Guest post by A number of recent reports provide a new picture of the current smart phone market landscape and the trends likely to impact that landscape over the coming year. The latest US market share report by Nielsen shows both the iPhone OS and Android growing at the expense of Windows Mobile and the Blackberry OS.
RIM continues the maintain its lead with 35% share of the market with Apple a close second at 28%. Despite ‘missing a whole cycle’ Microsoft remains third with 19%. Google rounds out the smart phone peloton in the fourth position with 9% of the US market.
The global market situation is tangibly different with Nokia maintaing its dominance of nearly 40% of the market, more than the next two vendors – RIM and Apple – combined. Much as in the US market RIM has slipped a few percentage points – to 19.4% – as it continues to struggle to answer the challenge of Apple and other vendors.
Apple was the stand out performer over the last year world wide with its market share growing from 10.9% to 16.1%, closing in on RIM’s second position. Android and Windows Mobile vendors made little or no gains over the last year, a situation which will surely change with the recent announcement of promising new offerings both in the OS and hardware arena.
We don’t know the methodolgy, which brands were counted and which ones were ommited, who paid for it and what qualifies as a smartphone. Funny, but useless.
Maybe, but Neilson has a good reputation, it’s the same company who’s surveys determine TV ratings.
Nielsen has an even better reputation. Oops.
I think main problem is that Nokia seems to put lot of phones as smart phones when they really aren’t (atleast I don’t view them same level phones). But in Nokias defence I think whole smartphone statistic was originally greated by competitors, because if look whole cellphone market Nokia is pretty much dominating field outside US. So in order to look bigger in minds of consumers lets make statistic that makes companies like RIM and Apple look bigger than they actually are.
I think there should be only 3 meaningful numbers, amount of sale in units, amount of sales in currency and average price of sold phones(this can be calculated easily by dividing sales per currency with sales per unit).
Well Nokias smartphones is mostly E and N series and a few X series, with those they cover most of the market from entry level to the high end smartphones.
I think they are on the same level, but I pretty happy with my HTC Desire right now, but I miss ovi maps. But the E and N series are pretty good as well, my old E71 is still high on my list and my XM5800 is useful to take running.
Well, yeah, but defining smartphones too narrowly makes the survey less interesting anyway. After all, we are more tech nerds than business people here, how well Apple or Nokia does money-wise is not that important, what is more interesting is what the sales number says about the future of the tech.
From the fact that Nokia keeps steaming ahead it mostly tells me that a lot of people can settle for slightly less smart phones if they impress through other factors (battery life, price, simplicity, small form-factor). After all, you can do a lot of sweet things on a Symbian smartphone still, most of the key apps run, like Spotify and various social networking applications. Having a sane subset is probably sufficient to a lot of people who don’t bother to chase through an app store for the latest and greatest anyway
Still, I am looking forward to Symbian^4. Qt is awesome and Symbian is actually if anything more free than Android (since key pieces of Android functionality are closed source), so I hope to see them remain in the running going forward.
Since there is no getting around Maemo being replaced with Meego, I’m watching how it progresses also. The N900 is the first device where I wanted my phone and PDA merged together and I’m very willing to give up the choice of multiple woopy-cousion apps in exchange for 300 mostly usable apps currently available for Maemo5.
On the up side, Meego is also further separate from Nokia than Maemo so if they do go a different route, the OS can continue to develop.
Nokia.. hurry up and bring the N900 to canada at a reasonable price!!
just want to say that i really like my n900.
i will wait and se about meego but im not to sure about the qt interface. for some reason it have never spoken to me i always find it kind of well off.
but i will se alot of videos before i decide. but that is one of the nice thing about the 900 it is like having a full linux workstation in my pocket
The moment I see it on tigerdirect for a reasonable price, I’ll be all over that order. I just can’t bring myself to grab one off ebay yet between the asking price and how Ebay has become. It looks like great hardware though and there is at least one killer app on maemo.org (wifi scanner). I’d be looking to dualboot maemo5/Meego personally. I did Maemo3/Maemo4 dualboot on the N800 before more 810 also and it worked great for transitioning.
Between Maemo5 and Meego, I still have to go over my list of apps and confirm that I can still do all that I need.
Offhand, is there a native PIM suite finally and how is it to work with and sync with other systems?
I really like Maemo and most of the hardware of the N900, but it’s heavily hampered by the horrible screen. It’s just not as good as the iPhone or the Droid/Droid Incredible.
No, Nokia just make smartphones look like normal phones. But once you get over the look you can really use the full power of symbian.
They might not use the most powerfull CPU, the most memory, the most eye candy. They don’t have the best UI, but the functionality of a smartphone OS is there, and it is not locked.
