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Android Phone Demand Up 250%, iPhone Down
CWmike writes "A 'monstrous' jump in demand for Android-equipped smartphones has turned the market upside down, according to a retail pollster. Of the people who told ChangeWave Research in a mid-December survey that they planned to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, 21% said they expected to purchase an Android phone. That number represented a 250% increase over the 6% that pegged Android as their mobile OS of choice when ChangeWave last queried consumers' plans in September. 'That change rivals anything that we've seen in the last three years of the smartphone market,' said Paul Carton, ChangeWave's director of research, adding that the sudden surge in consumer interest in Android had 'roiled' the market. 'This is an indication that Android has finally caught consumer interest,' added Carton, who cited the recent advertising campaign for the Motorola Droid smartphone as the reason why interest in Android has skyrocketed. Android's leap translated into good news for Motorola and HTC, the most prominent makers of Google-powered handsets, with the former reaping most of the benefit. Motorola's share of smartphone purchases in the next 90 days shot up from 1% in September to 13% in December. Carton tagged the company's Droid as the reason. '[It's] the first increase for Motorola we've seen in three years,' Carton said." Here is the ChangeWave report.
Yes... share growth is a useless metric for a new offering. Whats 350% of nothing? Still nothing. How about giving us the market share instead.
That must mean Android sales skyrocketed from 2 to 7 users! :D
On a more serious note: I love Google products, if only they'd market them better they'd be at the top with the iPhone easily.
The survey could mean lots of things without this bit of confirmation data. Sales are going in the same direction as the survey.
Home of The Suki Series
Notice that this wasn't a report of 250% sales growth... it was a report of 250% increase in a poll asking "What cell phone do you PLAN to buy?"... not quite the same thing.
The number that changed a lot was people who were planning to buy a new smartphone in the next 90 days. Of these, 21% said they prefer a phone running Android. (That's up from 6% in September.) 28% said they prefer an iPhone, down from 32% in September. Windows Mobile and Palm's percentages also shrank over the last 3 months.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Googles market model is better. Multiple phone designs on any carrier that will have them. It's really that simple. The design of the OS is better than iPhones competitors. Though, I do think the application openness is going to bite them in butt over the long term. Allowing background applications from any provider looks good on paper, but in practice is going to create a bot network.
If Apple went with all carriers who wanted them and released a handful of branded designs, it's sales would soar.
Burn Hollywood Burn
"Desire for half-decent non-AT&T smartphone is less saturated than desire for AT&T iPhone by those who haven't already got one."
I think this finding is more related to that fact that the only half-decent smartphone is currently limited to iPhone on AT&T. (Sorry Blackberry/Palm/HTC---no lightsaber app means that you're less than half decent B-)
Imagine that! Competition works! If regulators would only get that through their heads...with enough time, consumers will win in the end as a result of competition.
Maybe Apple will finally get it through their heads and open up the iPhone for real development; doubt it though...
I have a Macbook, Mac Mini and an iPod Touch, and I opted for a Droid. I think the #1 reason I went with the Droid was because it wasn't AT&T. But a close second was the fact that music was drag and drop and that it could run background apps. Overall, I am really please with the purchase. Ordered the multimedia dock today, so I can use it as an alarm clock.
I personally own an iPhone, and I like it.. despite the drawbacks. But I'm considering an Android phone next for some of the above reasons myself. I will weigh the pros and cons carefully and decide at the time -- if Polled, right now I might say that I'd get an Android phone next, if just because the idea is more appealing to me. This could be partly why interest in the iPhone is *potentially* waning... people see there are alternatives out there.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
My Verizon contract was up, and my family needed new phones. We ended up with 4 Android phones, 3 HTC Eris's, and a Droid. Verizon sold a LOAD of them over the holiday season, mostly due to rebates and discounts. The 4 phones, normally over $600 even with a contract, ended up costing me $200.
