Android has overtaken Windows Mobile and Linux for fourth place in smartphone OS market share with 9.6 percent, says Gartner. The worldwide study of first quarter smartphone sales showed a 707 per cent year-on-year increase in Android sales...

Google’s Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008.

Today IDC announced their market sizing numbers showing revenues for servers running Linux or Windows outpaced the sales of the rest of the market in the final quarter of 2007.

HP and IBM claimed an equal share of the global server market in the first quarter of 2008, according to IDC, echoing figures from rival analyst firm Gartner published last week.

I just saw the article of ServerWatch on server sales on Q4'2008. I had been waiting for it for a while to see how bad the quarter had been given the economy.. but mostly I wanted to see how the GNU/Linux vs Windows battle on the server space is going.

Gartner reports surging global handset sales in the second quarter, with Android taking second place over Apple's iPhone in smartphone OS market share. Meanwhile, the "partial fork" of Android from the Linux kernel has been debated at LinuxCon, with some claiming it's a temporary split, while others warn about the fork's long-term impact.

"Across the EMEA region, Linux is still being adopted at an increasing rate, with sales of Linux-based servers rising by 42 percent in the first quarter; on a global basis, Linux server sales grew by only 10 percent in the same time period."

Sun Microsystems reported net income of US$89 million on strong hardware sales for its first quarter of fiscal 2008, with the company posting its fourth consecutive profitable quarter after several years of financial loss and instability.

It takes money to make money, and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat knows this. Red Hat has made no secret of the fact that it wants to get more of its sales through indirect channels.