You might say that they lack GPS or WiFi, but that is just hardware to keep cost down. The smarphone is defined by the OS.
I believe Nokia was the first to add a GPS in a phone and Nokia is part of the core working group that design wifi.
But indeed, wifi and GPS is only available in high end Nokia phones. You mention the price as a reason. It’s true but I should add battery life, size, weigh and robustness. And that is what most people want. They don’t care much about GPS and Wifi. They want small rock solid phones with long battery life. Only geeks use the wifi on their mobile phone. People are quick to bash Nokia because they sell so called low end phones without wifi or GPS when actually it is what most people buy. Competitors sell phones without MMS, without 3G and without GPS and call that a revolution because apparently people don’t care about features but when it’s Nokia apparently it should have multitouch, wifi, gps and all the geek stuff to be usable.
Or as a bluetooth add-on, on some symbian handsets.
Mostly agree with your post, but disagree with this one. I already pay ^a`not26/month because I like unlimited texts, and I think that I already pay my carrier way more than enough. Wifi allows me to check my mails at university without subscribing to an over-expensive data plan, it’s an appreciable plus. I’m sad that Nokia does not care more about that feature (on an E63, it is here, but poor sensitivity and high directionality make it painful to use).
Edited 2010-06-07 08:40 UTC
PS : I was talking about GPS when I wrote something about bluetooth add-ons.
I belive that an other Finnish company was the first to add GPS and that company is Benefon (GeoSentric current name) with their Benefon Esc! 1999. But among the big players its possible that Nokia where first, I think N95 where the first one to have GPS from Nokia. And they are one of the six founders of Wi-Fi Alliance.
But Wifi and GPS are coming to more and more entry level phones. Nokia has a good position in GPS when they own NAVTEQ and GPS chip prices are falling. So today GPS and Wifi can be found in the 100 ^a`not range and both GPS and Wifi in the 150 to 200 ^a`not range.
wifi is pretty important to anyone who doesn’t want to get ripped off with a data plan
And have wifi access point available around. At home or at work, people would just use the computer, or are there that many people who use their phone to use the internet at home?
Where I leave I’ve found that is useful but only in some limited occasions like when I’m in a train station or if you pay for a wifi network in town but then you are screwed by another data plan.
Edited 2010-06-07 13:01 UTC
i use my phone for internet all the time, there are plenty of times i want to look something up, but i don’t want to go to my desk. At work, I do pair programming, and having access to email and the internet while at another desk is great. I use reeder for rss feeds, which will cache downloads, so i also use it to read stuff while offline on my commute. I live in a big city, so it typically isn’t hard to find hotspots, but even if i can’t, my carrier offers 2.99 “day” passes for data (although, I’ve only used that once)
And you must be a heavy internet user as well. I don’t think RSS is enough to get screwed by an expensive data plan. I think 500MB/mo is pretty cheap. You start to get screwed when you start to stream video and audio.
That all depends on the plans available to you and wifi access of course.
500mb is 25$/mo on my carrier, which I think is absolutely ridicules, considering in the states, you can do 10$ for 25mb/day (which I would totally go with), or 30$ for unlimited.
That reminds me of this:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pts_scale_2010&n…
Once Windows Phone 7 is released, then Windows Phone will also start increase. Windows Phone 7 videos on internet are looking cool like others.but will have to wait & see how is the real experience when all those in hands.
Link for videos: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Windows+Phone+7internet
I think, now in general SmartPhone sales will go down little bit, because of the ATT decision on not to support unlimited bandwidth , if all other carriers also started following the same.
Maybe, but having a nice platform isn’t enough. You need Have a nice buzz, a unique niche or something killer for the iphone/android crowd to be excited about. At the moment I’m skeptical MS can do that with their current direction. Have you seen MS’s advertising for the Kin lately? Almost as bad as having Ballmer up on the screen for 30 seconds trying to be hip. They just don’t get the market angle they need to push to compete.
It is a pity that the rest of the world is not represented in these Figures.
I’ll bet that the patterns would be different.
The Mobile phone market is very different in Europe. Multiple carriers exist in virtually every country. Most smartphones are available on at least two carriers.
I sometimes feel a bit sorry for users where devices like the iPhone are only available on one network. By all accounts AT&T is pretty awful.Thankfully, I have at least three different physical networks to choose from.
Most of these aren’t like the iPhone, available only on one carrier in the US. Blackberries, mentioned in the article, get released on virtually every major and even some of the prepaid carriers. Android is on all of the major carriers (though AT&T’s offering is weak and crippled). Palm had a six month exclusivity on Sprint, then came out with better WebOS handsets on two other major US carriers. Only AT&T enjoys a 5 year+ exclusive relationship with Apple in the US, the typical exclusivity ends after 6 months or so, for Blackberries, Android after the “beta” G1, and so on.
