People are just trying to get the best long-term deal, says Stephen Baker at the NPD Group:

“In a quarter without a major product launch from either of the two market leaders, consumers refocused their attention away from the postpaid wars and toward finding the best value for their dollar.”

Those two market leaders, of course, are Samsung and Apple. But Apple is hardly even a participant in the prepaid market.

The portion of the market sold prepaid has been increasing for years, says Baker.

“Sales of prepaid smartphones doubled from the previous year, continuing a string of more than 12 quarters of triple-digit sales increases.”

Apple’s share looks tiny, especially in a U.S. market where it has dominant market share, but it has quadrupled year-over-year since the first quarter of 2012. However, with the prepaid market growing so quickly, Apple’s latest –and typically expensive — phones have not been the big sellers. Rather, it’s the year-old iPhone 4S that is Apple’s leading contender in prepaid, just as one of Samsung’s top prepaid sellers is the now somewhat aged Galaxy S II.

Even outdated models get pricy — the iPhone 4S can cost $400 to $600 unlocked and brand-new, while the Galaxy S II can be between $300 and $400. But consumers make up the heavy upfront cost by saving on cheaper plans, potentially saving hundreds, if not a thousand dollars over the lifetime of their phones.

For Apple, however, capitalizing fully on this fast-emerging market trend means bringing out a cheaper iPhone that can be sold as a new, current model-year device at a price point closer to Android models from Samsung and LG. And Samsung has some work to do, too — while its market share remained stable from 2012 to 2013, competitors such as Apple and HTC have gained share.

Where are people buying prepaid phones? Mostly at retail, NPD says.

“Prepaid has proven to be a real winner for national retailers,” said Baker. “The easy purchase cycle and grab-and-go nature of the product play into the strength of large-format stores. Certainly, companies like AT&T recognize this shift in purchasing as they ramp up their focus on prepaid phones with their recently announced ‘Aio’ product branding initiative.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a global smartphone market that Android has been expanding at a breakneck pace, a bright spot for Apple has been increasing market share in the lucrative U.S. domestic market. A new report from the Yankee Group says that’s going to continue, and that Apple is winning the slow way, via customer loyalty.

The difference, according to analyst Carl Howe, is Apple’s ecosystem.

“Apple’s “black hole” ecosystem captures subscribers who never leave, while Android smartphones are losing one out of every six customers to other manufacturers,” Howe wrote when publishing the study.

That’s iTunes, the App Store, iBooks, iCloud, and the entire physical ecosystem of iPhone-compatible speakers, peripherals, and even cars, which sync and integrate an iPhone with users’ devices.

It seems difficult to believe, given the avalanche of sales Android has captured — led by Samsung. But Kantar Worldpanel data from January supports the Yankee Group’s thesis: Apple briefly captured a majority of U.S. smartphone market share in late 2012. And earlier this month, ComScore said that Apple is growing overall iPhone sales and iOS market share, while Android share is dropping.

Interestingly, Tim Cook said in Apple’s quarterly earnings call earlier this week that a lot of that was due to Apple’ old phones.

“Market share is important, and unit share is important,” he said, adding that the company had reduced prices on the previous-generation iPhone 4 in order to make the phone more affordable to a wider range of people.

The iOS ecosystem is one reason, the Yankee Group report says, that 91 percent of iPhone users plan to buy another iPhone with their next phone purchase, compared to a still-high but clearly lower 76 percent of Android users who plan to switch away from the Android platform. And, in fact, 18 percent of Android owners plan to switch to Apple’s phones.

What that adds up to is the “black hole ecosystem,” as Howe puts it, that grows Apple’s market share slowly but surely.

The question for Apple is whether it can translate that stateside advantage into an international one, where it’s having a much more difficult time capturing huge swaths of market share.

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The mobile operating system market share numbers are in for Kantar Worldpanel’s last quarter, and the numbers are shocking.

Not the Android and iOS numbers: Steady but unspectacular growth for Android and gradual but not catastrophic drops for Apple are pretty much in line with expectations.

But the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are dramatic changes from the same quarter a year ago. Windows Phone looks to be finally taking off, with 52 percent growth in December, January, and February of this year compared to the same three months in 2012. And BlackBerry is falling of a sales cliff, with an 81 percent plunge in sales.

Source: Kantar WorldPanel

Smartphone sales by operating system – U.S.

The big kahuna, of course, is Android.

Google’s Android now owns more than half of U.S. smartphone sales, with 51.2 percent market share. That’s up from 45.4 percent in the quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS is holding fairly steady at number two, with 43.5 percent, down slightly from last year’s 47 percent.

What’s interesting about the Windows numbers, even though they are on a much smaller installed base, is that Windows Phone is currently the fastest-growing mobile phone platform. At 4.1 percent of mobile operating system market share, Microsoft still has a very long ways to go, and growth rates could start to slow as it piles up share. But the numbers have to be encouraging for Redmond as it is finally gaining traction in a market that it once appeared to have completely lost.

And the international numbers contain pockets of even more good news, such as Italy, where Windows Phone now makes up 13.1 percent of new phone sales.

Apple’s mobile offerings are strongest with the two largest U.S. carriers, AT&T and Verizon. Both sell a majority of iOS smartphones, with AT&T selling 68.4 percent iOS versus 20.8 percent Android, and Verizon selling 55.1 percent iOS versus 43.4 percent Android.

Meanwhile, Samsung is continuing to expand its Android leadership, taking away market share from competitors LG and HTC:

“Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Samsung smartphone, 19 percent had previously owned a Samsung feature phone, 15 percent owned a HTC smartphone, 14 percent owned an LG feature phone, 10 percent owned a Samsung smartphone, and 9 percent owned a BlackBerry,” said Kantar Worldpanel analyst Mary-Ann Parlato. “It’s apparent that Samsung is successful at capturing users from across the competitor set and not just gaining from their own loyalists.”

Kantar Worldpanel is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel in the world, and conducts more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone to determine what consumers are buying and using.

In 2012, Samsung sold just over 30 million smartphones in China — a 300 percent increase from the previous year and good for almost 18 percent of the Chinese market. In a stat that shows just how explosive the Chinese smartphone market is, that 18 percent market share is up only 5.3 percent from 2011, despite the tripled number of units.

That compares to Apple’s 11 percent market share.

