Android in FOUR out of 5 new smartphones. How d'ya like dem Apples? The latest numbers from analyst house IDC on global smartphone sales during the third quarter of the year make good reading for Google and Microsoft – but it appears that Blackberry is dead in the water. Of the 211.6 million smartmobes sold in the quarter, Android took 81 per cent of the market, ahead of Apple at 12.1 per cent …
@bitten - "It's more painful to Microsoft than Apple I think as Apple does not aim to anything other than the premium market."
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If the market grows 39%, and Apple's sales only grew 25%, then Apple is the one that has the problem. Windows phone sales grew over 150% - about 4X the rate of market growth. Much of Windows' growth, I would guess, was at the expense of Apple.
We were reading these exact same headlines about Blackberry 3 years ago. Proprietary, locked-in hardware plus proprietary, locked-in software in a declining slice of the market. Bad, bad news for Tim Cook.
BlackBerry's problem was that it wanted to ship a modern OS in a touchscreen mobile. It didn't have the technology ready. So it threw away its existing customers in order to spend a few years developing a me too product.
Apple's problems are entirely distinct. It's comfortable servicing one segment of the market and that segment isn't growing much any more. It seems vaguely interested in other segments (per the 5C) but doesn't really seem to have much enthusiasm in pursuing them.
The two are in very different positions. It's likely that what happens to them from now on will be very different.
See also: what Windows did to Commodore and Atari versus what Windows did to Apple.
> Windows phone sales grew over 150% - about 4X the rate of market growth.
Article: 'Windows Phone handsets saw sales grow 156 per cent,'
IDC: ""Windows Phone handsets saw sales grow 156 per cent, ... with 9.5 million units during the period."""
They only did 3.7 million in Q32012. That was a particular low point because of the deadening of WP7 and the unavailability of WP8. In the previous quarter they sold 5.4 million.
fishman said: "So the growth of Windows Phone has been at the expense of Windows Mobile."
Exactly right. And at the expense of BlackBerry. Have you ever met anyone who would even contemplate giving up their iPhone for a WinPhone?? It is to laugh.
As far as that 150% growth... that's mathematically inevitable for any product that's starting from scratch. (Growth from zero market share to 0.01% is literally infinite, but completely meaningless) In reality, Microsoft is spending billions to subsidize its meager 3.6%, while Apple is making a juicy profit off its 12.1%. The two are much further apart than the high-level statistics suggest.
Microsoft's mistake was even thinking about competing with Apple, when Google is the big, fat target. And the one taking business that should have been Microsoft's, based on qualities like (relative) openness and friendliness with third-party hardware OEMs. If Microsoft had smoothly evolved Windows Mobile, perhaps making it play nicer with Windows proper, today it would BE Android.
Technically easy, yes. Except that it defines Apple as a follower. Already happened with the iPad mini. Apple buyers value the exclusivity, the innovation, the early adopter ideal just as much as the faux exclusivity of paying more than they need to for something. Much more of the "me too" offers and it'll be rather difficult to justify those fat margins, wouldn't you agree?
Marketing 1A:
Luxury goods are a product of appealing to a select, tightly segmented elite clientele to start with. This clientele usually pays more for perceived quality, design and service. Then once you have a reputation for exclusivity and being fashion-forward, then you can cut the price SOMEWHAT and appeal to the upper portion of the mass market.
And no, I am not a huge fan of Apple's current mobile phone marketing. They are pushing themselves too far into an exclusive demographic.
"don't forget rounded corners. If you want rounded corners there's only one place to go. supposedly."
Rubbish. I got rounded corners when I bought an Asus TF201 Prime. It's an amazing tablet, an example of a manufacturer rushing to copy Apple instead of saying yah-boo, screw you. So the Prime has rounded corners and BEVELLED EDGES and it's light, too, thus satisfying all the 3-stone weaklings who wrote such glowing reviews of that tablet on its release. without actiually identifying any of its obvious flaws.
