With all the hype surrounding Apple’s iPhone 4 launch, it’s easy to forget that RIM’s BlackBerry still has the largest share of the US smartphone market. Apple made a big deal about selling 1.7 million iPhone 4’s in 3 days, but RIM still beats them in marketshare.
RIM has about 35% of the US smartphone market while Apple comes in with 28%. The problem for RIM is that their share of the market is shrinking while others are gaining on them. It wasn’t that long ago that RIM was over 43%, and 5 years ago they were over 50% of the US market. Apple is gaining on them and Android is really putting on the heat. According to Gartner, Android will become the second-best-selling smartphone platform worldwide behind Symbian by 2012.
Research In Motion CEO Jim Balsillie said during the company’s quarterly earnings call last week that BlackBerry is well positioned for the brewing battle, with big international growth ahead, strong carrier partnerships in place and an efficient data infrastructure that will become more important as cellular operators adopt tiered data pricing.
Source: Sfgate