Apple, which has achieved astonishing success in China, including selling two million iPhone 5 units on its opening weekend, still does not have a deal with China Mobile, the big kahuna of Chinese carriers, with more than 700 million mobile subscribers. Morgan Stanley recently suggested that Apple could triple its Chinese market share with an “iPhone mini,” a clear sign that even a month ago, the data on Apple’s sales in the Middle Kingdom were not where they could be.

But the big loser in China was not Apple.

Eleven percent market share in a vast and growing market — with a premium product — is actually a very good performance. The title of biggest loser goes to Nokia, which lost almost all of its share, dropping from 30 percent to 3.7 percent in a now-familiar story.

Lenovo is now the number two smartphone seller, with 13.2 percent of the market in China. Huawei captured 9.9 percent, and Coolpad trailed with 9.7 percent.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

iPad display shipments have collapsed in the first month of this year, according to recent data from NPD and some creative analysis.

In fact, full-size iPad display shipments seem to have disappeared, dropping by an astounding 80 percent from December to January, even as Android tablet sales have grown.

“Unless Apple has a new full-size iPad on the way with a 10.1″ display, this strongly hints at a collapse in sales because of cannibalization from the iPad mini,” Tech-Thoughts analyst Sameer Sing wrote last night.

Source: Tech-Thoughts

Tablet display shipments by platform

Singh arrived at platform shipment numbers by analyzing the display sizes shipped in the last few months, as reported by NPD DisplaySearch. NPD  says that shipments of 9.7″ tablets have plunged, from 7.4 million in December to just 1.3 million in January.

9.7″ tablets are, of course, full-size iPads.

With a little more work correlating tablet display sizes and top tablets in the market, Singh arrived at the graph above: Android tablet display shipments grew slightly even in the post-holiday month of January, while overall iPad display shipments shrunk by more than half, from around 14 million to about six million.

Obviously, this is potentially a shocking and catastrophic event for Apple.

Source: John Koetsier

iPad mini

Last year when Android overwhelming seized the smartphone market-share lead, tablets were still a very bright spot for Apple, as iPad maintained market share of 68 percent early in the year and 73 percent in China mid-year. But iPad’s position was precarious, as analysts’ predicted, noting that Android tabket sales out-grew iPad sales in six out of the last eight quarters. And the IDC says that iPad dropped from 46.4 percent to 43.4 percent share in Q4 late last year.

But there is a possible explanation for this that does not involve iPadocalypse.

Apple’s full-size tablet display shipments could be vastly down for two reasons. One is that Apple is selling far fewer, or planning to sell far fewer, and so buying fewer displays. Another is that Apple is switching product mix and, perhaps, completely updating the iPad product line … and therefore ordering different sizes of tablet displays, which might just be coincident with some popular Android tablet sizes — and which, therefore, would look very much like Android tablets in the DisplaySearch numbers.

Which makes it not so surprising that fairly reliable sources are claiming that Apple will be revamping its iPad lineup as early as — wait for it — next month. That’s still conjecture, of course. But Tim Cook was extremely confident when speaking early in February at the Goldman Sachs’ Technology and Internet conference, saying that Apple’s culture of innovation was extremely strong and that the pipeline of new products was full.

And it would explain an otherwise baffling collapse.

photo credit: maveric2003 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After just three months of iPhone supremacy, Android is back as the top-selling mobile operating system in the U.S. And those who want Apple to produce a cheaper iPhone will know exactly why.

Price.

When iOS had the lead with 53.3 percent market share in the three months ending in October 2012, Apple and Android smartphones were about the same price, Kantar analyst Mary-Ann Parlato told me via email. But not in the three month period from October 2012 to January 2013.

“This latest period saw a significant price drop to $95 for Android, while iOS increased slightly to $146,” Parlato said.

The result?

Phones running Android jumped to 49.4 percent of all smartphone sales in America, up 6.4 percent over the same period a year ago. iOS came in second, of course, with 45.9 percent. Interestingly, Windows Phone was the only other mobile operating system to grow, adding over a percentage point of market share, while BlackBerry dropped to only a third of its previous share, to only .9 percent of the market.

The big difference between the August-October 2012 period and the November 2012 to January 2013 period was wireless carrier Sprint, which went from an even split of Android/iOS sales to a 72 percent Android landslide. One big driver was a price drop on the Samsung Galaxy S III from $199 to $99 during the holiday period.

Kantar’s consumer panel, where the data for this report originates, is the “largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel of its kind in the world,” surveying more than 240,000 people annually to track mobile phone purchase and usage.

Ultimately, Apple still has an incredibly strong hold on the domestic market, with three of the top five selling smartphones in the country and a much more unified OS, device, and apps ecosystem than Android. And that’s clear when you look at what phones wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon are mostly selling:

But those who are calling for a cheaper — or, shall we say, less expensive — iPhone will find plenty to grind their axes on here. Apple could triple its market share in China, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty said recently, if it introduced an “iPhone mini.”

A cheaper iPhone would also help domestically, it appears.

And so the question really becomes: How crazy does Apple want to get? How much does the company that wants more than anything to produce the perfect product also want market share?

photo credit: laihiu via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Strong sales of the iPhone 5 helped push Apple to the top spot among U.S. phone vendors, reports research firm Strategy Analytics.

The firm estimates Apple shipped 17.7 million iPhones during the fourth quarter (Apple’s own figures cover its fiscal quarters, not calendar quarters), barely edging out Samsung’s 16.8 million phones. That left Apple with 34 percent of the U.S. phone market (a big jump from its 25.4 percent share last year),  compared to Samsung’s 32.3 percent.

The victory was likely due to Apple having the iPhone 5 during the fourth quarter, while Samsung released its flagship Galaxy S 3 in the middle of 2012. Apple’s win may also be short-lived — Samsung remained the top U.S. phone vendor for all of 2012, with 53 million phones shipped versus Apple’s 43.7 million.

Strategy Analytics points out that Samsung has been the top U.S. phone vendor since 2008, and it will likely reclaim the top spot once it releases its next major phone, the Galaxy S 4. Samsung also has several other phone lines, like the Galaxy Note and lower-end Android phones, while Apple only has its iPhone line.

Overall, Strategy Analytics found mobile phone shipments in Q4 jumped 4 percent to 52 million units. But due to economic issues and carrier upgrade restrictions, the firm found, phone shipments fell 11 percent for all of  2012, from 186.8 million units in 2011 to 166.9 million last year.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Looks like the iPad may not be the tablet titan we all thought it was. The cheaper-but-still-nice Nexus 7 tablet has overtaken the iPad in Japan, according to Nikkei report.

