Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Thursday, October 12, 2006
What's a smartphone?
Gartner has provided a new report on the smartphone market that claims an increase in units of 57% since the same period last year. I hope the report provides a good definition of what a smartphone is, as it gets increasingly hard to tell smartphones and other mobile phones apart. Day to day it doesn't matter, but when justifying statistics and estimates it does.
This paragraph is striking in several ways:
Nokia owns 42 percent of the combined PDA and smartphone market, compared to single-digit market share for Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), Motorola Inc. and Palm Inc
I know Gartner uses the criterium "phone running Symbian OS is a smartphone", which can be argued, but means all Series 60 and 80 phones are considered smartphones. That also means there's a lot of Nokia phones that apply as such, even when they are sold as mainstream phones.
Also very interesting is how little marketshare RIM has. We are talking the PDA/smartphone market here. If we instead look at the total mobile phone market, RIM sales figures become invisible. Based on the media frenzy you would think RIM is a leading provider of ... at least something. The reason RIM gets so much attention every time they release something is probably because it's the choice of managers and journalists, which is a pretty small part of the market.
That doesn't mean RIM's market is a financially unattractive one, as the total ARPU is pretty high compared to mainstream phones, as the server and subscription costs add to the revenue, but it's clear RIM doesn't have exclusivity in the corporate email market. Nokia could easily knock RIM out if they wanted to. Let's see what happens with the Nokia E series.
Nokia leads smartphone vendors - Yahoo! News
This paragraph is striking in several ways:
Nokia owns 42 percent of the combined PDA and smartphone market, compared to single-digit market share for Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), Motorola Inc. and Palm Inc
I know Gartner uses the criterium "phone running Symbian OS is a smartphone", which can be argued, but means all Series 60 and 80 phones are considered smartphones. That also means there's a lot of Nokia phones that apply as such, even when they are sold as mainstream phones.
Also very interesting is how little marketshare RIM has. We are talking the PDA/smartphone market here. If we instead look at the total mobile phone market, RIM sales figures become invisible. Based on the media frenzy you would think RIM is a leading provider of ... at least something. The reason RIM gets so much attention every time they release something is probably because it's the choice of managers and journalists, which is a pretty small part of the market.
That doesn't mean RIM's market is a financially unattractive one, as the total ARPU is pretty high compared to mainstream phones, as the server and subscription costs add to the revenue, but it's clear RIM doesn't have exclusivity in the corporate email market. Nokia could easily knock RIM out if they wanted to. Let's see what happens with the Nokia E series.
Nokia leads smartphone vendors - Yahoo! News
