HTC is the new leader in smartphones in the US, according to a new survey from Canalys. The Taiwan-based company shipped 5.7 million smartphone units in the third quarter of 2011 in this country. Samsung was second with 4.9 million units while Apple came in third with 4.6 million smartphone shipments.
It"s not hard to see why. HTC makes a lot of Android-based phones for a wide variety of carriers and in a number of price points. The company now has about 25 percent of the entire US smartphone market, although that could change in the current quarter thanks to the sales success of the iPhone 4S.
But perhaps even more troubling is what is happening to the once dominate Blackberry brand here in this country. Canalys claims that the market share in the US for Research in Motion"s phones has dropped from 24 percent in the third quarter of 2010 to just nine percent in the third quarter of 2011. Those numbers were before Research in Motion had to deal with the mass online outages that prevented many Blackberry owners from using some of its features for many days.
Quite frankly, things don"t look good for RIM or Blackberry with the iPhone 4S launch and the upcoming launches of the Motorola RAZR and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. While Canalys claims that RIM needs to release a 4G-based Blackberry by early 2012 to stay competitive, we are not sure if that might be enough to save the company and its smartphone line at this point.