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Comments: 668 + - Mobile: Android Sales Surpass iPhone Sales on Monday May 10, @03:58PM
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gollum123 writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat:
"Smartphones based on Google's Android mobile operating system outsold Apple's iPhone in the US during the first quarter of 2010, according to a report by research firm The NPD Group. The data places Android, with 28 percent of the smartphone market [last quarter], in second place behind RIM's Blackberry smartphone market share of 36 percent. Apple now sits in third place with 21 percent. NPD points to a Verizon buy-one-get-one-free promotion for all of its smartphones as a major factor in the first-quarter numbers. Verizon saw strong sales for the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris Android phones, as well as the Blackberry Curve, thanks to its promotional offer. Verizon launched a $100 million marketing campaign for the Droid when it hit the market in November 2009, which likely contributed to strong sales in the first quarter as well."
Preston Gralla notes that it's not all bad news for Apple; this report could help their case in upcoming antitrust discussions.
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Unpossible! (Score:5, Funny)
Or should that be iMpossible?
I bet iPhone will be back on top this quarter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I bet iPhone will be back on top this quarter (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:iPhone 4G is barely catching up (Score:5, Insightful)
The big question is when "multitasking" is no longer the major difference between platforms
Well, that won't happen any time soon.
You do realize that the upcoming iPhone OS update doesn't add multitasking, right? What it adds is a limited set of background services that apps can ask the OS to perform. It will take some wind out of Android proponents' sails, because those background services are tailored to a handful of popular applications for multitasking -- playing internet radio, finishing downloads, etc. -- but while Android developers will be able to keep developing new uses for background code, iPhone developers will be stuck with the limited set of background operations that Apple has pre-approved.
what will be the next Android marketing slogan?
The ongoing circus that is the App Store approval process should provide plenty of slogans to come. How about "Android: the phone that doesn't block Pulitzer-winning cartoonists"? (OK, it needs a little polishing...)
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Re:iPhone 4G is barely catching up (Score:4, Insightful)
Wishful thinking? Or do you have a 4G now?
You don't have to guess at all; Apple has told us what the 4G has:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/ [apple.com]
And the hardware specs on the 4G are pretty clear from Apple's device. It's premium hardware, but likely at a premium price.
What matters is Android approaching the performance levels of Apple iPhone OS on similar hardware.
The reason iPhone OS is fast is because it is limited and old technology: C-based programming language, 20 year old kernel, little application integration, little componentization, limited multitasking. Android is a better, more powerful software architecture with many more features, and that naturally requires a more powerful CPU. Android is never going to be as efficient as iPhone OS because you need to make a tradeoff between features and efficiency. But the iPhone speed advantage is diminishing over time. Android today is about the same speed as a first and second generation iPhone. One more generation of hardware, and it's going to be so fast that it doesn't make a difference anymore even to picky users.
I have an Android phone, and I can't wait for Google to catch up with Apple
Apple needs to catch up with Google, not the other way around. Apple focused on efficiency and simplicity early on, but that matters less and less as hardware is getting more powerful. But software architecture and ease of development are going to matter more and more.
It's the same thing that happened with the original Mac: Apple squeezed every drop of efficiency out of the original hardware in their rush to bring an affordable GUI-based machine to market, they made it look good, but they botched the software architecture in the process. It's what Jobs does.
Believe it or not, some people don't buy a smartphone to compensate for some shortcomings
Seems to me that's exactly what iPhone buyers do.
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Anti-trust (Score:3, Insightful)
this report could help their case in upcoming antitrust discussions.
Or just as easily hurt it. As the report shows a big part of the sales was on Verizon network, which is a market Apple does not exist on. A large portion of those sales "might" have been for Apple's product had it be available on the Verizon network.
How does that hurt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just as easily hurt it. As the report shows a big part of the sales was on Verizon network, which is a market Apple does not exist on.
So to summarize what you are saying, is that because Apple is only only a single network instead of several, that makes it MORE LIKLEY they will be found to be violating antitrust because they are LESS ubiquitous than they might be?