The first reseller we went to (after they were very helpful during our selection process) had run out by the week before Christmas, and had to send us to a Verizon store. They had plenty, and they were going out the door fast.
Creative Zii runs also under Android AFAIK, as do some Archos devices.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I don't want to have to remember to bring a charger when I visit the in-laws for the weekend or travel for a meeting. Unless I'm going somewhere for >4 days I can leave the charger at home.
I often wondered what was so special about the iPhone. I have never got a satisfying answer.
The ability to see all of your voice mails without having to listen to them sequentially. You have a list, you can listen to any of them in any order. And you don't have to listen to them at all and still be able to delete them. - you can't do that with other services. That is why Apple is exclusive to ATT because the other carriers refused to do the necessary things to their systems to allow for that.
Some folks think that's worth the extra cost. Then there are the "it's a cool gadget" crowd who buy anything at any price - especially if it's made by Apple. BTW - the iPhone is made in China, Software designed and coded in India. Apple is just a design and marketing company now.
I sleep 6-8 hours a day and rarely use my iPhone while doing so. Like many clock radio these days, I got mine with an iPod/iPhone dock that charges it and/or plays music from it and it's sitting by my bed. It's really not that hard considering the utility it provides.
E pluribus unum
FWIW -- I've never had a phone battery last 4 days if the phone was in use at all. Not a chocolate bar, Nokia anything, RAZR, or Palm Treo.
"I feel a great disturbance in the Jobs, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly cut off."
Good finds!
Imagine that! Competition works!
I hear that's why the US has such fast internet and cheap, reliable telephony service, both with excellent customer service of course, especially compared to the EU and Japan.
</sarcasm>
Sorry if I'm pushing it here. It's just striking to hear about the abuse US ISP and telecomms customers (apparently) have to put up with, compared to what I experience in Denmark.
On the other hand, your government isn't doing much better than failing markets. For instance, take a listen to a recent EconTalk episode about market failures and government failures at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/12/winston_on_mark.html
In summary: it's the lobbyists.
If I recall correctly, the guest, Winston, only looked at government failure in the US. Extrapolating from there to government failure in general might be a wee bit hasty.
The really provocative statement would be that right-wingers don't get that government intervention is the right solution in theory, what left-wingers don't get is that it rarely works in practice, and the elephant in the room nobody is doing anything about is that the lobbyists screw up The Right Thing, making it Not The Right Thing, and so nothing works (as well as it could).
Probably, because that's what "demand" implies?
Maybe, but while opinion surveys can be interesting, they aren't very good indicators of actual behavior. If I asked 4,000 people whether they planned to buy a second Bible in the next 90 days -- for their children -- I bet a lot of people would answer yes. How many of them would actually go out and do it?
Part of "demand" in the economics sense is not just wanting something, but willingness to pay for something. It doesn't matter what people say; if nobody is actually buying a product, there's no demand.
It's also extremely important to understand the sampling method in a study like this (which is probably why so many of them neglect to discuss their methods). Where did the people surveyed come from? How was the sample selected? At random? How random? From the phone book? From a Web site? Were the participants self-selecting (i.e. you're only surveying people who were demonstrably interested to begin with)? Obtaining a representative statistical sample may not be a "science," as such, but it's darn close.
There are also such things as leading questions. What if the question on this survey wasn't phrased the way it's stated in the report? What if they just asked, "Who is your preferred smartphone operating system vendor: Apple, RIM, Symbian, Microsoft, or Google?" Apple fans would immediately say Apple; everybody else would say Google. The typical consumer doesn't realize that when you're asking them if they want a smartphone with a RIM OS, what you're really asking them is whether they want a BlackBerry. (And judging from my own, purely anecdotal survey -- looking around me when I'm waiting in line for something -- a lot of people do want one.)
Some people also answer "yes" to surveys because they're secretly hoping they will get something for free. Sometimes it's not so secret; what if everybody who participated in this survey got a $20 off coupon for any smartphone they wanted from Verizon. Which phone would they be thinking about while they did the survey?
