Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% 390
mrspoonsi writes "Engadget reports: Smartphone market share for the third quarter...as you'd imagine, the world is still Android's oyster. Strategy Analytics estimates that the OS has crossed the symbolic 80 percent mark, reaching 81.3 percent of smartphone shipments by the end of September. Not that Google was the only company doing well — Nokia's strong US sales helped Windows Phone grow to 4.1 percent of the market, or nearly double what it had a year ago."
2.3 million Android phones per day (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung alone accounts for 1 million of those, leaving 1.3 million per day for others. Here are the per-company numbers. [engadget.com]
It will be interesting to see if LG can deliver enough of the Nexus 5 to bump their numbers over the holidays.
Expensive Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Here in Australia, Apple have completely priced themselves out of the market. ... I just bought the Nexus 5.
iPhone 5S 16 GB: $869
Compared with a brand-spanking-new:
Google Nexus 5 16 GB: $420 (inc. shipping)
It's hard to justify _double_ the price for effectively the same thing.
Needless to say
It's time to sue everybody! (Score:4, Informative)
Bring out the clowns (... err lawyers): http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/31/rockstar-consortium-nortel-patent-google-lawsuit/ [engadget.com]
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
No it doesn't. Those stats are for iOS (iPhone + iPad) vs Android phones and tablets. And it's only for wifi traffic. On web traffic over cellular networks, Android devices generate slightly more traffic than iOS devices [allthingsd.com]. Basically your link cherry-picked the one chart favorable to iOS.
If you limit the comparison to just iPhone vs Android phones [statcounter.com], Android generates more web traffic. And before you pull out the NetMarketShare data showing iPhone still leading: (1) NetMarketShare gets data from only a few tens of thousands of sites, while StatCounter gets its data from millions of sites. And (2) NetMarketShare's figures are normalized to unique visitors per month. i.e. Someone who visits a site once in a month counts as much as someone who uses the site every day. StatCounter counts web hits, so is measuring actual web usage rather than counting number of users. In other words, more iPhone users browse the web on their phone than Android users, but they don't do much browsing. The hardcore phone browser users are on Android and they generate more web traffic than the larger number of iPhone users who use the browser..
Basically the only lead Apple still has is the iPad in the tablet market, and it's rapidly losing that too. Their share of quarterly tablet sales dropped from a commanding 60% in 2012 to 33% in 2Q2013, and now 29% in 3Q2013 [cnet.com]. Those are quarterly sales, so iPads probably still comprise the majority of tablets in use, which match with your initial stats showing iOS dominating in wifi-based web traffic.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
What on earth are you talking about? IBM didn't "open up" the PC design. Compaq reversed engineered it using a clean room process to avoid legal issues. (http://computemagazine.com/the-history-of-the-ibm-personal-computer/)
Re:Niche market (Score:5, Informative)
He's annoyed that they aren't free-as-in-speech, in that Google is making the most fundamental Android apps proprietary. The open-source versions have been abandoned by them. It'd be like if Ubuntu was still ostensibly open-source but everything outside of the window manager had to be written by the customer or bought via a non-compete licence agreement with Canonical.
Re:Niche market (Score:5, Informative)
Hell, as a real world user, and not a paid reviewer, I prefer Samsung's plastic case, because it is harder to damage, and my phone rarely leaves its leather case anyway.
All my family has Samsung phones, and every single one will change brand next contract if another brand has a better offering.
Some had iPhones b4, but poor reception and broken screens led to a change of heart.
Re:“SOURCE: Strategy Analytics” (Score:5, Informative)
Let's stick to facts - they are both in one of the most prestigious part of the capital city. Alas that's not really such a great conspiracy, is it?
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
And that reverse engineering process was significantly aided by the fact that all of the hardware was built using off the shelf components, and the only thing they actually had to reverse engineer was the BIOS.
Are *ALL* Nokia phones *smartphones* ?? (Score:2, Informative)
I believe that the stat is skewed.
I have friends in India, Bangladesh, Africa, Thailand, Indonesia who sell phones, and they tell me that, for every one Nokia smartphone that they sell, they sell 8 Nokia non-Smartphones.
Nokia's offerings in many 3rd world countries are largely comprise of very cheap cellphones, selling as cheap as 15 euro (or about 20 USD) a pop.
None of those phones has Windows installed on them.
Re:Are *ALL* Nokia phones *smartphones* ?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Informative)
Complete and utter bullshit.
Apple was famous for their cheapness and that "hardware that could support GUIs" was a 9" monochrome monitor with terrible resolution. PC's had better than that from the start.
IBM PCs were more expensive than Macs in the beginning and were vastly more premium in build. Apparently you weren't born yet.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
And the BIOS was published in source form and you could buy technical reference manuals for it. Some secret it was!!!
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for the warning about what was to follow!
The ur-Mac had a bit mapped 512x342 display with excellent sharpness and contrast, and used a 32/16 bit 68000 processor. The PC offered 640x200 with CGA (VGA wasn't until 3 years later) on a fuzzy-pixeled display (color, though), and used a 16/8 bit 8088 processor.