asymco

RIM shipped 10.6 million Blackberries and 200,000 PlayBooks in the last quarter. Management noted that their sell-through was significantly higher for Blackberry (13.7 million) but seems to be very weak for PlayBook as the prior quarter saw 500k units shipped. Additional PlayBook units this quarter probably mostly went into new channels in Asia and there were no additional sales into North America or Europe.

The figures for units are very poor. How poor depends on the frame of reference. Consider the shipment chart below:

In terms of the competition, 10.6 million units is less than half what Apple or Samsung sold in its prior quarter. It’s also less

In yesterday’s post about the “biggest mobile loser” I covered the exodus of users from non-smart devices in the US and EU5. I also said that what happens in those regions tends to happen in other regions with a time shift. In some regions it happens quicker but in most it happens more slowly.

But can we be sure that there isn’t vast non-smartphone growth in other regions? Well, no, we can’t be sure. At least not without access to reliable data.

But what we can track is the overall non-smart phone market and compare it to the smartphone market. Here are the growth rates of the two sub-markets:

The difference is plain to see. We can also note that the non-smart market may be heading into a contraction–something noted by some analysts close to the market–but no real sign of that happening in smartphones.

Beside growth, we can also see actuals and the split of various vendors’ volumes in the market.

Yesterday comScore published survey results for EU5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK) on smartphone use and installed base. The headline is very similar to what would be written about the US: Android had phenomenal growth over the last twelve months. I also noted that the apparent growth of Google (16.2% share change) seemed to be matched by an apparent decline of Symbian (-16.1% share change.) However the reading of the data is not so simple.

In order to understand what has happened to usage, it’s much more valuable to look at consumption and the actual number of users rather than change in share of a subset of the market. Consider the following charts:

The bar chart shows that