This isn’t even a race.

Second place is LG, with 2.5 percent of the device profits from Android smartphones, and third place is “Other,” with everyone else lumped in to a tiny 2.7 percent share.

“Samsung is, for now, the undisputed king of the global Android smartphone industry,” Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics’ executive director said in a statement. “We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does.”

Globally, Android smartphones accounted for 43 percent of the overall smartphone industry’s profits, the report says. Those profits reached $12.5 billion in just the first quarter of 2013. And due to an ultra-efficient supply chain, “sleek products,” and successful marketing strategies, Samsung has captured almost all of that 43 percent, or $5.1 billion.

Now the question in the Android ecosystem is this: Is Samsung more powerful than Google?

According to Strategy Analytics, perhaps.

“Samsung has strong market power and it may use this position to influence the future direction of the Android ecosystem,” Mawston says. “For example, Samsung could request first or exclusive updates of new software from Android before rival hardware vendors.”

Samsung, which shipped 400 million phones in 2012 and 82.2 million phones, tablets, and laptops in the first quarter of 2013, is clearly on a roll. Android has 75 percent global market share, and Samsung has a massively dominant position within the Android ecosystem.

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.”

While analysts, Wall Street, former Apple employees, and, yes — journalists — have been raking Apple over the coals for its agonizingly slow product release cycle and lack of response to the growing market for larger screens, Tim “no new products until this fall” Cook has held his fire.

That’s probably at least partly due to the fact that that “growing” market might indeed be growing, but not all that quickly. In fact, according to mobile advertising company Tapjoy, fablets only make up a tiny 4 percent of the market.

“Fablets don’t fill a market need that is most valuable to end users,” Brian Sapp, a director at Tapjoy, told me yesterday. “They fall in a gray area … the device manufacturers want to make larger screens, but most users just don’t care.”

Source: Swipe Telecom

Swipe Telecom’s 5-inch F3 fablet.

Tapjoy is a pretty credibly source of mobile market data — the company’s monetization solutions live in tens of thousands of apps, and thereby on over a billion devices globally, the company told me. That’s a big sample size from which to draw conclusions.

“Users,” Sapp concludes, “want a phone that fits in their pocket.”

This data very likely comes with regional lumpiness to that data, with fablets being more popular in some areas (I suspect Asia, for one). But 4 percent is not a big number, and it’s not the kind of massive market that Apple typically looks for.

In addition, Apple is much more concerned with making great products than flip-flopping in the wind of what’s popular du jour. And usability experts point out that already on iPhone-sized screens, some areas are hard to manage one-handed and to both access virtual controls and initiate standard on-screen gesture motions.

Which, of course, makes fablets two-handed beasts.

One caveat, however.

While fablets may be a small slice of the market, phones that are bigger than iPhone are not. The supersuccessful Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4 are both bigger than iPhone 5. And Samsung, which shipped 400 million phones in 2012 and 82.2 million smartphones, tablets, and notebooks in the first quarter of 2013, knows something about what customers want, too.

“Market share is important and unit share is important,” Cook said on the company’s last earnings call. “But we’re all about customer experience and enriching lives.”

Which means it is very likely that a larger iPhone will be coming at some point in 2013, closer to fall. Just not as big as some pundits might like.

And … it probably will still fit in your pocket.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is in glorious living color, but its original and still-strong-selling Kindle and cousins, the Kindle Paperwhite family, are still irritatingly stuck in 1950s-style black-and-white.

That may soon change.

As The Digital Reader found, Amazon has bought recent Samsung acquisition Liquavista while attempting to hide the fact by routing the acquisition through a limited liability corporation registered in Delaware, which is in turn linked to a holding company named CSC: “Corporation Service Company.”

Very tricksy, Amazon.

Amazon confirmed the purchase with a short emailed statement, saying:

We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.

Liquavista has built a screen technology that approaches the efficiency of traditional e-reader black-and-white e-ink screens while offering the color of LCD and other full-color screen technologies. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it, too: gorgeous full-color screen plus long-lasting battery life.

That might be just the technology that Amazon needs to kickstart conversion of its full e-reader line to a full-color and quick-response screen, as e-ink is also notoriously slow to refresh.

And that is important, because Amazon is doubling down on digital content, hoping to drive both sales and margin growth by selling digital media like movies and TV shows, apps, in-app purchases, and games. The company just launched its new virtual currency, Amazon Coins, today, attempting to increase the rate at which Amazon customers buy things that don’t have to be expensively stored, packaged, and shipped.

And you can’t sell much digital content on a slow black-and-white screen.

While Liquavista’s screen tech won’t be cutting-edge enough to run Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets, which need the best screens available, it is advanced enough for Amazon’s Kindles, The Digital Reader says, which are primarily budget, mass-market devices.

And advanced enough to move Amazon’s low-end devices beyond being ghettoes for books, and towards being able to handle all the full-color and full-motion media that Amazon can sell.

Image credits: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Still there?

Sorry for the big shocker. Almost a year after reports that Amazon was testing smartphones in Asia, half a year after rumors Amazon was buying a smartphone chip processor, a year after more reports that Amazon was building its own smartphone, five months after unveiling a notifications system that would look really nice on a smartphone, and six months after probably wild speculation that Amazon was going to unveil a smartphone for the pre-Christmas shopping spree in 2012, there’s yet another report that Amazon is building a smartphone.

But this one has a 3D screen.

The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is building at least two smartphones, including a high-end model with 3D graphics and retina-tracking technology so that users can navigate content by “using just their eyes.” Plus an audio-only “streaming content device.”

Harrumph.

Amazon is almost certainly working on a smartphone and almost certainly planning to release it in 2013. There’s just too much smoke for there not to be fire. And having made its bet on digital content being the growth engine of the company’s future success — 12 of the 15 highlights in Amazon’s recent earnings release were about digital content — a smartphone that makes use of Amazon’s recently expanded app store and burgeoning virtual shelves of ebooks, TV shows, movies, and all other forms of digital content makes way too much sense.

But a couple grains of salt.

Amazon hasn’t made its bones in the tablet market by offering the absolutely latest and greatest technology but by presenting a solid product at a rock-bottom price. So I’m a little skeptical about all the wild 3D speculation — especially because that could be a sweet datapoint plant for the company to identify leak sources. And, in reality, a company the size of Amazon, like Apple, is working on many different projects at any given time. Some of them will come to market, and some of them won’t.

