Android's increased market share

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Android, the Google made open source OS that has been seen on popular handsets from the likes of HTC and Acer, has shown significant growth over the last year.

In quarter one of 2009 it only held a 1.9% share, but it has been reported that the share has grown by a massive 600% to a respectable 9.6% share of the smartphone market in the last year. While the platform is still lagging behind the frontrunners, it has been showing great potential which is likely to show things turned around in the near future. Symbian and RIM's BlackBerry operating systems own a 44.3% and 19.4% share, respectively, while Apple's iPhone OS holds a 15.4% share of the market � 4.9% up from quarter one of last year.

With Android mobile handsets such as the HTC Desire taking the top spots in many of the smartphone charts, and budget Android mobile phones including the Vodafone 845 due to be released later this year, there is a wide enough range of Android phones in the market to suit a range of different needs and pockets.

Also, with it being an open source platform it is available to more app developers, meaning the Android Marketplace is catching up with the likes of Apple's iTunes App Store. These developments give the Android platform a very good chance of becoming one of the smartphone operating system market leaders.

In other Android news, Adobe have now released Adobe Reader for Android, which offers multi-touch gestures, including pinch-and-zoom, double-tap-zoom, flick-scrolling and panning. There's also a viewing mode called "reflow", which automatically wraps the content of text-heavy documents with wide margins for easy viewing on smaller screens.

Currently, supported devices include the Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone & Google Nexus One, but Adobe do state that �while we have not yet tested against other Android devices, we expect they may also run the application just fine.'

The app is available to download for free by clicking here.
Requires Android v2.1 and above.

Let us know what you think of the Android OS, or the Adobe Reader app by leaving a comment below.

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