New Windows Phone 8 devices are now being sold by Verizon, AT&T and now T-Mobile, but for the previous third quarter of 2012 Microsoft's share of the mobile OS market still lagged well behind that of the two leading operating systems, according to research firm Gartner.
In a new press release, the firm said that between July and September, Microsoft's amount of the smartphone market worldwide was 2.4 percent, an increase compared to just 1.5 percent from a year ago. Gartner says that 4.058 million smartphones with some kind of OS from Microsoft were sold worldwide in the quarter, compared to a mere 1.7 million a year ago.
However, those numbers are still behind Google's Android, which Gartner said had a whopping 72.4 percent of the smartphone market share. The firm says there were over 122 million Android-based smartphones sold worldwide in the third quarter. Apple's iOS was second with 13.9 percent in the third quarter.
Research in Motion's Blackberry OS was third with 5.3 percent, but that number is a massive drop compared to the company's 11 percent numbers from a year ago. Gartner also shows Samsung's Bada OS with a 3 percent market share in the third quarter and Nokia's Symbian with 2.6 percent.
With the new Windows Phone 8 devices from HTC and Nokia now on sale, with Samsung still to come, we should soon see if Microsoft makes some market share gains in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Source: Gartner | Image via Gartner
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