The success on the North American smartphone market of Apple and the Canadian Research in Motion is set to continue this year, estimates market research company Canalys.
Canalys predicts that in 2010 the shipments of Apple’s iPhone will increase by 27 per cent compared to 2009.
RIM will in turn see sales of its Blackberry handset increase by 21%.
While the Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia continues to find it extremely difficult to penetrate into the North American market, its competitors Apple and RIM are expected to ship in the region 13.8 million iPhones and 28 million Blackberries this year, Canalys calculates.
Based on the sales figures, Apple and RIM would cover 64% of the North American smartphone market between them.
One of the world’s most important mobile phone markets is North America, where Nokia has had severe difficulties for several years now.
Last year the number of all the Nokia handsets sold in North America declined by 14 per cent from 2008.
Canalys estimates that of all the smartphones sold in North America this year, the share of handsets utilising the open-source Symbian platform as their operating system will remain more or less the same as in 2009.
In 2008, the former Symbian Software Ltd. was acquired by Nokia and a new independent non-profit organisation called the Symbian Foundation was launched in April 2009.
The market research company predicts that in North America the sales of smartphones will reach 65 million sold units this year.
Since last year’s total figure was 47.2 million units, this would translate to a growth percentage of 38.
In relative terms Canalys predicts the most vigorous growth for the smartphones that utilise the search engine Google’s Android operating system. The sales of such handsets are believed to increase by a whopping 160 per cent this year.
This is partly explained by the fact that all told only 4.6 million Android-based smartphones were sold in the region last year.
Still, even that figure is three million above the total number of the Symbian phones sold in the North American market in 2009.
