Apple passes RIM on the smartphone sales chart
With smartphone sales going through the roof for most vendors, the order of preference has changed again, with Apple’s iPhone passing the RIM Blackberry line, but still trailing all Nokia phones worldwide.
A new study by Strategy Analytics has shown that the chase is over and that the iPhone has surpassed the sales of the entire Blackberry line of smartphones for the quarter which ended in September. This contest has been raging for many, many months, with the iPhone slowly overtaking the Blackberry at the end of every reporting period. This time, Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones, while RIM sold only 12.4 million Blackberries. The leadership position is still held by Nokia, whose worldwide sales of all handsets totaled 24.1 million. Other smartphone makers sold about 24.1 million handsets, primarily the manufacturers Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and HTC.
These latter three manufacturers are among the many that are transitioning to the Android operating system from Google. There are now over 90 individual handsets which run the Android OS. Most of these phones follow the iPhone paradigm very closely, something which the Blackberry line has refused to do. Unfortunately, it is the iPhone paradigm that consumers want, so both the iPhone and the Android phones have been eating away at RIM’s sales, culminating in the numbers as we see them today. Nokia’s sales numbers are primarily old-style handsets and not smartphones, according to a BBC story.
The numbers game in the smartphone marketplace are a confusing morass of stats. Nokia is the world leader, but most of its phones are not smartphones. Android is the most-sold operating system, but only because it it available on over 90 handsets, none of which can individually hold a candle to the sales of the iPhone’s single model. These mismatches give everyone an opportunity to claim that they are number on in some carefully crafted smartphone stat category. But if you compare apples to apples, the winner is Apple. 
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