Posts tagged Smartphones
Samsung sold 44.5m smartphones in the first quarter
The Guardian:
After narrowly beating Apple last year, Samsung’s smartphone sales exceeded Apple’s by a large margin in the first quarter. Strategy Analytics said Samsung became the world’s top smartphone maker, selling 44.5m handsets in the January-March period, followed by Apple’s 35.1m.
Very impressive quarter from Samsung in terms of sales. Not nearly as strong as Apple in profitability, but not doing badly there either.
The iPhone accounts for 78% of all AT&T smartphone sales
Jay Yarow, Business Insider:
AT&T activated 4.3 million iPhones, which is a 43% sequential decline. That means between AT&T and Verizon, iPhone activations fell 37% on a quarter over quarter basis.
This information was published under a somewhat misleading headline: ‘The iPhone Crashes At AT&T’. As you’d expect for this quarter - and Apple themselves indicated - the sales of iPhones are not going to match Apple’s blowout last quarter. But there’s one very telling snippet further down in Yarow’s piece:
This AT&T news sounds bad, but here’s the silver lining: AT&T sold 5.5 million smartphones overall, which means the iPhone was an astounding 78% of sales. At Verizon, the iPhone was more than half of all sales.
So the truth is that smartphone sales have crashed this quarter. (Again, smartphone sales dropping this quarter is no surprise.) But of those smartphones AT&T did sell, 78% of them were iPhones. That means that less than 22% were Android devices. That’s a pretty astonishing statistic and, combined with Verizon’s recent figures what had iPhones at around 50% of all their smartphone sales, Apple - in marketshare terms - is rising rapidly in the US market.
All in all, physical sales are down as you’d expect, but marketshare is rising rapidly. I don’t think Apple will be too worried.
Apple's iPhone gets head start in smartphone Christmas battle
Wow. 37% of all smartphones being bought in the UK in the run up to Christmas are iPhones.
Carrier IQ Speaks: Our Software Ignores Your Personal Info
John Paczkowski at All Things D:
While CIQ might “listen”* to a smartphone’s keyboard, it’s listening for very specific information. Company executives insist it doesn’t log or understand keystrokes. It’s simply looking for numeric sequences that trigger a diagnostic cue within the software. If it hears that cue, it transmits diagnostics to the carrier.
Regardless, why did no one know about Carrier IQ? Why was everyone so quick to distance themselves from them? Were any laws being breached?
Apple iPhone 4S accounted for 42.8 per cent of all UK mobile phone sales in October
This clearly won’t be sustainable, but it highlights just how impressive Apple’s launch of the iPhone 4S has been. And, as the majority of this growth is from people upgrading, it emphasises how loyal iPhone users are.
Facebook are building a smartphone
Liz Gannes and Ina Fried at All Things D:
After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.
It’s been rumoured for close to two years and it now seems that those rumours are true - though Facebook are still neither confirming nor denying it.
Why do Facebook need to get into the smartphone industry? Because they want to be a major player and not not just a support act to Apple and Google. The future is mobile and, though the Facebook app is the most popular smartphone app, it is still dependent on Apple and Google for creating the platforms that their app can run on. And what if they decide not to work with Facebook any more? For Facebook to be in charge of its own destiny, it doesn’t really have a choice but to enter the smartphone market.
The problem for Facebook is that I suspect, though they have millions of users, the true devotion of their users is not as great as they’d like it to be. I sense more and more that people are using Facebook because they have to (there’s no alternative where all their friends are) rather than because the love Facebook. Compare that to the devotion of people towards buying Apple products. Do Facebook have the kind of customers who love them enough to want to start to buy a phone from them? I’m not sure.
Oh, and just to be clear, it’ll almost certainly be at least another 12 months before we see anything close to a product ready to buy from Facebook.
Sniper rifle versus a bunch of guys running around with shotguns.
Everyone wins: Adobe to stop developing Flash for Android
ZDNET has got the scoop on some very interesting news: Adobe is going to cease development on mobile browser Flash and refocus its efforts on HTML5.