The Nexus 7 started shipping in mid-July and impressed a lot of tech-watchers including us by being one of the best $200 tablets around. Apple may have the most polished tablets on the block with the iPad and iPad Mini, but the Nexus 7 may be the overall best value of any tablet. And consumers around the world seem to be noticing.

Based on a survey of 2,400 Japanese electronics stores, the Nexus 7 appears to have a market share of 44.4 percent while the iPad has 40.1 percent. While the survey from Nekkei noted that Japan had a shortage of iPad Minis, the biggest factor for Japanese consumers was price. The Nexus 7 is about $100 cheaper than the iPad Mini.

The big question is if what’s happening in Japan will happen elsewhere, namely the U.S. A recent report predicted that the iPad will dip below 50 percent tablet market share worldwide in mid-2013.

Nexus 7 photo via Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Citing “supply-chain sources,” Taiwan-based Digitimes is saying that Apple “will roll out a low-cost version of the iPhone for China and other emerging markets in the second half of 2013.” Paradoxically, the new, cheaper iPhones are supposed to come with a bigger 5″ screen and a brand-new form factor. And, a new CPU: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.

Well.

Digitimes has a fairly spotty track record on rumors, but sometimes it hits. And while Apple marketshare in mobile has never been higher in the U.S., hitting 53 percent in the pre-Christmas quarter, emerging markets — and Europe, for that matter — are an entirely different story. Android grabbed 75 percent of global market share in the third quarter of 2012, and likely had similar numbers in the fourth.

So a cheaper iPhone does indeed make sense, as I have mentioned in the past. Analysts agree, with Gene Munster calling for a sub-$200 iPhone and Ben Reitzes looking for a sub-$150 phone from Apple in a recent research note. And Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy told me recently that “Apple has done pretty well with its ‘one size fits all’ approach. It won’t be enough in the future to keep a commanding presence like they have today in phones.”

But a whole new form factor? And a bigger screen? That doesn’t really make sense.

I said back in December that Apple had to do something crazy to maintain its smartphone and tablet market leadership. That “something crazy” is to build an inexpensive mass-market phone, which could either be focused on emerging markets or on the low end of the North American and European smartphone market.

I sincerely doubt that this is it — particularly the big-screen part.

But something does tell me that if Apple decides to do an inexpensive — not cheap — iPhone, the company might build a completely new form factor and not simply reissue old models, as it has done to this point. Jony Ive and company like to design perfect products for specific niches, and this would be perhaps Apple’s biggest challenge yet.

But I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.

Image credit: Nak Studio

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple was the leading smartphone platform with 53.3 percent share in the U.S. in late 2012.  According to Kantar Worldpanel data scheduled to be released on Monday, a big reason is Apple’s older phones and its capability to reach new users.

Sure, the iPhone 5 is a big part of Apple’s jump from 35.8 percent market share in the previous quarter, but not the only part.

“The iPhone 5 has been successful this period; however, we also see that Apple’s older models – the iPhone 4S and 4 — have also contributed to the growing share of iOS,” Kantar analyst Mary-Ann Parlato said in a statement. “This is particularly the case for first-time smartphone iPhone buyers where we see the older models still selling well amongs this group.”

In fact, of those who bought an iPhone in the month of November, 40 percent were new smartphone buyers. That’s significant, because it was only early last year that smartphone sales passed 50 percent and only in September that ownership passed 50 percent, both of which mean that there are still plenty of feature phone users out there, even in a supposedly mature American mobile market, who will be upgrading to smartphones over the next year.

Apple also did well with competing mobile operating system providers: 27 percent of iPhone buyers upgraded from another smartphone platform.

Source: Kantar WorldPanel

Smartphone operating system share

Apple can thank carriers for a large part of the massive jump, as AT&T’s share of iOS sales went up from 62.3 percent to 71.8 percent in the quarter, while its percentage of Android sales decreased from 25.9 percent to 22.1 percent. Verizon’s share of iOS also went from 40.7 percent to 55 percent, while its Android sales dropped below half to 43.1 percent.

RIM dropped almost 6 percent, while Windows Phone showed a slight improvement to move into third place in the smartphone wars.

While this data is U.S.-only and does not reflect international sales where Android is much stronger, it does follow huge quarters by Android, particularly in the July, August, and September period, when it captured 75 percent global market share.

Kantar’s panel data is generated by more than 260,000 consumer research interviews on a year basis in the U.S. alone, and it covers a somewhat nonstandard three-month quarter from September to November.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has reached the highest smartphone market share ever thanks to strong sales of the iPhone 5, according to the latest sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

With the iPhone 5 joining the 4 and 4S models still in the market, Apple broke through the 50 percent barrier and reached 53.3 percent market share in three months ending Nov. 25.

And the good news for Apple doesn’t stop there, according to Kantar:

“Apple has reached a major milestone in the U.S. by passing the 50 percent share mark for the first time,” Kantar director Dominic Sunnebo said in a statement, adding that the research company expects Apple to make “further gains” during December.

The same cannot be said across the Atlantic.

Samsung is top dog in Europe, with the highest number of sales and a 44.3 percent market-share position. Apple came in second place with 25.3 percent, while HTC, Sony, and Nokia are all vying for third. Nokia is taking back some of its lost share in the U.K., Sunnebo said, but it’s having a tough time reaching the most desirable demographic: youth.

“Over the past six months, just 28 percent of Nokia Lumia 800 sales have come from under 35s, compared with 42 percent of all smartphone sales,” Sunnebo said.

Meanwhile, Windows phones in the U.S. continue to have a tough slog, Kantar’s data suggests. With Microsoft putting on a full-court marketing press, the next quarter “will prove crucial in revealing initial consumer reactions to the Nokia 920 and HTC Windows 8X devices,” Sunnebo added.

Looks like Apple has found the marketsharing winning formula: releasing new phones. Now if only they could do that every quarter.

photo credit: PHOTO/arts Magazine via photopin cc

The question is simple: Does Apple want to win, or does Apple want to be niche?

Apple’s modus operandi has been to make a limited set of very few products. It chooses those products with almost unbelievable selectivity and with extreme care and attention to detail. This has been a winning strategy for taking Apple to the top. Following this approach has made it the biggest company in the world by market capitalization as well as by the biggest profits.

