Led by Samsung, Android smartphone shipments in 2012 Q2 surge to 68% of market

They’d make unhappy bedfellows but — taken together — Google’s Android platform and Apple’s iOS accounted for a record 92 per cent of global smartphone shipments in Q4 last year, according to new figures from analyst Strategy Analytics. The analyst estimates that 152.1 million Android smartphones were shipped globally in the quarter, nearly double the amount shipped i

Android dominates the worldwide smartphone market, running on 75 percent of all smartphones shipped throughout the globe in the third quarter, IDC reported. Samsung continued to hold sway over the Android market, but its market share slipped because of competition from a multitude of smaller vendors. Apple's iOS came in a poor second, shipping on 26.9 million smartphones in Q3 2012.

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IDC reported that 104.8 million Android-based smartphones shipped worldwide during the second quarter, representing a 106.5 percent gain over the 50.8 million handsets that launched in the same period last year. Android nabbed 68.1 percent of the smartphone market last quarter.

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Latest IDC numbers are out and there really isn’t anything new to report. For the first quarter 2012, Android’s market share was 59.0%, up from 36.1% a year ago. Apple continues to take the second spot with a 23.0% share, up from 18.3% a year ago.

IDC has released their numbers for tablet market share in the first quarter of 2013, and it looks great for Android tablets. In the first three months of the year, 27.8 million Android tablets were shipped, up 247% from Q1 last year. The 27.8 million tablets also happen to make up 56.5% of all tablets shipped during the quarter, snagging the top spot from Apple.

Get ready for the most obvious statement of the year: smartphones are a big deal. Some of us want a concrete number behind that, though. Now that we’ve got all the major earnings reports for the year out of the way, we’ve got that concrete number. Over 200 million phones were shipped in Q4, and the annual total for smartphones in 2012 was 671 million.

Gartner has this morning published its numbers for how the mobile handset industry has performed in Q3. The topline figure is that the mobile industry overall continues to see pressure from the wider economic downturn, and the gradual move away from cheaper, low end feature devices: overall sales of 428 million units for the quarter are 3% down on the same quarter last year.

The Android platform tops the list in sales of smartphone operating systems for the first quarter of 2011, according to a report by market researcher Gartner. Total smartphone sales accounted for 23.6 percent of global handset units overall, and various phones sporting Google's Android OS took 36 percent of that market. They sold more than 36.3 million units in the quarter.

A raft of smartphone market analyst numbers are out and they all continue to make very pleasant reading for Samsung — the maker of the Galaxy range of smartphones — underlining the success of the Korean company’s strategy of steamrollering the competition by offering an extensive portfolio of mobile devices at a variety of screen sizes and price points vs.