Posted on 05/10/2010 11:24:56 AM PDT by SmokingJoe
* Google's Android OS in 28 pct of U.S. smartphones in Q1
* Apple U.S. iPhone share 21 pct in Q1
* Research in Motion retains No. 1 rank with 36 pct share
SAN FRANCISCO, May 10 (Reuters) - Google Inc (GOOG.O) displaced iPhone maker Apple Inc (AAPL.O) to become the second most popular provider of smartphone software in the United States during the first quarter, the latest sign of the increasing competition in the fast-growing mobile market.
Smartphones featuring Google's Android operating system accounted for 28 percent of U.S. smartphone unit sales in the first quarter according to NPD Group, behind top-ranked Research in Motion (RIM.TO), maker of the Blackberry phone, which had a 36 percent share of the market.
Smartphones, which allow consumers to surf the web, send email and run specialized applications on wide, color screens, are increasingly replacing no-frills cell phones for many U.S. consumers.
The devices have become a prime battleground for a variety of tech companies seeking to ensure a good position in the evolving market.
Last month, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ.N) said it would pay $1.2 billion to acquire Palm Inc (PALM.O), which sells two smartphone models based on its WebOS operating system. Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), whose Windows operating system is used in the majority of the world's PCs, unveiled a pair of smartphones last month and recently launched a revamped version of its mobile operating system.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Android is much like Google Chrome - it is a huge piece of spyware that people intentionally use... Every contact, every phone call, every email, every voicemail and text message, every app you run, every bit of data that you send and receive gets archived and filtered for marketing purposes by Google.
Hmmm. I have an HTC Touch Pro 2, with Windows Mobile 6.1. I haven’t rebooted in a month (since I switched batteries - oh, can’t do that in your iPhone, can you?). Never even a soft restart. And I haven’t found an app that locks things up; if I don’t like it I simply uninstall it.
Bigger, higher resolution screen, uses Verizon’s CDMA network so I can actually USE the phone wherever I am, a SIM card for overseas use (non-Verizon SIM, right now it’s China Mobile), a UI that is slicker than the iPhone and totally customizable (SPB Mobile Shell), takes micro SD cards, and native tethering via WIFI - yes, it’s a hotspot as well.
Tell me again how the iPhone is superior? Because a half dozen Apple engineers were very thankful I had my HTC with me at CES, so they could make phone calls and get their flight info by connecting to my WIFI hotspot while their iPhones weren’t running...
You remember correctly, I paid cash and then went to AT&T to activate the phone.
I’m seriously leaning towards an HTC HD2... winmo 6.5. Availability issues about solved. Any advice?
I have a Droid. It’s pretty boring. Once the iPhone is available on Verizon I’m switching.
RE: Android will be getting Flash in June
Every time they set a date for Flash to be on Android it slips another six months. Has happened four times already.
Frankly, I have a Droid and I have no interest in having the Flash albatross on my phone.
That, and Google Maps. Great application, works around the world, and the traffic updates are pretty accurate.
That is not really relevant is it? HTC alone for example, sells lots of different Android smartphone models on the market. It's not so much how any particular model sells. It's how many units they sell altogether, all models combined.
“The real losers are Symbian and Microsoft. Apple’s doing just fine, haters”
Symbain is virtually non existent in the US. Their smartphone market share here is next to zero. They have very little market share to lose here, given that this survey is only for the US market.
And Gene Munster's "estimate" is the equivalent of a WILD ASSED GUESS...
Your post #48 is wrong. Original iPhone owners BOUGHT their iPhones outright and AT&T did not pay Apple any subsidy for them at all. AT&T and Apple renegotiated their agreement to make the iPhone a subsidized phone long before the Android phones were ever announced or released... at AT&T's request.
No, they did not. "Visual Voice Mail" allowed users to chose which voice mail to listen to and not have to listen to them sequentially. It was a patented invention of Apple.
Actually, the NUMBERS of Android phones sold is STILL way small compared to the iPhone and iPod touch... what IPD and AdMob are reporting as surpassing the iPhone is not numbers of devices in use... it is the number of Advertising hits on websites being surveyed by those two organizations ONLY IN THE US out of all websites in the World. There are various reasons for the higher numbers of hits from the Android platform smartphones... but the primary reason is that many of the Android apps are advertising supported, where very few of the iPhone apps are... and even the AndroidOS, being Google, is advertising oriented... while the iPhone OS is certainly not.
Uh, I think I have told you this before... and again you repeat this? One of the native apps on the iPhone since day one is Google Maps... with traffic updates as well. And exactly how much experience have you had with the User interface on the iPhone to make the judgment call that TouchFlo is more flexible and more usable? I would daresay, very little.
The television and radio markets in the US are also advertising oriented. The European socialists might disagree, but the free market based advertising driven model seems to work just fine.
If Android is free, how does Google make any money with it?It’s inevitable that Google will win it’s smartphone war against Apple. Phone manufaturers like free and Android is free.
Volume.
I’ve plenty of experience with the iPhone UI, and with Apple products in general. You do know I actually design products for Apple?
It’s enough to have Apple engineers oohing and ahhing over my HTC with SPB Mobile Shell at CES 2010, not just because I could actually get phone and data connections, but that I could do more than 1 thing at a time.
But don’t just take my word for it - the fact that Androids have more market share than the iPhone says than the general public thinks that the iPhone UI and experience is not the best. Sorry!
You do? What?
Now, here's a question for you - do you have any experience with SPB Mobile Shell? Ever tried it? Ever seen it? It's the UI that TouchFLO and the iPhone should have been. Totally customizable, you can mix and match different sizes for apps on screen, mix apps, contacts, widgets as desired. VERY nice, and allows simple drag-and-drop configuration of your entire UI.
For example, you can see my default home screen here, my contact and weather screen here, and my oft-used app screen here. Note that I can have up to 10 different home screens as needed, and that doesn't include the carousel for another 8 pages of commonly-accessed screens like detailed weather reports, multiple city clocks, full contacts list, etc. I decide what I want, where I want it, and what I want it to look like. Customization, it's a wonderful thing!
Looks nice. I will recommend it to people who have Windows Mobile phones. Thanks.
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