But staying at the top requires a different set of strategies … which is one reason, perhaps, why Apple stock has fallen 20 percent since September of this year as Android has captured massive market share. And why analysts like Gene Munster are calling for an inexpensive $200 iPhone.

Or, perhaps, even cheaper:

“We imagine an iPhone at a low price point to capture the initial smartphone purchase from customers upgrading from feature phones,” analyst Ben A. Reitzes said recently in a research note for investors. “We believe Apple can sell a phone … below $150.”

The tip of the spear

The reality is that Apple has, to a large degree, been the spear-tip of innovation in the computer and electronics industry. The mouse, the graphical user interface, the touch interface, the touchscreen smartphone, the tablet, the immersive, unified, and elegant operating system … these are all innovations that Apple brought successfully to market when others had failed to do so before.

And all of these innovations have been rewarded by sales, market presence, and profits.

But a market-opening strategy — simple, minimal — tends to not work as markets mature and require products that spread out to fill available niches in the new ecosystem. That is precisely what Apple saw, to its pain, in the personal computing industry of the ’80s and ’90s.

Part of the challenge is that as disruptive innovations penetrate a market, the competition becomes less between “amazing vs. awful” and more between “amazing and really, really good.” Or also amazing, but in a different way.

Mac OS was crazy better than Windows 3.1. It was still better than Windows 95, but the gap was not quite so wide — and plenty of people might legitimately disagree with that statement. Even more so about Windows XP, and, by the time Apple and Microsoft had moved on to OS X and Windows 7, the gap in quality, usability, and elegance was even smaller.

(Yeah, I’m a 25-year Mac guy, so I still think it’s a big difference, but that’s a biased and a history-influenced opinion. Objectively, the gap is much smaller than it was.)

History repeats itself

Clearly, you can see a parallel in the mobile-operating system world.

In 2007, the iPhone broke our brains. It was so new, so different, so amazing, so incredible, that it seemed like an alien artifact from a technologically superior civilization. It was so much better than Windows Mobile or BlackBerry or Nokia or feature phones that it created its own market space. It invented its own niche.

In 2012, the difference between the iPhone and its competitors is much smaller.

Yes, the iPhone is smoother, cleaner, and has a more elegantly integrated ecosystem of content, operating system, apps, glass, silicon, and accessories. But it’s an incremental advantage over Android. And, again, many would find that statement controversial or just plain wrong, saying that Android  is better than iPhone because of its freedom, openness, capability, and device diversity.

And the reality in the market is that Android is winning. With 75 percent market share in smartphones and rapidly rising market share in tablets, Android seems to be an unstoppable force. Reasons abound for this, including the fact that it’s free for carriers, that carriers can load it up with their own proprietary crapware, that it supports a vast array of devices, and that it presents a way for manufacturers to fight the Apple juggernaut.

Plus, Apple’s core fans are often also Google users, sucking them toward Android devices because it all just works together (where have we heard that before?).

But Android is also pretty bloody good, especially in the last few iterations. It now has a massive app ecosystem, and it benefits from Google’s suite of web-centric services, which is slowly but surely getting more tightly integrated with each other and with mobile devices. And with the latest versions, Android is even looking pretty well designed, too.

Apple: the thin red band

Developer and entrepreneur Tom Dale puts the core challenge this way: “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.”

I agree with that, and the reality is that cloud-connected services are really the most important thing for our smartphones to do. We don’t carry a piece of glass and plastic and silicon so we can stay in the little box: We want to get into the big wide world of the Internet.

The problem for Apple, if the current sales and market trends continue, is that iOS will get less and less important, relatively speaking. And those massive profits will start to wither away, start to follow the leaders — the new leaders — and we’ll be back to the ’90s.

But there is another way.

More products, more price points, more aggressive pricing?

Steve Jobs was never afraid of changing his mind, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview. And Jobs was never afraid to make himself obsolete, replacing the best-selling iPod Mini with the new iPod nano in 2005.

I think that if Apple wants to continue to be the leader — or, should I say, recapture the title — it will need to do something crazy. Something against its current corporate DNA. Something that it has never done in the past.

And that’s coming out with more products at more price points with more aggressive pricing. (It’s heresy, I know.)

Apple analyst Patrick Moorhead agrees, saying that “Apple has done pretty well with its ‘one size fits all’ approach. It won’t be enough in the future to keep a commanding presence like they have today in phones.”

Here’s the reality: Not everyone wants the same size phone. Not everyone wants white or black. Not everyone can afford a top-end phone. And those who want something different don’t necessarily want to have to settle for last year’s model to get it.

It’s not just about us

That’s true in rich North America and western Europe. Those markets, while they are wealthy, provide great margins for electronics companies, and are easy to focus one because, frankly, we live here. But they are not the ones to look at for growth, because our markets are saturated. Seventy-five percent of all new mobile phone subscriptions on the planet in the third quarter of 2012 were in Asia and Africa, according to a massive Ericsson study.

And guess what: The 3 billion people who don’t yet have mobile phones at all, mostly in India, China, and Africa, are not going to be buying iPhone 5s, or 6s, or 7s when they their first mobile device. They’ll be buying a feature phone, or more likely in the next few years, a cheap Android phone.

So what, you might say, there are no profits there — just look at Nokia, which still sells a ton of feature phones but can’t make money at it, having to hock its own building just this month. That’s true today. But consumers in developing nations who are poor today may not be poor in the future. Chinese middle class, anyone?

Trends like this have contributed to people like Jay Yarow saying that “Tim Cook has to be worried that his company has become a niche player in the biggest global computing market” and economist Jack Bass reminding us that market share matters and that Apple should make changes to its product and pricing strategy.

Market share does matter

Market share does matter, because ecosystem health — diversity of apps, availability of content, compatibility of services, and more — depends on it. Without market share, a platform loses developer share, and a virtuous circle turns vicious.

That’s true even though Apple continues to grow. The problem is that Android is simply growing much faster.

Which is why analysts like Moorhead are saying that Apple needs “features like larger screens, NFC, enhanced security, and even pen support,” because they are attractive to buyers. And if market share is important to Apple, “they will need to more greatly diversify their iPhone portfolio to attract more kinds of consumers and businesses.”

That’s antithetical to the 1984-ish Macintosh-announcing ad’s “garden of pure ideology” that some feel Apple has now come to embody. It’s antithetical to what Tim Cook has stated very very recently: doing a few things very, very well.

