Posted on 08/03/2010 10:58:40 AM PDT by SmokingJoe
What the numbers say
Android’s market share grew by an amazing 886% in the second quarter of 2010 compared to the second quarter of 2009. And as exciting as that sounds, it was pretty much to be expected. Back in Q2 2009 Android had 2.8% of the smartphone market. You can only go up from such a measly number, basically.
This time last year, Android was on just over a million of the handsets sold. And almost all of those sales were made up by the HTC Dream/G1. Android 1.5 was released during that second quarter of 2009, but by the end of June only two devices were running the new OS version, the Samsung i7500 Galaxy and the HTC Magic. Arguably, neither Android 1.0 nor Android 1.5 were anything close to final, stable versions of the OS despite their numbering. It was only with 1.6 that came out in September last year, when the OS started to look good enough for mass adoption, and that’s when many new devices started to show up, and Android’s growth rate started surging.
Today, Android is only 0.9% away from RIM’s BlackBerry OS, and if the current trends continue, will overtake it in Q3. Which is not a small achievement by any standard. RIM’s OS was holding that second position since Windows Mobile started to go down a long, long time ago (in mobile device years, anyway).
We’ve clearly not seen the peak of the Android platform yet. How much it can still grow from this point on is anybody’s guess, but it has absolutely grown up this year. My guess is that it won’t peak in 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at unwiredview.com ...
Dell and Intel helped so far simply by being major powers joining in on Android. With their backing, you know it's serious, and you know Android will expand, especially into Atom-powered devices.
Now answer my question for the vast majority of companies, the cell phone industry powerhouses, behind Android. You don't think they had anything to do with Android's rapid growth?
Just look at the numbers. Your oh-my-god-it's-selling-like-crazy most hyped, most beloved Android phone that broke all sales records managed a whopping small fraction of the iPhone 4's initial sales. The only reason Android has grown so much since release is that it has been installed on no less than SIXTY phones on all major carriers in two years, and that doesn't even count carrier rebranding. The market is flooded with these phones from low-end to high-end.
In short, the sales of over TWO DOZEN current Android phones COMBINED on all major carriers COMBINED managed to barely edge-out the iPhone. That's fine. Apple needs competition. But only a warped mind can see this as some kind of great achievement. I would have considered it a failure if Android didn't eventually surpass the iPhone in sales.
I know this must must be confusing to you, dearie, but Droid is a phone line made by Motorola, including the Droid, Droid Eris, and Droid X.
Android is a free OS that Google rolled and released to run phones.
Please try to at least look like you know what you're talking about if you're going to participate in the discussions...
You'd LOVE an iPad then - the virtual keyboard (meaning it costs ZILCH to change or add buttons to) doesn't even have arrow keys!
At first, this seemed like a funny joke, but with the way Apple is going perhaps it was rather prescient?
BTW, you may want to know that Jobs' expectations for the iPhone was 1% of the phone market, or 10 million phones, in 2008. Apple passed that mark well before the year was over and shot way beyond that in following years. Quite simply, the iPhone has broken pretty much every phone sales record and far surpassed all expectations. Can you say that for any other phone?
I’m not going to play Stupid Republican and let you frame the argument narrowly so that you win like the Democrats do.
I just got the Droid with the slide up model for this very reason. I can't manage the virtual keyboard so I have the best of both worlds with my regular keyboard and the virtual one.
Prove it. It is quite likely that CPUs made by Samsung ended up running WinMo, and phones of Samsung manufacture were sold with it. However, Samsung wasn't in a consortium whose mission was the advancement of WinMo. Microsoft had the sole role in that. Microsoft found phone manufacturers to carry WinMo of course.
Remember how Symbian blew up and took the majority of worldwide smartphone sales? A lot of these same players are in the Symbian Foundation. Of course, these days we see they've mostly abandoned it, with the major exception of Nokia.
Chinese factories are known for running two types of shifts: day shifts to make the product the manufacturer requested, and a night shift to make counterfeits of it for local sale.
Aside from those operations, the there is a class of manufacturer in China dedicated to duplicates. They watch the market for anything exciting, and immediately duplicate it as closely as possible using generic hardware and free or pirated software.
IOW, illegal copies can hit the streets in literally days after the introduction of a product. They are sold widely in markets, so brazenly that attempts to shut them down are confronted with protests.
True for general cell phones, and it used to be true for smartphones... Not any more...
From what I've read, no phones are sold subsidized in China.
That used to be true for smartphones, but over the last year or so it's changed. The more expensive phones are now typically sold with a 1 or 2 year contract, with the phone "subsidized" over the months. China Telecom started it with the sales of iPhones (too expensive in China for the average person to buy), and the others now do the same thing for high-end phones only.
The bigger picture is that Apple simply doesn't understand the Chinese market. Sure, you see "iPhones" all over Shanghai, but 90% of them are cosmetic copies, running Windows Mobile or Android. They don't run iOS, and in fact few really want iOS.
Why? It's simple: character input. You NEED a stylus for Chinese character input. Sure, you can do the Mandarin keyboard thing (where you start typing "kuai" - pinyin for fast - and up pops a list of possible characters including 快 which is what you wanted), but that assumes you know pinyin - which a large portion (the majority) of the population do not.
