Gartner Market Share Estimates Places Windows Mobile as Dead Last (if you combine all Linux based phones)

From ZDNet UK based on on Gartner Research data…

Windows Mobile loses nearly a third of market share

That’s a drop from an 11% market share in Q3 2008 to 7.9% in Q3 2009. Symbian (mostly Nokia), RIM (BlackBerry), and Apple are far ahead of Microsoft with 44.6% (dropping from 49.7%), 20.8%, and 17.1% of the smartphone market, respectively. Interestingly, the Android (3.9%), webOS (1.1%) and other Linux based phones (4.7%) own 9.7% of the market meaning that Windows Mobile might be considered in dead last in smartphone platforms.

The iPhone and Android-based phones play nicely with Exchange Server now (I had my Droid talking to my office Exchange Server in under a minute), Windows Mobile’s Exchange support aspect is not as important as it was a year or two ago.

Windows Mobile 6.5 doesn’t appear to have generated much excitement. So, Microsof thas everything riding on Windows Mobile 7 which, if we believe various reports, will not be delivered until late 2010.

Will Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile help? Stay tuned for my next blog item…

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