Smartphone sales in Asia grow 270 percent year-on-year —report

International research firm GfK has just released a study which shows that 4.7 million smartphones were sold in Q3 2010, a surprising 270 percent increase over the 1.27 million smartphones sold in the same period the previous year. GfK said that one in every five handsets purchased in Asia in Q3 was a smartphone, with a total worth of over US$1.48 billion. Also according to the GfK report, Android has outpaced Symbian as the operating system of choice for Asia's over 4.7 million smartphones. The Symbian platform is the most common operating system used in Nokia mobile phones, which are very popular in the Philippines. "Our Q3 report shows that Android has recently overtaken Symbian as the most popular smartphone OS in the context of Asia as a whole, in both value and unit sales," said GfK Asia Pte Ltd.'s regional account director for telecommunications, Gerard Tan. In the Philippines as well as in Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, the Symbian platform is still the leading smartphone OS. However, the market for the OS in these countries is declining, according to the report. Meanwhile, in northern Asia —specifically Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, and Taiwan— the battle for dominance between OSes is "at its most intense" as a result of strategic and tactical initiatives by various manufacturers. - GMANews.TV