One company that can’t be happy about Amazon impending smartphone plans, however, has to be Google. Amazon has essentially hijacked Android for its Kindle offerings, taking the open-source mobile operating system that Google has developed, stripping out the Google app store, Google apps, and Google branding, and replacing them with its own offerings. Amazon will doubtless adopt the exact same strategy with any smartphone play — as Samsung might as well.

And, given the fact that Kindle is probably the leading Android-based tablet, it has the potential to do well in smartphones as well.

Of course, incumbent leader in Android sales Samsung might have a thing or two to say about that.

Image credit: Brian Sawyer/Flickr

Since the company already employs 100,000 workers to manufacture components and devices for customers like Apple, Dell, and HP, that translates to 40,000 new workers. And since Apple is widely expected to be releasing not only an updated iPhone 5 but also a cheaper, plastic-bodied iPhone in the fall-to-winter time frame, that translates to speculation that Pegatron is gearing up for big orders.

This fits both with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s announcement during the company’s recent earnings call that Apple would not bring out any new products until the fall and with recent rampant rumors of new iPhone models.

And, says Reuters, Pegatron’s CFO Charles Lin indicated that 60 percent of the company’s 2013 revenue would come from the second half of the year.

Apple needs new products, badly.

Canalys’ numbers for smartphone, tablet, and laptop sales for the first quarter of 2013 show that Apple’s growing only 7.6 percent in smartphone sales, while the industry is growing at a 64.3 percent pace. And while Apple sold 37 million iPhones, Samsung shipped is growing its smartphone shipments by 64.3 percent.

Apple’s not interesting in market share for the sake of market share, but at some point market share has to impact the overall health of an ecosystem. And without a strong app, media, and device ecosystem, smartphone manufacturers are in deep, deep trouble.

photo credit: jurvetson via photopin cc

Once again, Android accounted for 75.6 percent of all smartphone shipments, and once again, Samsung is killing it.

The Korean smartphone king grew smartphone shipments by 64.3 percent year-over-year while shipping 82.2 million tablets, smartphones, and notebooks combined. Meanwhile, mobile rival Apple grew its iPhone shipments by a shockingly low 6.7 percent, hitting single digit growth in a market which has overall growth of 37.4 percent.

Let me say that again: Apple is at single digit growth in a market growing at almost 40 percent.

Source: John Koetsier

Android meets Wall-E.

If there’s any doubt why Apple’s stock in moldering in the mid-400′s after hitting highs last year of over $700, that’s why. And with Tim Cook basically telling Wall Street that Apple won’t ship any significant new products until this fall, or even 2014, the situation is not likely to change.

‘Despite its slowing growth, Apple still shipped over 37 million iPhones,’ Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham said in a statement. ‘But HTC and Samsung have raised the bar with their latest handsets and Apple needs to respond with its next iPhone. The iPhone user interface is now six years old and badly in need of a refresh.”

Tablets are one area of slight comfort for Cupertino.

Apple retains 46.4 percent of the tablet market, Canalys says, shipping 19.4 million tablets. That’s down from 58 percent market share in the first quarter of 2012, and once again, in a market growing at over 106 percent year-over year, Apple grew less than others — about 60 percent growth year-over-year.

‘Spearheaded by Google and Amazon, the commoditization of the tablet market has happened far quicker than that of the wider PC market,’ Canalys analyst Tim Coulling said.

The upshot?

Without significant new Apple products, major new product categories, and a much more intense Apple effort to produce a wider range of phones and tablets that the market is looking for right now, Apple share will continue to drop.

And one other interesting tidbit in the Canalys data:

Calculating operating system share over all “smart devices,” lumping in smartphones, tablets, and laptops does provide interesting insights. With that view of the industry, Microsoft ends up with an 18.1 percent OS market share — a very different proposition than high-90-percent share in the laptop/desktop world.

Image credit: Louish Pixel/Flickr

Analysts expect earnings of $10.12 a share on revenue of $42.6 billion, which sounds great for almost any company on the planet but Apple, it seems. Apple’s own guidance was a rather more modest $9.23 to $10.23 per share on earnings of $41 to $43 billion.

The question is whether those results — or better — will push Apple’s brutalized stock up … or down.

I talked to Pace University’s Darren Hayes about Apple, technology, and the stock market. Hayes is a professor at Pace’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.

VentureBeat: What has driven Apple stock down over the past six months?

Hayes: iPhone 5 sales have failed to impress. There’s been a lack of innovation over the past few years to come up with the next great device, and consumers have failed to see any differentiation. Samsung has captured the market.

VentureBeat: Isn’t the stock undervalued?

Hayes: It’s possible. The short sellers have had a field day, but once the stock starts to rebound, they’ll have to cover.

With the amount of short selling that has been going on, it has been oversold. So with any kind of bump, the short sellers will have to cover, and there’s likely to be some rebound.

Short sellers are happy when the stock is going down … they may even increase their short position. But if there’s a couple of days of increase, short sellers may need to cash in on their profits and buy it back, so instead of it moving $2 it may move $12.

VentureBeat: So if Apple reports good news, the stock could jump significantly?

Hayes: It’s possible it could bump up $50 or $75.

VentureBeat: What does Apple need to do to make that happen?

Hayes: The company needs to look at business alliances. We’ve all heard about BlackBerry’s difficulties maintaining market share. Apple has failed to grasp that opportunity … failed to capture a tremendous business opportunity.

For example, even with servers — Apple had tremendous servers, but never looked to expand their market. They need to talk more about how they’re going expand their reach in corporate markets.

Google and Android have had a very effective strategy — it’s easy for developers to develop for Android, it’s open source, integrated in the auto industry, into appliances — and its adoption rate is far great than Apple’s.

In terms of of security, Apple does have better security, but businesses are going with the cheaper option.

VentureBeat: What is Apple’s biggest challenge?

Hayes: Apple has the market share in terms of tablets and they’ve been able to compete in computers, but what people are really interested in is the smartphone market. Smartphones are the most important thing people are looking at right now. For example, look at HP and Dell — it’s clear people are buying smart devices and not investing in traditional computers.

There’s about one billion smartphones in use, and that’s likely to double by 2014 according to Gartner.

The problem is that the iPhone has really failed to impress – demand has been very soft for iPhone 5.

VentureBeat: What about a cheaper iPhone?

Hayes: That’s definitely a good move, but what’s really important is the incentives they offer to carriers. Apple has already incensed a lot of carriers by offering very, very small incentives, so many carriers feel they’ve been squeezed by Apple and now would rather promote Samsung and Android.

So it’s not just about improved features and better pricing … it’s about carriers.

VentureBeat: Can Apple ever get back to $700 stock price territory?

