February 9th 2010
James Burt, a 24-year-old Australian gamer, is facing a debt that he will probably be struggling to pay for the rest of his life after committing an act of piracy.
He managed to buy the game New Super Mario Bros. Wii early when a games shop sold it before the official release date. James didn’t take [...]
February 9th 2010
After the rumored iMac 27 global shipment halt, reader Adam Pattee has sent us confirmation that his unit—purchased on January 29—is now shipping. Apple says his iMac will arrive on…
February 9th 2010
Most of the gamers I knew stuck with XP during the Vista’s time because it drained precious CPU cycles, but that’s not the case here: Steam’s released their latest stats on Windows usage, Windows 7…
February 9th 2010
There was a time, before Avatar, when 3D meant crummy virtual gaming. A recent patent granted to Apple shows they are (or were) considering a 3D virtual Apple Store—a more welcoming way to shop…
February 9th 2010
A shocking revelation from Warner Bros. earnings call this morning: Since they bumped prices on a bunch of iTunes music, growth has slowed down! Digital track growth dropped from 10 percent in the…
February 9th 2010
There’s no lack of smartphone market share numbers and usage statistics available for analysis. It feels like I’m reading a new set of quarterly numbers every few weeks, which sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s true. The latest data comes courtesy of comScore’s MobiLens product and the numbers show a continuing trend of new platforms eating away at the old guard. In the final quarter of 2009, Google and Apple continued their smartphone momentum, while Microsoft, Palm and Research In Motion all stumbled slightly.
The reported data looks at subscribed smartphone platforms by those aged 13 and up in the United States. That’s a different metric from what I’ve typically seen — often, firms try to measure the usage by platform, which is a challenge. After all, you can only measure the usage scenarios that you know of or are involved with. AdMob, recently bought by Google, is a perfect example of this method — its data only includes measurements from applications that use its mobile advertising platform. That’s not a bad way to measure, but it is a limited one.
I’ve consolidated the comScore data into this chart for ease of reading and it’s evident to see who grew and who lost from the third quarter to the fourth of last year.
Palm shows both the largest nominal and percentage decrease — it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Google leapfrogs Palm by mid-2010. Android’s momentum is picking up steam with more handsets and more frequent updates than Palm is offering. Having webOS devices on a single carrier in the U.S. didn’t help Palm either. Although the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are now available on Verizon Wireless, that didn’t happen until the first month of 2010. These numbers won’t reflect the wider availability and buy one, get one free deals on webOS devices that Verizon offered. The next quarter’s numbers ought to show a positive impact for Palm, but the question is — how much of an impact will that be?
The BlackBerry platform still holds the top spot, but this is one of the first scenarios I can remember that BlackBerry numbers are in decline. While Research In Motion has made a very successful expansion from enterprise to consumer over the last few years, the new handsets seem like the older ones evolved and not as revolutionary as people are looking for. A great keyboard will take you far — think Lenovo and the ThinkPad notebooks — but there’s more to a solid overall product than one hardware attribute. Besides, some of the hottest phones today don’t even offer a hardware keyboard. Research In Motion has done well, but needs to step up their game lest the trend continue.
Microsoft lost ground as well, but I think that’s to be expected given that Windows Mobile 6.5 was also more evolutionary than revolutionary. The latest update, v.6.5.3 is probably what 6.5 should have been and shows promise. Unfortunately, it arrived after the comScore reporting period, so any positive effects from that release won’t appear until this quarter or the next. Of course, Window Mobile 7 is expected to cure many ills as well, so the second half of 2010 into 2011 will be worth watching from a Microsoft point of view.
The chart above isn’t too bone-jarring — the actual change doesn’t really focus on the rates of growth or decline, which I’d loosely equate to momentum. I took the same comScore numbers from the third and fourth quarters of 2009 and charted the percentage of each platform’s positive or negative change. The picture takes on a whole new meaning.
Here you can clearly see the momentum of growth for Google’s Android platform — and Palm’s going in reverse. But Palm ought to be on the positive side once the Verizon webOS sales hit. The same for Microsoft although I don’t expect to see them on the plus side for at least two or three quarters. Amazingly, Apple continues its march forward with no new handset models since last summer and not even that many feature-filled upgrades. And Research In Motion shows negative momentum, even with new handsets and their App World. What’s it going to take to slow Apple and Google down?
Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Mobile Winners and Losers in 2009
February 9th 2010
A guilty pleasure of mine is Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t know what the heck they put in them, but there is nothing better than a box of them with coffee in the morning. Everyone has their favorite and some have even designed their own.
Back in June, Dunkin’ announced the winner of of their “Create Dunkin’s [...]
February 9th 2010
There’s nothing fancy about this idea for a home theater, but it’s a very clever way to save space in a small house, using the dead space under the stairs to store a ton of tech gear.
The setup…
February 9th 2010
Google has finally stepped up to the plate to offer a support phone line for Nexus One owners. It’s a necessary move, given the volume of customer complaints, but it’s also turned out to be a…
February 9th 2010
Texas Instruments says that their WiLink 7.0 is the first chip with four wireless radios in one: FM transmission and reception, GPS, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. What does this mean for you, gadget…
February 9th 2010
Gadget lust can get in the way of romance—like when your dinner date checks her email over dessert or live-tweets the entire encounter. We’ve got our share of these stories, but we really want…
February 9th 2010
Say you’ve got an aging laptop that would be perfect for playing WoW or Star Trek Online on your television…if only it had HDMI out—that’s where the Atlona AT-HDVieW comes into play.
Running…
February 9th 2010
This is not a rainbow. It’s a moonbow, an extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon caused by the near-full moon that it’s extremely hard to catch. So hard, in fact, that you can only see its colors…
February 9th 2010
We’ve seen more than a few Core i5 notebooks recently, all of which have been hamstrung by Intel’s weak integrated graphics. Now, Nvidia’s Optimus enables PCs to switch automatically between Intel’s…
February 9th 2010
At CES, we determined that if you insist on buying a 3DTV this year, Panasonic should be on the very short list. Now, the company has priced a 3DTV for the first time—$5,900 when converted from…
February 9th 2010
The WorldMate travel service has been a long-time companion to 5 million frequent travelers. The web service that makes keeping on top of travel arrangements a breeze is paired with smartphone apps to bring all its benefits into the palm of traveler’s hands. There are WorldMate apps for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Nokia/ Symbian phones. BlackBerry users will especially benefit from a new partnership that WorldMate announced today, integrating the travel service with LinkedIn. Not only does this bring helpful new features to the WorldMate BlackBerry app it also means WorldMate becomes a native LinkedIn app on the ‘Berry.
WorldMate members can take advantage of the new LinkedIn integration through the web and on the BlackBerry handsets. From the press release:
With this new offering, members can share their travel and meeting itineraries, notify their business contacts when they arrive in their destination city, search for contacts by city, and quickly access professional profiles of their colleagues before walking into their next meeting. This LinkedIn functionality is immediately available to all WorldMate users.
WorldMate has long been known for handling travel difficulties, with automatic flight delay notifications and the ability to find alternate flights on the fly. Kevin could have used WorldMate to good advantage recently during his travel that was interrupted by adverse weather conditions on the east coast. With the new LinkedIn integration, his professional network could have been notified of changes as they occurred.
February 9th 2010
Google has finally decided to implement its own phone support service for the Nexus One smartphone. Many would argue that this should have been a service available at the phone’s launch, but Google was trying to sell its smartphone with direct support links only to its hardware and network partners HTC and T-Mobile.
Clearly a completely [...]
February 9th 2010
This is not a rainbow. It’s a moonbow, an extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon caused by the near-full moon that it’s extremely hard to catch. So hard, in fact, that you can only see its colors…
February 9th 2010
We’ve seen more than a few Core i5 notebooks recently, all of which have been hamstrung by Intel’s weak integrated graphics. Now, Nvidia’s Optimus enables their discrete GPUs to work in…
February 9th 2010
RealPlayer SP beta for Mac launched Monday as the first major upgrade to Real’s media solution on Apple’s platform in quite a while. First thing you’ll notice, RealPlayer SP is a good citizen – the app looks and behaves according to Apple’s interface guidelines. More importantly, this new version adds all the cool features from [...]