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Android Outsells iPhone In Last 6 Months
tomhudson writes "Despite all the hype about Apple's latest iPhone, Android has sold more in the last 6 months (27% of all smartphone sales) than Apple (23%). The gains for Android are coming at the expense of RIM (still #1 at 33%, down from 45% a year ago), Windows Mobile (11%, down from 20%) and the iPhone (down from 34% at it's peak 6 months ago). If the current trend continues, Android is expected to be #1 within the year."
Yawn... These are sales from January to June - before the iPhone 4 was released. People were intentionally holding off purchases because they knew iPhone 4 was coming out. Wake me up if they outsell iPhones for the next 6 months.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
In our company, any smartphone under the sun is supported. Until September, when we start enforcing passwords, remote encryption/wiping abilities, etc.
Pretty much every major smart phone made in the last couple of years supports these features, except Android based phones.
People are very upset that their very nice Drod's will stop working soon, and they still have over a year on their phone contracts. (many people get re-imbursed by the company for monthly expenses).
Microsoft has published their spec for ActiveSync for exchange. Google so far has not bothered to code it in. This is keeping iphones and blackberries (and winMobile 6.5 and above) phones popular here.. otherwise everyone would drop them.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
My employer-provided phone is an HTC EVO 4G (Android). I could have chosen a Blackberry or an iPhone (or even Windows Mobile). And I work for a large Fortune-500 company. Corporate America is opening up to the new options.
(My company is large enough that they've outsourced the phone purchasing to some other company that specializes in it. I went to that company's web site, selected the phone that I wanted from the list that had been approved by our IT department, and they shipped it directly to me. All said, it seems like a very good system, especially compared to some of the other services that have been outsourced.)
Android 2.2 is supposed to take Exchange integration a step further, letting corporate IT wipe the phone if it's reported as lost or stolen, as well as allowing corporate security policies to be enforced. So expect Android to compete even more heavily with Blackberry once 2.2 comes out.
First of all these numbers directly contradict the numbers presented a few weeks ago that only 20% of Android users would buy another Android phone. Here it says that 71% of Android users would buy another Android phone. Still lower then Apple's 91%, but that can partly be ascribed to the fact that Apple has built a very strong brand loyalty over the last several years. Secondly, there is a direct negative correlation between the release of the Motorola Droid (which began the release of many droid phones like the Incredible) and the drop in recent acquirers of IOS4, going from 34% to 23% in the same period that droid went from 6% to 27%. Now this could be that people were holding out for the iphone 4, however the trend started nine months ago. It's doubtful most people were holding out nine months for the latest iphone. There were probably a few, but I don't think that explains these numbers. Third these numbers are going to be dramatically different in the third quarter simply because the hype of the release of the iphone 4. Because the new iphone is released rarely compared to a most other phones that event atmosphere lends itself to what I'm sure will be a spike in iphone sales. What will be most telling is what happens in Q4 as things balance out.
iPhone vs. Android -- they're currently seen as more "personal" phones, whereas Blackberry's market dominance is largely based on businesses, a market in which neither is remotely competitive with Blackberry yet
At the company where I work, tons of my co-workers have picked up the iPhone. Corporate IT has been forced to offer Outlook email integration for iPhone in addition to Blackberry (they offer no such support for any other smartphone OS, including Palm, Android, and Windows). I'm happy to stick with my Blackberry as it does everything I want in a smartphone, but to say none of the others are remotely competitive is to ignore the reality on the ground.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
> It's most telling that Palm is flatlining and Windows Mobile has lost half of its already
> meager market share in the past year.
Are you counting people who own phones that were sold with Windows Mobile, but are now running Android (like the HTC Touch HD2)? The HD2 debacle will go down in tech history as one of Microsoft's worst marketing/business decisions in history. Here's a phone that was eagerly embraced by Microsoft's few remaining enthusiasts, even as their friends and peers ran for the door marked "Android", only to get its owners metaphorically kicked in the balls by Microsoft on what was probably the lamest pretense for non-compatibility *ever* (it had four buttons instead of three).
Microsoft could hardly have done a better job of driving its few remaining friends into the Android camp if they'd personally rebranded MSDN as an Android portal & given a free Nexus One to everybody who attended a Microsoft event in 2010.
Linux never sucked for mainstream. Nothing about Linux makes it unsuitable for mainstream use except user interface design.
Does it really matter if everything that most people consider part of "Linux" is missing? I know most people don't care, but certainly the fact that Android phones run the Linux kernel is completely irrelevant, and deliberately so.
Note: I bought a Nokia N900, specifically because it was not Android (well that and it had a slew of awesome features that fit my needs perfectly.)