My initial reaction to this was that Steve Jobs and Apple have won. Apple - famously - chose to ignore Flash and refuse to run it on any of its mobile devices. It never considered it to be good enough and chose to go with the open HTML5 standard for video playback.
Android phone makers have however tried to make Flash a unique selling point of their devices (whilst playing down the fact that Flash was, to put it nicely, crap). So, this news that Adobe are stopping their development of Flash for mobile browsers would seem to be the final evidence that this is a battle that Apple has won. John Gruber makes the point though that, in fact, the death of Flash on mobile devices is a win for everyone:
Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any sort of Apple technology. It’s been superseded by truly open web technologies. Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.
It’s definitely interesting that this move will help to ensure that Android, which claims (misleadingly) to be open, to actually fully adopt the open HTML5 standard and leave behind their use of the closed Adobe Flash plugin.
Hopefully this move will also give the BBC a good kick up the backside to get a move on with making the video content on their news site accessible via HTML5!
Many Android users don't know they have smartphones
From The Loop:
Apple’s iOS is continues to grow, as it reached an all-time high among mobile operating systems accessing the Web in October.
According to data by Net Applications, iOS showed 61.64 percent share in October, a 6.99 percent increase over the 54.65 percent share it held in September.
Ok, ok, I admit that the title to this link is somewhat provocative! :) And - clearly - a lot of Android users do very explicitly know they have smartphone. So don’t shoot me just yet!
But here’s the thing: despite there being a LOT more Android phones and tablets in the world, Apple’s iPhone and iPad have over 40% higher market share when it comes to accessing the web.
Why is this? My take is that it’s because a lot of people who still only use their mobile phones for making calls and texting are now being sold entry level Android smartphones rather than feature phones (which will soon be obsolete). They are now so cheap that there’s no reason not to get a smartphone, even if the smartphone features (like accessing the web) never get used.
So I think that there are now a lot of consumers with zero plans to use smartphone features who now - perhaps unwittingly - have a smartphone that they are continuing to use the same way they used their previous dumb (feature) phone. And the reason Apple has such high market share for accessing the web is because everyone buying an iPhone is making a deliberate, conscious choice to buy a smartphone that does a lot more than just make calls and send texts. All iPhone users are deliberately spending more money to buy a phone that does more. The same cannot be said for all Android users.
To be clear, I don’t mean this as an Apple is better than Android post. It’s simply my interpretation of some stats that might not immediately make sense when factoring the marketshare of the actual devices as opposed to the usage of those devices.
Samsung overtakes Apple in smartphone sales
From the BBC News site:
Samsung overtook Apple to become the world’s biggest seller of smartphones between July and September.
Research from Strategy Analytics showed that Samsung sold 27.8 million smartphones in the three month period, compared with 17.1 million from Apple and 16.8 million from Nokia.
Who says copying doesn’t pay?!
Seriously though, it’s a very healthy quarter from Samsung. Obviously the comparison is against Apple’s weakest quarter (in light of everyone knowing a new iPhone was on the way). I suspect that Apple will take the mantle back this current quarter (with some analysts predicting up to 40 million iPhone sales).
It’s worth emphasising that market share has never been a primary objective of Apple (though I suspect they would like to keep the crown of top smartphone maker). And, it’s also worth emphasising that though Apple only has 5% of the global phone market share, they take over 50% of the phone market profit.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Android 4.0 not quite a super duo
Good write up by Andy Ihnatko:
Vlad Savov from ThisIsMyNext.com was at the announcement in Hong Kong and spent some time in the event’s hands-on demo area. He reports “a good deal of stutter” in the interface, reinforcing a consistent problem with Android: the UI always seems to be about a half a step behind your taps and sometimes, presses don’t even register. This is still pre-release software (which Vlad notes) but I’m skeptical that within the next month, the Android team will solve a problem that’s existed since Day One.
I mean, it’s great that Android 4.0 now has a nice new system font. But a disconnect between the user and the interface should have been considered a five-alarm, all-hands-on-deck problem.
