According to recent figures from retail watcher GfK and reported in the Guardian, the number of mobile phones running on Android has dramatically increased in the UK recently and now accounts for 20 percent of all SmartPhone operating systems in the UK.
For example, in the week ending 18th April, 12.3 percent of all contract phones sold had an Android operating system, compared to only 3 percent during the last week of March.
This represents a fourfold increase of sales of SmartPhones running on Android in the past month. Why?
The increase is thought to be a result of new Android devices on the market such as the HTC SmartPhone range which includes the HTC Desire and HTC Hero, as well as the Xperia X10 from Sony Ericsson.
Android’s popularity is rising across the board though and apparently now accounts for 37.6 percent of the mobile phone market and a massive 63.9 percent of mobile phones taken out on contract.
The higher contract figure is probably because taking out a contract is the only way some people are going to be able to afford the SmartPhones, which don’t come cheap.
By the way a SmartPhone as defined by GfK is a phone that is capable of downloading applications from a third party provider.
One plus with an Android phone is that users currently have access to over 50,000 apps and this is growing all the time.
According to GfK Android’s rise in popularity has nothing to do with more people buying SmartPhones and is more to do with the Android taking some of the market share from other platforms.
“It’s not down to one particular handset,” said a spokesman for GfK.
“More and more of the major handset manufacturers are viewing Android as a useful solution and using it in their SmartPhones”.
The popularity trend is likely to continue too as more Android phones are being launched on the UK market in the coming weeks with Google’s Nexus One, which is now available from Vodafone, as well as other Android phones such as the LG Optimus GT540 and the Samsung Galaxy X which are coming soon too.
Now over the past while we’ve been hearing that this or that phone will kick the iPhone off it’s lofty superior perch but perhaps it isn’t a specific phone that will prove to be the ultimate iPhone killer, but Android itself.
