Goodbye HTC, Samsung now clear Windows Phone 7 market leader

In February this year Samsung vowed to overtake HTC and become the 4th largest smartphone vendor.  Early this month Gartner confirmed that Samsung has indeed achieved the feat, taking over the 4th position spot with 7.85 million handsets shipped in Q3 2010, largely based on their Android sales. 

At the time most would have thought HTC’s dominance in the Windows Mobile segment would not see this repeated in the Windows Phone 7 segment, but a poll run yesterday on WMPoweruser.com for current Windows Phone 7 owners, which collected over 1500 votes, revealed that Samsung already owns 51% of the Windows phone 7 market, well ahead of HTC’s 37%. 

The rear is brought up by LG with 9%, and Dell with 3%.

Of course these are preliminary numbers very early into the release of Windows Phone 7, and some handsets, such as the Dell Venue pro and LG Quantum are only available in the market in extremely limited quantities or have arrived just recently.

The votes on ownership do however broadly represent opinions prevalent in the Windows Phone 7 smartphone  community, who have found Samsung range of the Samsung Omnia 7 and Samsung Focus more compelling that most of HTC’s devices, especially the HTC Surround, which appears to have been a marketing miss, with only 2% of the market share.

Some of the factors which previously supported HTC in preference to other OEMs, such as the support for “custom ROMs” from community sites such as XDA-Developers.com and their proprietary user interface, HTC Sense, are also no longer relevant on the new platform, which prohibits both activities.

Samsung was recently rumoured to be throwing much of its weight behind Windows Phone 7, and if in fact this is the case it is likely HTC will be increasingly side-lined.