What RIMM doesn’t say (and, as far as I can tell, no one else has noted) is that Apple has surpassed them in total smartphone revenues. This quarter RIMM reported sales of $4.1 billion in revenue for their whole company. Apple surpassed them, selling $4.6 billion worth of iPhones in Q4 2009 and, more recently, $5.6 billion in Q1 2010. Remember, the iPhone didn’t exist until mid 2007.i Phone sales have gone from zero to $5.6 billion in about 900 days. It’s very hard to compete against that explosive growth.
Author: Horace Dediu
The old guard has The Fear
Palm’s entire market cap is comparable to the amount of Apple’s free advertising in the last 48 hours
The product is getting in depth coverage from CNBC, Fox News, The NY Times, The LA Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Dave Letterman Show, The Jimmy Fallon Show, and practically every local news station and newspaper around the world. Not to mention prime time product placement in ABC’s Modern Family as well as a cameo in the most memorable Jay-Z moment at the 2010 Oscar’s.
And Apple has only spent to run one ad (which itself went viral on YouTube).
(credit: Jason Schwarz newsletter (subscription only))
iPhone passes 500K sales in South Korea
Apple’s official carrier in South Korea, KT, revealed yesterday that iPhone has now surpassed the half-million (500,000) sales mark. This makes South Korea, a nation with 47 million total mobile subscribers, number 8 globally in first year iPhone sales.
via iPhonAsia.com » Blog Archive » iPhone passes 500K sales in South Korea.
There have been several chauvinistic campaigns in Korea that attempted to undermine iPhone’s success. Yet, ironically, these well-funded initiatives may have backfired
Fry on iPad
yet when I eventually got my hands on one, I discovered that one doesn’t relate to it as a “tool”; the experience is closer to one’s relationship with a person or an animal.
via Apple’s iPad: The Mothership Prepares for Launch – TIME.
Can’t wait.
RIM Reactions: Goldman Downgrades to 'Sell'
Goldman Sachs: “Evidence that the structural competitive issues are starting to weigh on its growth prospects. We estimate that RIM’s U.S. business declined 15% [quarter-on-quarter]—the second q-o-q decline in a row, and the first [year-over-year] decline. While RIM attributed that to an inventory reduction at a North America customer, we think the magnitude of the decline points more to lower demand at Verizon as a result of its endorsement of Android; our checks showed a dramatic reduction in the number of RIM [models] at Verizon last quarter and better sales for Motorola’s DROID than for RIM at many Verizon stores.”
via RIM Reactions: Goldman Downgrades to ‘Sell’ – MarketBeat – WSJ.
RIM remains the best feature phone company out there. Too bad that feature phones are not going to survive against mobile computers.
Apple: When Will They Build Their Own Mobile Search Engine?
Apple: When Will They Build Their Own Mobile Search Engine? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com.
The opportunity here is not to do web search better than Google, but to find a way to index the information that lives on the iPhone ecosystem. With potential for millions of apps and hundreds of millions of iPhones generating usage patterns a separate mountain of information is emerging independent of the current cloud. The mobile cloud has different hooks and different relevance measures.
Mobile search will be as much about new algorithms as about getting a new way to spider the data.
It seems Apple is better positioned to leverage this emerging space than Google.
The iPad Era dawns
I think the iPad is the most important launch in Apples history — bigger than the Mac, iPod or iPhone. More than that, I think its the most important cultural phenomenon of this generation. Its bigger than technology.
via The iPad Era dawns.
Amen.
Business customers eager to try Apple iPad
“Apple has blown through the barriers with the iPhone, and the same thing is going to happen with the iPad,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer for Salesforce.com. “This will be huge for business, and a major new category that will be a catalyst for many different aspects of the industry.”
link: Business customers eager to try Apple iPad
Analyst likes vertically integrated smartphones
“We believe that user experience complexity will grow and weigh in favor of those companies that can control and deliver superior integration through vertical integration of software and hardware,”
link: RIMM, Nokia tops in ‘year of the mobile computer’ The Ratings Game – MarketWatch
I’ve been banging on about this for some time. The analyst continues:
“We expect this unstable period to last for another 2-3 years before expected user experience stabilizes and a more horizontal industry emerges,” he wrote.
In this type of market, Hall says, Google’s Android has a greater advantage in a horizontal market than a vertical one.
“We would caution investors against prematurely declaring Android as the winner as we expect the mobile computer OS platform market to be hotly contested over the next 2-3 years,” Hall wrote.
I would argue it will take even longer than 3 years for horizontal (or, as I call it, modular) architectures to become competitive.
The evolution of user interfaces is now so rapid that modes of interaction become obsolete before value chains have time to evolve.
The iPod continues unchallenged long after it over-served because standalone music players are no longer an attractive market to challengers, especially in light of the continued integration with a music service (iTunes).