Hayes: They need to get more hype about their products. And they need to think about the next big device that would really create some interest and buzz. Apple TV is probably not it … there’s not many details about it — they need to come out with something new.

We’ve been spoiled for years by Steve Jobs unveiling some new device year after year.

Image credit: Marco aka MenfiS/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This Apple’s still got some bite.

After weeks and months of good news for Android, ComScore’s U.S. subscriber market share report released today says that Apple is actually growing overall iPhone sales and iOS platform penetration, while Google’s Android is dropping.

In terms of the installed base of devices, Apple owned 38.9 percent of the market as of February 2013, leading second-place Samsung by almost 18 percentage points. Apple’s market share is up 11 percent from the previous quarter, which ended in November 2012. Since Apple’s iPhone is synonymous with Apple’s mobile operating system — it’s not available on any other device — iOS also grew 11 percent in the quarter.

Source: ComScore

Top smartphone OEMs February 2013

Meanwhile, Google’s Android actually dropped overall market share.

While at the end of November 2012 Android owned 53.7 percent of the market, at the end of February 2013 that had dropped to 51.7 percent — losing two percentage points for an almost 4 percent reduction. That’s astonishing for a platform that has had so much momentum and so many manufacturing partners.

Source: ComScore

Top smartphone platforms – February 2013

Samsung did pick up market share, adding a percentage point for five percent growth in the quarter, while HTC dropped further still, as did Google-owned Motorola, and LG.

The numbers contrast quite starkly with numbers that Kantar Worldpanel released just three days ago, which showed iPhone sales down, Android up slightly, and Windows Phone growing rapidly. Those are sales numbers, so you expect some discrepancies with installed base numbers. The question is how ComScore shows an overall increase in iOS marketshare while Kantar says there’s been a drop in iPhone sales.

I’m checking with both companies for updates, but one potential reason is that ComScore numbers only apply to consumers age 13 and up, which could skew the numbers Apple’s way. But essentially, if ComScore’s numbers can be trusted, this means that Apple had a stellar Christmas quarter — which we already knew from its massive $54.5 billion first quarter earnings.

The question in analysts’ minds is whether Apple can keep this up … and whether it can replicate this kind of success in Europe as well as in emerging markets in Asia.

Judging from Apple’s stock market woes, the answer so far is no.

photo credit: Marco aka MenfiS via photopin cc

Ever scrolled to the bottom of a long page on your iPhone, then watched the page lift up from the bottom of the screen and then bounce back? Apple patented that rubber-banding effect, and it was reportedly one of Steve Jobs’ favorite things about the iPhone, since it adds verisimilitude, making what is virtual act as if it is real.

That specific iPhone behavior was one of the issues in Apple’s billion-dollar courtroom victory over Samsung, seven months ago. Now, that patent is on shaky ground, and so is Apple’s legal win — or at least part of the proceeds of that win.

According to a recent Samsung court filing, Apple patent 7,469,381 patent has been invalidated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in a statement called a “Final Office Action:”

This Final Office Action by the USPTO is relevant because it finally rejects multiple claims of the ‘381 patent …

This final rejection includes claim 19, which is the only claim of the ‘381 patent at issue in this action. The jury found at trial that 21 accused Samsung products infringed claim 19 of the ‘381 patent.

Claim 19, along with 18, comprise the bounce-back portion of this patent — the ability of the iPhone to show a surface “beneath” a document when the end of the document is reached and then bounce the document back over it.

Apple’s original billion-dollar victory, of course, was reduced by Justice Koh a month ago to $450 million. And a new trial is expected to determine the final value of the judgement. With Samsung arguing that one of Apple’s key patents has now been ruled invalid, the amount could go down yet again. Both companies are, of course, posturing, with Apple claiming in late 2012 that the billion dollar settlement was $700 too little. Originally, Apple had requested $2.5 billion in compensation.

According to Samsung, the USPTO rejected the patent on March 29 of this year. Apple is likely to appeal the ruling.

The never-ending trial of the smartphone giants continues …

Image credit: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

“Let’s just call it as it is,” he said today on CNBC, “there has not been a single piece of good news about Apple for 300 points, and today is just another day when the news is just horrendous.”

He’s either referring to Apple’s apology to China or to the fact that Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock today.

But not only has Cramer not seen any good news from Apple for months, he’s also predicting that the company’s next product, due in September, “is a clear loser,” as he seems to believe that Apple is incapable of pulling out of a “tailspin.”

That’s a fairly remarkable statement, even from Cramer. He is, of course, the financial analyst who predicted two years ago that an “overpriced” LinkedIn IPO would “destroy everyone,” so he is not unknown for hyperbole and bombast. But predicting the utter failure of a future, unreleased product?

Interesting.

Essentially, what Cramer seems to be saying is that the momentum of the mobile markets has swung so far in favor of Apple competitors Google and Samsung that Apple will not be able to reverse it, no matter what devices they bring out: new iPhones, new iPads, a new iWatch, or even other unexpected products. That’s essentially a platform call, saying that Android is winning and iOS is losing.

Of course, if that’s true, and if Apple misses on its next quarterly numbers — as Cramer expects — CEO Tim Cook’s job security could be in doubt.

Cramer did temper his comments at the end of the show by backpedaling a little, saying that Apple still has a strong installed base and that if it releases a new wow product, it would still matter. Of course, that came after some theater in which he somewhat incoherently complained that Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs:

Now, you feel that if Cook were to do one of these big shows and come out and say we are about to announce maybe the most disappointing product we’ve ever had since the Lisa … this is the Lisa 2 and nobody likes it and I don’t know why we’re doing and it’s all yours, America and China.

And we apologize that it’s so bad.

We’ll see Apple’s quarterly results in three weeks. Meanwhile, the stock is up almost $8 today:

Source: Google Finance

Apple stock April 2

Apple’s iPhone 3G was released on July 11, 2008, and followed a little more than a year later by the faster 3GS on June 19, 2009. The iPhone 4 was released on June 24, 2010, and followed by the 4S sixteen months later on October 14, 2011. The iPhone 5 was launched on September 21, 2012, and if a rumor from Japan is correct, it will also be followed by a 5S model, to be released on June 20.

That is just an eight-month gap.

According to MacFan, a Japanese Apple fanzine that is celebrating its 20th anniversary, June 20 is the announce date of the newest iPhone, which will then ship in volume in July. How exactly a Japanese fanzine would be in possession of that privileged information is difficult to determine, but the timetable does square with analyst expectations. As CNet notes, Gene Munster and other Apple followers have identified June as the most likely launch window for the 5S.

