Apple's iPhone 5, Android Ready to Rule 2012 Smartphone Market

Apple reportedly plans to debut iPhone 5 in September or October. Technology In Motion just debuted a slate of BlackBerry devices it will push aggressively to businesses and consumers. And Microsoft -- hand-in-hand with Nokia and other hardware manufacturers -- will begin to make a second large drive for its Windows Phone platform. A number of manufacturers -- including HTC and Samsung -- will as well continue to produce handsets loaded with Google Android.

The future with certainty

Nobody can predict the future with certainty, and it would be a fool's game to try and forecast the various vendors' precise market share a year from now. That being said, there is enough data floating around to make some educated guesses about the state of the smartphone market in 2012.

For the most part, analysts seem to think Apple will continue its robust sales run. "Apple has but to top Nokia's single-quarter volume record of 28.1 million units, Ramon Llamas, an analyst with technology firm IDC, wrote in an Aug. 4 note. "However, given Apple's momentum in the smartphone market, it may not be a question of whether Apple will beat that milestone, yet when."

The IDC note recommended that Apple's unit shipments increased 141.7 percent in Q2 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Samsung's unit shipments rose 380.6 percent in the same period, during HTC's increased 165.9 percent and RIM's rose 10.7 percent. The big loser was Nokia, which declined 30.4 percent in Q2 2011 compared with the same quarter a year ago.

Both HTC and Samsung benefited from their Android phone portfolios. But, the note suggests that RIM is facing some pitfalls in the quarters ahead: The company has released only a few new models so far this year; most of its shipments are older, less expensive models that have allowed competitors to grab mindshare and market share with multiple new models.

To top that off, many vendors have targeted business users with enterprise-grade smartphones, which has long been RIM's stronghold.

RIM is depending on its latest slate of BlackBerry smartphones, which offer revamped hardware and the new BlackBerry 7 OS, to act as a sort of placeholder until its QNX-powered smartphones can hit the market sometime in 2012. Nevertheless, analysts haven't been sharing the company's public optimism about the new devices.

Meanwhile, Nokia finds itself struggling in the fallow months previously it releases its first devices running Windows Phone. The Finnish company has been bleeding users ever since it announced the abandonment of Symbian, its homegrown mobile OS, in favor of Microsoft's offering. Analysts have recommended overall adoption of Windows Phone is relatively stagnant.

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