Android Outsells iPhone In Last 6 Months 514
tomhudson writes "Despite all the hype about Apple's latest iPhone, Android has sold more in the last 6 months (27% of all smartphone sales) than Apple (23%). The gains for Android are coming at the expense of RIM (still #1 at 33%, down from 45% a year ago), Windows Mobile (11%, down from 20%) and the iPhone (down from 34% at it's peak 6 months ago). If the current trend continues, Android is expected to be #1 within the year."
Re:After almost 20 years (Score:1, Interesting)
Google's ChromeOS is on the horizon.
Re:Bring tha hate, bring tha noise! (Score:0, Interesting)
Yeah, the iPhone wasn't even close to being the #1 Smartphone in the US. That honor goes to Blackberry. So why compare to Apple? Ah, because it's cool to hate on Apple.
they buy a phone because it has a brand name that they think is hip and cool. rather than being ashamed of how they justify their purchasing decisions, they are instead smug about hopping on the walled-off Apple bandwagon where customizing a device you own is not allowed unless it's approved by the company that sold it to you. apple fanboys deserve every last piece of derision they receive. that's because they are fanboys. if they bought iPhones because they were familiar with their needs and saw that the iPhone and the carrier were the very best match for their needs, it would be different, but then they wouldn't stick up for Apple and defend it no matter what it does.
there's no comparison to the blackberry. it's popular because it is geared towards corporations and business users. businesses don't generally care about how hip and cool a brand name is. they care about how it affects their profitability. that's the difference. that's why it is not cool to "hate on" the blackberry, for they made their choice based on rational utilitarian reasons and not because they were dazzled by Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. got it?
Here's the trouble with Android (Score:1, Interesting)
I should have called it the problem but anyway, 'Android' is mis-understood or even mis-represented.
Case in point: Look at the title of this story, " Android Outsells iPhone In Last 6 Months". Essentially, the author is comparing an OS, (Android) to a device, (iPhone)! It would be better and more informative to the reader to rephrase the title to something near "Android devices outsell iPhones In Last 6 Months".
This is the same plague in Linux land. Some folks know Linux is an OS while others think it's RedHat or Debian or Ubuntu - troubling!
Since this is a platform for geeks or geek story lovers, I expected better. And even then, Android devices outselling iPhones should be expected because the latter is only sold on one carrier in the US and comprises of just 'one' product from one manufacturer.
Yawn... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yawn... These are sales from January to June - before the iPhone 4 was released. People were intentionally holding off purchases because they knew iPhone 4 was coming out. Wake me up if they outsell iPhones for the next 6 months.
Re:Higher demand after iPhone 4 release in Q3 (Score:1, Interesting)
It is determining how portable device will be used by the mainstream. Locked down, or open?
And how many non-geeks really care about such a thing? Oh yeah, almost none. They buy Android phones because of the marketing of slick looking phones.
Re:Already #1 in the US market (Score:3, Interesting)
In our company, any smartphone under the sun is supported. Until September, when we start enforcing passwords, remote encryption/wiping abilities, etc.
Pretty much every major smart phone made in the last couple of years supports these features, except Android based phones.
People are very upset that their very nice Drod's will stop working soon, and they still have over a year on their phone contracts. (many people get re-imbursed by the company for monthly expenses).
Microsoft has published their spec for ActiveSync for exchange. Google so far has not bothered to code it in. This is keeping iphones and blackberries (and winMobile 6.5 and above) phones popular here.. otherwise everyone would drop them.
Re:I wonder how this factors in... (Score:4, Interesting)
My employer-provided phone is an HTC EVO 4G (Android). I could have chosen a Blackberry or an iPhone (or even Windows Mobile). And I work for a large Fortune-500 company. Corporate America is opening up to the new options.
(My company is large enough that they've outsourced the phone purchasing to some other company that specializes in it. I went to that company's web site, selected the phone that I wanted from the list that had been approved by our IT department, and they shipped it directly to me. All said, it seems like a very good system, especially compared to some of the other services that have been outsourced.)
Android 2.2 is supposed to take Exchange integration a step further, letting corporate IT wipe the phone if it's reported as lost or stolen, as well as allowing corporate security policies to be enforced. So expect Android to compete even more heavily with Blackberry once 2.2 comes out.
