Versatile Amphibian

Since Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility finally went ahead this week, I thought this might be a timely moment to share some data that a colleague sent me regarding Android shipments. It throws into sharp relief the way in which a combination of Samsung at the mid and top end, and Chinese manufacturers at the low end, have reduced Motorola, LG and even formerly mighty HTC to also-rans. Motorola’s market share has fallen from about 11% in the 1st quarter of 2011, to less than 6% in the same quarter this year. HTC is even worse. They were neck and neck with Samsung at the start of the period, selling 22.5% of all Android devices. Now they are only 8.9% of the market and falling fast. Samsung, on the other hand, now represent 41.7% of Android shipments. This looks like a dominant position, but it should be remembered that one or two failed launches could easily lead to a rapid decline. What they need to do, in my opinion, is push much harder to create a credible ecosystem th...

Following the recent announcements that Huawei, ZTE, Fujitsu and Panasonic would (re)enter the European mobile handset markets, I spent Day 1 of the Mobile World Congress focussing on high end smartphones. My objective was to decide whether these newcomers could genuinely challenge today’s hegemony of Apple, Samsung and HTC. The answer was a clear “yes”, but the most obvious challenger was more of a surprise. I’ll give you a hint – they weren’t Japanese... Symbian is not dead, just stunned Before I could get started on this, however, there was the small matter of an 830am Nokia keynote to get out of the way. You may recall that this time last year, Stephen Elop announced his firm’s “exclusive” partnership with Microsoft. This year, despite being promised “significant industry news”, Nokia delivered more of the same. At the high end there were two new devices, the anticipated Lumia 900 and a new camera phone – the N808, featuring a 41 megapixel camera... no, that’s not a typo, it really...

Nielsen have just released this piece of analysis of smartphone ownership in the US , which shows Android pulling ahead of iOS and Blackberry. I've heard rumblings amongst commentators that this marks the point at which the open platform that is Android puts the software smackdown on evil closed ecosystems. My view is a bit different. Certainly the PC market was created by multiple software and hardware vendors being able to offer their own distinct take on a universally compatible platform, however in my view times have changed. For starters, globalisation has meant that proprietary platform providers can achieve sufficient volumes to create plenty of opportunity for developers on the platform, even if overall market share is relatively low. Second, the PC has always been and remains a somewhat complex environment for the end user. Multiple combinations of hardware and software create choice, but they make for an inherently buggier experience than that which is available in a clos...