Frankly, it’s not what I expect Apple will do, because I think Apple likes making just a few amazing, excellent, exclusive products. But I think that for the company to get back on top, it must do something crazy. Without a change, those market-leading profits will slow and eventually begin to contract. Apple’s market-leading ecosystem will cede leadership to Google and Android. So even if Apple’s mission in life is defined by creating just a few iconic products, the company might want to remember the lesson of the ’90s and start to change its tune.

The events of the past weeks, in which Apple stock lost $35 billion, then $19 billion, and then dropped below $500 for the first time since February might make this a little less crazy than it sounds.

photo credit: Nina Matthews Photography via photopin cc, shaniber via photopin cc, Yutaka Tsutano via photopin cc, sg_1969 via photopin cc, JD Hancock via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s smartphone marketshare is growing slower than the overall smartphone market, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said today in a research note to investors. That fact will push Apple to release a cheaper iPhone for mass markets.

The first statement is clearly true: Android is swiftly winning market share. The second is more controversial: It may well be true … but if so, it’s a significant departure for the company.

Apple CEO Tim Cook just said in an interview a few weeks ago that Apple wanted to make only a few products because it insisted on only doing a few things well. And it was Steve Jobs who famously brought in the four quadrants of Apple products just after returning to the company, simplifying and streamlining Apple’s line-up into consumer and pro versions of portable and desktop PCs.

But Munster sees some historical precedent for the move:

“Looking back historically, Apple always priced Macs as the higher end of the market and ultimately the iPad, and now the iPad mini, became the ‘Mac for the masses,’” he wrote.

How could Apple do this?

Cheaper components, no retina screen, or even more aggressive pricing on older models, Munster suggested, could get the price down to $200, contract-free. That number seems terribly aggressive, considering that the no-contract prices for iPhone 5s right now range from $649 to $800 and a no-contract iPad mini is $329. Even more to the point, contract-free iPhone iPhone 4s — which are two model revisions old — currently sell on Apple’s site for $450.

That said, I think Munster is generally right — at least about what Apple should do, if not about what the company will do. More about that tomorrow.

photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google chairman and former CEO isn’t mincing any words, saying that Google’s Android mobile operating system is in a war with Apple’s iOS — and that it’s winning.

Refreshing honesty from an executive, or hubris?

Schmidt made the statement in an interview with Bloomberg published this morning. He referenced Android’s massive third quarter of 2012, in which it captured three-quarters of the mobile market and explicitly drew a parallel to the Mac/PC wars of past decades.

Which would mean, I suppose, that Google is the new Microsoft. Be careful what you wish for, Schmidt.

Schmidt did not, of course, mention the past quarter, in which Apple’s iPhone 5 — the gadget of the year, according to Time magazine — helped propel iOS back into a leading position in the smartphone wars, with 48.1 percent of the market versus Android’s 46.7 percent.

Realistically, of course, this last quarter of 2012 is a bit of an aberration, coming as it does just after the launch of the newest iPhone model and providing an opportunity for Apple to capitalize on pent-up demand as savvy customers wait for the latest and greatest. The overwhelming trend of the last year is a shift to Android — even that shift back to iOS in this last quarter was U.S. only, with Android still at 75 percent in Germany, 82 percent in Spain, and more than half the market in England.

Which leaves little choice but to agree that Schmidt is right, and his admission is refreshingly honest for a business executive speaking publicly.

But it’s not likely to win him any allies in Apple legal who might want to settle the incessant Apple-Google courtroom cold war, which have thus far been fought with Google’s proxy companies Samsung, HTC, and others.

And it would be wise for Google to remember — like it or not — that this war will not only be fought in the market. And that Microsoft is now … well … Microsoft.

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc, Yutaka Tsutano via photopin cc

As previously rumored, Nokia has agreed to sell its head office building to a Finnish commercial real estate company, Exilion, for €170 million ($222 million U.S.). Part of the agreement is that Nokia has agreed to a long-term lease of the property.

“Owning real estate is not part of Nokia’s core business,” Nokia’s chief financial officer Timo Ihamuotila said in a statement, adding that “We are naturally continuing to operate in our head office building on a long-term basis.”

That long-term basis is very much in doubt, however.

For 14 years, Nokia was the king of mobile, selling more phones than any other manufacturer. That reign ended this summer, when Samsung took the title, but truthfully, it was over in effect before it was over in fact. In October, Nokia slipped out of the top three smartphone manufacturers globally, winning a pitiful four percent — four percent! — of the global smartphone market as Apple and Samsung took over half of the market by themselves.

That’s down from 31 percent in January … a precipitous decrease in a market that Nokia helped invent.

What that pitiful market share in the most profitable sector of the mobile market translates into is massive burn rate. In the first six months of 2012, Nokia burned through an incredible €940 million. That’s $1.3 billion U.S — a massively unsustainable cash flow crisis. At that rate, the $222 million in proceeds from the sale would only cover a single month of operations.

Of course, Nokia has been and will continue to cut costs, trimming 10,000 jobs in June of this year. And the company hopes to do better in the smartphone marketplace as Windows Phone, to which the Finnish company has hitched its wagon, makes strides in the market.

But even though the company still sells many, many phones to developing sectors of the market, Nokia’s future is very much in doubt.

Nokia has occupied and owned the building, which has 48,000 square meters (516,668 square feet) of office space, since 1997.

photo credit: Chiva Congelado via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While Samsung is still sitting pretty at the top of the U.S. smartphone market, Apple just climbed to the second-place spot for the first time, according to the latest data from the research company ComScore.

For the three-month period from August to October, Apple climbed 1.5 percentage points to reach 17.8 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, toppling LG to third-place.

Samsung still maintains a healthy lead with 26.3 percent of the market, after growing by .7 percentage points. But it’s clear that Apple is slowly, but surely, beginning to nip at Samsung’s heels.

All of the other top-five mobile vendors, including LG, Motorola, and HTC, fell in market share — which helped Apple reach that number-two spot. And of course, the release of the iPhone 5 in October likely helped Apple as well (though we’ll probably see bigger gains from that event in ComScore’s next report).

Overall, there are 121.3 million smartphone owners in the U.S., accounting for 51.9 percent of the mobile market. That’s 6 percent more smartphone owners than ComScore’s July numbers.

In terms of smartphone platforms, Android grew 1.4 points to 53.6 percent, while iOS grew .9 percent to 34.3 percent. RIM fell a whopping 1.7 points, and both Microsoft and Symbian fell slightly as well.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Android smartphones have already taken the sales crown with 75 percent share and 57 million shipped by Samsung alone last quarter. It seems that the tablet market will soon follow suit.