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Cool, but .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Android phones are not as open as Maemo/MeeGo phones. Andoird could have been way cooler if Google have picked up Maemo instead of starting from scratch using Java. That said, I don't mind that all the mobile games targeted for Android should eventually run on Maemo.
(Random text inserted at the end of the message to allow mouse chicks on text in Shashdot's edit window on Safari)
Re:Cool, but .. (Score:4, Interesting)
To be fair it wasn't until the N900 that Maemo was even on a phone... which was 2009? Their previous devices were wi-fi tablets only. Android pre-dates that quite a bit. Android Inc was around at least before 2006.
Nokia really never has treated the platform with any respect - instead shipping crap phones with S60 on them. Even their latest phone - the N8 is Symbian^3.
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Re:Cool, but .. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, S60 allowed those "crap" phones to be smartphones in first place - cheapest S60(v3) smartphones aren't much more expensive than 100 bucks...without contract. Generally they seem to be doing something right if Symbian has half of the market.
Plus Symbian^3 (and text ones) seems to be going in the good direction; with UI and development based on Qt there won't be that much of a difference from Maemo...
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Re:Cool, but .. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because S60 sells. Nokia has something like 40% of the global phone market. That's huge. Apple can't even dream of having a tenth of that.
Fast processors and lots of RAM in a phone (eg, N900) are always going to be niche. Most people, world wide, just don't have that sort of money.
Symbian just got open sourced too.
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Forgive me if I'm wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
This has all happened before and it will all ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple is committed to making the same mistakes it made in the 80's. It amazes me how they think they can break the natural laws of the market and make their business model work. In five years the iPhone's market share will pale in comparison to Android and it will be for the sole reason that Apple cares more about its vision than its customers. Android is the Windows of the mobile world.
Re:This has all happened before and it will all .. (Score:4, Funny)
It's going to crash a lot and get a lot of viruses? /duck
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Re:This has all happened before and it will all .. (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that a smart phone is basically an application platform like the PC. The iPOD is not, it's basically a souped up media player. And don't forget that although these kind of markets are highly volatile, it may take a long time before a relatively good product like the iPOD is taken over by its competitors.
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Now, the true app experiment begins. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's been anecdotal evidence that there isn't as much money to be made writing Android apps as there is to be made writing iPhone apps.
One theory has gone "that's because the user base isn't there yet; when the users show up, the developers will come".
Well. It looks like the users are showing up in numbers that are becoming difficult to ignore. So now it's time to keep a close eye on app developers, and see what happens! Is Android more like the XBox 360 (where a lot of third-party developers make a lot of money), or more like the Wii (where almost nobody but Nintendo ends up making much money)?
It's all going to be very interesting to watch. Yay competition!
Re:Now, the true app experiment begins. (Score:5, Interesting)
My own research (which involves poking at the dev environment and talking with Android developers, but not actually doing Android development yet) leads me to believe that both you and the person you're responding to are partially right.
You can write very portable apps if you want to. You can write very locked-in apps if you want to. For some developers it's not a problem, and for other developers they're finding that they have to (at least) change the way they think about a lot of stuff.
There is a (weak) analogy to J2ME here. There was a common subset of J2ME, and if you stuck to it, your apps could run on a wide variety of handsets... but they sucked, since that common subset sucked. The best J2ME apps were written for individual handsets.
Nothing I've seen indicates that the Android marketplace is that bad. But it's also not "write once, run everywhere, even without putting any design effort into making that come to pass, regardless of the kind of app you're writing".
For some apps (especially some games), the developers have it stuck in their heads that they must have the background of their main view be based on a pre-rendered bitmap image that's got exactly the same number of pixels as the display it's rendering on. If those folks insist on continuing to think that way, they'll have an awful lot of work to do...
You know there are cases where you essentially do, right? It's not common for most apps yet, but if you use the newer OpenGL features on the 3Gs, the app won't run on a 3G or 2G. The iPad takes this to an even greater extreme.
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Re:Now, the true app experiment begins. (Score:5, Informative)
One thing Apple has, and nobody else does, is the ITMS (one stop shopping).