They say "lies, damn lies, and statistics" because it's easy to make numbers say pretty much anything you want -- especially if you aren't sticking to sound statistical principles. In my experience, fly-by-night marketing firms seldom do. It doesn't pay the bills.
Breakfast served all day!
If you're not on top of the game before mainstream rags like Money start to cover the topic than you're already too late.
The deal with catching the wave of any technology is to be at your best as the wave starts to happen, to already be where the action is as it happens, not to look at it from the beach once it's already happening (read: nearly over) and wish you'd had grabbed your board and gave it a go.
Sorry guy, or guy's friend, you have to put in your hours before the market knows that what you're doings is a market. There is no fast path to success if you're building your own merchandise.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The phone part of the iPhone is it's least appealing part. What makes the iPhone amazing is that it is a fully featured small computer with a ton of low-cost apps. I recently went to a trip to Budapest, Hungary. I downloaded apps which included an offline map of the city (so no data use), maps of the metro system, and an audio tourist guide. It was like having my own personal tourist guide. When back at the hotel I used Skype over wifi to call home cheap. Sure beat having a big clunky book + large foldout map that screamed "tourist please rob me". When the android has the apps the iPhone does, I will consider it.
Huh? iPhone and Mac software is developed in Cupertino which last I heard is in California. If you don't believe me go to http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/corporate.html#software and see the locations of the job postings. Notice the large number are in Santa Clara Valley. Maybe in 2012 there will be a cataclysmic earth quake and we at apple will find ourselves in a new home.
Look more closely. I'm starting to see more Heros, myTouches, and DROIDs out there. The catch is that they don't stand out nor are they all the same shape like the iPhone is.
What I don't see much of are Windows Mobile devices. For as popular as WinMo fans make them out to be, they either don't stand out at all, are heavily masked by HTC and the like, or really aren't that common. Maybe a combination of those.
The 250% increase is in "demand," not sales or market share. That is, how many people planning on buying a phone soon are planning on Android? This statistic is unrelated to market share, and is perfectly valid for both old and new offerings.
From the article, 21% were going for an Android phone, compared to 28% for the iPhone.
For a brand new product vs an iconic powerhouse, that is little short of amazing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not as of a few days ago. Chrome passed Safari in browser market share, according to digitaltrends.com.
Remember, that's a beta Google product vs Apple's flagship browser.
Safari isn't even the browser of choice for Mac users, for chrissake.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because it makes you feel happy. So much of what a human is revolves around feeling, that if you ignore it, you are going to miss a lot.
A perfect example of how feeling trumps logic is your assertion that charging daily takes a lot of time and attention. In fact it only takes 30 seconds of attention in the evening to plug your phone in, it is not something that should logically seem like a problem, and yet somehow it has created this loathing inside of you. That doesn't make any sense at all, and yet it is real (note: this doesn't apply if you actually use your phone so much that you have to charge it three times a day, but that isn't a problem for typical users, the type you were referring to).
Qxe4
Some of the answers are obvious; I'm not sure what's unsatisfying about them. It works well. It's not complicated to set up. It's functional as an iPod, which lots of people already owned. The web browser renders pages normally, the way a desktop computer would. It's mail application connects to mail servers normally, the way a desktop application would. "Visual voicemail" works the way voicemail should work-- no more "if you would like to listen to this message, please press 1". Apple proved that a touchscreen can work on a phone if it's executed properly. If you own a Mac and use iTunes already, then the phone will integrate extraordinarily well with your system in a convenient way. The iPhone had 8GB of storage built in for audio and video when most phones came with something more like 32 megs of internal storage. Apple managed to get a large set of developers to produce applications for their phone. The interface is simple and elegant, pretty, and responsive.
