Samsung tops Apple in smartphone market: What’s up with that?

Samsung is now officially the world’s largest maker of smartphones, shipping around 28 million of the devices — almost all Android-powered – in the third quarter, compared to Apple’s 17.1 million phones. This is just the latest milestone that helps put an end to the fallacy that iPhones will rule the world. When Android phones were first released the bu was about how clunky they were, how much fiddling they took, and how few applications were available, all valid concerns at the time.

As each Android updated improve the system, and hardware vendors learned how to build better phones, and Android roared ahead in market share, pundits blamed AT&T, sure that a Veri on iPhone would reset the balance. When that didn’t happen, and sales of the Veri on iPhone fell short of expectations, the Apple App Store’s compelling lead in applications was cited as the reason Apple’s phones would continue to triumph. While there is still some very compelling iOS-only software (Windtunnel Pro comes to mind), the Android Market now includes over 300,000 applications (compared to the Apple App Store with 500,000), both more than enough for most users.

All this happened in spite of the very legitimate concern over the fragmentation of the Android device market, by hardware vendor, phone model, and OS version. With Samsung’s ascendance over Apple in market share, even that objection is falling away. It is easy to forget that in the dawn of the personal computer era there were literally do ens of companies making PCs, many of which ran variants of DOS. That market consolidated quickly after the introduction of the IBM PC and later rise of Compaq’s portable, into one where developers could aggressively target specific models of hardware as needed, but still have the knowledge that their software could run across the universe of DOS, and later Windows, machines.

With Samsung’s strength in the Android market, it was fitting that Google’s flagship Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) device would be a Samsung, since ICS is the next step in sorting out the Android roadmap. By bringing tablets and phones together on a single OS platform, and delivering a compelling end-user experience out-of-the-box, Google is aiming to greatly reduce both the fracturing of the user experience ,and the delays in phone upgrades caused by the extensive vendor-customi ations the Android market has seen to date.

In a few short months Android has become the dominant smartphone OS, seen the emergence of a volume leader who can set product direction, and surpassed Apple in application downloads. It is not too early to think about whether Android will be as dominant on smartphones as Windows has been on the desktop. And time will also tell whether Samsung becomes the IBM of the smartphone space.

Samsung tops Apple in smartphone market: What’s up with that?