Apple vs. Samsung and the reality of the Android ecosystem

Thanks to Samsung’s ability to build and source mobile components — from memory to processors to screens — the company should be able to become one of the leaders in the smartphone ecosystem. The battle, in fact, will be between Samsung and Apple, something that we have reported multiple times over the past year or so. Lately that battle is actually between the iPhone and the Galaxy brands. Samsung sold an estimated 87.6 million to 94.6 million smartphones in 2011 (though it made a lot less money than Apple, which sold about 58 million iPhones during the first nine months of 2011).

It may not seem obvious today, but in a few years, as the rest of the world moves away from feature phones to touch-enabled, Internet-connected phones, we will see Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese companies, go head-to-head with Samsung. And they are so dominant in Africa and parts of Asia that we are going to see them become major players in the low-to-medium end of the market.