Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Android OS is beginning to dominate the European smartphone market, with the UK one of its most successful territories.
According to figures from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Android accounts for 38 per cent of the market in the UK. In France and Germany, the figure is 35.9 per cent and 35.5 percent respectively.
Japan and the US are even more successful markets for Android, the report says, with a 58.3 per cent market share in Japan and 54.7 per cent in the U.S.
While Android’s UK market share is up 30 per cent year-on-year, the iPhone’s market share is down by 16 per cent over the same period.
Though Nokia’s share of the smartphone market is dwindling, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech pointed out that it was still the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world “by some margin”.
If Nokia were to convince a large number of its non-smartphone customers to move to the company’s planned Windows Phone 7-based handsets, it could make a dramatic change to the current smartphone market, the firm said.
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech’s figures would seem to agree with recent predictions from analyst firms Gartner and IDC, which in separate reports said that Android would account for around half of the smartphone market by 2015, while the iPhone risked falling behind Windows Phone 7.