Julien Theys / Published - 02 Dec 09

Thanks to a slew of innovative devices, the higher end of the handset market has managed to weather the depressed economic climate. RIM's focus on messaging and data features, driven at first by professional users, secured the BlackBerry a very good spot at the start of the smartphone race. Price drops, together with free, open-source operating systems, will boost the mass-market adoption of cheaper smartphones, but GMI expects the BlackBerry OS to drop to fourth place in smartphone OS market share in the next 36 months, behind Symbian, Android and the iPhone.