And android has the Android Market [android.com]. The only difference is that you're not forced to sell your app through google if you don't wish to.
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How did this crud gets modded up is beyond me. (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps you've heard of the Android marketplace.
It's not locked down like the Itunes store. You can browse it here [androlib.com], here [appbrain.com] and here [cyrket.com]. Androlib even has QR codes that you can scan with your Android phone that will take you directly to application in the Android Marketplace.
Because no phishing applications made it past the ever watchful censors at Apple?
NoThankYou.jpg to gateway only security. I'd rather have on-device security which informs me which services (API's, but in simple terms like "can send SMS", "accesses your contacts/personal data" or "can write and delete from the SD card"). Even third party APK's do this (because it's part of Android, not the thrid party software).
So stop spreading FUD and others stop modding up FUD.
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Droid Does Porn (Score:5, Funny)
Re:surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah, but I'm not switching to AT&T just to get an iPhone. No one I know but the two people with iPhones has AT&T, the coverage sucks most of the places I am most of the time, etc. Is the iPhone cool? Sure. Is it switch to AT&T cool? Hell no.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, AT&T has incredible 2G coverage. You might have trouble making calls in population centers, but they do cover as much of the remote and rural as Verizon.
It's their 3G that's sorely lacking, which for smartphones is a problem, but not for phones under ordinary data-less plans.
Re:surprising? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know what rural areas you're basing your observations on. But I've personally observed Verzon > AT&T in rural OH, IN, KY, WV, and TN in every instance.
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Re:surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:surprising? (Score:4, Interesting)
The phone definitely matters. Just yesterday I noticed that an iPhone 3GS gets 3 bars in my house and an iPhone 3G gets 0 - 1.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They pale into insignificance compared to assshare.
Three Ss in sucesssion? is that permisssible?
Re:surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is also the market leader in PC sales by that standard. And Sony's beat the crap out of VHS manufacturers, after all they were the only ones who made Betamax recorders.
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Re:surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, since Verizon is giving smart phones away in an effort to inflate the non-Apple smart phone numbers,
Verizon is giving away phones to get more 2 year, $70/month contracts
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Re:Apple (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason why Windows is still 95% desktop share, while Mac OSX is only 4%
Investment in existing software plays a huge roll in that. Smartphones don't have that issue (though a very small percentage of people have spent a ton on app downloads).
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Re:Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important to note that the iPhone is in one of the low-sales points of its product cycle for these figures. Everybody who's paying attention *KNOWS* that Apple is going to introduce a new model of the iPhone next month, with greater capabilities and probably at the same price as the current model. Anyone who can wait until summer solstice to buy their first iPhone is waiting, and the oodles of people who bought an iPhone 3G in the second half of 2008 are waiting to become eligible for a subsidized upgrade 2 years later. Kind of like unemployment figures, iPhone sales figures need to be "seasonally adjusted" to be meaningful.
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Re:Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
In a world where over 90% of people are illiterate, yeah, that'd be a valid hypothesis.
Face it, pretending a significant percentage of iPhone buyers did so out of appreciation for its design is as senseless as pretending that a significant percentage of Android buyers did so out of a desire to download its source-code and hack it. The overwhelming majority of the world's population can't program worth shit, and similarly the overwhelming majority of the world's population does not have a degree in industrial design.
Admit it, both platforms are succeeding because of marketing. You know, the field whose entire purpose is to sway people to purchase a specific product? yeah. Not enlightenment or whatever.
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Re:Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
I had the same experience. I walked into Best Buy on launch day (this was in Boston) and they had a big display with 5 iPads. No lines, 3 of them were not even being used, so I wandered up and played with one for 10 minutes and only at the end did someone else come up behind me to try one out. I listened with amusement to the guy trying to avoid telling the elderly people who asked him how much RAM it had (he had a long explanation about how how a small amount of memory in an Apple device was like ten times as much in a windows computer, but couldn't bring himself to say the actual number).
Perhaps it was just incredibly uncool for any Apple devotee to ever cross the threshold of Best Buy, but I couldn't observe *any* kind of shortage either on launch day or in the weeks thereafter.