Oh, by the way, I have four major physical networks and several others to chose from here in NYC, though with contractual agreements on the major carriers, excepting their prepaid offshoots, you can only switch carriers every two years so it might as well be a monopoly.
Apple actually does exclusivity deals in Europe also. There are a number of countries in Europe where iPhone is only on one network and cannot be bought freely.
Yes. And the service is usually as bad. I am in The Netherlands, and have an iPhone with T-Mobile as the exclusive carrier. Their coverage sucks, and even if you have good coverage, Phone calls are dropped all the time, and 3G Internet is worthless.
One foundation is starting an equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against T-Mobile to get refunded for bad service. Meanwhile, T-Mobile is offering two months of free service if you can give a very specific description of network problems (place and time), although they do not provide such a compensation for coverage problems (only if you have good coverage, but still experience dropped calls, etc.).
My next phone will definitely not be a iPhone if the exclusivity continues to exist.
Edited 2010-06-07 08:00 UTC
Funny. My T-Mobile coverage here in The Netherlands has always been excellent, far better than my friends’ Vodafone and KPN connections. Mind you, I live in a small rural town in the middle of nowhere so you’d think it’d be worse here. I’ve never had a dropped call, for instance.
Though, we don’t have 3G coverage in this town.
Using just percentages to come to faulty conclusions… Shades of browser share lies. The article itself doesn’t make those mistakes, since it takes the time to point out things like “more iPhone users want to try something else than android users” thanks to their slice being bigger – but as usual people quoting the article miss the point.
See, the problem is, sure – google and iPhone have increased their share of the market – but the market has been growing! If the size of the pool changes, loss in share can be meaningless.
Even if Windows and RIM lost 2% of the market apiece, the market still grew in size… the smartphone penetration of world pop going from 16% to 23%, making the number of users increase 43%. (23-16=7, 7/16=43.75)… If the number of people using smartphones grew 43%, that means if the number of people using win mobile went from 21% to 19%, you multiply by the world population times the penetration (16% and 23% respectively) and win mobile went from 224 million users to 298 million users… Despite ‘losing 2% of the market’ they saw 33% increase in userbase!!!
The conclusions drawn by the sensationalist title of the article here on OS News is the exact lies as the whole “IE dropped from 90% in 2005 to 54% today – there are less IE users today” lie. Given that the world population increased over that period and the penetration of the internet more than DOUBLED over that time frame, they’ve gained 300 million users DESPITE the ‘loss of share’… So in fact while losing share there are still MORE IE users today than there were when they had market dominance.
Again people, it’s called card stacking – supporting a presumption by only presenting the facts that support the argument and omitting all others – The most obvious tell for such lies or faulty conclusions is when you see percentages over time without telling you a percentage of what.
So sorry Kristoph, but you drew completely the wrong conclusions from the numbers you were looking at. MS and Blackberry didn’t really ‘lose’ anything so much as the iPhone and Android broke into new markets. You dig deeper and you’ll find that the numeric growth of the others is in fact fairly steady as the market expands… it’s just since the iPhone and Android have hit the market is growing faster – which means there’s room for everybody.
Developing markets are fun.
Edited 2010-06-07 11:56 UTC
Except that second part (my bold) is nowhere to be found in the article. The article strictly refers to “market share”, and says nothing about the absolute number of users.
In other words, you have misread the entire article.
See how that passage was in quotes, that’s because it was a complete thought and a simile referring to past articles and abuse of percentages.
Also the point, since the article here on OSAlert starts out with
and goes downhill from there with nonsense like:
If you do the math neither Win mobile or RIM have in fact had their user-bases increase, and in fact have shown growth – so one, both of those ARE still growing as fast as ever, and neither iPhone or Andriod have done a damned thing at the ‘expense’ of either!
No, you failed to comprehend my post. 21% of a 1040 billion user market is less than 19% of a 1495 million user market. Win Mobile showed growth in user-base DESPITE losing share. Simple arithmetic.
Edited 2010-06-07 13:38 UTC
That’s the whole point, sunshine. Nowhere does the article say the userbase decreased. All it says is that market share has decreased. Market share != userbase.
As I said, you clearly misread the article, and are reading things that aren’t there.
I didn’t say decrease unless someone edited my post! I said increase, and I just REPASTED from the notepad copy I had here. (since I don’t type in the crappy little posting box here that barely fits 20 words)
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT!?!
Last time I checked 284 million is more than 218 million, that’s an INCREASE in the number of users DESPITE 2% market loss.
