Mobile Solutions CI

comScore Reports April 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share - comScore, Inc

Apple Assumes #2 Spot among Smartphone Platforms

via www.comscore.com

comScore's market numbers have some interesting tidbits. About 40% of consumers say they use their mobile browser vs 38% using apps -- and less than 30% access social networking sites.

Text usage is claimed to be 68%, lower than most estimates.

The headline news about market share is meaningless--reading through this they have mixed overall mobile share with smartphone share and OS share.

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.

886% growth! Android overtakes iPhone market share, does it matter?

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."

The false choice of mobile apps versus mobile browser

GigaOm has an article up arguing that mobile app uptake will be balanced in the coming months or years with mobile browser uptake. This is such a meaningless discussion that I have a hard time understanding why it remains such a popular meme.

To begin with there is this comment: "Eventually, a spot on the home screens of smartphones will become like beachfront property in Monte Carlo –- highly coveted real estate."

If you develop and deliver mobile content you are already laughing. A spot on a device home will BECOME high coveted? Really? Consider for just a moment how incredibly constrained and fought over this real estate has been in mobile content ecosystem over the last ten years. And is now. Anyone in mobile can tell you the mobile home screen has been a Manhattan penthouse always and the iPhone introduced a boardwalk square but that filled up pretty damn quick.

Even if we ignored all of that I would point out that mobile browser usage has always gone hand in glove with mobile app uptake. Look at any reporting numbers from any provider and you will see that people who use mobile apps use mobile web equivalently.

Let's stop arguing over the channel for information and realize that we need to solve what information and how it is discovered. This is true across and within channels. The old "browser versus app" argument just says you have no revenue model, no strategy, and no clue.

CTIA observations: Samsung's big S splash

I skipped CTIA this year which has been both good and bad. Sure don't miss Vegas but I have missed connecting with friends in person. However I'm still following product announcements in the press and through twitter.

Of all the usual device rollouts the big Samsung announcement was most interesting to me so far. This moconews writeup says Samsung is focusing on screen, speed and content. 

It will be interesting to see how that goes with battery life and call quality, two mainstays of mobile device usage that often get overlooked in new product announcements. I like Samsung's move to go past just the OS and focus on the experience (a trend I mentioned earlier) but with only Paramount joining them in the announcement I'm a bit skeptical of the success of this particular launch. Ideally you want to see a range of content partners with real examples to demo, not one guy from a partner acknowledging they will somehow be working together. Hint to Samsung--that doesn't look like market ready for summer to a product guy!