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Re:Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice during the short period when you're in transit, but it presents a dilemma once you get there because it is so deprived of basic capabilities that people do tend to want.
For example I go on holiday, I want to take pictures. I need something easy to plug my camera into to download and quickly crop and edit pictures. The iPad is just horrendously horrible for this due to Steve's obsession with locking it down and removing all the standard ports from it. So you are confronted with the dilemma of bringing both the iPad AND the laptop and doubling up on a lot of capabilities or doing without a lot of the basic things most people *do* want to do when they are travelling.
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Re:Proof that being more open = more sales (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Proof that being more open = more sales (Score:4, Informative)
Since when is "buy one, get one free - but you still need to sign them both up to a multi-year contract" free? Just like those $100 iPhones aren't really $100 once you look at the contract.
Check out the Evo 4g and try to say that with a straight face - it's kit like that which will kill both the iPhone and iPad. Bigger, easier-to-read display than the upcoming iPhone 4g, much more portable than an iPad ... it's the face of the next generation of smartphone computing devices that people will actually be able to type on half-way decently.
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Re:Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you are serious or being rhetorical, but since it's a good point either way, let's just state it:
Google's Android revenue: 0.
Apple's iPhone revenue: over $5B per quarter and growing.
Summary: Apple could not care less about market share, as long as their total sales and revenue keeps growing at the insane rate they have been.
And since the iPad is really just a giant iPhone/Touch (ie uses the same OS)... 1M units in 30 days is probably about $600M revenue for their latest product - in a month. Yikes.
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Re:Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
The main thing of concern for Google is probably whether or not the ecosystem is open to their way of making a profit. Maybe they saw a problem looming, with the walled garden approach of Apple.
Google wasn't really involved in activelly contributing to healthy mobile landscape when Blackberry was dominating in the US (still is actually) and Nokia globally (still is)
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Re:I TOLD YOU SO! (Score:4, Insightful)
> (Sits back and waits for the karma burn.)
Yes, that karma burn is going to have nothing to do with your statement objectively actually being flamebait. It adds nothing at all to the discussion. Even people that agree with you that it was unavoidable that Android phones were going to surpass iPhones can at most ignore your post. There's nothing interesting, informative or insightful about it.
Maybe just don't post shit next time.
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Re:Does the droid and iPhone do this?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:LOL, Fanboy Spin (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Good news! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully, the 'Droid can come out with a version that beats Apple's 4G series that are approaching the market.
Indeed. [sprint.com] It's also a wifi hotspot for 8 devices, and can stream HD video out of an HDMI port on the phone, in case you're one of those people who likes to watch videos on something other than your phone.
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Re:Android did not exceed "iPhone OS" sales (Score:4, Interesting)
They're only in a different market if you are a telco. If you are a developer trying to make money by making applications for these devices, 'phone' is just another feature like GPS. What really matters would be the total number of devices that your app can be bought for. If one of the OSs has the developers for the most and best apps, it gives it an advantage over the other phones. Given that the Android developer market currently seems to be split up between different versions of OS and hardware, Apple has a little bit more weight to its cause when not talking strictly phones.
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Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
I never noticed motorcyclists on the road until I started riding.
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Re:Bullshit. (Score:5, Funny)
Hell at a boardgame party Saturday night (I am that lame) we even whipped 'em all out to compare.
TMI, dude... TMI... ;)
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Because nobody gives a shit about them... (Score:4, Insightful)
...in the mobile OS space anymore. They don't really have a dog in the fight right now. I've used WM6.5, and it is awful. I think it is actually worse for them having tried to ape some iPhone features.
They are already basically relegated to the sliver of the mobile OS marketshare pie chart labeled "Other." By the time they get WM7 into devices and on store shelves, Apple will have iPhone OS 4 out and be working on improving it, and Google isn't standing still with Android, either. Microsoft is going to be playing an endless game of catch-up, and they can't use their old tactics anymore to chase their competitors out of the market. Windows Mobile now has to compete on merit alone.
They laughed at the iPhone and basically ignored Android, let their own product languish, and now they're paying the price.
~Philly
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