Android's success doesn't surprise me either. In a lot of ways, I think it's a validation of Apple's approach, and it proves that Apple's success wasn't simply based on hype and trendiness. The Android phones that are now enjoying success actually resemble the iPhone much more than any of the pre-iPhone smartphones. Look at the iPhone and the Motorola Q, and ask yourself which smartphone the Droid has more in common with. Apple was successful because they made a well designed product. Now Motorola is enjoying success because they've made a well designed product.
The only downside is many of the manufactures now violate the GPLv2 copyright either by refusing to release the kernel sources or dragging their feet for months... For example HTC keeps violating the GPL with their phones... go ask HTC specifically for the Kernel (not the Android software) for their CDMA phones and they'll either point you to the GSM version of the kernel, claim that their kernel modifications fall under the Apache license, are proprietary or claim that Sprint and/or Verizon have to release it.
I take it you didn't read the part about 6% of people polled wanting an Android smartphone to 21% of people polled wanting an Android smartphone.
6 * 3.5 = 21.
(remember, a 250% increase represents 3.5 times as much as the previous number)
:(){
I often wondered what was so special about the iPhone. I have never got a satisfying answer.
If you're saying the iPhone isn't appealing to you, great. Fine. Whatever. Have some free mod points from people who agree with you.
If you're saying you don't understand people-- if you're saying you honestly try to put yourself in other folks' shoes, try to empathize with them, try to see why they love what they love, but you just can't-- well, congratulations, you're a geek. You've come to the right place.
Wow, so demand for a phone that has sold tens of millions of units in the 2.5 years it's been out is leveling off, and demand for a newer phone that has sold far fewer units is growing? Stop the presses!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
When the market for the iPhone is saturated, then of course it's market share will drop when some new do-dad comes out.
Except the market for the iPhone is not really saturated. It's the market for the iPhone on AT&T's network that's saturated. I bet nearly everyone reading this post knows at least one person who drools over the iPhone but would sooner take a hot poker in the eye than switch to AT&T to get it.
When Apple opens up the iPhone to other carriers in the US, iPhone adoption will skyrocket due to that pent-up demand. And they are definitely going to open it up to other carriers as soon as the latest exclusivity agreement expires-- because AT&T has dragged them down long enough, and because other carriers will give Apple what they want, now that they have seen the success it brought to AT&T despite their sub-par network.
~Philly
Windows Mobile is on history's exit ramp.
Couldn't this be all of us poor saps who aren't on AT&T (in the US, of course) finally getting a shot at picking up a nice smartphone that's not a Blackberry? Think about all the people who want iPhone like functionality, but don't want to switch to AT&T. There's plenty of them, and this is probably them finally having their day. No other smartphone, has come close to the iPhone in terms of hype-crazed-madness for the phone like the revised android platform. That's not to say there aren't other good smartphone platforms out there (Palm, RIM, whatever the hell else people use these days), I think these are just skewed numbers from non AT&T customers finally pouncing on a cool set of phones.
I would have answered YES to an android in December. Now, the answer would be NO. Not unless I can replace all the Google apps with something else.
What changed my mind? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google..
This is the same guy who had Google blackball CNET after they published some of his personal info.
The guy's a hypocrite who simply can't be trusted any more. I don't need my phone spying on me for some guy who thinks his personal info is privileged, and yours and mine isn't.
Notice that this wasn't a report of 250% sales growth... it was a report of 250% increase in a poll asking "What cell phone do you PLAN to buy?"... not quite the same thing.
Also worth noting is the complete lack of any mention of the margin of error. And the report also doesn't really explain what is losing out to Android. The summary implies it's the iPhone, but TFA says that iPhone demand went from 32% to 28% - only a small fraction of the 15 points that Android picked up. From the original story the numbers are:
iPhone from 32 (Sept 09) fell to 28 (Dec 09)
Android from 6 rose to 21
Blackberry from 17 stayed basically stable at 18
Windows Mobile dropped from 9 to 6
Palm OS/Web OS dropped from 6 to 3.
