Android overtakes BlackBerry as top-selling U.S. smartphone OS

Google's Android platform now represents 17.2 percent of the global smartphone market, overtaking Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS as the world's third most popular smartphone OS and edging past Research In Motion's (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry to emerge as the top-selling OS in the U.S., according to new data published by research firm Gartner. Worldwide sales of Android-powered devices topped 10.6 million in the second quarter of 2010, up from just 756,000 a year ago, at which time Android made up only 1.8 percent of the global smartphone market. "A non-exclusive strategy that produces products selling across many communication service providers, and the backing of so many device manufacturers, which are bringing more attractive devices to market at several different price points, were among the factors that yielded its growth this quarter," said Gartner research vice president Carolina Milanesi in a prepared statement.

Last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said sales of Android smartphones now total about 200,000 each day. "People are finally beginning to figure out how successful Android is," Schmidt said, adding that Android device sales totaled about 100,000 per day just two months earlier. "It looks like Android is not just phenomenal but incredibly phenomenal in its growth rate. God knows how long that will continue." Schmidt added that the leap in Android activations corresponds with increasing revenues resulting from mobile search: "Trust me that revenue is large enough to pay for all of Android's activities and a whole bunch more," he said.

Gartner reports that global smartphone sales totaled 61.6 million units in Q2, up 50.5 percent year-over-year. Symbian remains the leading smartphone OS worldwide, controlling 41.2 percent of the market (down from 51 percent a year ago)--sales of Symbian devices topped 25.3 million in the second quarter, up from 20.9 million in Q2 2009. BlackBerry unit sales exceeded 11.2 million (up from 7.8 million a year ago), with the platform representing 18.2 percent of the worldwide market, off from 19.0 percent. Sales of Apple's iPhone surpassed 8.7 million, with iOS now making up 14.2 percent of the market--in Q2 2009, consumers purchased 5.3 million iPhones, translating to 13.0 percent market share. Microsoft's Windows Mobile took the biggest hit: Sales slipped to 3.1 million from 3.8 million a year ago, corresponding with the platform's market share plummeting from 9.3 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to 5.0 percent in the most recent quarter.

For more on worldwide smartphone sales:
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