smartphones

Research firm Nielsen chimed in today with a survey that puts Apple as the leading handset maker in the United States whilst Android is portrayed as the top mobile operating system in the country. Those findings follow a recent analysis which had Apple overtaking Nokia to become the world’s leading smartphone vendor in July, also corroborated  by IDC figures. According to Nielsen’s June data, Google’s Android remains the nation’s top phone platform with a 39 percent of the country’s consumer smartphone market. Apple’s iOS follows with 28 percent and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion continues to bleed share, down to 20 percent in the second quarter of 2011. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined grabbed nine percent, webOS and Palm OS were barely a blip with two percent, as was Nokia’s dying Symbian OS.

Apple on the other hand is the top smartphone maker in the United States that controls 28 percent of the market (excluding iPods and iPads). That’s partly “because Apple is the only company manufacturing smartphones with the iOS operating system”, Nielsen argues. HTC shares second spot with Research In Motion with a fourteen percent share of Android devices and six percent of Windows Phones for a total of 20 percent share of the whole market, same as the BlackBerry maker. HTC is also the nation’s leading Android and Windows Phone vendor with 14 percent and six percent share, respectively. No wonder Apple is suing HTC and seeking to ban import of their phones into the US…

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Nearly three-quarters of Android sales in Britain during a twelve-week period ended June 12 came from people upgrading from so-called feature phones to their first smartphone. In addition, only 1.8 percent of new Android sales came from iOS users jumping ship, a Kantar Woldpanel ComTech survey reveals. The research didn’t take into account corporate sales or contracts and was based on extensive interviews with up to one million consumers in Europe alone.

Android has grown its share of total US handset market to 9.2 percent in June of this year, up over just one percent a year ago. The platform had a 45.20 percent share of the entire smartphone market in the country, while iOS fell from 30.6 percent share in June 2010 to 18.3 percent share in June 2011. A big part of this was price: Apple’s is among the priciest consumer smartphones and only 45 percent contracts offer the device for free versus 90 percent for Android phones.

The fall of iOS came as a result of the overall UK market growing at a faster pace than iPhone sales, which have been overshadowed for the past two months as Samsung’s Galaxy S II smartphone emerged as the best-selling smartphone. In the US, Android and iOS had 57 percent and 28.7 percent market share last month, respectively. Android is clearly victorious in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and Japan, where the platform enjoys a whopping 64.7 percent share of the smartphone market versus 27.7 percent for iOS.

Kantar analysts predict that by this time next year smartphones would account for nearly 50 percent of the overall handset market, thanks to more and more feature phone owners dumping their devices for smartphones. This is not unexpected because trends hint that eventually all phones will become smartphones. Other phone vendors are experiencing sharp declines around the world, especially Symbian which has been bleeding share as Nokia fights for survival.

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It’s interesting how Microsoft is becoming an intellectual property vendor these days. This is all thanks to Google’s Linux-based Android operating system which incorporate Microsoft’s many patents, allowing the Redmond firm to seek royalties from handset vendors. Microsoft first forced HTC to pony up five bucks in royalties per each handset sold. The revelation has prompted pundits to note that the HTC deal earns Microsoft more money then licensing fees collected from Windows Phone partners.

Microsoft has signed a similar pact with General Dynamics Itronix and their licensing division took cash from component maker Wistron Corp., in addition to Android backers Veloicty Micro and Onkyo Corp. And now, we learn that Microsoft’s legal rottweilers are after Samsung, the leading Android handset maker, reports Reuters based on local media. Note that Microsoft already has licensing agreements in place with Samsung and LG.

Microsoft Corp has demanded that Samsung Electronics Co Ltd pay $15 for each smartphone handset it makes based on Google Inc’s Android operating system as the software giant has a wide range of patents used in the mobile platform, local media reported on Wednesday. Samsung would likely seek to lower the payment to about $10 in exchange for a deeper alliance with Microsoft for the U.S. company’s Windows platform, the Maeil Business Newspaper quoted unnamed industry officials as saying.

Let’s put it this way: Microsoft is set to make $30 million in Galaxy S 2 royalties alone based on sales of three million Galaxy S II smartphones. That’s a run-rate of twenty million handsets a year, meaning the Samsung deal could be potentially worth a cool $200 million in annual licensing fees on the Galaxy S II smartphone alone. And what happens if an Android vendor does not sign with Microsoft for patent protection?

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A lot of potentially far-reaching developments happening right now in China where Baidu, the dominant search engine, is secretly cranking up a mobile operating system of its own. It’s based on – of all things – Android and code-named Qiushi, which means fruits in autumn, explains TechNode quoting a local report by Chinese-language TechWeb.

Baidu says it’s just “an under-developing mobile ad product”, but considering that several Android-built mobile operating systems already exist in the country (i.e. Xiaomi Tech’s MIUI and DianxinOS) – and taking into account that Android benefited a certain search giant in ways more than one – it isn’t so far-stretched a notion that Baidu is leveraging Android to attack mobile on all fronts and further reduce Google’s share of China’s search-based revenue. Should Google be worried? Read on…

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While we’re at it, check out the sharp decline of RIM’s once powerful BlackBerry platform.

