The headline on Windows Phone sees big gains at the expense of BlackBerry and Symbian at engadget overstates matters. Those big gains are a climb from a minuscule 2.7% share of the smartphone to a still small 4.1% share.
Microsoft’s smartphone OS is still small fry, but it is early days. If Windows Phone’s market share climbs another 50% next year I’ll be impressed.
A report in CommsDay says New Zealand and Australia have higher than average use of smartphones when compared to non-smart phones. The numbers come from the Cisco Live conference in Melbourne.
Globally Cisco expects non-smartphones to be 50% of devices by 2017. In Australia they will be just 2.4% of the total and in New Zealand 7.4%.
New Zealand is ahead machine-to-machine connections which will hit 29% of all connections in 2017 while in Australia they will account for 28% of the total.
Cisco also said by 2017 mobile devices will consume over 5GB of data each month. That’s up from today where the average smartphone uses 342GB or 1.3GB if on an 4G or LTE network.
That’s the term used by Richard Chirgwin at the register to describe NFC (near field communications) mobile payments. Let’s hope it catches on.
Microsoft Says Windows Phone Store Now Features More Than 130K Apps, 40K New Developers Registered Since WP8 Launch | TechCrunch.
Getting developers and apps on board is an important step for Microsoft. Reaching 130,000 apps is good.
Now Microsoft needs to focus on getting the right apps. It doesn’t matter how many there are if the essential ones are missing.
I look at the Windows Phone app store and still can’t see certain basic functions that would make life easier. And there still isn’t a native WP8 app for my bank while there are apps for iOS and Android.
There was a glimmer of hope for Nokia when the phone company announced its 2012 results last month.
While the headline figure – a loss of €2.3 billion – is shocking, the company made a €439 million profit in the fourth quarter. In the same quarter a year earlier the company lost €954 million.
Remember phone makers usually have a good quarter as sales take off in the run-up to Christmas. And some of the improved profit is due to the company dumping 25% of its staff during 2012. Nokia’s figures also include revenue from the network division, Nokia Siemens Networks, which had a strong quarter.
Even so, there’s talk that Nokia may have turned a corner. That’s premature. According to research from Canaccord Genuity, Nokia’s smartphone business made a loss for the 2012 year and only broke even in the fourth quarter. The same report also shows every smartphone maker except Apple and Samsung lost money during the year.
So can we say Nokia is on the comeback trail? Not yet. It is too soon.
The Lumia 920 is a great phone – dammit, the best smartphone on the market at the moment yet that’s not enough. All it has done is buy Nokia breathing room. Nokia needs to sustain the Windows Phone 8 momentum and pick up sales lower down the market with the Lumia 620.
Would Samsung be more competitive if it was vertical?
Samsung sells more Android devices than anyone else. The company’s smartphones compete head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone for market share. Samsung also is the leading non-Apple tablet maker.
Samsung is arguably the world’s largest gadget maker – unlike many others it makes a profit.
And yet Samsung has little control over its future direction in the gadget market. That’s because it has to take its lead from Google, which owns Android.
Samsung could take greater control of its destiny if it went vertical. That’s trade jargon for controlling every aspect of its technology including the software controlling its gadgets, services that make the gadgets more useful and the app stores customers use to add functionality to their devices.
This is exactly what Apple does and many believe Apple’s vertical model is behind the company’s success. It means Apple has complete control over the entire customer experience. It differentiates Apple’s products from rival kit and it offers a competitive advantage. Owning all the technology can also be lucrative.
The big question is not whether Samsung has the capability to go vertical – there’s a wealth of talent in the company and much of the technology it needs is already there – but whether it would be a smart strategic move.
What do you think?