If accurate, that’s a lot quicker than Apple has brought out upgrades in the past. But the pace of innovation has quickened, and the competition is getting hotter.

Samsung just recently unveiled its Galaxy S IV, the successor to its best-selling Galaxy S III, and the Korean manufacturer’s flagship phone against which Apple’s current iPhone 5 and next models will be compared. Samsung had released the S III in May of 2012, so the IV came out just ten months after — a much quicker model succession than Apple has traditionally managed. In addition, Galaxy IV pre-orders were 446 percent higher than III, at least for some carriers, and iPhone trade-ins doubled in the month leading up to the IV’s launch.

In other words, the Galaxy S IV is a major competitive threat, and Apple needs to address it. Which makes the June-July timeframe credible, even if the actual launch date is not June 20.

The only question, really, is whether Apple is prepared to run a quarterback sneak and maybe, just maybe, release multiple iPhone models simultaneously for the first time. With one that is just a bit cheaper for emerging markets – the cheaper iPhone that is supposed to come out in the latter half of 2013.

Now that would be interesting.

photo credit: Mez Love via photopin cc

At least, on a whopping ten patents.

Google says it is “committed to promoting innovation” and that therefore, it is “pledging the free use of certain of its patents” used in both software and hardware products. Open systems eventually win, Google says, but open platforms like Android have faced increasing levels of attack via what Google calls “bogus patents” in the hands of Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle. Therefore, to protect innovation and everyone’s ability to deliver great products and services, Google says, it’s announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge.

But don’t take that to mean that Apple is now in the clear.

The ten lonely patents Google is starting with are not mobile patents, they aren’t focused on Android, and are therefore not in the most litigious arena of the current era which has seen Apple and Google proxy Samsung pitted in numerous patent infringement cases across the globe: smartphones. Don’t forget that Google-owned Motorola sued Apple with its 17,000-strong patent portfolio just last year in an attempt to ban the import of pretty much Apple’s entire product line: iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

Oh, and one more massive caveat? The project or product using Google’s patented technologies must be open source. Good luck with that one, Apple and Microsoft.

Still, it’s a start. And it’s a noble endeavor.

But it’s interesting, even odd, that Google chose to cite the Android-under-attack example, because right now, given the patents that Google has added to the pledge, what this is really about is open source software projects like Linux or Apache. The ten patents Google is pledging are all about data management, data analysis, and data processing. Which means that technologies like Hadoop (an open source technology for processing large amounts of data across multiple distributed servers) which will not now have to worry about stepping on Google’s patented toes when building in new capabilities.

And that’s all good and excellent.

But it’s not going to do anything for Android or to create patent peace between warring competitors like Apple and Samsung, or Apple and Google for that matter. To do that, the pledge would need to be broadened to closed-source products and tailored a little to be more comfortable to for-profit enterprises.

This is at least a start, and Google will add more patents to the pool over time.

But it’s also probably reflective of an internal Google ethos that not only believes that open systems win, but that in a world where open systems increasingly dominate, Google wins.

Here’s Google’s open patent non-assertion pledge:

Google promises to each person or entity that develops, distributes or uses Free or Open Source Software (a “Pledge Recipient”) that Google will not bring a lawsuit or other legal proceeding against a Pledge Recipient for patent infringement under any Pledged Patents based on the Pledge Recipient’s (i) development, manufacture, use, sale, offer for sale, lease, license, exportation, importation or distribution of any Free or Open Source Software, or (ii) internal-only use of Free or Open Software, either as obtained by Pledge Recipient or as modified by Pledge Recipient, in standalone form or combined with hardware or with any other software (“Internal-Only Use”). The preceding Pledge does not apply to any infringement of the Pledged Patents by hardware or by software that is not Free or Open Source Software, or by Free or Open Source Software combined with special purpose hardware or with software that is not Free or Open Source Software (except Internal-Only Use).

It is Google’s intent that the Pledge be legally binding, irrevocable (except as otherwise provided under “Defensive Termination” below) and enforceable against Google and entities controlled by Google, and their successors and assigns. Thus, Google will require any person or entity to whom it sells or transfers any of the Pledged Patents to agree, in writing, to abide by the Pledge and to place a similar requirement on any subsequent transferees to do the same.

The Pledge is not an assurance that any of the Pledged Patents cover any particular software or hardware or are enforceable, that the Pledged Patents are all patents that do or may cover any particular Free or Open Source Software, that any activities covered by the Pledge will not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of a third party, or that Google will add any other patents to the list of Pledged Patents. Except as expressly stated in the Pledge, no other rights are waived or granted by Google or received by a Pledge Recipient, whether by implication, estoppel, or otherwise.

photo credit: Cre8iveDoodles ~ Has been ill…Back Soon! via photopin cc

SellCell.com reports that iPhone trade-ins were up 194 percent in the month preceding last week’s Samsung Galaxy S IV launch, compared to the month before its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S III, was launched in 2012.

This is bad news for Apple, and it’s not just due to increased volume in the market either. Galaxy S III trade-ins actually declined in the same period, sagging 4.8 percent. And in the day following the S IV launch, iPhone trade-ins were up 42.2 precent compared to the already relatively high preceding two Fridays.

“Based on feedback from our partners and the news of several big product launches from HTC, BlackBerry and now Samsung, we get the feeling that the luster of the iPhone line for Apple fans may be waning a bit,” SellCell’s managing director Colin White said in a statement. “Our data bears this out as more people trade-in and search for iPhone quotes on the site than other product lines, an effect that we believe is from the introduction of new smartphones and features that iPhones don’t have.”

Apple occupies the entire top five spots in SellCell’s trade-in list right now, with the low-end iPhone 3G fetching only $40, while the much more recent iPhone 4 16GB brings in almost $190. And while iPhones, like Apple laptops and desktops, have traditionally held their value very well, Samsung devices are starting to do so as well.

“In particular, the growing, fierce rivalry between Samsung and Apple extends to the trade-in world as the GALAXY line of phones is beginning to hold value like the iPhone, which has traditionally been the best smartphone investment as it depreciates the least,” White said.

Although the Galaxy S IV price has not yet been revealed, SellCell has already assigned it a trade-in value of $550.

That new Android-based smartphone from the biggest phone manufacturer in the world with the big New York launch, the massive screen, and the 13-megapixel camera? Looks like it’s pre-selling like proverbial hotcakes.

Carphone Warehouse, a big UK mobile distributor, says the Samsung Galaxy S IV is pre-selling at more than four times the rate of its predecessor, the Galaxy S III. Which was already a best-ever launch for Carphone.