Sales of Android-powered tablets have grown faster than iPad sales in six out of the last eight quarters. That fact, along with other trends in the tablet marketplace, mean that Android-based tablets will out-sell iPads in either the second or the third quarter of 2013, according to analyst Sameer Singh.

iPad market share dipped precipitously to just 50.4 percent in the third quarter of this year, but that was an aberration, says Singh, based on rumors and anticipation surrounding Apple’s new midsized tablet as well as shipping slowdowns due to the impending product refresh.

However, while the fourth quarter numbers should be much better for Apple with the new iPad mini and the unexpectedly refreshed fourth-generation iPad, the long-term trend is clear: iPad will not always be the market leader.

Source: Tech Thoughts

Tablet market share

Android’s last dance with majority share was last Christmas season, when Amazon flooded the market with its inexpensive Kindle Fires, causing Android tabs to come within a few million of Apple’s sales numbers. However, we are currently seeing much broader-based growth, according to Singh: more tabs from more vendors at a greater variety of price points, all of which combines to offer more sustainable sales growth.

On the positive side for both Apple and Google, the total volume of sales should continue to rise, meaning both Android and iOS sales will grow.

photo credit: @superamit via photopin cc

According to a just-released study from London-based ABI Research, iPhone had only 29 percent of app downloads in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 47 percent for Android.

There are a number of factors behind this, of course. A big one is the fact that Android is significantly outselling iPhone, with 75 percent market share in the past quarter. Another, according to ABI, is that Apple recently cracked down on download bots that some developers had been using to manipulate their install numbers.

“The iPhone’s download share tends to see a lot of seasonal fluctuation, but over the past year or so it has stayed surprisingly resiliently between 30% and 37% of the total,” ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen said in a statement. “In our estimates the second quarter represented the first time the iPhone dipped below 30%. The iPhone 5 will most likely cause a second-half hike to the download count, but that may be of a rather temporary nature.”

But another factor, the analyst speculates, is the shift up the value chain to generally higher-priced tablet apps — a shift that Markkanen said is happening much faster for Apple than Google.

“We estimate in the first half of this year the iPad saw over five times more app downloads than all Android tablets combined.”

Apple’s iPads have seen wider commercial success than Android tablets, which have comparatively fewer apps optimized for the larger screens. Its newest iPads, including the mini, have sold over 3 million units just in the first weekend of availability.

That said, developers will definitely be taking note that half of the smartphone app economy (though not necessarily half of the cash in the app economy) is taking place on Android phones.

photo credit: April Julian Cakes via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a major turn-around, Android smartphones now account for a majority of mobile web traffic in the U.S and Canada, with close to a 51 percent share. That’s a massive change from May of this very year, when Apple owned 72 percent of smartphone traffic, compared to only 26 percent for all Android phones.

The results are according to a new study by ad network Chitika.

Apple accounts for 46 percent of all mobile phone traffic in the U.S and Canada, and bitter rival Samsung’s phones add up to 17 percent. Just one month after its introduction, the iPhone 5 accounts for three percent of North American mobile web traffic single, er, phonedly, compared to the Galaxy S III’s 2 percent. (The iPhone 5 surpassed the Galaxy S III in just three weeks, as we reported last week.)

The more interesting information is in the platform numbers, however.

BlackBerry is still holding on to 2 percent of web traffic with its fingernails, and Windows Phone is a tiny little thin slice — but probably poised for growth — at just 1 percent. But getting the Android numbers out requires a bit of digging.

The 43 percent slice in the chart includes all of Apple’s other phones: the 4, 4S, iPhone 3s, and all the way back to the very first iPhone, released in 2007. (Amazingly, some of them are still in use.)

The 15 percent Samsung chunk includes all of its smartphones, which are almost all Android-based.

So the really interesting part of the graph is the big 37 percent terra incognita slice labeled “Other Smartphone.”

When I asked one of Chitika’s data engineers, Andrew Waber, about that group of phones, he ran some additional numbers, slicing the data in a different way.

It turns out that non-Samsung Android is 34 percent of North American mobile web traffic.

And since Windows Phone is only 1 percent total of the market and Samsung sells almost exclusively Android-based smartphones in the U.S., an overwhelming majority of its 15 percent in the graph can be added to the 34 percent.

Which means that 34 percent non-Samsung Android, plus 15 percent non-Galaxy-S III Samsung, plus 2percent Galaxy S III, adds up to 51 percent … giving Android a total share of 51 percent. Or, if not exactly 51, some number between 50 and 51.

In other words, a majority for Android.

I talked to Waber about my mathematical assumptions. He verified that I’m not inventing the numbers, but he did caution that the numbers do fluctuate.

“What we’ve seen is it’s near even, but sometimes swing just lightly in majority of Android or iPhone. But this is not inconsistent with what we’re seeing too.”

In other words, we are right at the tipping point between majority iPhone and majority Android web traffic. That’s big news, and while it was likely to come for some time given the fact that Android out-sells iOS, it’s a milestone event.

The question now becomes: How high will it go?

But it’s still less than half Apple’s capitalization at $627 billion.

Google’s stock dipped a bit in later trading today, and as of 9:39 a.m. Pacific time, the search and advertising giant is worth just a little less than Microsoft. But the overall trend is very clear: Google is up over 18 percent in the past six months, while Microsoft is down just over 8 percent.

Source: Google Finance

Google vs Microsoft.

Google continues to win in web search, with an almost 70 percent search market share, with Microsoft’s Bing search engine making only modest moves to increase its share. Google’s mobile story is strong as well, with 68 percent of smartphone buyers in the U.S. choosing phones running its Android operating system.

Perhaps surprisingly, social is also doing well for Google, with increased traffic to Google+, and — perhaps more importantly — the world’s biggest social network continuing to put its stock-market palm directly on its face.

One fly in the ointment is the loss of mapping and location data from iOS, as Apple has replaced Google Maps with its own program. But Apple’s woes in that area more than compensate (even if Apple’s Maps isn’t as bad as the press has made them out to be.)

The real story here is Google versus Apple, and whether tiny profits hundreds of times per day per user will eventually prove to be more lucrative than large profits several times per year per user. Google, of course, profits by organizing information at scale, making it accessible, and matching it with advertising. Apple profits by creating lust-worthy customer experiences with tightly woven hardware, software, and services.

