Smartphone shipments rise 28%

As Canalys reports recently there are bright spots in the midst of otherwise bleak business news and projections. Smartphone shipments continue to rise at spectacular rates. 40 million units were shipped in the 3rd quarter of 2008. And smartphone OS fragmentation continues to grow. The iPhone vaulted into the number two position in terms of shipments, although in overall base it is still behind Nokia and Research in Motion. Lest you start to count out Windows Mobile, look at HTC’s numbers, more than doubling their market share in shipments over the last year. And their latest device, the HTC Fuze running Windows Mobile, would appear to be their strongest yet. Finally, though the Canalys report doesn’t mention this, the seeming laggards in shipment growth, RIM and Windows Mobile, are clearly still the strongest in US enterprise market share.

I have two observations for mobile app developers reading this:

* software for smartphones is indeed a burgeoning business

* at least for enterprise applications, there’s no clear single device operating system to target. Pick the installed base leader and you ignore the growing platforms.

Very curious how you application developers are going to attack this seeming dilemma. We’d love to see you try Rhomobile as one solution to the problem.