Android keeps dominating

The market analysts from Gartner have posted their report on the smartphone market in Q3 and have outlined some pretty interesting trends. The market as a whole grew by 5.6% and Android saw its share more than double and its total shipments nearly triple compare to Q3 of 2010.

The Google OS powered more than half of all smartphones sold in the third quarter. That's a total of over 60 million units shipped, which adds up to over 650 thousands for each day of the quarter. The sequential increase in the market share of the platform is quite impressive as well - 9.1 percent points.

Symbian took a distant second place with a market share of 16.9%. Its shipments fell both sequentially and year-over-year and it's pretty certain that this is the last quarter when Symbian is the second best-selling platform.

In third place, iOS suffered a minor setback as Apple missed its regular iPhone refresh pattern and sales of the platform took a rare-to-be-seen sequential dip. Still, the shipments were much higher than in Q3 of 2010 and back then we had a new iPhone in the market. The gap between iOS and Symbian stood at just 1.9 percent points in Q3, which is less than the iPhone 4S sold in its first day of existence.

RIM keeps struggling to match the growth rate of the market as a whole and while it maintained its 4th place and shipment volumes both YoY and sequentially, it keeps losing market share. BlackBerry powered just 11% of the smartphones sold over the past three months and with Windows Phone finally about to mount a serious challenge runs the risk of being relegated to the role of an also-run.

Interestingly though, Windows Phone is still unable to make any kind of serious impact and its sales are decreasing, instead of increasing. With a market share of 1.5% it was even overtaken by Bada, which now sits in fifth place.

Operating System	3Q11 Units	3Q11 Market Share (%)	3Q10 Units	3Q10 Market Share (%)
Android	60,490.4	52.5	20,544.0	25.3
Symbian	19,500.1	16.9	29,480.1	36.3
iOS	17,295.3	15.0	13,484.4	16.6
Research In Motion	12,701.1	11.0	12,508.3	15.4
Bada	2,478.5	2.2	920.6	1.1
Microsoft	1,701.9	1.5	2,203.9	2.7
Others	1,018.1	0.9	1,991.3	2.5
Total	115,185.4	100.0	81,132.6	100.0

Moving on to the other interesting bit from the Gartner report, the manufacturers' ranking, we see that Nokia has retained its top spot, though the gap to the second-placed Samsung is quickly closing.

LG comes in a very distant third and it too is on its way to being overtaken by Apple. RIM already knows how that feels as the company lost to both the Apple and ZTE in Q3 2011 and is now sixth.

And if RIM doesn't improve its performance right away, it risks falling victim to the fast growing HTC and Motorola, too. Even Huawei isn't that far behind.

Sony Ericsson comes last of the major manufacturers with a market share of just 1.9%. The joint-venture, which is on its way to becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony, shipped less than 8.5 million units in the past three months and unless it picks up its game, it might become another member of the dreaded Others group in some of the next reports.

Vendor	3Q11 Units	3Q11 Market Share (%)	3Q10 Units	3Q10 Market Share (%)
Nokia	105,353.5	23.9	117,461.0	28.2
Samsung	78,612.2	17.8	71,671.8	17.2
LG Electronics	21,014.6	4.8	27,478.7	6.6
Apple	17,295.3	3.9	13,484.4	3.2
ZTE	14,107.8	3.2	7,817.2	1.9
Research In Motion	12,701.1	2.9	12,508.3	3.0
HTC	12,099.9	2.7	6,494.3	1.6
Motorola	11,182.7	2.5	8,961.4	2.1
Huawei Device	10,668.2	2.4	5,478.1	1.3
Sony Ericsson	8,475.9	1.9	10,346.5	2.5
Others	148,990.9	33.8	135,384.1	32.5
Total	440,502.2	100	417,085.7	100

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Samsung Galaxy Note battery life test ready, here go the results [TEST]

It’s episode three of our new battery test and we have the Samsung Galaxy Note starring this time. The phoneblet has a 2500 mAh battery, which is much larger than that of the average smartphone, but it also has a very power-hungry 5.3″ screen.

As a direct result, the Samsung Galaxy Note’s performance in our test was quite unusual. While it got a monstrous score on the telephony part, its web browsing endurance were quite disappointing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Traditionally, we start with the talk-time test. The Samsung Galaxy Note turned out the best performer of the three handsets we have seen here, surviving an unthinkable 12 hours and 47 minutes of 3G talk time on a single charge. The result wasn’t that surprising though – with the screen turned off, the power consumption of the Galaxy Note isn’t higher than that of the average smartphone, but the battery is much larger here.

Next came the web browsing test, which was the stage of the Galaxy Note’s worst performance. The Note managed just 3 hours and 35 minutes of continuous browsing, which is some way off the standard set by the iPhone 4S and Nokia N9. As most of the web pages are predominantly white, the 5.3″ screen turned into a power-leeching beast that’s hard to feed.

The great power hunger is also partially due to the GPU-acceleration of the browser. If you are willing to trade the stock browser for one of the alternatives found on the Android Market you would see worse performance, but slightly better battery life. We repeated the test with Opera Mobile and the Galaxy Note lasted for 4 hours this time.

The Samsung Galaxy Note restored some of its pride in the last challenge – the video playback test. It used 90% of its battery after 8 hours and 25 minutes of looping the same SD Xvid video. It’s still worse than what the two smartphones we tested previously achieved, but at least it’s in the same ball park.

Finally, and most importantly the Samsung Galaxy Note got an endurance rating of 39, which means that you will have to be plug it in every 39 hours if you do 1 hour of using the stock web browser, 3G calls and video playback every day. That’s exactly as much as the N9 got, but not quite as impressive as the 45 hours achieved by the iPhone 4S.

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