Both want to own the user: Google with services that are too valuable to lose, and Apple with experiences that are too excellent to switch.

The best part of this story?

We’ve all got front-row seats to the clash of the titans.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Here we go again. The clouds part, and another iPhone descends from the heavens.

What mystical secrets will be written on the device’s extra-large, 640-by-1,136-pixel Retina display? Will there be earthshaking new features? Will it contain the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything?

Not likely. Apple has entered a new phase in the evolution of its iPhone line, and you can pretty much forget about radical reinventions from now on.

The iPhone is now a mature product, and as with many mature products, the chief innovations will interest chief financial officers more than tech reporters like me: Expanding to new international markets and new carriers. Reducing dependence on sometimes-antagonistic partners like Google and Samsung. Marginal improvements to major features. Enough new features to maintain parity with chief competitors. And a few nifty extras, like rainbow colors (my favorite speculative iPhone 5 concept), to keep customers feeling special.

At this point, Apple has settled into its favorite spot: A comfortable No. 2. That’s because the company has always prioritized profits over market share and is happy to cede the latter as long as it can hang on to the former.

Source: Horace Dediu/Asymco

Apple dominates mobile phone operating profit share.

Horace Dediu’s analysis of Apple’s profit share earlier this year makes this crystal clear: Even though the iPhone is no longer the leading smartphone, it has by far the largest share of the market’s profits. But even the term “profit share” is misleading, Dediu points out, because it assumes that the total pool of profits is constant.

“The story isn’t so much that Apple ‘took the profits from the incumbents.’ Rather, it’s that Apple created a vast new pool of profits,” Dediu writes.

It did so by squeezing mobile operators, never anyone’s favorite companies, and by coming up with a model for how to make smartphones that was demonstrably better than anything that came before. Once they had seen it, millions of customers flocked to the iPhone, and dozens of companies followed with their own takes on the touchscreen phone. As Apple demonstrated conclusively in its recent court victory over Samsung, it has defensible patents to protect the iPhone, so competitors now have to find new, less derivative ways to make smartphones, while Apple continues to own the “rectangle with rounded corners” approach.

I’m not saying that Apple is sleepwalking its way to irrelevance. It remains a potent, prickly competitor, out to make no friends. It will continue litigating its patents and aggressively renegotiating business deals. If Samsung is proving difficult, it will source iPhone and iPad componenets from Sharp, LG, and others. If Google is rattling its sabers, Apple is more than happy to ditch Google Maps and build its own iPhone maps and then ditch YouTube and let Google release its own iOS app.

As long as Apple can maintain control over its entire ecosystem — including hardware, software, and services — and keep its customers rabidly happy, it will be assured of having the fattest margins in the smartphone industry, which in turn will help keep Apple the most valuable company in the world.

If you’re looking for radical reinventions, you’ll have to wait for Apple’s idea of a television. (If that happens.) In the meantime, look for a slightly better iPhone tomorrow. It won’t change the world. But then, it doesn’t have to.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform will likely overtake Research in Motion’s BlackBerry market share in the U.S. by the end of this year, according to new data from StatCounter.

The data, which was first posted by WMPoweruser, projects that in November Windows Phone will reach a 1.5 percent install base in the U.S., while BlackBerry’s market share will slip just under that. That means by the end of this year, Android and iOS will practically have the market to themselves.

Next up on the Windows Phone agenda is Windows Phone 8, which includes a ton of new features. The launch of devices with the updated smartphone OS is expected before the launch of Windows 8, which lands on Oct. 26. There’s a rumor floating that Nokia will launch the first Windows Phone 8 devices in September.

Take a look at StatCounter’s chart below to get a better look at BlackBerry’s quick fall and Windows Phone’s slow rise:

Photo credit: Vernon Chan/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s market-leading iPad has great penetration globally at 68 percent market share. But it’s even bigger in China, where Analysys International says that iPad has almost 73 percent of the tablet market.

IDC’s latest numbers show that Apple owns the global tablet scene — 17 million shipped just in the second quarter of 2012. And selling almost seven out of 10 tablets sold worldwide is impressive.

But selling more than seven out of 10 in a market where even the cheapest retina iPad costs easily 10 percent of an average worker’s annual salary is unbelievable.

Source: Apple

iPad2 and new iPad sales rising in China

In fact, that’s a 20 percent increase from the first quarter, most likely due to price cuts on earlier models. But going down from 10 percent of an average salary to 7 percent or 8 percent is not terribly significant.

The Chinese iPad numbers contrast with home-grown Lenovo, which mustered up only just over 8 percent of tablet market share, and near-neighbor Samsung, which actually lost market share in China this quarter, coming down to 3.59 percent.

Perhaps the numbers should not be that shocking. With a middle class already as large as 250 million people, there will soon be almost as many well-off Chinese as there are Americans in total.

And the 33 percent of global iPads sales that are currently recognized in the U.S. could soon be 20 percent or fewer.

Image credit: Aleksandar Mijatovic/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While the Android buzz is now firmly focused on the recently unveiled Jelly Bean, the previous major update, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, has finally reached double-digit penetration in the market.

It’s a bittersweet victory, though, as it took 8.5 months since Android 4.0′s release to scrape together 10.9 percent of the Android market. Meanwhile, the majority of Android users (64 percent) are running the 15-month old Gingerbread update.

The latest statistics, gathered at Google’s Android developers website, won’t do much to satisfy critics who say that Android is horribly fragmented. Google has historically avoided forcing Android updates on device manufacturers, who usually need several months to tweak the software for their products.

At least the adoption of Android 4.0 seems to be speeding up. Last month, Google reported that only 7.1 percent of devices were running Android 4.0.

Come next month, Google will add Android 4.1 Jelly Bean statistics to its market report. That update will officially hit Nexus devices later this month, and it’ll give us some idea of how well Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet sells.

Via Android Police

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Chrome is one of Google’s biggest success stories. Rank it up there with search that doesn’t suck (hard to find back in the day) and AdWords (the print-your-own money machine that drives everything else Google does).

Today at Google I/O Sundar Picahi, senior VP of Chrome and apps, says that Chrome is not only the most popular browser in the world, it’s now in active use by 310 million people.

That’s double last year’s numbers and astonishing growth, pushing past Microsoft’s Internet Explorer earlier this year.

And he shared a few fun numbers too: 60 billion words typed on Chrome every single day, and one terabyte of data download via the browser each and every day.