Being able to literally draw on the screen what characters you want, and have the phone interpret that and choose the right corresponding character is critical. WinMo and Android do that VERY WELL. Apple's iOS does a really bad job of it.
And that's why Apple is seeing very little penetration into the Chinese phone market (830 million registered, monthly paid accounts and rising). It's a phone that simply doesn't work for texting or typing (understand that a text message is basically free; you pay for any phone calls. So it's best for your pocketbook if you just text back and forth; this is fundamentally different from the US market where you're charged to text, either per text, or a flat rate for a given number of text messages).
Come over, take a look around - you'll see WinMo used on more "iPhones" than iOS. Simply because it does a fantastic job of character recognition and still is a good smartphone OS as well. Android is picking up steam, too, because it has some great character recognition capabilities, and is free for the phone maker (which they all love).
I can't help but believe that most users buy outside and just find the best carrier deal for their GSM phone
It's a real easy thing to do: you have 3 carriers available: China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom (which, although still its own entity, was bought by China Unicom about 2 years ago). No other options. And if you want an iPhone, you buy from China Telecom, or the Apple store which forces you to sign up with China Telecom.
For the typical Chinese consumer, if they want just a phone for texting, phone calls, appointments, alarm, etc - basic functionality - it's best to head down to the local phone store or market and buy what you want, after haggling over the price.
If, however, you want a higher end smartphone, you still could go to the phone market (except for a real iPhone), but you'll not get a real discount at all over what the carriers offer. So you typically go to the carrier-of-your-choice (usually the one you have now, since phone numbers are NOT portable) and buy what you want with a 1 to 2 year subsidized contract at the same time.
It's not in the English one for the NYSE, but it is in the Mandarin one filed with the Hang Seng market.
It's not required.
Nope, but they trumpet it. China Mobile signed up 2.2 million new smartphone subscribers in 1Q2010, and China Unicom signed up 3 million new smartphone subscribers.
Overall, the Chinese smartphone market is still "small" as a percentage of the total market. It's about 65 million people at this point. However, it's growing quickly; in 2015 there will be over 100 million smartphone users in China, making it the largest smartphone market in the world.
Nokia and Motorola both have done it in the past, and others will do it in the future. As far as passing all expectations, look at the EVO and the DroidX - both sold out for weeks, because demand is WAY beyond supply.
For electronics, I'd moderate that to SOME Chinese factories... Bigger, better ones like Flextronics, Compal, Foxconn, Vtech, and others are heavily controlled and very much on the up-and-up.
Most of the clones you see in cell phones and other electronics don't roll out from the original factory, but from second tier producers who simply buy the original and reverse engineer it for the domestic gray market.
Now, in the clothing/textile industries the second shift is MUCH more prevalent. But it's justified as "overproduction to cover defects in handling/final inspection" because the determination of what is 'good' or 'bad' is much more subjective (how tight of a stitch is tight enough?)
My nephew has an Android and he told me I would never be happy with it because of the battery life. Sounds to me that Motorola didn’t figure it out after their RAZR battery disaster.
You need to try swype, short learning curve, much faster than tapping a keyboard. Just did this post using swype on the new droid x.
Completely depends upon what you’re doing with the phone. If I’m using it with WIFI surfing the web, yeah, it dies a LOT faster than surfing via 3G.
I can get about 7-8 hours of web surfing from my phone, via 3G (that’s a LOT of surfing). Cut that by 3 when using WIFI.
I use my phone as a reader and music player when on airplanes, such as the Seattle-to-Tokyo flight. A solid 10 hours, the phone will let me read a book and listen to music non-stop for all that time, and then the subsequent 3 hour flight from Tokyo to Shanghai, and I still have 25% left when I arrive at my apartment.
This week, I charged the phone on Tuesday morning, it’s still showing 60%, and it’s Thursday morning. About 90 minutes talk time so far, a few dozen text messages, and about 5 minutes of Google Maps (got turned around in Jingan district, needed to find out where the heck I was!).
For constant movies or WIFI browsing, yeah, batteries die quick on ALL phones. But other than that it lasts a lot longer. Just like my laptop; if I use it for basic word processing with the screen turned down in brightness and WIFI off, I can get 6 hours out of it. But leave the screen at full brightness and stream a movie via Netflix (thankfully VPNs report you as in-country!), I’m lucky to get 2 hours.
All of the feature? More BS! What have you been smoking? Accelerometers? Nope. Just one feature that the iPhone had at inception that NONE of those phones had. More of you exaggerations.
Back off me...
Then quit making exaggerated claims like those older phones had "all" of the features of the iPhone years before... it simply is not true.
Jim told me to back off, so you take the same advice...
Since neither Dell nor Intel have amounted to much in cell phones or smartphones, their being "major powers" have about as much effect on Android market share as Disney being behind Android. Their effect on Android market share was a big far ZERO.
“With their backing, you know it's serious, and you know Android will expand, especially into Atom-powered devices.”
With their backing, neither Dell nor Intel made any headway in smartphones, let alone increase Android's market share. You can't help someone when you can’t even help yourself.
Atoms huh?
How many Atom powered smartphoes have you seen being sold anywhere?
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