“The record breaking launch of the Galaxy SIII last year was always going to be a tough one to beat,” said Carphone Warehouse COO Graham Stapleton. “But Samsung have pulled out all the stops with a dazzling new device that’s sure to inspire many people to make the switch to Android from other operating systems.”

The phones aren’t scheduled to be available until April 26, and pricing hasn’t been announced yet. Even so, with pre-orders at 446 percent of S III levels, it looks like Samsung has impressed enough of the Android faithful to deliver another best-seller.

The SII sold 10 million units in its first two months and 30 million in five months, so beating those numbers won’t be easy. But Samsung did ship 57 million smartphones in Q3 last year as part of over 400 million phones shipped in all of 2012, so anything seems to be possible.

The question will be: Can Samsung top Apple’s iPhone 5, which was the top-selling phone in the last quarter of 2012?

Perhaps.

“We’re anticipating a massive amount of customer interest in this handset and are expecting our stores to be busier than at the height of the Christmas period,” Stapleton said. “We are planning to extend opening hours at our larger sites to cope with the increased demand.”

None of which changes my contention that the Samsung Galaxy S IV will mark the beginning of the end of Samsung’s smartphone dominance.

Smoked by Windows is Microsoft’s fun, social, and viral YouTube campaign targeting iPhone and Android users. But now it’s moving offline and going to network TV — ESPN and CBS — just in time for March Madness.

And Microsoft is taking specific aim at Samsung:

The ads feature Microsoft’s top Windows Phone marketing manager, Ben Rudolph, who told us that he has the best job in Microsoft when we chatted a couple of months ago. It’s his job as director of Windows Phone evangelism to convince hundreds of millions of Android and iPhone users to switch to Windows phone … and he’s pretty persuasive.

But this particular tactic won’t work for long — the new Samsung Galaxy S IV sports a 13-megapixel camera which is bound to be better than the S III’s eight megapixel effort. And likely to best the Nokia 920′s 8.7 megapixel camera too, in spite of the built-in image stabilization that does give the 920 great night-time photos.

It’s the 85-inch S9 UHD TV — official designation UN85S9 – a monster TV first unveiled at CES this January, and available for pre-order at Samsung.com in “late March.” Which would make it pretty bloody soon.

Samsung says the UN85S9 is not just big, it’s also good, with an extremely high contrast ratio (unreleased), deep blacks, and “vivacious whites.” I am not making this up. And in case you can’t access any of the world’s tiny library of ultra high-def content, Samsung says the TV upconverts high-def feeds to ultra high-def, also known as 4K.

The UN85S9 is thin for its size, and appears to float in its easel-like frame. Samsung has also equipped it with 120 watts of 2.2 sound, which it says is six times better than the average TV.

But this isn’t the biggest TV Samsung will release this year.

Samsung has not yet released pricing for the S9′s big brother, a 110″ monster. One can only assume that if the UN85S9 is in Mini Cooper territory, the big guy is in Mercedes territory.

Toshiba also announced an 85″ 4K TV at CES. Pricing and availability have not been released, however.

But massive globe-trotting success wasn’t instant: The SI sold 20 million, and the SII sold 28 million. It wasn’t until the SIII that the really big numbers came out — Samsung has sold 50 million as of March of this year.

And while I have my doubts about the long-term success of Samsung as it is veering away from a clean, true Android experience, there’s no doubt that the newly-released Galaxy S IV is going to be wildly successful as well in terms of units sold.

TopTienMobiel, a Dutch site, tracked the history of the Galaxies in visual form:

photo credit: thebadastronomer via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I’m going way out on a limb here, and cutting it off behind me.

But I have a theory. The more Samsung “adds value” to Android by customizing a version of it for the Galaxy line of phones, as it’s doing with its new Galaxy S IV, the more it will suck.

This is, of course, the company that sold 400 million freaking phones last year. And 57 million smartphones in just one quarter of 2012. Samsung seems, more than any other, to be the company that has shaved a few hundred billion off Apple’s share price.

But companies, like people, do best when they stick to what they’re good at. Better yet, what they’re great at.

And let me tell you, there’s no way that Samsung is great at machine language translation. And facial/eye recognition to drive smart document scrolling. And building app stores for hundreds of millions of global users. And tying Kinect-style hand gestures to phone functionality navigation. And building a personal health/self quantification system. And programming a voice-controlled smart personal assistant. And implementing a ticket-and-card aggregating Apple Passbook clone. And any of a thousand other software-based features Samsung is adding to its phones and laying at the pagan feet of the ruthless god called product differentiation.

No bloody way.

Not as good as Google, for the features that Google chooses to build, and are amenable to machine learning and improvement. Not as good as Fitbit or Up or other companies whose livelihood is self-quantification and health. Not as good as Kinect, or Leap Motion, which are focused on gesture control.

“Some of the features definitely didn’t seem to work all that well,” analyst Avi Greengart, who Samsung pre-briefed about its phone, told me today. “For the hover feature … you have pick the exact right distance from the screen for it to activate, and you select things you weren’t intending to select.”

Other features worked better, like a camera app that puts you in the picture while you take the picture, Greengart said, though he was most concerned about the sheer quantity of new features overwhelming consumers.

“A lot of it will drive people crazy,” he said. “But at the same time people will buy the phone so they can check it out.”

There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is that Samsung is not a software company, in much the same way that Intel, though it employs thousands of software engineers, is not a software company. Another is that ancillary features added by a company that is primarily focused on using those features to sell more of that product are seldom as good as the features created by companies that focus on those things exclusively.

But the big one is that Google is getting frightfully good at software. Partly because it learns a million times a minute as customers interact with its solutions, and data drives its decisions, but also partly because it gets mobile in a way that few other companies do. Google currently has five of the top six apps in North America on any platform.

Do you really think Samsung can build a better mobile user experience than Google?

I haven’t yet handled, played with, or slept beside a Galaxy S IV. But the early reviews on that cool eye-tracking technology that auto-scrolls documents for you? It works “better in theory than they did in practice,” according to CNet. And that neat gesture phone control technology? It seems to “work intermittently.”

ZDnet wonders if this is innovation or gimmicks, and Gizmodo hits the nail on the smartphone head:

Truthfully, there are too many modifications to go into, and most of them aren’t things you’ll ever use. Which is really the S IV’s biggest problem.

In other words, Samsung’s over-the-top Broadway launch for the Galaxy S IV might be the perfect metaphor for a phone that has everything you don’t need: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.

