The latest figures released from Kantar WorldPanel show that Google's Android platform is continuing to dominate in the European smartphone market.
Infact, in the 5 major European countries (UK, Italy, Spain, Germany and France) it now has over a 67 per cent share of the market. That is an increase of 20.2 per cent based on the same time last year. Over the same period Apple saw their share drop to 14.6 per cent which is a decrease of 5 per cent . However, you can expect this to rise sharply when the new iPhone 5 launches in the next month.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Windows platform grew its share by 1.5 per cent taking their overall market share to 5.2 per cent. We'd also expect this to rise when Windows Phone 8 smartphones hit the market next month.
The new figures don't make good reading for RIM whose share of the smartphone market dropped 4.9 per cent to just 6.1 per cent. As you'd expect the Symbian platform lost a large amount of its market share (10.6%) , due to the platform being discontinued and now commands just 4.3 per cent of the market.
One interesting finding reported in the new report is the increased popularity of smartphones with bigger displays. Of all smartphones sold in the last 12 weeks 29 per cent had displays over 4.5 inches in size and 3G only expect this number to increase in the next 12 months !
