From iPhone to Sony Ericsson???

I think anyone who shifts from an iPhone back to another manufacturer's smartphone is in for an unpleasant surprise. I work in the mobile industry, and for the last five years or so I've had the opportunity to get my hands on the latest smartphones rather early. I have to confess that I'm slightly biased against WinMo, mainly due to poor experiences with early versions; but since I got an iPhone myself, I look at the latest new stuff that comes through our business and I'm hardly even tempted to pick it up and play with it anymore. People who use an iPhone get so used to the features and intuitiveness (OK, call me a fanboi) that I'd think they'd die of frustration trying to go back to one of the other interfaces, however slick - even my simple business Nokia which I love seems *less* intuitive now I've been using the iPhone for a while. I'll give the X10 a look when we get one but if I can't get all around it blindfold in less than 10 minutes it'll go back in the box...

Let's get a little historical perspective on Windows Mobile's performance:

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

Yep, that's Steve "Crystal" Ballmer 2.5 years ago, bang on the money as usual.

Ads on iPhone/iPod touch

I've got rather a lot of apps (research, cough), and surprisingly few of them have advertising in them - certainly none of the paid apps have advertising at all.

Reports of intense piracy are probably pushing Admob's numbers for Apple devices up fast, as devs try to mitigate the damage by trying out (if not entirely relying on) advertising. If it pays, it'll only get better.

Personally I'm amazed it pays at all, but I guess Admob's numbers aren't likely to correlate to click-throughs...

Or maybe....

iphone users just use the interweb more than blackberry users, etc

Canalys figures

A reference to the data from Canalys might be useful here. They claim the iPhone's market share was 13.7% in Q2 and 17.8% in Q3:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Operating_systems

http://www.canalys.com/pr/2009/r2009112.htm

Of course it may be that iPhones get more use than others. My personal experience is that iPhone owners are constantly fiddling with them ...

Block!

Symbian and Palm have the best ad blocking technology, huh? Might have to look into them...

tosh!

Or, if you look at things the other way round... iPhone users are less bothered about their software being filled with adverts!

while the winmob and Blackberry users (professional types i guess, as opposed to trendies!) are a little more selective with what they are force fed!

Blackberry

I used to carry one for work. I was unable to put any unauthorized app on it, so these numbers might reflect that. Still, if you're writing apps, that's useful to know. Even if there are three times as many Blackberries as iPhones, that means little if the Blackberry users can't/won't/don't put an app on there.

Not surprised about Symbian

To be honest I'm not surprised about Symbian. I'd have replaced by 9200 with an E90 if Nokia had kept the same OS. Instead they dumbed it down and made it just another business phone losing the great messaging client. Nokia went for mass market, and that will be its downfall.

Windows Mobile

According to the graph, Windows Mobile seems to be a rounding error. Hmm....

Skewed...

True title should be...

iPhone users suffer more ads than other smartphones!

I'm sure it was only a couple of weeks ago I saw a graph of smartphone OS use (probably on here) which had Symbian at least double the iPhone.

And now for some less skewed figures from Gartner...

According to figures released on 12th Nov, 09 by Gartner, world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, Microsoft’s mobile OS witnessed a downfall from 11 % of the global smartphone market in Q3 2008 to 7.9 % later this year. The iPhone’s share saw a rise to 17.1 % from 12.9 %, and RIM’s share had risen from 16 percent to 20.8 percent. Symbian’s market share fell with 10% from 49.7 % to 44.6 % over the same period The new open-source Android operating system did not have any market share in Q3 2008, however, in Q3 2009, it had managed to capture 3.9 % of the smartphone market. Palm’s WebOS had 1.1 %, and other Linux-based mobile operating systems had 4.7 %

17.1% != 50%

Not much use as a statistic

This sort of statistic isn't necessarily representative of smartphone share though.

Ignoring the obvious issues of admobs coverage via different OSes/handsets, other issues exist in this data as it ultimately is based on web browsing. That isn't what defines a smartphone though.

I own a few handsets and they don't all get used for web browsing - so it isn't entirely representative.