Now, we’re talking about unreleased hardware and software, and there are bound to be improvements before Samsung ships the Galaxy S IV to customers. But putting together a coherent, excellent operating system with well-integrated features is hard. Google went through multiple iterations before finally starting to get it really right perhaps a couple of years ago. Microsoft went through hell for years, trying to find its way in mobile operating systems.

Is it likely that Samsung, which is building on the Android foundation but chipping away at every piece of Google’s fingerprints it can while doing so, can get it right?

I think not.

“Look at the Samsung Galaxy S III,” ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen told me. “Everything that was good about the software came from Google, and everything that was annoying came from Samsung.”

Others that I’ve talked to agree, but still see a role for Samsung’s innovation.

“I agree that some of the software is buggy,” Rocky Agrawal, an analyst and mobile consultant who also writes for VentureBeat, told me. “If they would stick to the non-core things that they’re adding it could make sense … but to go in and mess up core stuff like keyboards and error correction, that’s just innovation for the sake of innovation. You should differentiate on things that matter.”

We have seen this movie before, during the 90s and 2000s, in a different industry: the PC market. Much as Android is to iOS what Windows was to Macintosh, Android vendors are to each other what HP was to Dell was to Compaq was to every other faceless PC manufacturer: a clone trying to be an individual.

And with every vendor trying to deliver unique value, a unique product, and a unique brand in a by-nature commoditized market, they get desperate. The result: software that adds a line item in the product comparison chart and a bullet point in the marketing blurb, but is really just crapware.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been that crapware vendor, sad to say, bundling a solution into HP’s, Asus’s, and even Intel’s offerings.

And my money’s on something similar happening here.

(Oh, and these user interface issues will be at the heart of our discussion at the Mobile Summit in Sausalito on April 1 and 2, where we’ve invited the mobile industry’s leading players. We’re hosting a wide cross-section of ecosystem from Google, Samsung, Facebook across the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, to Cisco, Intel and the major analytics folks, like Flurry — along with the top 60 or so publishers and disruptive private companies.)

photo credit: Great Beyond via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With the new Galaxy S4, Samsung is moving farther and farther away from Google. In fact, you have to wonder, will Samsung turn into the new Amazon?

Just look at the new Galaxy S IV, unveiled yesterday.

It has AirView to control your phone as if it was an Xbox and the camera was Kinect; facial recognition technology to pause video when you glance away or scroll a document based on your gaze; S Translator to translate text, as if there was no Google Translate; Galaxy S Voice Drive, which emulates Apple’s Siri; and if you want to get apps on your Samsung Android phone, Samsung’s pushing its own Hub app store, with nary a mention of Google Play.

The reality is that Samsung’s position as the premier Android device developer in the world gives it a ton of clout. And it seems to be using that power to ween users from Google.

We have seen this movie before.

Amazon almost certainly owns the Android tablet market, except its tablet doesn’t really run Android. Or, at least not the version of Android that Google produces. And, instead of connecting to Google services and the Google app store, Amazon’s Android products link into Amazon’s media ecosystem and Amazon’s private app store. Which is a brilliant if somewhat parasitic business model.

Samsung may very well be moving down this road.

The Korean company has made at least two attempts to create its own smartphone operating system: the now-abandoned Bada mobile OS, and Tizen, an effort with Intel to create a Linux-based OS for smartphones that is ongoing. But a simpler and cheaper solution might be the Amazon model: Accept the Android OS from Google with a smile and a nod, strip out as much Google as you can, load up as much proprietary software as you can, and ship, ship, ship.

Wham, bam, thank you ma’am!

“All signs are pointing to Samsung trying to pull off a Great OS Escape within the next year or two,” analyst Aapo Markkanen wrote this morning. “Doing it with an Android fork would be far too risky … so the hero’s role is now reserved for Tizen.”

That’s one reason, according to Google’s just-former Android head Andy Rubin, Google acquired Motorola: a hedge against any one Android partner getting too big, too powerful.

The big question now as we come off a year in which Samsung sold 400 million phones globally is this: Is that hedge big enough?

You can bet Google execs are asking that question. And you have have to start wondering when investors will start to factor that risk into Google stock, which is currently near a five-year high.

photo credit: Louish Pixel via photopin cc

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.

photo credit: My Daily Sublime via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In 2013, we’ll download 10 apps for every single woman, man, and child on planet Earth.

Half of those apps will be Android apps, which will have 58 percent smartphone app share, according to ABI Research, and 41 percent of those will be iOS apps. Apple’s iPhone will account for 33 percent of smartphone app downloads, ABI says, while the company’s iPad will take 75 percent of tablet app downloads. Windows Phone and tablet devices will account for the majority of the rest, with BlackBerry taking about a 2 percent share.

Add it all up, and about 35 billion Android apps will load to devices in 2013, plus another 29 billion iOS apps.

That is a lot of apps.

While Google’s Android is clearly doing well in smartphones, the future of its tablet aspirations is not yet as clear. Only 17 percent of tablet downloads in 2013 will be on Android tabs, ABI says, which compares poorly to iPad’s 75 percent tablet app share.

“The most pressing issue for Google is how much of this handset momentum will ultimately trickle down to tablets, where Apple is holding the fort remarkably well,” ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen said in a statement.

Source: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Jeff Bezos and the Kindle Fire

Interestingly, Markkanen says that Amazon, which is a major Google frenemy, might be helping Android the most in the tablet space, since its Kindle Fire is almost certainly the best-selling Android-based tablet on the market. The enemy part is that Amazon’s Android is a de-Google-ized version of Android which taps into Amazon’s content ecosystem, not Google’s.

The friend part is that since Kindle Fire is giving Android at least some degree of tablet momentum, app developers are more likely to build apps for Android-based tablets, which they can then sell on both Google and Amazon app stores.

But Google needs more Android tablet partners to do well if it wants Android’s share of app downloads to increase.

“The question is becoming, is there enough critical mass with Android partners, led by Samsung?” Jeff Orr, another ABI analyst told me over the phone. “And, are there going to be more vendors who can make a move and break away from the pack?”

Another big question: How will wearables affect the market?

Google is coming to market with Glass in 2013, the company has said, and it’s a perfect chisel to pry Apple fans out of the iOS ecosystem. But Apple is countering with iWatch, conceivably. Both will stimulate an explosion in apps designed either to work with them or on them.

“We’re certainly looking at wearables,” Orr said.

photo credit: schnaars via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The U.K. judge who ruled that Samsung’s tablets did not ape the iPad and forced Apple to apologize to Samsung on its website and in advertisements has been hired by Samsung to help it defend itself against patent infringement complaints by Ericsson.