The combination of rounded corners and bevelled edges and lightness means -- but of course -- that no HDMI connectionm will stay in its socket; the microSD card misses its seat and is chewed up by the tablet; the screen works loose; and, er, on top of all that, the sodding thing is hopeless with wifi and even worse with GPS. And it freezes and crashes with increasing regularity as time goes by.
"Rounded corners" indeed. They just killed off an entire brand thanks to Asus's pathetic rush to turn its pioneering TF101 Transfrormer into a shoddy shabby Apple me-too. How nice it would be, as a customer, to be able to walk into the marketing department of an outfit like Asus and say: "You're all fvckin' fired!"
Actually it would be. When the WP8 Phablets are released Apple will have the lowest maximum screen resolution of the three top smartphone OS's and on a larger screen that is going to tell.
If you go back to the move from 4S to 5 there were teething problems with apps changing the screen ratio, a lot of apps had to be updated so that they didn't look stretched or have black borders.
Then there's the iPad issue. If the iPad mini (non-retina) is only and inch bigger and sports the same resolution are users expected to buy the iPad ir iPhone app? iPad apps are generally more expensive because of the higher resolution, that distinction will be lost on a Phablet.
at the moment and given Google's latest moves with data slurping and ads everywhere, one has to start to wonder if the infamous Apple Walled Garden might be the lesser of two evils.
This may not last though.
But you have to consider it but not that it matters to me either way as I don't use a smartphone.
Sadly for an awful lot of people the Google slurping etc matters not one little bit. Sad but true.
"Sadly for an awful lot of people the Google slurping etc matters not one little bit. Sad but true"
I don't mind terribly much if Google "slurps" my data. It's not like MS and Apple haven't been doing it for years, and if it means the inevitable ads are more relevant to me, and I can ignore them like I do the irrelevant ads, where's the harm?
Most of Google's slurping can be avoided by disabling Chrome, Maps, and Network Location Services. Alternatives are easy to come by. On the other hand, Apple is just getting their data slurping started and their mechanisms allow for no workaround.
Both are invasive. If you do nothing, iOS will probably spy on you less. If you work at it, Android will spy less. I'm not sure about Windows - I haven't even seen one yet.
Also, the 211M units of smartphones sold figure replicates multiple authors' errors on this subject - probably pasted from an errant press release in email. The actual figure for total smartphones shipped in the IDC report is 261M units. The 211M units figure is just the Android portion.
Though there is one interesting fact left out of the story. I believe that Apple still collects around half of the PROFIT in the smartphone market. Apple does not seem interested in quantity sold as much as profit earned. Samsung gets the other half of the profit. Samsung clearly believes in quantity sold to get the job done. Looks like all the other Android makers are pretty much getting killed.
Another thought; Microsoft is cleaning up with $10 or so earned on most every Android phone sold! May be the reason Samsung is pushing its Tizen OS, especially on lower cost devices for the "emerging" markets. Would be pretty funny if the company that really make Android go switched to another OS for most of its phones.
@AC 21:07 - " Apple does not seem interested in quantity sold as much as profit earned."
That's what we were all saying about Blackberry 3 years ago. The market share might decline, but the profits will keep rolling in because everyone "needs" their phones.
Yeah, that really worked out well.
I wish we were given reasonably accurate numbers and separation of "types". It seems to me that there is a subset of "smartphones" that actually live between what is a proper smartphone and what is classified as a feature phone.
For example, if you take the Nokia S60 in its base design, it by no means matches the level of a HTC-One. The question is if you change out the OS for Android, does the OS itself qualify a phone to be a "smartphone" or are there other characteristics to be considered. I believe this is a long time debate that has never been answered and really should be answered to give proper weighting to the values that are given in the market.
Unfortunately the post-pc era (or the world of mobile computing if you prefer) is bleeding so many lines of distinction that simplified numbers are no longer meaningful.
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