Canalys reports that Android has overtaken Apple in market share of smartphone. But is "smartphone" a market segment any more? I'd argue no.
Apple continues to kill in content consumption. What other platform, whether measured vertically or horizontally (e.g. Android as OS, direct-to-consumer content, cloud-based verticals such as streaming music, etc) approaches the growth, sell through, breadth, and consumer interest of the app store on iPad, iPod, and iPhone?
If you are still focused on "smartphones" as an indicator of your customer base I think you have missed the revolution of the past three years. The bigger question around content is whether packaged, paid content will dominate or whether user-generated and communications-based content will drive the mobile industry.
Meanwhile, here is a neat snippet of trailing indicator information on market share from Rethink Wireless : "The US smartphone market as a whole grew by 41% year-on-year, in unit sales terms, said the researchers, making it the largest base for the open OS handsets in the world. Within that, Android devices accounted for 34% of sales, overtaking RIM and Apple for the top spots. Canalys particularly singled out Verizon's aggressive promotion of its Droid range, the latest flagships being the HTC Incredible and Motorola Droid X. With 14.7m units sold, RIM was still the biggest individual vendor, with 32% share, ahead of Apple on 21.7% and HTC on 14.4%, combining Android and Windows Mobile sales."
Nielsen claims American teens average 3,339 texts a month
Nielsen is reporting that texting has become the number one reason to buy a cell phone. They also show rising usage on both sms, browsing, and app downloading.
I like that this comes from actual user data:
"Using recent data from monthly cell phone bills of more than 60,000 mobile subscribers as well as survey data from over 3,000 teens, The Nielsen Company analyzed mobile usage data among teens in the United States for the second quarter of 2010 (April 2010 – June 2010). No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month. Teen males also outpace other male age groups, sending and receiving an average of 2,539 texts. Young adults (age 18-24) come in a distant second, exchanging 1,630 texts per month (a comparatively meager three texts per hour)."
One thing not mentioned here is what percentage of this traffic and usage is directly user generated and what is sms serving as transport protocol--updates, alerts, notifications, etc from Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, etc. That would be very interesting to pull apart.
Because the most interesting thing about any of the non-voice use cases of a phone, particularly a smartphone, is that they are not substitute activities for other data activities. They seem to be cannibalizing voice somewhat but most of this would seem to come from PC activities such as email or media consumption from newspapers and TV.
October 18, 2010 in Mobile content, Mobile industry commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)