the mobile phone market three years later, creating Sony Ericsson, later Sony Mobile. It looks like the mobile phone market is going to be brutal, with Apple and Samsung crushing everybody else except possibly HTC, which is still rising, and Motorola (which has Google to look after it)."

Comments

no huge surprise .. nokia is engineered to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks to the microshit idiot in charge, nokia will fail and microshit will pick up the remains for pennies on the dollar.

Re:no huge surprise .. nokia is engineered to fail

[recoiledsnake]

> Nokia and MS have utterly failed in building ecosystem around what they decided to go with

There are 85,000 apps in the Windows Phone marketplace now, not stellar but nothing to sneer at either. With Windows 8, the software platform will be unified, and porting a Win 8 Metro app to Windows Phone will be super easy, with only the UI layer needing tweaks. Nokia going it alone would've faced much bigger challenges.

Re:no huge surprise .. nokia is engineered to fail

[shutdown -p now]

There are 85,000 apps in the Windows Phone marketplace now, not stellar but nothing to sneer at either.

The problem is more apparent when you look at what those apps actually are. I mean, WP is still the only platform that doesn't have a fully functional Skype client (what it currently has does not work in background).

With Windows 8, the software platform will be unified, and porting a Win 8 Metro app to Windows Phone will be super easy, with only the UI layer needing tweaks.

Since there have been no public statements on the future version of Windows Phone, so far this is just wishful thinking (or, if you're an insider, a leak).

In any case, the problem is the word "will". No-one cares about what "will" be there - it'll matter when it'll be there, which we still don't know yet. Meanwhile, iOS and Android are here already.

Already warming up my "I told you so" dance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just the beginning of the end. Nokia was doomed the moment Microsoft was whispered in the head office. Any company to work that closely with MS always gets burned.

Right now the mole is just tanking the company, making it cheaper for the inevitable buy out.

I'm dead serious about all of this. You'll mod me down now, but I'll be laughing when it happens 8-18 months from now.

Re:Already warming up my "I told you so" dance.

[recoiledsnake]

> Any company to work that closely with MS always gets burned.

Lets see, Intel,AMD, Nvidia, HTC(who started out as a only-Windows Mobile OEM), Dell, HP, Sony, ASUS, Acer, Samsung, Lenovo... all of these got burnt and didn't make lots of profits because of their partnership with MS right?

Re:Already warming up my "I told you so" dance.

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Nokia was doomed several years ago. They ridiculed Apple while they failed to streamline Symbian app development, while they failed to research and develop touch-screen mobiles, while they failed to build a proper app store that was easy to use, while they failed to build.

Making a deal with Microsoft was just an act of desperation. They were already bleeding profusely from the consequences of all their dumb-ass decisions made around 2005-2007 when mobile internet was beginning to take off. The Ovi store could have been launched in 2005-2006 with over-the-air app downloads. Had Nokia remained on the leading edge and focused on making their products better from a consumer-point-of-view, then Apple would have had a much harder job in invading the mobile phone market.

But Nokia was not focused. Apple and Google had them for lunch.

Re:Motorola, Nokia

[binarylarry]

With Windows Phone Nokia has to do whatever Microsoft wants. They have very little wiggle room.

With Android they can go to any extreme, from working directly with Google to forking the whole thing like Amazon.

Using a poor platform like Windows Phone was a huge mistake for Nokia and it's probably going to be a fatal one.

Re:Meego

[Anonymous Coward]

And, despite the lack of marketing, way more N9s have been sold than Lumias. It's a realy pity because Harmattan's swipe interface is lightyears ahead of anything Android has to offer.

--
Sundar Pichai is the asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the closing down of the Atlanta engineering office. Great work!

Re:Motorola, Nokia

[mystikkman]

>With Windows Phone Nokia has to do whatever Microsoft wants. They have very little wiggle room.

Nokia negotiated the right to change any part of the WP OS.

>With Android they can go to any extreme, from working directly with Google to forking the whole thing like Amazon.

You mean the same Google that also owns Motorola? Or the same Google that gave preferential access of new releases to Samsung first for the latest two major revisions?

http://androidandme.com/2012/04/smartphones-2/google-picks-samsung-for-4th-generation-nexus-phone/

Say what you will about MS, but they never played favorites with or bought OEMs.

Not to mention that the Kindle Fire cannot access the Google Marketplace and is doomed to be a few versions behind the latest Android while Amazon waits for Google to throw code over the wall at release(the same code that Samsung/Motorola has access to for months).

Re:Instead of linking to a random blog post...

[tbird81]

But then how is the blogger (probably Soulskill's friend) going to make advertising dollars?