Thinking of a trip to Barcelona this week? Don't bother. Flights and hotel rooms are either unavailable or will cost a king's ransom and the city is throbbing with irritable types shouting into three phones at once. For this is the week when the mobile phone industry comes to pay homage to Catalonia - or rather to try to do as many deals and exchange as much gossip as possible between beers and tapas at Mobile World Congress.
The mood this year should be grim after a 2009 that this industry like many others will want to forget - mobile handset sales fell for the first time most in the mobile world can remember. But for what you might call the 'smart set' it wasn't such a bad year. Smartphone sales raced ahead, with the retail analysts Gfk calculating that sales in Western Europe rose a staggering 109% in the last three months of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008.
So that's where the growth and the profits are and it's the question of which handsets and which operating systems are going to rampage across this smartphone battleground in 2010, consigning their opponents to oblivion, which is exciting visitors to Barcelona this week.
What's the state of the smartphone market then as this event gets under way? If you were to believe one Sunday newspaper, Apple rules the roost - Nokia "has been plunged into crisis by the arrival of the iPhone and iPad" read a headline. Well, it's true that the iPhone changed the rules of the game but the figures don't yet add up to a crisis for Nokia, even though it was caught on the hop by the arrival of first touchscreen then apps.
The research firm CCS has sent me their report on the market for 2009. It shows smartphones running Symbian - formerly owned by Nokia, now open source - still have 46% of the market, though that's down from 64% in 2007. In second place comes Blackberry with 20%, followed by Apple with 14%, with Google's Android moving forward to take 4% of the market. So Apple's advance has been quite remarkable - but it's got some way to go before it really makes Nokia suffer.
News Source:- http://www.bbc.co.uk
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