The latest research, conducted by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, has highlighted some very interesting trends in the UK smartphone market !
The first of which is that the Android platform now accounts for 50 per cent of the total smartphones in the UK, which has grown from 42.2 per cent in the previous year. The all-conquering Android machine is showing no signs of slowing, but Apple iOS platform also continues to grow and now accounts for 29.2 per cent of the UK market up from 19.7 per cent at the same time last year.
As you'd expect the growth of Android and iOS is bad news for all other operating systems which have seen a reduction in their market share.
Blackberry's share has reduced from 22.5 per cent to just 15.7 per cent this year. Meanwhile, Nokia Symbian has dropped by a whopping 10.2 per cent down to just 2 per cent market share, which you'd expect as Nokia have dropped the operating system in favour of Windows Phone 7. However, Windows Phone 7 only saw a 2 per cent growth bringing its share up to just 2.6 per cent.
One of the most interesting findings of Kantar's research is that in the last 3 months almost half of all new smartphone purchases were made by users over 50. This makes it the biggest growth area and one which mobile manufacturers will be keen to capitalize on.
Interestingly, the older crowd with their higher disposable income are buying mid-range smartphones not high-end smartphones such as the Apple iPhone. Perhaps this is due to a fear of not being able to use the latest technology, which is something that manufacturers should look at addressing.
In the over 50 category Samsung has a 36.6% market share, while Apple lags behind with 23.4 per cent which will be good reading for the Korean company !
