Jun 15

The Smartphone Wars: The invasion begins

For months I’ve been predicting that a flood of ultra-cheap SoC-based Androids is coming at us from China, motivated by the prospect of Third World and BRIC sales volume in the billions and beginning in 3Q2011. The iCube announcement was one harbinger; today we have some others. It’s worth another look at what this trend is going to do to associated markets.

Continue reading

Jun 07

The Smartphone Wars: The world turned upside down

It’s always a good day when you get to wield the Righteous Cluebat of Reality straight into the teeth of dogmatists and downshouters – and no, I’m not talking about being Andrew Breitbart, though I do like to think I’m at least as capable of upending smug certitudes as he is. Today’s cluebatting concerns two developments that, taken together, put paid to a lot of negative mythology around Android.

Continue reading

May 27

The Smartphone Wars: HTC rejoins the good guys

Market pressure works. In response to an outcry from customers, HTC has just annnounced that it will return to its policy of shipping handsets with unlocked bootloaders.

This makes me personally happy because I’ve been a fan of HTC handsets since the G-1; I would have had to stop buying and recommending them if they’d stuck to the lockdown. But the larger reason this story is interesting is because of what it signals about ongoing shifts of power in the Android smartphone market – and throughout consumer electronics, as well.

Continue reading

May 11

The Smartphone Wars: Still It Rises

I’ve been meaning to put together a running plot of U.S. smartphone marketshare for some time. The monthly press release from the market research firm comScore contain enough information to do it, but you have to stitch a number of them together as they only report the covered month and the third previous month. Stitching all the data together is actually rather revealing.

Continue reading

May 03

The Smartphone Wars: With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?

Android just got a boost it didn’t need. RIM, already staggering after a 5% market-share drop over the last quarter and the Playbook debacle, has just…well, “shot itself through the foot” fails to convey quite the right sort of intensity. In fact it has executed a hitherto-unprecedented form of marketing suicide which can only be characterized as a “double-tap Osborne through the head”.

Continue reading

Apr 21

The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail

The news is out that Verizon sold 2.2M iPhones in the roughly 60 days from product launch to their quarterly report. I’ll fess up; this is well over what I was expecting, based on the reports of unimpressive first-week sales.

But I also underestimated Android new-unit sales by a larger factor. Even on the very optimistic assumption that Verizon sustains its pace through Q2, Android phones are selling so much faster in aggregate (ratio of about 10:1) that iPhone 4V is barely going to budge the needle on the market share numbers (if that). Focusing too much on the the quarterly numbers is ignoring the forest for the trees.

Continue reading

Apr 19

The Smartphone Wars: Android measured at over 50% U.S. market share

Two consecutive smartphone-wars posts is unusual here, I know, but the latest marketshare news is high-explosive stuff. The Guardian in Great Britain has published data from a European market-research outfit, Kantar WorldPanel Comtech; the article is titled Nokia and RIM bleeding smartphone share while Android cleans up, and includes a very informative table of smartphone share numbers by country. They become even more interesting when set against the ComScore numbers covering Nov 2010 to February 2011, which I previously analyzed in The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now….

Continue reading

Apr 18

The Smartphone Wars: The Stages of Apple-Cultist Denial

It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic. But I will attempt a brief tour through the more prominent delusions here.

Continue reading

Apr 07

The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now…

Ah, yes, I see it’s time for another comScore report and another round of breathless journalism on the state of the U.S. smartphone market. But, you know, these are getting almost boring now. Once again, Android rampages over its competition like Godzilla laying the radioactive smackdown on Tokyo. And once again…everyone acts surprised?

Get with it, people. Some of us (by which, of course, I mean me) predicted this trajectory in the first months after the G-1 launch in November 2008, and have been patiently explaining Google’s grand strategy and the underlying economics ever since. By now this kind of market news should be no surprise to anyone.

Still. This round of alarums and excursions has a few piquant tidbits in it. Let us consider them together.

Continue reading

Apr 01

The Smartphone Wars: Microsoft may win after all

By a curiously-timed coincidence, three lines of evidence have combined over the last week to convince me that I have been seriously underestimating Microsoft’s competitive potential in the smartphone market. One is that I actually got my hands on a Windows 7 phone; another is a report from a major market-research outfit that has been reliable in the past; and the third is a revealing report from an informant on the hardware side who I’ll call Deep Chip.

Continue reading

Mar 28

Don’t panic over Honeycomb’s release delay

Google’s announced plans to delay the public release of the source code for Honeycomb, the tablet version of Android, are causing some indignation to be vented among the partisans of open source. But should it? This is a good time to reflect on what the freedoms guaranteed by the Open Source Definition actually mean and what they’re for.

Continue reading

Feb 25

The Smartphone Wars: Nod and WinCE

I learned this morning that Windows Phone 7 – the smartphone OS that bricks your phone! – is a skin over a bunch of core components from Windows CE. Which if you came in late, is widely regarded as the second most wretched hive of bugs and villainy Microsoft ever shipped.

(Yes, I said “second most”. Even WinCE could not come near matching the epic failitude of Microsoft Bob, which can only be explained by the justified supposition that its product manager was doing the mattress mambo with Bill Gates. She later married him, and Microsoft Bob disappeared down the event horizon of a black hole created by its own suckiness.)

My initial reaction to this news was “Doomed! What on Earth were they thinking?“. On reflection, however, there is an angle from which this way of slapping WP7 together makes a horrifying kind of sense. Not that I now think it’s any less doomed, mind you…but there are perhaps some useful lessons to be learned if we examine this fiasco from the Microsoft point of view.

Continue reading