Although still an infant on most counts, Android has had a promising start in the fiercely competitive mobile OS market that was dominated by the likes of behemoths such as Research In Motion’s Blackberry OS, Apple’s iPhone OS, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and the Symbian Foundation’s Symbian OS. This is evident from the stir it caused when Gartner Inc, an independent research firm, declared that Android had attained almost four per cent of the smartphone OS market and 14.5 per cent of the mobile OS market in less than a year.
What’s more? Analysts at Gartner predict that by the end of 2012, sales of Android-flavoured smartphones will stand at 94.5 million or 18 per cent of the global smartphone market – second only to Symbian-based smartphones. That, in itself, is a phenomenal leap of nearly 450 per cent from last year’s statistics alone.So the question is – what is it about Android that has some of the world’s biggest mobile phone makers opting for it in increasingly large numbers? Mobile phone giants such as Samsung, LG, Motorola and HTC have all launched a myriad of Android-based devices in the recent months. Taiwanese manufacturer HTC takes the lead with its current portfolio of six Android phones, closely followed by Motorola with five. Moreover, mobile phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson is expected to jump on the bandwagon with an Android-equipped offering going on sale in the first quarter of 2010.
Perhaps it is the open-source nature of this OS that is primarily propelling this shift, coupled with Google’s uncanny ability to churn out regular, free-of-cost, updates of the OS – each named after a scrumptious confectionary. Whatever it may be, the underlying functionality that Android offers is an element that can never be discounted – something we discovered during our extensive testing of Android OS 1.5 (Cupcake), on the HTC Hero.