Posts Tagged ‘Android’

Kevin C. Tofel asks ‘Why should you care about smartphone market share as a consumer’?

There are a number of factors, but I think the main one is software…Developers are following the sales figures because the better selling platforms offer a wider audience interested in the apps being developed and sold.

He uses the latest Gartner market share data to illustrate that there are only three fast growing mobile platforms; BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.

Wired reporting that Symbian, the mobile OS that powers most Nokia phones on the planet is now Open Source and Free. Sounds like a move designed to compete directly with Android.

Symbian’s move to open source has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from mobile phone to a tablet.

This is the greatest unboxing video you ever might see.

Great review of the Nexus One on YouTube. Conclusion is….it’s kind of OK but still no iPhone. Watch it below:

Also, if you’re still interested in Nexus One, Ars have finally finished their hands on and conclude with this:

The Nexus One is the best smartphone on the market at this point for general use.

According to Nielson, iPhone 3G takes number one spot with 4% of ‘embedded base of all subscribers’, with RIM chomping on its heals.

Commentary from Melinda Varley in Business Spectator on the market for mobile marketing:

In the UK – the most sophisticated and saturated mobile market in Europe – marketers spent almost £29 million on mobile advertising in 2008, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The Mobile Marketing Association now expects total spend to reach £1 billion by the end of 2009.

In the US, ad spend on mobile is expected to reach $US6.5 billion by 2012. And although in Australia the medium remains in its infancy, growth is poised to almost treble with communications specialist Telsyte forecasting that spend will grow to $20 million by the end of 2009 from just $7 million in 2008.

Paul Graham’s latest thoughts about the App Store, and it’s failings.

How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn’t like?

His observations about the industry are also good:

The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers have iPhones. They may know, because they read it in an article, that Blackberry has such and such market share. But in practice it’s as if RIM didn’t exist.

Can anything break this cycle? No device I’ve seen so far could. Palm and RIM haven’t a hope. The only credible contender is Android. But Android is an orphan; Google doesn’t really care about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search.

PACMan3000 argues (on Flickr, strangely enough) that when you think about the iPhone, you also need to consider the other iPhone, the iPod Touch; a product that has and will continue to sell millions and millions of units to people who don’t want to sign up for an expensive cell phone+data plan.

To kill the iPhone, you must also kill the iPod Touch, iTunes, the App Store and any other product that Apple puts out with the same OS, like the 10 inch Tablet device that may or may not come out next year.

Saul Hansell reporting in the NYTimes:

More cellphone makers are turning to the free Android operating system made by Microsoft’s latest nemesis, Google.

This move by Google is straight out of the Microsoft playbook. If you can’t compete on price, give away your product for free. Exactly what Microsoft does in developing countries where their biggest competitor is piracy.