It’s always a good idea to take whatever analysts are predicting with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said,  Needham’s Charlie Wolf cites IDC data that portrays Android as losing ground to iOS in America. Android, of course, is the country’s leading smartphone platform which in the first quarter grabbed a whopping 49.5 percent of the smartphone market while Apple’s iPhone had 29.5 percent. The momentum cannot continue forever so it’s little surprise then that Android controlled 52.4 percent of the market in the quarter-ago period. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt calls this Android’s “first sequential loss ever in any region of the world”, quoting Wolf’s Monday note to clients:

In our opinion, this is just the beginning of Android’s share loss in the US. The migration of subscribers to the iPhone on the Verizon network should accelerate this fall when Apple coordinates the launch of iPhone 5 on the GSM and CDMA networks. The iPhone could also launch on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks.

It looks like ol’ Charlie’s trying to offload some AAPL shares. He argues that…
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtXZXhTpywY?rel=0]

Motorola’s upcoming handsets are leaking all over the web. The latest? How about three guided tour videos showing off the various features of the upcoming Droid 3 smartphone? The Droid brand has done very well reviving Motorola’s ailing phone business while putting Android on the map and Motorola Mobility recently refreshed the brand with the Droid X2 launch on the Verizon Network. With the third incarnation of the smartphone that started the Android craze Motorola is hoping to woe consumers with more oomph, a continuation of the strategy which has served them well thus far. Check out two more Droid 3 videos below the fold…

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So Intel has showcased six Honeycomb tablets at the Computex show, all of them engineered around the company’s latest 32-nanometer silicon code-named Medfield, the chip maker’s first system-on-a-chip engineered specifically for tablets and smartphones. Unsurprisingly, the demos fell on deaf ears with the veteran journalists who have seen it all.

Sean Moloney, Intel’s new president for China, flashed six Honeycomb 3.0 tablets and a smartphone during his opening keynote. He said reference designs for Medfield tablets and smartphones include both Android and ill-fated Meego software that Intel and Nokia co-developed for high-end mobile gear.

Intel has been trying for years to penetrate the potent mobile market where ARM-based processors designed by Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Apple and others woe device makers. Be that as it may, we don’t see Intel’s latest technology competing effectively with market incumbents – neither this nor next year. Why?

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Color us blue (no pun intended), but this has got to be one of the best AT&T television commercials yet. Dubbed “Spider”, it sports the new Samsung Infuse 4G said to have colors “so real that it’s almost unreal”. Why “Spider”, you ask. Just watch…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcr2uWkJkzI&w=670&h=411]
Notice how he simply grabs his shoe magically from under the table?

Gartner is out with their first quarter 2011 mobile phone market survey. The results are astounding. The first quarter belonged to Google and everyone else was reduced to extras in an Android show. Both Apple and Google grew their respective share of the smartphone market, estimated at 100.8 million quarterly units – nearly double the 54.5 million units from the year-ago quarter. Smartphones grew 85 percent and cut into sales of regular handsets, accounting for almost one quarter (23.6 percent) of the 427.8 million handsets shipped during the first quarter.

Predictably, Android was the leading smartphone platform in the first quarter of 2011. And here comes your mind-boggling takeaway: More Android-powered smartphones were sold during the first quarter than the combined sales of Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerrys, Microsoft Windows Phone smartphones and vendors belonging to the Other OS category. And that is worldwide, mind you. Go ahead, do the math yourself (the below table).

It’s fascinating that Microsoft and Symbian combined had three percentage points lower market share than Android. Also, while Apple doubled iPhone sales,  they barely gained any marketshare. This just shows that Android is gobbling up market share at a rapid pace, eating pretty much everyone’s lunch in the process…

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(Cross-posted from 9to5Mac.com)

A pattern is emerging in smartphones. Think about it, the same scenario has been playing out over and over in every territory where Google and Apple battle for supremacy. Apple first wows the market with its iPhone. Then, Google brute forces its way into the game and eventually takes the lead thanks to countless Android handsets in all shapes, sizes and price points, carried by virtually all wireless operators. Japan, however, is an indication of a new pattern that has iOS and Android forming a duopoly that squeezes out entrenched players, upping the barrier to entry.

In the latest survey of the Japanese market by MMI Research Institute reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, Android posted an incredible 2,000 percent year-over-year growth, capturing 57 percent of the country’s 2010 smartphone market versus 38 percent for Apple’s handset (as big as anywhere) – a notable decline for the iPhone’s 72 percent share from a year earlier and also a catastrophic loss for other platforms.

Shipments of Android phones rose to 4.91 million units in the year ended March 31, Tokyo-based MM Research said in a statement today. That compares with sales of 250,000 units, or 11 percent of the market, a year earlier when devices running Google’s software started to be widely available in Japan.

Apple shipped 3.23 million iPhones in the country in the last fiscal year, all sold excursively via Softbank. The combined 57 percent share for Android plus 38 percent for iPhone leaves little room for Nokia and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Both brands have been reduced to the Others category with a minuscule five percent market share. Is this a sign of things to come? Read on…

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According to many, Samsung Galaxy S II is the best mainstream Android phone currently available on the market. It appears the company has a hit on their hands as Electronista reports they sold an astounding three million pre-orders around the world as of Sunday night. The figure puts Samsung on track to beat its own goal of ten million Galaxy S II units in 2011. The dual-core phone sold about 120,000 units in the first few days of availability in South Korea. The Galaxy S II features a monstrous 4.3-inch display with the latest Super AMOLED Plus display technology.

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