That leaves 30% unaccounted for in the September numbers and 24% unaccounted for in the December numbers.
You do know that 2.0 is in the AOSP (Android Open Source Program) so the code is freely available to anyone, there are community ROMs that run 2.0 on my HTC Dream albeit very badly. The problem is that other manufacturers are planning to deploy it on their new hardware lines not their old ones. Motorola just released earlier then Samsung or HTC (who just announced their 2010 line up).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Do you realize that the iPhone only has 4% of the market? Even so, I think the presence of the Android is great, because maybe it will cause Steve J. and his flock of ass-ki...er, fans, to stand back and realize that the iPhone, while quite cool conceptually, suffers from some very lame design issues. Now all Google needs is a phone-less device that can subscribe to a carrier's broadband-only plan.
Yes and no. The iPhone hasn't changed much since it's inception. It was huge when it was new. Now the improvements are incremental. Makes sense that a new phone with similar capabilities, a fresh face, new paint, and unknown possibilities will evoke keen interest. Time will tell of course. Until the actual sales numbers, rather than intent are in, this is worrisome, but hardly crushing news for Apple.
I just hope the people buying these phones do the research. In Canada, Rogers (one of the big three cell providers here) has said that they're not going to provide an upgrade for the HTC Magic (literally the same phone as the myTouch3G) to Android 1.6 - they think 1.5 provides a "good user experience" and so they're not going to bother. Just how do you think all these people buying new phones are going to feel when they get it home and discover a bunch of the bells and whistles they've been promised don't work? And there are already apps out there that require 1.6. That's one big difference between Android phones and the iPhone - Rogers is supporting the iPhone.
Source: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/12/19/rogers-htc-dream-and-magic-to-be-deprived-of-donut/ (as well as the HTC website)
Android has apps iPhone doesn't like built in voice navigation in google maps, google voice, google goggles, and tethering most of which Apple has outright denied for iPhone store and so will never be on the iPhone. I have both an iPhone 3G and a Moto droid just switched mostly because AT&T sucks big donkey dicks. And In some ways the Droid is better removable battery, upgradeable memory, slide out kb, 5MP camera and some of the apps are really great like Listen (streaming podcatcher). In some ways it's not as good as the iPhone some of the built in apps are only so so like the music app and no iTunes like synching desktop app for seamless integration of playlists and device backup Windows media player does not really count IMO. But overall I would give the nod to the Droid because of the Verizon network as AT&T just blows.
Symbian, J2ME, Windows Mobile are "open" because they have a very paranoid security model which some hate. iPhone has nothing of that sort, there is no "Apple signed" scheme and Apple loves the "app store" like stuff including the policies. See the hell they gave to basic OS X input manager developers just because some idiot trolls released proof of concepts.
Apple has set up a monster themselves and there is no way to change it unless they implement "symbian signed" scheme. Things would be a lot easier if they didn't start a lawsuit fight with Nokia along with offensive arguments which are unheard in mobile scene until now.
Symbian signed makes more sense than J2ME sandbox because both deal with native apps which have real deep access to OS/hardware. I can't really picture Apple allowing 2-3 resident apps I use on Symbian right now, e.g. iON Battery timer... Something replicates battery level functionality with estimated time remaining. Imagine the horror if you submitted something like that to app store :) Or the idea of a IM application always on and shamelessly added to startup. Or the themes...
If you open the platform, people will ask for such things from developers and developers will sure ship them.
My iPhone 3G lasts about 4 days if used smartly and sparingly. That is, Edge for voice, data through Wifi, only a few short calls per day, no bluetooth, no music/video/games. Pretty much the same functionality you got from your Palm Treo :)
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Apple will lose this fight because they made 3 big mistakes:
As it stands, Android will be capable of gaining a lot of ground in the coming year and dare I say even be dominant in 12 months time as contracts expire. Hell, if Palm can pull some decent hardware out of their asses for their nice new OS, they might even finally be able to gain some ground too.