Is there any single phone model that is selling as well as the iPhone these days?
Last year the Motorola Droid was selling more then the iPhone 3GS... and now with the Droid X coming out it's quite possible that it can outsell the iPhone 4...
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
because Apple are limiting themselves too much with the One True Form-Factor. Some people want a keyboard, either palm-style or N900-style, some people want a bigger screen, some want a smaller device (though the iPhone 4 is getting small), and some a more rugged one. No matter how good the iPhone gets, most people I know just won't consider it because of the form factor issue. I for one want a larger screen (my HD2's is 44% bigger by area than the iPhone's, I'm strongly considering a Dell Streak, 99% larger), above all other considerations.
All the rest (features, locked-ness, looks) can be argued about. Form-factor is a very straightforward issue, and there's a reason why there are so many different ones on the market.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
...but then ignoring non-phone Android devices is fine?
One that hath name thou can not otter
You may consider putting your hopes into MeeGo with this. It's planned to be an OS that will function in both netbooks (and notebooks) and smartphones, and just might smuggle linux onto desktop through the back door.
Or at least get it decent games and applications finally making it a worthy opponent of windows, rather then one that is constantly playing catch up, and never having any good games supported natively.
Wrong.
I have a Motorola droid. I plug a USB adapter into the phone and my computer, swipe the status bar down, and tell it to mount the SD card. I then get a removable drive on my PC. I opened my music directory, selected all my songs, right-clicked and selected copy. I then opened my SD card, created a directory called "music", and copied my MP3's there. Never once did I have any need to root my phone for that one so I can certainly load my own music and I do not need iTunes or some other application to get anything through, it is just a standard USB drive. Ring tones required an app from the Android market, I picked one called "Ringdroid" IIRC. I then can open any MP3 I have and one of the menu choices is "set as ringtone", if I press that choice it .... sets it as my ring tone. I still haven't rooted my phone at all. I can also check or uncheck a security feature that allows me to install unsigned applications, that still doesn't require root. So as far as I can see everything the person you are responding to says they can do one can regardless of what you may have heard.
Some manufacturers do have some applications you can't remove - Android is Open Source and people are allowed to extend it in ways they see fit and that includes that. However Android itself doesn't. Some manufacturers have also chosen to require rooting for other common functions too - again it is Open Source so they can modify to their hearts content. There are people who want a phone with no "dangerous" options and are fairly locked down (as many iPhone users say they want to be) and Android can accomodate that - indeed Motorola's answer to signing ROM's on the Droid-X is "If you want an extensible phone, purchase a different model" for that very reason. Android itself is open and it isn't hard to find currently sold models that are near as "free" (as in speech) as the nexus one is.
Maybe last you heard was from another Apple user that wishes Androids were not selling like they were? Or at the least you believed someone that was *very* misinformed and you should take what they say from now on with a large grain of skepticism as they were easily fooled.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
In quite a bit more. Apart from (obviously ;) ) tablets, there's also a team of few major car manufacturers.
(and you know, with how FB/Flash/etc. games are taking the world by storm for some time, are in realiy a big part of "PC gaming")
One that hath name thou can not otter
I don't know what android phones you've got; but the ones I've seen aren't really that much better than an iPhone when it comes to being 'open'.
If you buy a phone directly, without a carrier, sure, it's "open". But then you are spending several hundred dollars extra. If you buy it through a carrier, it's going to have limits and restrictions imposed by the carrier. Truthfully, even if you buy it yourself, you'll still have restrictions, just fewer of them.
The source is available for android phones; but that means nothing. The carriers are free to branch the code and use their own and 99.99999% of people can't do anything with the source anyway. 'Rooting' your android isn't any easier than doing something unsupported - like installing the Homebrew channel on a wii. It's not encouraged. And doing it causes all sorts of potential problems like voiding your warranty.
So, in theory, an Android phone is great.
In practice, I can't delete the Sprint TV/Sprint Nascar apps from my HTC Hero without voiding my warranty.
It's probably largely due to the fact that until around the time the iPhone hit the market, US smartphones were mostly limited to ugly hunks of plastic like the Treo 650, Blackberry 8700 series, or various Symbian bricks, and they generally didn't have particularly remarkable web browsing or media playing capabilities.
It wasn't until Apple came along and thrust style (and admittedly, usability) to the forefront of smartphone design that the non-business market really started to pay attention. Say what you want about Apple's products, but they have taking full advantage of a style-conscious market down to a science. In standard follow-the-leader fashion, other handset makers have clued in on this, and now we've got a much more lively market, and it seems that plain old feature phones get very little hype around here anymore.