A couple things (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already #1 in the US market (Score:2, Interesting)
iPhone vs. Android -- they're currently seen as more "personal" phones, whereas Blackberry's market dominance is largely based on businesses, a market in which neither is remotely competitive with Blackberry yet
At the company where I work, tons of my co-workers have picked up the iPhone. Corporate IT has been forced to offer Outlook email integration for iPhone in addition to Blackberry (they offer no such support for any other smartphone OS, including Palm, Android, and Windows). I'm happy to stick with my Blackberry as it does everything I want in a smartphone, but to say none of the others are remotely competitive is to ignore the reality on the ground.
Re:Already #1 in the US market (Score:4, Interesting)
> It's most telling that Palm is flatlining and Windows Mobile has lost half of its already
> meager market share in the past year.
Are you counting people who own phones that were sold with Windows Mobile, but are now running Android (like the HTC Touch HD2)? The HD2 debacle will go down in tech history as one of Microsoft's worst marketing/business decisions in history. Here's a phone that was eagerly embraced by Microsoft's few remaining enthusiasts, even as their friends and peers ran for the door marked "Android", only to get its owners metaphorically kicked in the balls by Microsoft on what was probably the lamest pretense for non-compatibility *ever* (it had four buttons instead of three).
Microsoft could hardly have done a better job of driving its few remaining friends into the Android camp if they'd personally rebranded MSDN as an Android portal & given a free Nexus One to everybody who attended a Microsoft event in 2010.
Re:After almost 20 years (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux never sucked for mainstream. Nothing about Linux makes it unsuitable for mainstream use except user interface design.
Does it really matter if everything that most people consider part of "Linux" is missing? I know most people don't care, but certainly the fact that Android phones run the Linux kernel is completely irrelevant, and deliberately so.
Note: I bought a Nokia N900, specifically because it was not Android (well that and it had a slew of awesome features that fit my needs perfectly.)
Re:Curious... (Score:1, Interesting)
OS X is based on the open source Darwin operating system utilizing BSD components.
By the way, experts say iPhone sales were down because of the iPhone 4 leak. Customers were holding off on purchasing a 3G until the 4 came out. Plus, this isn't including iPad sales which also run iOS. This story is comparing an OS to one device.
But then again, it's a Google product, which means it automatically gets the Slashdot stamp of approval...
Re:If this trend continues... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there any single phone model that is selling as well as the iPhone these days?
Last year the Motorola Droid was selling more then the iPhone 3GS... and now with the Droid X coming out it's quite possible that it can outsell the iPhone 4...
That's logical (Score:3, Interesting)
because Apple are limiting themselves too much with the One True Form-Factor. Some people want a keyboard, either palm-style or N900-style, some people want a bigger screen, some want a smaller device (though the iPhone 4 is getting small), and some a more rugged one. No matter how good the iPhone gets, most people I know just won't consider it because of the form factor issue. I for one want a larger screen (my HD2's is 44% bigger by area than the iPhone's, I'm strongly considering a Dell Streak, 99% larger), above all other considerations.
All the rest (features, locked-ness, looks) can be argued about. Form-factor is a very straightforward issue, and there's a reason why there are so many different ones on the market.
Re:Already #1 in the US market (Score:5, Interesting)
...but then ignoring non-phone Android devices is fine?
Re:After almost 20 years (Score:4, Interesting)
You may consider putting your hopes into MeeGo with this. It's planned to be an OS that will function in both netbooks (and notebooks) and smartphones, and just might smuggle linux onto desktop through the back door.
Or at least get it decent games and applications finally making it a worthy opponent of windows, rather then one that is constantly playing catch up, and never having any good games supported natively.
Re:What are you smoking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong.
I have a Motorola droid. I plug a USB adapter into the phone and my computer, swipe the status bar down, and tell it to mount the SD card. I then get a removable drive on my PC. I opened my music directory, selected all my songs, right-clicked and selected copy. I then opened my SD card, created a directory called "music", and copied my MP3's there. Never once did I have any need to root my phone for that one so I can certainly load my own music and I do not need iTunes or some other application to get anything through, it is just a standard USB drive. Ring tones required an app from the Android market, I picked one called "Ringdroid" IIRC. I then can open any MP3 I have and one of the menu choices is "set as ringtone", if I press that choice it .... sets it as my ring tone. I still haven't rooted my phone at all. I can also check or uncheck a security feature that allows me to install unsigned applications, that still doesn't require root. So as far as I can see everything the person you are responding to says they can do one can regardless of what you may have heard.
Some manufacturers do have some applications you can't remove - Android is Open Source and people are allowed to extend it in ways they see fit and that includes that. However Android itself doesn't. Some manufacturers have also chosen to require rooting for other common functions too - again it is Open Source so they can modify to their hearts content. There are people who want a phone with no "dangerous" options and are fairly locked down (as many iPhone users say they want to be) and Android can accomodate that - indeed Motorola's answer to signing ROM's on the Droid-X is "If you want an extensible phone, purchase a different model" for that very reason. Android itself is open and it isn't hard to find currently sold models that are near as "free" (as in speech) as the nexus one is.
