RIM collapses, fish swim, birds fly

Research group Canalsys has a new report on smart phone shipments in the third quarter of 2011. It shows huge gains for HTC and Samsung from the same numbers a year earlier. Both of the Android phone makers were at 14% market share a year ago. Now HTC is at 24% and Samsung is at 21%. Apple drops from 26% to 20%, although the authors of the report stress that this is largely a function of Apple’s release cycle – the company came out with the iPhone 4 in June of last year but had nothing new until October this year so customers were likely waiting for the new thing.

But the big story is RIM, plummeting from 24% to 9% in a year. Yow. And this was before the infamous outage the company had. People aren’t buying BlackBerry phones anymore. They’re just not.

It’s also important to note that these are phones SHIPPED not phones SOLD so that 9% includes all the phones sitting in a store with no one to take them home.