Some new numbers from mobile industry tracker Comscore are in, and the picture they paint is so extremely stark it’s almost eye-popping.
According to the new data, the last part of 2010 was huge for Google in a good way, and huge for Research in Motion in a bad way. Comscore looked at smartphone market share in December 2010 and compared it to September 2010.
The single biggest change came from Google, which has exploded in those three months from 21.4% to 28.7%, a 7.3 point gain in a market that almost never sees such dramatic climbs in such a short span of time. That is enough to leapfrog over Apple, a feat it actually completed in November.
Meanwhile, RIM went from 37.3% to 31.6%, a decline of 5.7 points. While it is still #1 in the US, clearly it’s running out of reserves. It’s like living off your savings for a year after you get fired. You’re still living comfortably, but the only thing in your future is rock bottom.
In all of this, Apple has remained at a sort of plateau. Its market share grew over the period, but only by 0.7 points. As of December it sits at a 25% market share.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Palm also both continue to lose ground, but their changes are minimal and nothing shocking.
If things continue to go at this pace, RIM will actually lose its throne in a very short amount of time. Such a thing would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, but there has been a cataclysmic shift in the industry like nothing ever seen before.
These numbers really tell an amazing story. Amazing, that is, unless you’re RIM.
