Rumor: iPhones made up 66 percent of AT&T December sales
updated 11:05 pm EST, Fri December 30, 2011
Android said to have done under nine percent?
The iPhone was the runaway hit of the Christmas season at AT&T if a source quoted by Mac Observer is credible. The report claims that iPhones outsold all combined Android phone offerings at the carrier from Dec. 1st to the 27th by nearly a factor of eight, totalling some 981,000 units compared to Android's 126,000. The report may be skewed in its sampling, however, and its claim that basic "feature" phones sold slightly more units (128,000) than all Android phones combined is dubious at best.
The source's figures are limited to corporate AT&T stores only, which represents sales figures that are just a fraction of what the company would have sold throughout the month in all other channels. Other options for AT&T phones include authorized resellers, website sales, telephone orders and other retail shops that carry AT&T phones such as Radio Shack.
While the iPhone has long been the best-selling single handset line for AT&T, the carrier and its partners have engaged in widespread advertising of Android phones over the course of the season, and the figures are further undermined by the marketshare of combined Android models across carriers, which was was recently seen to be sitting at almost exactly 50 percent of the smartphone market.
AT&T has done very well with iPhone sales, reporting around six million units sold in each of the past two quarters and expecting to surpass that number in the current quarter. The combined iPhone 4S, 4 and 3GS accounted for 56 percent of AT&T activations in the third calendar quarter of the year. If the statistics provided by Mac Observer are true, the holiday period would have iPhones rising to 66 percent of all sales (in corporate owned stores, at least), with basic phones at 8.6 percent, Android at 8.5 percent, Blackberry and QMD tied at five percent and others (including Windows Phone) at a combined 6.9 percent.
Apple has previously said that it expects this quarter (fiscal Q1 2012 for the company) to smash records. [via Mac Observer]
Chart provided by Mac Observer
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2009
Now that's the way
to CHERRY PICK your data.
Make sure you gather data when the new iPhoney4GSXR comes out. Like all the other iPhondles, Android sales will pick up and crush these flash-in-the-pan numbers from the Fruit.
Drroid!