Category: Technology

I’ve been chronicling RIM’s death spiral, and much more willing than most to call it as a straight-up suicide by bad planning and management, not just a “bad things happen to good companies” episode. Now comes an open letter from inside RIM describing the unforced errors in excruciating detail. In other news, the trade press… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Rumors of demise

Here’s an interesting news story alleging that Nokia has ported Android to the N9. There are pictures at engadget.

It’s been a quiet week in the smartphone wars. The three most interesting developments are (a) stock analysts have begun hanging crepe for RIM’s funeral, (b) HP has priced its WebOS tablet to die, and (c) the iPhone 5 is now not expected in September, being constrained by iOS 5’s ship date.

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The invasion begins

A few weeks go, I reported a conversation with a Chinese-American investor who confirmed my suspicion that the next game-changer for the smartphone market is going to come out of mainland China. He wouldn’t name the company, but I think they’ve just unstealthed. ICube matches the hints he was dropping exactly.

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The world turned upside down

The April 2011 figures from comScore are out, and I’ve added them to my time-series plots. There are no surprises here, which is very bad news for anybody not an Android fan.

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: HTC rejoins the good guys

Today, a prediction about the timing of Android victory. But – more importantly – a discussion of the uses and perils of statistical extrapolation.

I’ve put together a tool to visualize the smartphone market-share data comScore makes available in its monthly press releases. Readers can download both the tool and the raw data in order to check my work. And the first new visualization is quite interesting:

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Still It Rises

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

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail

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

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The Stages of Apple-Cultist Denial

In this week’s installment of “As the Smartphone World Turns”, we hear dire rumors from Nokia and see (more) evidence that RIM is circling the drain. We finish with a fascinating dispatch from the Android front.

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now…

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… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Microsoft may win after all

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… Continue reading Don’t panic over Honeycomb’s release delay