Linked List: January 31, 2011

Monday, 31 January 2011

The iPhone’s Share: 17.25 Percent of Smartphones, 4.2 Percent of All Phones ★

Horace Dediu:

The iPhone ended the quarter with 17.25% smartphone share and 4.2% phone share. Share of revenues was about 22% and share of earnings was about 51%.

I still hold that 20% smartphone share is possible for the iPhone. As the smartphone market slowly becomes the entire phone market that share will be worth something.

Can Apple dominate — or at least co-dominate — the mobile market with 20 percent share of smartphones sold? The answer may depend on whether the remainder of the market is split between several winners, or if Android winds up with a giant 60 or 70 percent share. But maybe Android’s growing market share lead won’t matter to Apple any more than Symbian’s previous (and fading fast) market share lead. How important is “smartphone” market share compared to overall mobile OS market share (counting things like the iPod Touch and iPad)? I don’t think the answers to these questions are clear.

Here is Dediu’s fourth quarter mobile phone industry overview. Apple made a majority of the industry’s profits selling just over 4 percent of the phones.

Canalys: ‘Google’s Android Becomes the World’s Leading Smart Phone Platform’ ★

The iPhone doubled, but the year-over-year growth for Android is just astronomical. According to these numbers from Canalys, the iPhone doubled in terms of shipments year-over-year, but dropped slightly (one-third of a percentage) in overall smartphone market share. RIM’s shipments are up, Nokia’s shipments are up, but the only OS with year-over-year smartphone market share gain is Android.

This is only for phones — so the numbers for last quarter don’t include 10 million iPod Touches and 7 million iPads — but still, Android’s growth is amazing.

Many Macworld Attendees Don’t Have a Smartphone ★

Leander Kahney:

Here’s a surprising statistic from Macworld 2011: about 40% of show goers don’t have a smartphone.

That was the number given to me at a meetup on the show’s last night. It was from someone who ran a competition all week in one of the booths. To win a prize, entrants had to download an app to their smartphone — and about 40% didn’t have a device that could download apps.

“I was really surprised,” said the source, who asked that neither she nor her company be identified. “Especially in a city like San Francisco and at a show like Macworld.”

That does seem high, but I think the obvious answer is that smartphone monthly plans simply cost too much. And Android isn’t any cheaper than the iPhone in this regard.

Update: Another theory, submitted by several readers: Many of these attendees did have iPhones (or other smartphones), but claimed not to because they didn’t want this company’s app.

Why Is Dropbox More Popular Than Other Tools With Similar Functionality? ★

Michael Wolfe, on Quora:

Well, let’s take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

There would be a folder.

You’d put your stuff in it.

It would sync.

They built that.

Yup.

iPad’s Future Prospects for Tablet Market Share ★

Bloomberg:

A wider range of cheaper devices with Google features like YouTube and Google Maps will probably erode the iPad’s market dominance, said Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics. Its share of the global tablet market will probably drop to 67 percent this quarter, he said.

We now know this is factually wrong. Those numbers are based on Samsung’s claims of two million “sold” units, when in fact they only shipped two million units to retailers. Samsung has not revealed how many Galaxy Tabs have actually been sold.

The cheapest version of the iPad, which only has Wi-Fi connectivity and 16 gigabytes of memory, costs $499 in the U.S. Acer plans to introduce an Android powered tablet in April that will likely sell for as little as $299, Jim Wong, Acer’s head of information-technology products, said in November.

“Apple’s volumes will continue to go up, but market share will inevitably go down,” Mawston said in an interview. “Even at $500 retail, based on some of the research we’ve done, that’s probably two or three times more than what most mass market consumers are expecting to pay.”

This assumes that Apple won’t push toward lower prices. That’s a bad assumption. Apple has kept the iPod on top of the music player market for a decade by lowering pricing.

“If you were to ask me in two years time, will Apple have less than 50 percent of the global tablet market, I think that’s a certainty,” Mawston said.

A certainty, eh?

It’s also worth pointing out that Neil Mawston is the same analyst who, back in June, declared that the iPhone’s “honeymoon period is over”:

“The honeymoon period for Apple in the mobile world is clearly coming to an end,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston wrote. “Apple was criticized for its intensive production methods in China, while the iPhone has been heavily criticized for its poorly designed touchable antenna, and may have lost some heartshare in recent weeks because of its perceived mishandling of the antenna problem.”

