According to market research from the NPD Group, in the US, sales of Android-based smartphones have now overtaken BlackBerry devices to claim the number one position. RIM’s Blackberry phones have previously held the lead since the 4th quarter of 2007, but it looks like Android will continue to go strong for quite some time to come.
Discussing the survey results, Ross Rubin, NPD executive director of industry analysis, said, “For the second consecutive quarter, Android handsets have shown strong but slowing sell-through market share gains among US consumers”.
Android is now installed on one of every three smartphones sold at retail in the US, accounting for 33% of all smartphones purchased in the second quarter of 2010, while RIM dropped to 28% and Apple gained a little, moving up to 22%, up 1% over last quarter with help from its recent iPhone 4 launch.
Just a quick recap of the mobile phone distribution network in the US: The iPhone is exclusive to AT&T, while four major carriers - AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile - all sell Android handsets.
Sprint and Verizon, for example, have been selling Android-based phones like the Droid Eris, HTC Hero, the HTC Incredible and the HTC EVO 4G – the first 4G phone in the US, as well as the popular Motorola Droid (also known in Europe as the Motorola Milestone). Verizon is still running several popular promotional campaigns for the Android devices, including various buy-one-get-one free offers.
What is interesting is that out of the top five list of best selling Android phones for Q2 in the U.S. market, 4 out of the 5 top selling phone models included the HTC DROID Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, HTC Hero, and HTC DROID Eris. Sprint and Verizon HTC Android Smartphones surely have been performing very well! HTC was not able to bump the Motorola DROID from the number one spot, but with 4 HTC models among the top 5, not many from HTC will be too concerned about that!
With the HTC Desire HD in the pipeline and having a rumoured release date sometime in Q3 2010, things are certainly looking bright for HTC. The following are the leaked specs for the HTC Desire HD. The smartphone, also known as the "Ace," has a lot of the same features as the HTC Desire but with a few exciting tweaks.
- 4.3 inch WVGA Touch Screen
- 8 Mega Pixel Camera
- 1 GHZ Qualcomm Processor
- Android 2.2 OS
- HD 720p Video Capture
- Xvid Video Playback
- SRS Surround Sound
- Automatic Face Tracking
- Adobe Flash 10 Support
- 4GB Internal Memory (upgradable to 32GB)
- E-book Reader Feature
- Unibody Aluminum Design
There seems to be a trend towards 4 inch screens or even bigger, as the HTC Desire HD specs have shown. I guess, if this keeps up, we will all be carrying around pseudo “mini tablet PCs” in our pockets soon!
