Mobile Phone Shipments Surge 21%

By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek
April 30, 2010 11:35 AM

Worldwide shipments of mobile phones grew 21.7% in the first quarter, turbo-charged by the booming demand for smartphones, according to market research reports released Friday.

Research In Motion, which has always been strong in the smartphone category, rode the category to break into IDC's top-five market share finishers for the first time. RIM knocked Motorola from the top five list. IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker reported that 294.9 million mobile phone handsets were shipped in the first quarter.

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Nokia held onto its first place in the IDC rankings with a 36.6% market share, but that figure was down from last year's 38.4% share. Samsung showed the best growth among the leaders with a 21.8% market share -- up from last year's 18.9% figure. Others in the top five were LG with 9.2% market share; RIM, 3.6%; and Sony Ericsson, 3.6%.

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No US manufacturers, even nominally US manufacturers with production in China, in the top 5. Another industry that was invented in the US and which is now mostly off-shore.

Motorola lost the lead when handsets went from analog to digital, and never regained it. Most of what we now consider to be "modern" cell technology was invented in Europe and Japan, and those areas continue to be far ahead of us in network speed, reliability, and device features. The U.S. manufacturers have been playing "me-too" in this field for at least the last 20 years (many would rightly argue that the U.S. companies haven't "invented" anything new for the cellphone market since the mid-80's).

This particular failure isn't due to offshoring, but due to a lack of U.S. innovation.

And instead it built multiple networks for TDMA, CDMA and GSM by individual carriers.

just like blue ray and the other one for that! LOL!ticks me off. if i buy a phone i should be able to take it to any carrier. just like if i still had landline i wouldn't need a new phone if i changed carriers.

...the rest of the world picked a single standard and ran with it. This gave them a HUGE leg-up, as all of the other developers in the world were innovating for a single interoperable protocol. That allowed various innovations (SMS in Finland, data transfers in Japan, etc) to stack on top of each other and collectively lift the featuresets of all the phones using that protocol. U.S. manufacturers, with their walls of patents and corporate mindsets focused on improving only their technologies, were quickly left in the dust. Our manufacturers, by the early-90's were relegated to simply copying the features invented for other networks elsewhere in the world.

That's not to say that we're entirely innovation free. The current smartphone market explosion is primarily and overwhelmingly driven by U.S. developers including Palm, Apple, and Google (and, in fairness, even by Microsoft to a more promotional extent). While the devices themselves are generally manufactured overseas, the innovation is entirely domestic. AFAIK, the only real competition to U.S. domination in that market (currently) is RIM/Blackberry, which is a Canadian company. Only time will determine whether we will keep that lead, or whether overseas competitors will eventually eclipse us.

While Apple, HP/Palm cling to their proprietary OSs.