Apple creeps up on Android in US smartphone sales Although sales of Android-based smartphones remain essentially flat in the US, sales of Apple iPhone are on the rise, thanks in part to T-Mobile beginning to offer Apple's smartphone this April. "The highly anticipated release of the iPhone on T-Mobile has benefited iOS in the latest 3 month period, though it has not yet …
RIM is in an enviable position. Now that iOS and Android plus all American servers and services are tapped by the NSA, RIM as a Canadian company is positioned to take advantage of people looking for secure communications.
Silent Circle has already gone to Canada to take advantage of their excellent privacy laws as well, but they lack the hardware. RIM could pull itself out of the fire if their dim witted management can get their collective stuff together. The one thing Blackberry has is secure comms for corporate use.
Are you sure?, really really sure?
I wouldn't want to be that there isn't some deal hidden away in some office somewhere in a Canadian Ministry that gives the NSA free access to RIM's servers.
After all, you can't have those pesky terrorists using Canada as a safe haven now can we?
Nuke ---> (the NSA, GCHQ and anyone else involved in PRISM)
Am I sure? Yes. Yes I am.
Canada does not have secret laws enacted by a President's Executive Authority without oversight. The relevant Canadian law protecting an individuals information is called PIPEDA and there's the full act here:
http://www.priv.gc.ca/leg_c/court_14_e.asp
The 10 principles of PIPEDA are:
Accountability
Identifying Purposes
Consent
Limiting Collection
Limiting use, disclosure and retention
Accuracy
Safeguards
Openness
Individual Access
Provide Recourse
Which means (and I'll use small words for you) if they use your personal info, you have to have authorized its use beforehand. If not, you can go after them for a large amount of cash. There are no secret legal back doors, or government taps that can be activated with a letter such as in the states.
This does not mean NSA cannot brute force a RIM algorithm, but it does mean there is no direct hand over of info from a Canadian company to government sources. We do things a wee bit better than our paranoid and delusional cousins to the south.
Several companies have opened in Canada specifically because personal info is protected under the law. SilentCircle is one of them.
Yup, spot on.
People buy iphones not because they're easy to use, not because they do what the user requires, not because of all the various apps & games on offer, nor for the large hardware ecosystem that exists due to their defined software & hardware interfaces. I'm sure the continued development of the os and their ability to push it out directly to users had nothing to do with it either.
I could go on, but you're soooo right - they just keep selling because they look good
"nor for the large hardware ecosystem that exists due to their defined software & hardware interfaces."
What's a hardware ecosystem - trees?
I prefer a product that just works with any device because it uses open standards, and not because it's locked into part of some "ecosystem".
(The rest of your points are common to all platforms, there are plenty to choose from. And the OP is right - for whatever reason, the US phone market is and has always been different to the rest of the world.)
Locally in Canada Ontario Waterloo. Maybe.
Or has BlackBerry suddenly invented a method that their phones connect directly to their canadian servers without using any route through an American or otherwise network? If it does use some kind of network, then it's tappable.
Not even a magic canadian Blackberry can transmit 1900MHz from Britain to RIM/Blackberry's HQ at 2 Watt.
"In their own backyard, MSFT have failed."
Uhm - but US Windows Phone sales have been climbing slowly but steadily for a while now. Windows Phone was only really available on 1 carrier for ages - it is only this month that other carriers have launched WP handsets...At this rate, WP will likely hit 10% US market share this year.
It's not really their backyard though - most of WP sales are from Nokia, and people see phones in terms of the manufacturer rather than the OS. Nokia aren't American, and have always had very little presence in the US (Symbian was the number one dominant OS until 2011, but was never used much in the US).
Also, I assume that this is a different definition to "fail" than the one used for Apple (where one million sales in 76 days is hailed as a runaway success instead of a fail).
The difference between "X percent" and "X percentage points". It is not a minor niggle because one can end up drawing mistaken conclusions from the given set of figures. To whit:
"Windows Phone devices also saw a year-on-year improvement, rising 0.9 per cent to reach 4.6 per cent,"
No they did not. The increase was (if I have not made a cock-up here myself, which is quite possible) 0.9 percentage points which on a difference year on year going from 3.7% to 4.6% is a year on year increase of 30 percent. Though having said that of course I doubt that Ballmer is about to break out the champagne any time soon - a very small market share is still a very small market share. It would just be nice if we discussed such figures with a modicum of care and precision, hmm...?
Err....
A 0.9 increase on 3.7 gives...
0.9 / 3.7 * 100 => 24%
Although I do agree with your point about the difference between percentage points and plain percent.
However as it is the proportion of the whole that is more interesting here, quoting the 0.9 rather than 24 makes more sense in context. I guess the author could have put "rising 0.9 percentage points" which would have been more correct but it's more verbose and most people here know what is meant anyway.
Just sayin.
Conducted over the past ... year?
Uh-huh.
So basically, a bunch of useless marketeers standing in shopping centres, erm, I mean "malls", pestered a bunch of hoodies to tell them what toy their parents they were going to buy next, and a few more than last year lied claimed it would be an iThingy, because that's the "cool" thing to say in front of your hoodie friends (before promptly going off to steal buy a much better Samsung).
People actually get paid for this shit?
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