Edited 2010-06-07 13:40 UTC
You were saying that the article is wrong because the userbase actually increased. I say, the article is correct because it does not mention userbase at all – it only talks about market share. RIM’s and Windows Mobile’s market shares have indeed decreased.
In other words, you are inaccurately saying the article is wrong, while in fact, it’s spot-on.
The article that was linked to, or the article here on OSAlert linking to it?!?
I’m referring to the conclusions drawn HERE…
http://www.osnews.com/story/23414/iPhone_Android_Grow_Windows_Mobil…
Comprehension, try it.
Edited 2010-06-07 13:47 UTC
Holy cap, are you intentionally thick or what? Stop confounding user base with market share for god’s sake! Let me spell it out for you:
OSAlert article talks about MARKET SHARE. It decreased for RIM/Windows Mobile. Article does NOT talk about user base.
You talk about user base. It (may have) increased for RIM/Windows Mobile. Article does NOT talk about user base. Article talks about market share.
Is this clear enough for you, or do I need to call Dora?
Oh, I’m being intentionally thick – RIGHT.
With a topic title like “iPhone, Android Grow; Windows Mobile, BlackBerry Don’t” What are we supposed to think is being said?
It is couched in language to make it sound like they are on the decline when in fact they are not. JUST talking about share does NOT give the entire picture and the ONLY legitimate excuse for doing so is to push a falsehood!
You confuse market share with userbase here. If the userbase is 1 billion ppl and you sell 300 million phones, you increase your userbase by 30%. If 300 million ppl drop their phone, then the userbase decrease by 30%.
I think many people confuse marketshare with userbase. marketshare indicates how your userbase grow. But the userbase grow and shrink at the same time. The userbase evolution is much harder to monitor. It not as simple as watching how many phones are being sold, but you’ve also got to measure how many phones have been replaced or dumped. Marketshare is only how many units are sold. It’s not because you sold 40% of the phone this quarter that you have 40% userbase. If your competitor has sold phones for 20 years and this is the first quarter you sell them, chances are that your userbase is actually less than 0.1%. also if you still sell 40% quarter after quarter but only because your userbase keep upgrading every version of your phone, your userbase does not actually grow.
Edited 2010-06-07 12:45 UTC
Which has nothing to do with applying share to total market.
TRUE.
NO!!! That’s what I’m saying is the incorrect assumption, because if the size of the total market goes UP, your share can shrink while your userbase GROWS.
It’s why I made the comparison to IE’s market share. What’s more? 90% share of 1 billion, or 54% share of 2 billion? Share can go DOWN while userbase GROWS.
By the linked to articles numbers, the number of smartphone users as a percentage of world pop (aka market penetration) rose from 16% to 23% from Q2 ’09 to Q1 ’10 – in other words even if the world population remained fixed at 6.5 billion over that period (it exceeds that by 300mil) the total market grew in size from around 1 million to almost 1.5 million.
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/smtp…
6.5 billion * 0.16 == 1040 million
6.5 billion * 0.23 == 1495 million
Which means that if over that same period Windows share of the smart phone market went from 21% to 19% as their chart implies (ok, it implies from Q1 ’09 – but close enough)
1040 million * 0.21 == 218 million
1495 million * 0.19 == 284 million
THEY GREW THEIR USERBASE 30% WHILE LOSING 2% SHARE… Which is why share in an expanding market is a false indicator.
The pool gets bigger, year to year percentages lose relevance. You need the whole picture!
— edit —
Oh, I would add that the charts are all suspect because none of them seem to line up to the same time frames of information (since Q1 ’09 is missing) and do not specifically say what the percentages are of…
I kind of assume the chart I linked to is of a percentage of the potential market – aka world pop; It could be percentage of the overall phone market since not all phones are smartphones, which could FURTHER skew the numbers in favor of what I’m saying since that market is constantly growing in size as well. Nothing like a percentage of a percentage to skew things around… Except that their normals appear to go DOWN over time, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense…
Edited 2010-06-07 13:29 UTC
None of that matters, however, when you consider how intensely both Windows and Blackberry based phones suck.
I like the chart showing people making less than 15K per year having an iPhone or an Android device.
It reminded me of my sister’s friends who waited in line to get the iPhone 3G to replace their existing iPhones (and pay a nice premium since they didn’t have their existing ones for 2 years yet). They filed for bankruptcy a month later.
That crap makes me angray.
Because I’m paying for their food stamps with my taxes they have enough disposable income to pay for an iPhone and all the monthly charges.
When I worked at a grocery store in high school and in college I’d see these guys come in all the time with (at that time) nice phones buying premium cuts of meat which I couldn’t afford with their food stamps.
Driving cars with expensive stereos and big chrome rims.
We have a ton of dumb people in America with no sense of financial responsibility living week to week.