This isn’t illegal, apparently, but it is a bit of a shake-your-head moment.

FOSS Patents uncovered Sir Robin Jacob’s new gig in documents relating to the new Erisson-Samsung case. One positive: He’s not working on projects — that we know of — that affect Apple. But it’s obviously something that has massive potential for conflict of interest if judges who make rulings affecting companies start getting hired by those very same companies.

Sir Robin was one of the judges that forced Apple to acknowledge publicly on its website that Samsung’s tablet was not a copy of the iPad. When Apple did not comply satisfactorily, he and two other judges then admonished Apple for doing it in confusing, roundabout legalese, and they also told Apple to place ads in U.K. newspapers (how antique!) with a similar message.

Interestingly, Sir Robin had publicly criticized Apple for what he thought was a lack of integrity, adding that he hoped “that the lack of integrity involved in this incident is entirely atypical of Apple.”

I’m fairly sure most companies and people hope that the possible conflict of interest implicit in this judge’s new job is entirely atypical of U.K. jurisprudence.

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mary-Ann Parlato is Global Insight Director for Kantar Worldpanel ComTech

With some 70,000 visitors in Barcelona this week for the Mobile World Congress, the tone is being set for the next phase of the dynamic mobile telecommunications industry.

This is coming at a particularly pivotal time in its history as mobile technologies dominate digital communications worldwide and platforms, and operating systems are locked in ever intensifying competition.

Against this backdrop, some important trends are emerging.

Connecting with the next billion consumers

With smartphone usage globally growing exponentially, manufacturers are focusing on expansion to the next generation of consumers. The tagline “connecting the next billion consumers,” is almost an official theme for the gathering. Key brands driving this trend this year are Huawei, Nokia, ZTE, and Firefox.

The Huawei and ZTE brands are showcasing a multitude of products across the entire spectrum of low to high end. One new entrant in particular is generating intense interest: ZTE Open with Firefox.

Firefox OS offers a user friendly interface that provides a few unique functionalities, such as the ability to create your own apps from online searches. These devices will be extremely useful for low end consumers in developing markets.

Smartphone penetration is currently low in these markets due to the expense of current smartphone products and tariffs. Yet many in the market have proved a desire to use an OS as ownership of “smartphone lookalikes” has increased over time. These devices have the benefit of looking like a smartphone, yet only include a few advanced features such as messaging, without any OS. These handsets and plans are generally lower in price and thus more affordable for the low end consumer in these markets.

The availability of more OS brands and devices will lead to fierce competition and ultimately provide consumers in these markets with affordable smartphone options for the very first time.

It’s not the OS, it’s the form factor that matters

In many booths, companies’ product showcasing and pitching seemed to stop at the point of physical inspection. This is thanks to the expansion and perceived equivalence of key operating systems dominating most of the new devices at MWC.

Now, differentiation surrounds the physical product — the materials, the size, the look and in particular, the feel. In other words, like the pre-smartphone era, the manufacturer brand’s physical product is of key focus moving forward.

For a consumer deciding to purchase, a physical trial of the product is important. Kantar Worldpanel ComTech latest US data shows that 24 percent of consumers that considered the purchase of a smartphone in December 2012 wanted to test the phone themselves. This is in fact the most influential source in considering a new smartphone, followed by a promotional offer at 15 percent, and the in-store display at 14 percent.

Fablets, the physically larger flagship devices, were an interesting range of products at the show. Smartphones with a 5″ or larger screen were prominent across the show, from Huawei’s Ascend Mate to ZTE’s GRAND Memo. Five inch screen flagships are almost becoming the norm from what one can see at MWC.

Category 4 connectivity & BYOD

“Ultrafast” connectivity was the tagline at Huawei’s stand.

New devices’ — think Ascend P2 and P1 — major selling point was the LTE category 4 connectivity which delivers up to 150 Mbps download speeds. Kantar Worldpanel ComTech data showcases that connectivity is important to consumers, ranking in the top five reasons why consumers are either satisfied or dissatisfied with their current phone.

While consumers are satisfied with current functionalities such as the camera and internet browsing, only 26 percent of current smartphone owners say they are satisfied with their connectivity.

Another particular roll out to notice was Samsung’s new KNOX system. This BYOD system from Samsung will be aimed at the enterprise market, providing consumers with the ability to have their personal and business phone all in one and will be available on key Galaxy devices later this year in the UK. Kantar Worldpanel ComTech US data shows that of those who bought a smartphone for themselves in January, eight percent have their company paying for their calls.

This shows that BYOD approaches are currently being utilized across businesses and are likely to continue.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech USA maintains the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel of its kind in the world, conducting more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone. ComTech tracks mobile phone behavior and the customer journey, including purchasing of phones, mobile phone bills/airtime, and source of purchase and phone usage. 

photo credit: LGEPR via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Seventy-seven percent of all new smartphones and tablets activated in the enterprise last quarter were Apple devices, according to a new report from Good Technology.

The most popular device was Apple’s new iPhone 5, with 32 percent of all activations. The top five devices activated also included the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPad 3, and iPad2. Out of the top 10, eight were Apple devices, including the iPad 4, the aged iPad 1, and the equally venerable iPhone 3GS.

Essentially, it’s utter enterprise domination by Apple’s iOS:

Source: Good Technologies

Top 10 devices activated in the enterprise: Q4 2012

Android’s first foray into the enterprise comes at number six, with the Samsung Galaxy S III, and its only other contestant is the S III’s baby brother, the Galaxy S II, which clocks in at number 10. iOS activations were up 8.5 percent year-over-year.

Good Technologies offers solution for secure collaboration, communication, and data. With 4,000 enterprise customers and half of the Fortune 500 in its stable, it has fairly good insight into what the enterprise is doing in mobility.

One place Android is gaining somewhat? Tablets.

“Between Q1 and the end of Q4 2012, Android tablet activations jumped from 2.7 percent to nearly 7 percent of total activations,” Good says in its report, attributing the spike in part to the rise of fablets: hybrid phone-tablet devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note.

Source: Good Technologies

Tablet activations in the enterprise: Q4 2012

Windows reigns, of course, on the enterprise desktop, but it is a marginal, niche player so far in enterprise mobility. Only .5 percent of enterprise device activations in the fourth quarter were Windows phones or tablets. That may, of course, change as Windows 8 edges into the enterprise and CIOs look at the potential benefits of a more unified desktop-mobile operating system environment.