In 2006, according to analysts 58% of iPod users were thinking about buying a Zune.
http://www.abiresearch.com/products/research_brief/Consumer_Electronics_Market_Update/101
"21% said they expected to purchase an Android phone. That number represented a 250% increase over the 6% that pegged Android" From the summary. "4,000-plus American consumers surveyed in December" From the article.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
Windows Mobile post 6.0 has one feature I wish Android had. The ability to encrypt everything on a memory card. This way, should a device be stolen, it would erase itself by too many wrong password guesses, or erase itself if told to, and the items on the memory card would be useless to the thief.
This is very easy to do in Linux, either via a filesystem method (encfs), or just block loopback encryption.
I just wish this was implemented properly, so when an Android phone tells an Exchange server it supports encryption; it actually does.
>> Like Mac in the desktop/laptop/netbook market? Or like Safari in browser market? ...and with only a 15 year head start too.
>
> Mac hasn't entered the netbook market (yet).
> In the other two, Mac is far ahead of Linux
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Symbian, J2ME, Windows Mobile are "open" because they have a very paranoid security model which some hate.
And so, too, does the iPhone.
iPhone has nothing of that sort, there is no "Apple signed" scheme
Just how do you think app store apps run anyway? All apps coming from the app store are signed by the developer, using an Apple generated certificate. Just try running an unsigned app on a non-jailbroken phone. Springboard (the app launcher) will not run it.
All apps run in a sandbox (unless you jailbreak) and cannot get to the system. There's that "paranoid security model" you claim they do not have.
I can't really picture Apple allowing 2-3 resident apps
Well sure, because it eats into battery life. It's pretty ironic to take down the lifespan of your device by an hour just to have a battery measurement app wake up the processor every few seconds... I can understand why people want background apps but actually notifications are a decent compromise for users so they can have a somewhat predictable battery experience. For instance, there are already a number of IM apps that use notifications for this and are thus essentially "running all the time" as far as the user is concerned.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Android has apps iPhone doesn't like built in voice navigation in google maps, google voice, google goggles, and tethering
You can buy a number of apps for voice navigation on the iPhone (or download Waze which is free), most of which work without a data connection (google maps is nice until you start traveling outside cities much, Waze does require data though). You can manage Google Voice using the web app on the iPhone, and the iPhone is not lacking for AR apps now.
As for tethering, it's not Apple involved there. iPhone OS 3.0 supports it, as do a number of carriers around the world - look right at AT&T if you wonder who is preventing you from tethering in the U.S. Granted to a consumer it doesn't matter if it's Apple or AT&T blocking that, but it's unfair to blame Apple for AT&T suckage.
I don't know when you owned an iPhone but your information is terribly out of date.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Both systems will probably die in the long run as they will be replaced by normal operating system. The iPhone already officially runs on MacOSX, but because of stupid marketing decisions it's not open. The Android is marketed as a Linux device, but instead is just running a proprietary flavour of Linux which is barely compatible with anything. It doesn't even use X11!
So I predict that in the future, people who actually care about what their phones can do (which is a minority) will probably run some kind of stripped down normal OS. Early devices implementing this are the Maemo ones which is essentially a stripped down Debian. It's probably already possible to share repositories with Ubuntu ARM. (need to try that)
Where'd you get the 4%? Currently, it looks like Apple has 10+% of global smartphones and almost a third of the US market.
And do you know the actual context in which he made that statement?
In context he was right... search engines retain information and he cant guarantee that google can keep the information that it gathers private. His inner politician must have been off that day because he should have used more PC words. But i actually applaud him for being honest, and saying something that we all know to be true... with the patriot act in play, no information is private or safe if the feds want it.
You're underlying issues arnt with google but with all search engines because they are required to keep this information.