Apple surpasses RIM in 2011 Canadian smartphone sales

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple has overtaken long standing leader RIM in sales in home court sales. A recent report from IDC and Bloomberg revealed that RIM is no longer the leading smartphone vendor in Canada as of 2011. Apple led with sales of 2.85 million devices in Canada surpassing BlackBerry sales that totaled 2.08 million.

By comparison, in 2010, BlackBerry's offerings outsold iPhones by over half a million devices in 2010. Back even further, in 2008  which was the iPhone's first official year in Canada, BlackBerries outsold iPhones by more than five to one.

The reason for RIM's decline for this period is that they haven't released new hardware for the holiday buying season as the QNX powered next generation smartphones were moved to a late 2012 release. Apple's iPhone 4S quickly became the bestselling device. The iPhone is also quickly being adopted into the enterprise, an area that was RIM's domain.

This is expected to change in 2012 once feature-competitive BlackBerry 10 devices roll out and RIM slowly reclaims ground in the market. 

RIM, however, is enjoying surging popularity overseas. I am presently visiting the Philippines where demand for BlackBerry smartphones is simply staggering since the devices are seen as status symbols while the BBM messaging service is extremely popular.

It is a different market and certainly one that isn't driven too much by apps and data services (as these are prohibitively expensive).

Instantaneous communications and staying in touch with friends and family in a real time fashion is the most valuable feature of mobile networks here. This is something BlackBerry has excelled in with email as well as messaging platforms.

I will be covering the BlackBerry World conference this May in Orlando. RIM is expected to show off some of the new features and possibly hardware that is coming to the market.

Source: Bloomberg