Source: Good Technologies

Q4 2012 activations by device type

One interesting note: The business sector that is driving down Apple’s stock valuation is the same industry that is purchasing the most of Apple’s products. According to Good Technologies, between 30 percent and 36 percent of all iPads activated in enterprise where purchased by the financial services industry. The next closest sector is business and professional services, at under 20 percent.

Curious, no?

Source: Good Technologies

iPad activations by industry

photo credit: papalars 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

“With Apple and Samsung in an epic battle over smartphone supremacy, the biggest issue that no one talks about is overall reliability,” FixYa CEO Yaniv Bensadon told me via email.

FixYa’s smartphone reliability report says that Samsung smartphone owners have consistent issues with microphone and speaker quality — plus battery life problems, particularly with the Nexus line. According to the report, Nokia users say their phones are laggy and have a poor app ecosystem — this is not a shock — and Motorola customers say their phones have too much pre-installed crapware, poor quality touchscreens, and bad cameras.

How did FixYa arrive at these conclusions?

The product Q&A site took 722,558 troubleshooting requests posted by smartphone owners to its site and analyzed the data to see what issues were reported most for each manufacturer. Then FixYa normalized the data for relative market share — as defined by Statcounter.org — and derived a Smartphone Reliability Score.

The upshot? Apple wins, big time, and it’s not even close:

1. Apple: 3.47
   26 percent market share, 74,163 problem impressions
2. Samsung: 1.21
   23 percent market share, 187,520 problem impressions
3. Nokia: 0.68
   22 percent market share, 324,439 problem impressions
4. Morotola: 0.13
   1.8 percent market share, 136,436 problem impressions

“Our newest FixYa report looks at lines like the iPhone, Galaxy, or Lumia,” Bensadon said in a statement. “The result is a scaled approach to fairly compare these top companies to truly see who is the most reliable, and who is barely even competing.”

FixYa also provided data on the most common problems for each smartphone manufacturer. Browse that data in the gallery below:

One big question I had was on the market share data … it’s not U.S. market share, certainly, where Apple had 53 percent market share last quarter. When I checked with a company representative, he said the data provided by Statcounter was for global market share.

It’s worth noting that Statcounter’s numbers differ somewhat from other reports we’ve seen.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

According to screenshots unearthed by SlashGear from a Korean messageboard, Samsung appears to be building a smart watch, probably but not certainly on an Android foundation:

Meanwhile, Apple — the company that supposedly HATES leaks — has been “leaking” like a sieve for weeks about a rumored iWatch. Do you think the timing is a coincidence?

Bloomberg published what is almost certainly nonsense: 100 product designers working on a wristwatch-like device (does Apple do anything in teams of a hundred?), the venerable New York Times said that Apple is making a Dick Tracy-like watch, and the Wall Street Journal said that Apple has already talked to manufacturing partners.

Anyone who has covered Apple for any length of time knows that rumors don’t just pop up in those sources naturally. Apple rumors start in odd, out-of-the-way Asian tech blogs, or dedicated Apple rumors sites.

So rumors appearing in the august tomes of the WSJ, NYT, and Bloomberg mean Apple wants us to think an iWatch is coming and is quietly feeding rumors to plant stories it wants to see in the press. Which either provides great pre-buzz for that product when Apple releases it, or  – and probably more likely — pre-seeds excitement and interest around a product that is something like an iWatch but not quite … something that clearly, with a quick dose of gen-u-wine Apple Mixture No. 1 Reality Distortion Field, is instantly and obviously better.

On the the Samsung side, a smart watch, if real, is potentially a massive seller and another brick in Samsung’s growing wall of innovation. There’s also obvious profit appeal: Crowdfunded company Pebble sold out of its watches and raised over $10 million, and other crowdfunded watches have also done spectacularly well – and it’s relatively fresh territory to claim and commercialize. Plus, it would be a major feather in the company’s cap to beat Apple.

So Apple has a reason to counter that move by pre-releasing we-were-first hype.

Realistically, many things could be happening here. Apple and Samsung could both be working on smart watches, and neither could be, and all combinations in between. Samsung could have seen the speculation about iWatch and decided to head it off at the pass by pre-releasing a product in true Asian-style super-speed to market. Apple could have found out about Samsung’s project and decided to do exactly the same, except via the press. Any which way, I hope what we get out of this is more than just a watch, and not a Dick Tracy toy.

My guess?

Whatever iWatch actually is, it’s the Apple answer to the incessant calls from Wall Street for a cheaper iPhone. Because when Apple gets calls for cheaper, it starts to think different instead.

iPod becomes the screenless iPod Shuffle. MacBook becomes iPad, as Tim Cook said this week to the bow-tied stock-breaking classes. iPhone becomes … iWatch?

One thing is clear, however:

Even if both Samsung and Apple are working on an iWatch-like product, they are not the innovators in this space. That title, and that honor, belongs to the tiny groups of dedicated people like the Pebble team that have been building the future of wrist technology on a crowdfunded shoestring.

Image credits: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio, Samsung smartwatch images via SlashGear

Both phones are incredibly hot sellers, of course, and that’s driving tremendous usage growth as well

“Both iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S III have doubled web traffic share since October,” an analyst from advertising and analytics company Chitika said.

But with its many other devices, Samsung has held a commanding sales lead over Apple for quite some time, selling almost 400 million phones in 2012 to Apple’s 136 million. In turn, Apple has held a commanding lead in web usage share: people actually using its devices to  surf the mobile web.

Now, even though Apple led fourth quarter smartphone sales in the U.S., that’s starting to change.

The iPhone 5 still has a small lead on the Galaxy S III, with 6.6 percent of mobile web share to the Samsung device’s 6.4 percent, but that’s shrinking, according to the latest study from Chitika.

And so is Apple’s overall lead.

Devices from both companies generate over 60 percent of all smartphone web traffic in North America, and Apple’s share has dropped slightly from 46 percent in October to 41.5 percent in February. Meanwhile, Samsung’s has bumped up from 17 percent to 20.6 percent.

Why?

When I talked to Chitika’s Gabriel Donnini about the last study, he said that it was a factor of both who was using those phones and the user-friendliness of the devices. In other words: Android users skewed older, and Android wasn’t as user-friendly as iPhone. But the changes in the current numbers seem to indicate that those differences are disappearing, and that Samsung’s global sales lead is having an effect on smartphone web use share.

I asked the company if they could identify whether that was caused by more S III devices being on the market, or by existing S III owners using them more to surf the web, but the company does not track individual users and so does not collect that data.

photo credit: samsungtomorrow via photopin cc