Oh dear. Apple’s iPhone and iPad are under assault from an Android. Or rather, from Android. Item: Android is now the top operating system for smart phones:
In terms of market share, Android grew 615 percent from 2009 to take 32.5 percent, while Symbian fell from 44.4 percent to 30.6 percent in the same period.
Phone makers HTC and Samsung had notably strong years, accounting for 45 percent of the Android phone shipments.
Apple’s iOS fell to third, at 16 percent, remaining practically flat year-over-year. Shipments increased 86 percent, however, to 16.2 million iPhones.
Worse yet, another item: Android tablet sales are skyrocketing:
Android tablets skyrocketed in the fourth quarter, increasing their market share by nearly 1000%, even though they’re based on a version of Android not even built for tablets. In doing so, they’ve taken market share away from the iPad. It’s a clear sign that one day, Android tablets will outsell the iPad, in the same way that Android phones have overtaken the iPhone.
Bloomberg reports that according to market research firm Strategy Analytics Android tablets boosted its market share nearly ten times in the fourth quarter, and ate into iPad’s share of the market.
Bloomberg reported:
Android devices captured 22 percent of global tablet shipments in the three months to Dec. 31, up from 2.3 percent in the preceding quarter, the Boston-based researcher said in a statement today. The iPad accounted for 75 percent of shipments in the period, down from 96 percent, it said.
That last article points out that the big difference between iPhones and Anroid tablets is choice. There are already a slew of tablets running Android and there will be more. They are priced at various levels and have varying features. They aim at different segments. The iPad is a typical Apple “We’ll tell you what you want” product.
From personal experience, I can tell you that not all iPhone customers are happy with what Apple has allowed them to rent from them. When I showed my new Samsung Galaxy S to one of my coworkers who owns an iPhone, she immediately began calculating how long until her contract was up. She fell in love with the display on the Galaxy (which is very impressive).
I was toying with the thought of getting a Galaxy Tab, but I really didn’t want my wife to kill me. Maybe I’ll get her one for Valentine’s Day.
UPDATE: Motorola is definitely positioning their new Xoom tablet as an Apple Killer. Check out this Xoom ad for the Super Bowl.
Who would have predicted 25 years ago that offshoots of the unix tree would dominate the cell phone and small computer market?
It’s probably so popular because the iPhone makes up 4% of the phones, but brings in 51% of the profits for the entire phone industry.
Boo-yah, time to undercut! ^.^
The Galaxy Tab is a beautiful thing. Its book-size is the ideal form factor IMO for a tablet computer. It handles movies, mp3s, pictures, games, emails, web browsing and e-books wonderfully. The free or cheap apps can extend its flexibility amazingly. This is the first new technology that has excited me as much as the original Macintosh.
It is of course over-priced, but will become much cheaper in a few years with competition and further economies of scale, as more Android tablets appear. The Apple iPad, I’m convinced, will be relegated to the same sort of niche that Macs live in compared to Windows.
Apple will lose the smartphone and tablet wars. Furthermore, these devices will cannibalize the mp3 player, including the iPod. So all told, Android is very bad news for Apple.
‘I also think that consumers will be attracted to Android’s openness versus Apple’s closedness once consumers realize they can get a similarly sleek interface experience from Android.
“Apple will lose the smartphone and tablet wars.”
You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?
Apple has already won.
I dunno TC, it seems, amazingly enough, that the exact same dynamic of Apple vs PC in the eighties is just re-running itself today.
Apple pretty much put the PC (and the mouse) on the market. But they made sure that their hardware and software were tightly bundled, and pretty much isolated from everything else (which largely did not exist when Apple broke out). Then IBM and Compaq, and then HP, essentially backward engineered their PC’s for market, mouse and all, bought an OS from a little company that didn’t even invent it (called Microsoft), and all that interchangeablilty and inter-competetion forced the prices down, forced mutual compatibility across the board, and thus PC/MS wound up snarfing much of Apples’ market share with cheaper and more varied products. As a matter of fact, this all drove Apple into serious trouble, rendering it’s entire future in doubt, until the brilliant Jobs came up with… the i-pod cum i-phone. And around the wheel goes….
Apple seems to be second-to-none in innovation, in stylistic design of heretofore unseen products, and in blasting those products onto the market big time and making them part of our lives. But they seem to have an innate desire for control over same which appears to allow competitors to flank and overtake them in the market.
It will be interesting to see if that trait remains in a post-Steve Jobs era.