Just yesterday, the mobile version of Chrome came out of beta.

Google I/O, on Chrome:

Android accounts for 61 percent of all smartphone sales, according to data published today by NPD Group.

That number is trailed by the 29-percent stake claimed by iOS devices, and RIM and Windows Phone are nowhere close.

These figures for the first quarter of 2012 represent healthy growth for Android, which had previously slumped to a 49 percent share of smartphone sales.

Smartphone sales still only make up 66 percent of all mobile phone sales, but that’s just sales of new devices. Separate research from Nielsen shows that as of March 2012, more than 50 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers owned smartphones, up from 47.8 percent at the end of 2011.

Also from Nielsen, we learn that for currently activated smartphones, Android grabs 48.5 percent of the market, a healthy lead on Apple iOS’s 32 percent.

Other highlights from Nielsen’s numbers include:

• The ladies: 50.9 percent of female mobile subscribers used smartphones compared to 50.1 percent for men.
• The (relatively) youngsters: More than two out of three people ages 25 to 34 have a smartphone.
• Asian Americans: This group leads smartphone adoption with 67.3 percent using a smartphone as their primary mobile handset.

However, other Android-related news today (Google getting a partial guilty verdict in a landmark court battle with Oracle) has us wondering how much market domination is worth if your product ends up getting nickel-and-dimed into unprofitability.

via Cnet

Top image courtesy of laihui, Flickr.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

iPhones and iPads now account for more web traffic than Macs, according to a study by ad network Chitika.

Chitika measured the percentage of its ad impressions that were delivered to iOS devices and the percentage going to OS X devices. According to the firm, iOS has been steadily gaining ground since August, 2011, while OS X has lost 25 percent of its market share since September.

As of February, 2011, the iOS market share surpassed OS X for the first time, with both notching approximately 8 percent of overall web page views.

It’s worth noting that this study applies only to web pages within Chitika’s network, but the company says the data set includes hundreds of millions of ad impressions. Because the web-based data applies to devices that people are actually using, not what they’re buying, it’s an interesting correlation to sales-based data. In the first quarter of 2012, for instance, Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and just 5.2 million Macs.

It’s not quite the death of the desktop, but mobile devices are gaining ground on their traditional brethren, at least within the Apple-centric world.

Still, Apple CEO Tim Cook is unlikely to be worried about one of his products losing market share to another, as Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng noted.

“There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe that there’s much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad,” Cook said on Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, “and there’s much more left to cannibalize.”

Hat tip: BGR

Chart courtesy Chitika.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

To the surprise of absolutely no one who’s been paying attention, the iPad is the clear leader in global tablet web traffic, with an astounding 88%, far greater than all Android tablets and afterthoughts like the BlackBerry PlayBook, according to Pingdom.

But while the iPad has such a sharp lead in tablet web use, almost certainly because it’s the most popular tablet, the upcoming Kindle Fire, which costs $300 less than the iPad and features the powerful Silk web browser, could begin eating away at that stat.

Pingdom’s study admits that the exact figures of tablet web use aren’t readily available, but it was able to extrapolate from a variety of other sources to complete a convincing picture that the iPad owns about 88% of tablet web traffic. StatCounter regularly completes surveys of the percentages of OSes that access the web. When you bring down those OS web access stats to just tablets, iOS has 87.6%, Android takes 10.9%, webOS has 0.7% and BlackBerry OS has 0.7%.

These statistics match up well with sales figures throughout the world, as noted in a post a few months ago by John Gruber. In the U.S. alone, the iPad makes up 83% of tablet sales, and around the world it counts for 73% of tablet sales.

No Android tablet up to this point has been a runway hit – not even Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Motorola’s Xoom, arguably the two slickest premium Android tablets. But the Kindle Fire could change that. It doesn’t look like Android on the surface, but it still is built using Android’s operating system and could greatly help Android’s tablet market share because the $199 price point is so attractive. Microsoft’s Windows 8, which will go live next year, also looks like a viable competing OS that could help bring the iPad down a notch.

Firefox users have seen quick updates of their browsers ever since Mozilla decided to mimic Google Chrome’s rapid release schedule. Six weeks ago Firefox 7 debuted with performance gains, and six weeks before that Firefox 6 hit with extra tools for developers. Mozilla has been a little spooked ever since it started to look like Google Chrome could overtake Firefox as the number 2 browser.

Two big changes are in store for those updating to Firefox 8. First, there is the addition of a Twitter search tool that can be selected from the top right corner, like searching Google, Bing or Wikipedia. Second, Firefox 8 disables add-ons by default and forces users to re-reselect add-ons if they truly want to use them.

“Add-ons installed by third parties present a number of problems: they can slow down Firefox start-up and page loading time, they clutter the interface with toolbars that often go unused, they lag behind on compatibility and security updates, and most importantly, they take the user out of control of their add-ons,” said Mozilla programmer Justin Scott in an August blog post about the decision.

Firefox 8 also adds support for “Cross-Origin Resource Sharing,” which lets developers load WebGL graphics and textures from other domains securely. Additionally, the updated browser offers a faster way to restore windows with many tabs that can be turned on from the Firefox Menu under Options/Preferences.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Out of all mobile app downloads in the third quarter of 2011, 44 percent were Android apps, making Android the market share leader over iOS’ 31 percent, according to data from ABI Research.

The research firm attributed the large shipment of phones running Google’s Android operating system as the reason for the high market share. The total number of Android devices activated worldwide has now reached 190 million (or an estimated 600,000 per day), according to Google.

By comparison, growth in iPhone shipments fell for the second straight quarter — from 15 percent in the first quarter 2011 to nine percent in the second. Meanwhile Android’s shipment growth rose from 20 percent in the first quarter to 36 percent in the following quarter.

Also worth noting from the research firm’s data is that Android’s installed base (the number of phones running Android) is 2.4 to 1 over devices running iOS. ABI said that ratio will reach a stunning 3 to 1 by 2016.

But number of downloads doesn’t necessarily mean Android is besting Apple. According to ABI, Apple is leading in the number of downloads per person. People download two iOS apps for every one Android app. Also, Apple’s strategy toward monetizing applications is more attractive to innovative developers, as more users on iOS are willing to pay for applications.

Finally, ABI reports that the total number of mobile app downloads ever will reach 29 billion by the end of 2011. Comparatively, people only downloaded nine billion apps worldwide in 2010.