Maybe last you heard was from another Apple user that wishes Androids were not selling like they were? Or at the least you believed someone that was *very* misinformed and you should take what they say from now on with a large grain of skepticism as they were easily fooled.
Re:After almost 20 years (Score:3, Interesting)
In quite a bit more. Apart from (obviously ;) ) tablets, there's also a team of few major car manufacturers. [wikipedia.org]
(and you know, with how FB/Flash/etc. games are taking the world by storm for some time, are in realiy a big part of "PC gaming")
Re:Higher demand after iPhone 4 release in Q3 (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what android phones you've got; but the ones I've seen aren't really that much better than an iPhone when it comes to being 'open'.
If you buy a phone directly, without a carrier, sure, it's "open". But then you are spending several hundred dollars extra. If you buy it through a carrier, it's going to have limits and restrictions imposed by the carrier. Truthfully, even if you buy it yourself, you'll still have restrictions, just fewer of them.
The source is available for android phones; but that means nothing. The carriers are free to branch the code and use their own and 99.99999% of people can't do anything with the source anyway. 'Rooting' your android isn't any easier than doing something unsupported - like installing the Homebrew channel on a wii. It's not encouraged. And doing it causes all sorts of potential problems like voiding your warranty.
So, in theory, an Android phone is great.
In practice, I can't delete the Sprint TV/Sprint Nascar apps from my HTC Hero without voiding my warranty.
Re:Already #1 in the US market (Score:3, Interesting)
It's probably largely due to the fact that until around the time the iPhone hit the market, US smartphones were mostly limited to ugly hunks of plastic like the Treo 650, Blackberry 8700 series, or various Symbian bricks, and they generally didn't have particularly remarkable web browsing or media playing capabilities.
It wasn't until Apple came along and thrust style (and admittedly, usability) to the forefront of smartphone design that the non-business market really started to pay attention. Say what you want about Apple's products, but they have taking full advantage of a style-conscious market down to a science. In standard follow-the-leader fashion, other handset makers have clued in on this, and now we've got a much more lively market, and it seems that plain old feature phones get very little hype around here anymore.
Re:Already #1 in the US market (Score:1, Interesting)
Apples market cap is higher than MS by a fraction, it's revenue and real numbers is a totally different story. Apple makes their money from the fact that they hype and sell "luxury" based technologies. Microsoft on the other hand sells infrastructural tools and business based necessities. We still need to remember the world is going through an economic crisis it isn't like we are all going on holidays, buying sports cars and iPads. US consumer demand is dwindling and they are being forced to seek alternative markets and sell in different countries.
I think the other day I was quoted $66k for a copy of SharePoint. Name a product that Apple has where they can offer products of this nature? They cant, wont and haven't the capacity to deliver. A perfect example of this is the fact they struggle at making things like accelerated graphics API's and other than being able to create "a basic needs PC" Apple cant get past their short comings and build anything next level. Not to rant and rave about Microsoft because their licencing models on software will make you go nuts and it's clear in my mind that these little iDevices sell well and the markup is stupid on them.
As for my experiences, I'm an owner of an iPhone, iPod Nano, and iPad. The iPhone is okay but Android really owns over it. The iPod nano was redundant after I purchased the iPhone. As for the the iPad to put bluntly it sucks ass and it's only real use is as a coaster in my lounge room. If you were to look at the Microsoft products in my house i have 3 PC's (2 x windows 7 and 1 x XP) and I have purchased 2 copies of Office over the years and have and XBox 360 with halo and a pile of other games.
My MS purchases reign higher than Apple's and it wasn't by a clear choice between preference of brands because I dont do that, I go by what i want at the time not who makes it. I have been a bit of a virgin Apple purchaser since those purchases have been more recent but they are defiantly purchases i hold with regret. The iPad really really sucks, you have no idea how much this thing sucks till you have one, as for the iPhone if I held out for 3 months longer i would of gone Android. The iPod was a birthday present so it cant really count, in any case, the iPad and iPhone two things i was responsible for buying and in both cases I wish i didn't.
Man, does the iPad suck, half the websites dont render properly, half of facebook's features work, youtube sucks on iPad and google tools are screwed and even worse it crashes all the time. Yeah, really solid work guys, distract us with the iPhone 4 as to not draw attention to the failure that is the iPad.