It was a joint event in which Google showed off Android 4.0 running on Samsung’s elite new handset, the Galaxy Nexus. It certainly looks like a neat and capable phone. It’s a 4G phone with a big 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display with enough pixels to run 720p HD movies, the de rigueur dual-core processor, and a radio set for near-field communication.
Are any of these things necessary? Which is to say: does the fact that the only thing on this list you’ll find in the iPhone 4S is the dual-core processor, put Apple — or any similarly underequipped phone — at a disadvantage?
Why I’ll never buy an Android phone
Whenever starting a comment that has a negative element about a Google product I always feel the need to emphasise first that I’m a Google fan. I’m not anti-Google. A day never goes by without regular use of Google products that I love.
I have never loved Android though. (Android is the operating system (OS) Google build and then gives away for free to phone makers to use in their phones. If you’ve recently bought a Samsung or HTC smartphone, it almost certainly has Google’s Android OS on it.)
The first reason I’ve never liked Android has two sides to it. Side one is that I bought the first ever iPhone and fell in love with it and have not yet seen a compelling reason to shift. The other side is that Android is pretty much a copy of the iPhone. Sure there’s some big differences, but when it comes down to it, the Android OS is about 90% the same in functionality and operation as the iPhone OS. Inevitably, having started with the copy, Android has in some areas actually improved on the iPhone. That then leads to Apple catching up, taking the lead in other areas, before Android then does the same back. It’s now just an ongoing game of cat and mouse.
The second reason I’ve never like Android is because of how they went about pretending that Android was an ‘open’ operating system and that Apple’s was ‘closed’. This was at best misleading and at worse disingenuous. Android may be more open than Apple, but Google presented a black and white scenario that just just doesn’t fit with the reality.
The third reason I don’t like Android is a new one. As this AppleInsider article describes, it turns out that not only is Android a copy of the iPhone, it is also built on technology (Java) that they knowingly and wilfully chose not to license. In other words they have deliberately behaved in a anti-competitive manor (which ironically - and, again, disingenuously - they just accused Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle of doing). It’s no wonder they have been able to give Android away for free when they’ve not paid for licensing of the technology it’s built on (not to mention the numerous patents it almost certainly abuses).
In summary, everything about Android just leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. When it comes to Android, Google has misled, been incredibly hypocritical, used unlicensed technology, abused patents, and just generally behaved in a very ugly manner. Which is why I’ll never be buying any Android product.
Thankfully, it looks like all this ugly is coming back to bite Google hard. The anti-competitive advantage that Android has had will soon be levelled.
UPDATE: To clarify, I don’t have a problem with copying and don’t think it is wrong (providing licenses for relevant technology and patents are in place). The reason I mention copying is that, I prefer to have the original. Part of the reason I won’t buy an Android is because I want the original, not the copy. But the main reasons I won’t buy an Android device are my second and third reasons.
► Add your comments on Google+
If you don’t yet have Google+, use this link to subscribe.
Two new iPhones coming in September?
MG Siegler delves into the rumours circulating about there possibly being two new iPhones to come from Apple later this year:
Look for Apple to launch a true “iPhone 5″ this fall, with the potential surprise of an “iPhone lite”.
Might Apple enter the mid-market smartphone market with something cheaper? It’d be an interesting move. Of course, Apple will still want to make money from it and yet also maintain their high standards. If they did do this, it would be a definite indication that they do want to fight Android phones for market share and not just profit.
The smartphone future
Charles Arthur in The Guardian:
In the first three months of 2010, 85m PCs were sold worldwide, compared with 55m smartphones. Optimistic analysts forecast that the crossover might happen in 2012. Instead, by the last three months of 2010, 94m PCs were sold – and 100m smartphones. Analysts believe that this trend will never reverse. (It continued in the first quarter of this year: 82m PCs, 100m smartphones.)
This is an interesting look at how smartphones are gradually killing the PC (or at lease aspects of our use of it) as well as some of the implications of a future where everyone has a smartphone.
The only slightly bizarre aspect to this piece is the lack of any meaningful reference to Apple. In light of the subject matter, excluding them seemed pretty strange.
- Page 1 of 2
- Next »
