Finally a colleague sent me the study I've been waiting to see. According to a new Gartner forecast reported by Register Hardware, Android will have more than quadrupled its market share by 2012. Its market share stood at only 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2009, but will grow to 14.5 percent by the final quarter of 2012. This would move Android from the sixth most popular operating system for smartphones to the second most popular, following Symbian. The main reason for this market share growth is because, unlike Apple, Google licenses their OS to multiple original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
If this projection is even close to accurate it holds huge implications for the mobile communications market here in Korea, which is on the verge of a major transition to mobile handsets capable of surfing the web (all of it!) with a host of new services and content appearing in the process. Not all of the services and content will be "made in Korea," but a flood of new applications should strengthen, not weaken, South Korea's mobile content, services and software sector. If all works out well, 2012 should be very interesting, with gigabit per second internet service in major cities and much faster mobile broadband.