HTC Becomes Highest Shipping Smartphone Vendor In the US

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article in BGR: "Samsung blew past Apple and Nokia in the third quarter to become the No. 1 smartphone vendor in the world, but another emerging smartphone vendor stole the top spot in the U.S. according to a new report. Market research firm Canalys on Monday released country-level smartphone shipment estimates and according to its figures, HTC shipped 5.7 million own-brand smartphones and another 700,000 T-Mobile-branded handsets last quarter to take the top spot with 6.4 million total devices shipped."

HTC are not new.....

[bleh-of-the-huns]

They have been making phones for years.. starting way back in the windows mobile days. Granted, they were mostly OEM for other brands, but they are not new.

Re:Cue the shipped vs. sold debate

[jrumney]

Apple can only give "units sold" figures for phones sold from the Apple store. That might work for the US market, but in many other countries they are doing the same as every other vendor and quoting figures for what they have shipped out to distributors, because those are the only figures they they can get.

Good old conspiracy theory.

[mjwx]

And these are sales figures to the end consumer, but mostly shipments.

Fixed that for you.

Apple sells most of it's phones via telco's. Which means they ship through the same channels as HTC, Samsung and everyone else. In Australia Apple have to ship through Brightstor to sell on most Telco's as Telstra and Vodafone have exclusivity agreements with Brightstor (not sure about Optus but it would not surprise me). The situation is quite similar in Europe. So most of apple's "sales" figures are shipped figures like all other manufacturers.

Secondly, this conspiracy is a little far fetched that HTC phones are not actually selling. I've heard this channel stuffing conspiracy for over a year with the Samsung Galaxy S yet it keeps selling and we've heard nothing about millions of returns. At some point you fanboys will have to admit that Android is outselling Iphones.

Re:Cue the shipped vs. sold debate

[demonlapin]

iPhones don't work until activated with an iTunes account. They can't say "units sold" for most outlets, but since an iPhone is useless without activation, it's a pretty safe bet that they know almost exactly how many phones have been sold.

Re:Good old conspiracy theory.

[maccam]

Since iPhones, whether sold in an Apple Store or via a Telco, are activated via iTunes, I would suspect that Apple has pretty accurate units-sold numbers.