At the recent World Mobile Congress, Microsoft rather quietly announced that the company has sold more than 50MM Windows Mobile devices (the operating system) over it’s 10 year lifetime. RIM also recently announced achieving a 50MM in BlackBerry device sales milestone over the same 10 year timeframe.
In comparison, Apple has sold a total of 17MM iPhone as of January 2009. But to put that in perspective, the milestone was achieved in only two years. Projections for iPhone sales have been trending downward for the past several months, but (depending on the source) could still go as high as 30MM units in 2009.
Can it be possible that the iPhone can reach the same 50MM milestone in less than 3 years? The smartphone market is only now becoming mainstream, and overall sales have been increasing around 40% a year. This opens the field for hundreds of millions of new smartphone sales, from iPhone, WinMo, RIM, Palm, Android, etc., etc.
In fact, the third largest phone maker in the world, LG, which sells about 20x times as many handsets a day as iPhone, has just signed a deal with Microsoft to put Windows Mobile on 50 LG phones over the next 5 years. I have to believe that’s going to have a big boost for WinMo. And whatever you do, don’t forget about the new Pre – now scheduled for a May-June launch.
These sales milestones are impressive, but they will pale in comparison to what the next couple of years brings.
What is amazing to me is the market share that iPhone currently has considering it is one OS for 1 device! Windows Mobile and Blackberry have had various carrier and device specific versions of their OS’s on many different devices. Just goes to show the market appeal of iPhone. Theoretically there is a Windows Mobile or BlackBerry device that would appeal to everyone, yet iPhone is still outselling them! Plus the appstore already had millions of users trained from buying music on iTunes. Sheer genius!
Comment by bolle — March 2, 2009 @ 8:41 pm