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Tue, 03 Jun 2008 BlackBerry outpaces iPhone in Q1 - IDC

Research in Motion (RIM) Ltd.'s BlackBerry outpaced Apple's iPhone in US first quarter sales

Matt Hamblen, Computerworld (US)

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Research in Motion (RIM) Ltd.'s BlackBerry outpaced Apple's iPhone in US first quarter sales, and actually increased the gap between the two when compared with the last quarter of 2007, according to research by IDC.

The first quarter report shows that BlackBerry took 44.5 per cent of the US market, up from 35.1 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at IDC.

At the same time, the iPhone's US market share dropped to 19.2 per cent for first quarter, down from 26.7 per cent of the market in the fourth quarter of 2007, Llamas said. A drop in the first quarter could be expected, he said, since the fourth quarter includes the holiday shopping season.

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But RIM has undertaken a strong consumer marketing campaign, including slick TV ads, to move well beyond its typical business customer base toward more mainstream buyers, Llamas and other analysts have noted.

IDC does not publish actual sales numbers, which were shared by some of its customers and then confirmed by him in a telephone interview. Nor did he reveal the total number of smart phones sold. IDC defines BlackBerry and iPhone devices as smart phones, which are mobile phones combined with high-end operating systems and featuring Web surfing, e-mail and full alphabetic keyboards or touchscreen keyboards.

Llamas also said that Palm gained market share from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of this year, increasing from 7.9 per cent to 13.4 per cent. Despite that jump, Palm's share is still less than the 23 per cent it held in the first quarter of 2007. Similarly, RIM's market share for the first quarter is down from 48.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2007.

Samsung Electronics had an 8.6 per cent market share in first quarter, ranking it fourth, while Motorola Corp. dropped to 2.6 per cent of the market.

Microsoft officials have touted Windows Mobile, an operating system that runs on many devices from four manufacturers, as having the largest smart phone market share of any single operating system. But Llamas said he could not confirm that fact, since Windows Mobile devices are hard to count and sometimes include ruggedized devices that don't directly compare to the iPhone or BlackBerry.

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