The iPhone 4 is now the best-selling handset in the entire world.

Eric Raymond Analyzes the Smartphone Market ★

Eric Raymond:

First: We can expect Verizon’s iPhone sales to be anemic. A bit of arithmetic applied to this chart tells us Verizon has been churning about 93M * 1.42% * 3 = 396K customers a quarter — about the same as that deadly 400K. The smart way to bet is that most of Verizon’s potential Apple customers decamped to AT&T long ago and are part of that 90% saturation.

Well, that’s one opinion.

Intel Discovers Bug in 6-Series Chipset ★

AnandTech:

The fix requires new hardware, which means you will have to exchange your motherboard for a new one. Intel hasn’t posted any instructions on how the recall will be handled other than to contact Intel via its support page or contact the manufacturer of your hardware directly. In speaking with motherboard manufacturers it seems they are as surprised by this as I am.

Intel will begin shipping the fixed version of the chipset in late February. The recall will reduce Intel’s revenue by around $300 million and cost around $700 million to completely repair and replace affected systems.

Hardware bugs are expensive.

The Hilarious Everything Bagel ★

Kottke at his best.

Windows Mobile 6 Beats Windows Phone 7 in Initial Quarter ★

Todd Bishop:

In a surprise twist, smartphones running Microsoft’s old mobile operating system grabbed more market share than new Windows Phone 7 devices did in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, according to data released by the NPD Group research firm this morning. Devices running the legacy Windows Mobile registered 4 percent of the U.S. consumer market in the quarter, down from 7 percent a year earlier. Windows Phone 7 debuted at 2 percent.

Windows Phone 7 devices weren’t available all quarter long, and they still aren’t on Verizon, but this is bad news for Microsoft.

John Barry, RIP ★

Barry scored, composed, and conducted the music for most of the early James Bond films. It’s impossible to imagine James Bond without Barry’s music, but apparently it almost happened:

Shortly after this Barry would receive the fateful phone call from Bond producer Harry Saltzman. “I got a phone call from Harry,” recalled Barry in a 2006 article in the Telegraph. “He never used to come down to the recording sessions, and he says: ‘John, that is the worst fucking song I ever heard in my life. We open in three weeks’ time, otherwise I’d take that fucking song out of the picture. I’d take it out! Out!’”

Some great examples of his Bond work, here.

‘1984’: As Good as It Gets ★

Steve Hayden, writing for Adweek:

The brief for “1984” was simple: Steve Jobs said, “I want to stop the world in its tracks.”

Samsung Galaxy Tab Sales Actually ‘Quite Small’ ★

Evan Ramstad, reporting for the WSJ:

In early December, Samsung announced it had sold 1 million, declaring that sales were going “faster than expected.” Then, in early January, Samsung announced sales of 2 million.

But during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Friday, a Samsung executive revealed those figures don’t represent actual sales to consumers. Instead, they are the number of Galaxy Tab devices that Samsung has shipped to wireless companies and retailers around the world since product’s formal introduction in late September.

Pressed by an analyst at an investment bank, the Samsung executive, Lee Young-hee, acknowledged that sales to consumers were “quite small,” though she didn’t give a specific number.

I’ve never seen a Galaxy Tab out in the real world. I see dozens of iPads — and Kindles — every time I get on an airplane. This whole issue of companies announcing how many units they’ve merely shipped to retailers as “sold” is pernicious. Almost everyone, myself included, took Samsung’s previous announcements the wrong way.

Claim Chowder: Bloomberg on the Verizon iPhone ★

Amy Thomson, reporting for Bloomberg way back on June 29:

Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile-phone company, will start selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone next year, ending AT&T Inc.’s exclusive hold on the smartphone in the U.S., two people familiar with the plans said.

The device will be available to customers in January, according to the people, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public.

Off by a week, but I award full credit. Bloomberg nailed it.

Microsoft Loses Another $543 Million Online ★

Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova:

Every quarter Microsoft reports earnings, and every quarter it reports a massive loss in its online operations. Today it reported a $543 million loss for its December quarter. This gives Microsoft a trailing-four-quarter loss of $2.5 billion. That’s simply astounding. We’ve asked it before, and we’ll ask it again: Has any company lost as much money online as Microsoft?

Just keep digging.