Smartphones are now more popular than PCs

What's the bestselling computer of 2011? The laptop? The desktop PC? The tablet?

Answer: none of the above - it's the smartphone.

For the first time, more smartphones have been shipped in a business quarter than PCs. According to IDC (who track such things), the last three months of 2010 saw 92 million PCs leaving factory doors, compared to over 100 million smartphones.

If that overtaking manoeuvre doesn't illustrate the dramatic growth of smartphones as the personal computing device of choice, consider the raw percentage increase: that's an 87 per cent growth rate compared to the 54 million units shipped in the last 3 months of 2009.

Who's selling the most smartphones?

Beleive it or not, despite their well-publicised troubles, it's Nokia. Despite their senior management shakedown they still comfortably outshot the competition, shipping 28.3 million devices in total. 

But Apple is more than just the second-placed manufacturer: its output of 16.2 million devices is growing at a staggering 82%. This growth rate saw it past Research In Motion, whose 14.2 million BlackBerry devices earned only third place.

Meanwhile other fast growers are shooting up the table: Samsung nearly quadrupled its smartphone output to 9.7 million, while HTC showed a threefold increase with 8.6 million devices.

A very different OS playing field

Of course, the rise of the smartphone has seen a radical new field of competition opening up between operating systems as well as manufacturers.

Apple, of course, has (and presumably always will have) its own OS, shared with nobody else. Take the iPhone out of the equation and what do we have? An intriguing version of the Windows vs Linux battle.

And this time it's inverted from the PC marketplace: the Linux-based Android OS is dominant, having become the cornerstone of multiple vendors' smartphone strategies, including HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung and Motorola.

Meanwhile Nokia has ditched its market leading but moribund Symbian system in favour of the new Windows Phone 7 operating system. But by the look of the latest figures, both will have everything to do just to keep pace with Android and Apple's iOS.

If you are considering smartphones for your business and want to know how this will impact on your IT support needs, our Bristol IT support team can be contacted on 01275 398900.