BlackBerry tops handset sales… sort of
So, the biggest selling phone of last year was the… BlackBerry. It’s been a mixed year for… Wait… What? BlackBerry? Seriously?
After a year that has seen global blackouts and gigantic writedowns – culminating in its co-chief executives stepping down last month – RIM has come out with a tub-thumping statement claiming to be the number one selling smartphone in the UK for the second year running, beating the iPhone 4 (and the 4S) and the Samsung Galaxy S2.
The announcement, based on figures from GfK, appears to go against pretty much everything we’ve heard up until now, including the research company’s own (leaked) findings from the four weeks up to 9 December, in which the iPhone 4S came out as the top selling device at around 25 per cent of the market. But RIM says it grabbed 26.3 per cent of December sales and averaged 27.7 per cent through 2011.
Sounds good – but what exactly does that mean? The first thing to remember is that “BlackBerry” is the brand name for a host of handsets (the various Bolds, the Torch etc), not a single device. What RIM seems to be doing is comparing the entire BlackBerry catalogue to the iPhone 4 and 4S, which is a bit sneaky. In terms of individual handsets, the top selling is, by almost every measure, either the iPhone 4/4S or the Galaxy S2. In terms of operating systems, Android – mostly consisting of Samsung and HTC handsets – is the clear market leader, not BlackBerry.
Jupiter released figures last week that showed RIM shipped 14.4m smartphones in the fourth quarter, a drop of 0.7 per cent on the year before, with the company’s market share falling by even more in a growing overall field. USwitch, which uses a metric based on units shipped and online interest, placed the Samsung Galaxy S 2 top overall, with its Ace, Nexus, Note and S i9000 all featuring in the top 10. Now, both of these other sets of figures are based on shipments, rather than the sales figures used by GfK, which could explain some discrepancy. However, as anyone who has tried to buy a new iPhone will attest, there is a shortage of available handsets – Apple doesn’t appear to be bulk shipping millions of iPhones and keeping them locked in a cupboard somewhere.
I don’t doubt that the research is accurate. It just doesn’t show what RIM wants it to.