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Mobile Market Wrap-up for February 5, 2010

Devesh Khare — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:20:10 +0000

Welcome to the latest installment of my weekly mobile summary. To our loyal readers, I’m trying a little experiment and will be releasing the weekly wrap-ups on Mondays instead of Fridays as usual. I personally like getting summaries on Monday mornings to set the tone for my week, so if you agree or if you don’t like the change, please leave a comment below.

The big story last week was the latest smartphone handset numbers released by Strategy Analaytics. According to the report, 53 million smartphones were sold globally in Q4 2009 which represents a 30% increase from the year before. Overall, 173.8 million smartphones were sold during 2009. No surprise that Nokia topped the charts with 39% of the marketshare with RIM and Apple gaining marketshare to 19.8% (up 4.3%) and 14.1% (up 5.3%) respectively.

The other entertaining story was more Google vs. Apple cat fighting (you should expect it by now). These two companies have turned the mobile market into a soap opera that includes name calling, product bashing and sometimes personal attacks. Last week Google released their Google Voice webapp which circumvents iPhone’s “ban” on the Google Voice downloadable app. And now this week, Google added Multitouch support to the Nexus One. I’m not aware of any changes in Apple’s multitouch patent, so my best guess is that Google just decided to release the new feature to tell Apple “no more Mr. nice guy, we’re ready to rumble”. Both companies seem to be mirroring each other with features (e.g. multitouch), acquisitions (e.g. mobile advertising – Google/AdMod and Apple/Quattro), and messaging (e.g. mobile is our future). This should be an exciting week/month/year as these two companies battle without any playground rules.

As always, here is the mobile handset news I found from last week:

To finish this week’s summary, here is a quick list of articles I found interesting during last week and want to share with you:

See or hear anything else interesting in mobile. Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Mobile Market Wrap-up for Sept 25, 2009

Devesh Khare — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:10:35 +0000

Welcome to this week’s summary of the mobile market. There wasn’t any huge news this week but Net Neutrality captured a few headlines that gave us all a lot to think about in terms of mobile internet. The FCC announced two additional proposals for Net Neutrality: non-discrimination in terms of network traffic and transparent management in terms of an ISPs network management practices (e.g. traffic blocking at peak hours). Reading several articles this week, the big question for the mobile market is how will Net Neutrality impact wireless carriers, or will it? As expected, the rules currently do not apply to wireless carriers and they wouldn’t have it any other way since they complain that mobile internet is more bandwidth constrained. I don’t get it since isn’t a service provider’s job to provide better service. If the bandwidth is constrained, then fix it. Seems like a double-standard to me. It’s the same as me saying that I didn’t make my mortgage payment because I didn’t have enough money… the bank will still take my home won’t it?

To add to this week’s Net Neutrality news, AT&T filed a complaint with the FCC asking that they investigate Google for possibly violating telecommunication laws with its Google Voice application. According to AT&T, Google Voice is guilty of “blocking some calls to rural areas to cut down on network access expenses.” I’m not familiar enough with the Net Neutrality laws but I think this debate and investigation will lead to more transparency in the mobile market which is good for everyone.

Well, it looks like another mobile OS has just tossed their hat into the crowed ring – this time it’s Linux. I’ve been hearing a lot about Linux based phones for a while now but this week Intel announced their Moblin 2.1 for phones at their developer’s conference. Also on the Linux front, Samsung announced their latest LiMo (Linux Mobile) phone and said it will support Vodafone’s 360 service. Linux-based phones are expected to reach more carriers over the next year. How can the mobile market support all these different multi-platform operating systems? It can’t. Based on what we’ve seen with the PC market, I predict that only two or three OS will survive over the next 4 years. So which ones will end up gutter – Android, WebOS, WinMo, LiMo, Symbian? I think it’s time to say bye bye to WinMo and WebOS. If you don’t believe me that the mobile OS space is too crowded, just look at these articles from this week alone:

This week there were a lot of interesting, random news in the mobile market. Here’s a long list of the ones I found worthwhile:

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts with us.