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Apple's iPhone Continues to Outpace Smartphone Industry Growth

KnightWRX said:
Way to spin this into a positive. Comparing Q309 and Q409, Apple lost market share for the first time while Nokia and RIM both gained a few percentage points. This is not positive. RIM just keeps stretching their 2nd place lead over Apple quarter after quarter. Heck, Apple lost market share even though they've just had their highest unit shipment numbers, ever.

This is far from positive, the iPhone did really bad in Q409. The holiday season should've at least kept them growing as much as the market grew.
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Yeah, if you look at those numbers purely on units sold, Apple increased their sales by an amount roughly half way between RIM at the lower end, and Nokia at the upper end.

Percentage variations are generally meaningless[1]. Market share is more informative since it gives a benchmark by which the individual case can be measured.

[1] It doesn't take a lot to produce insane growth figures if you're starting from a low value. Few percentage points for the market leader may not sound like a lot, but it could easily be the difference between a smaller competitor being a viable business or not.
 
Carniphage said:
Nokia's gigantic smartphone marketshare is 75% featurephones running Symbian. Nokia's proper Smartphones - the N-Series sell half the number of the iPhone.
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Nokia doesn't have any feature phones running Symbian.

All Nokia Symbian phones are smartphones.

adbe said:
That isn't something to be proud of.
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Like I said, I don't give a damn what you are anyone thinks of my signature! If you don't like it - tough! :)
 
Carniphage said:
No one cares about unit market share.
Businesses care about revenue share and profitability.

Nokia's gigantic smartphone marketshare is 75% featurephones running Symbian. Nokia's proper Smartphones - the N-Series sell half the number of the iPhone.

The result: Apple makes more profit from iPhone sales, than Nokia does.

That's not "Apple makes more profit from iPhone sales, than Nokia makes from N97 sales". That's Apple's iPhone sales makes more profit than the entirety of Nokia.
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Assuming Apple's strategy in the phone segment is the same as that of its Mac business. Volume may be a more important long term strategy for them than their usual niche-with-high-margins approach.

There's a real, albeit small, chance that mobile OSX could end up dominating the mobile space in the same way that Windows came to dominate the desktop space. Steve Jobs certainly understands the benefit of being on the winning side of that kind of fight. As does Google.
 
Carniphage said:
No one cares about unit market share.
Businesses care about revenue share and profitability.

Nokia's gigantic smartphone marketshare is 75% featurephones running Symbian. Nokia's proper Smartphones - the N-Series sell half the number of the iPhone.

The result: Apple makes more profit from iPhone sales, than Nokia does.

That's not "Apple makes more profit from iPhone sales, than Nokia makes from N97 sales". That's Apple's iPhone sales makes more profit than the entirety of Nokia.

C.
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Unit market share is important. Number of units = number of potential devices where you can market your aftermarket/3rd party add-ons/software. This is good for both manufacturers/developers as it is for users.

Revenue share/profits is only important if you're a share holder.

Again, this is being spun as a positive when Apple just showed their first signs of weakness with the iPhone. This is sweeping everything under the rug just to try and say the iPhone is still as successful (at being in 3rd place) as it was before when it fact Q409 showed us that RIM (that was behind Apple at some point in 2008) and Nokia are both still the market leaders.

And I have a newsflash for you : the iPhone isn't any smarter than Symbian devices. There is no such thing as smartphones really. It's all artificial seperations created to make the numbers seem bigger. All cell phones sold after 2002 have pretty much been smartphones (with data access, Web browsers, e-mail, texting, games, apps, SDKs, etc...).

Have fun playing Ostrich with your head in the sand.
 
Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/5.0.16831/2444; U; en) Presto/2.2.0)

but but Steve said they sell more "mobile devices" than nokia and rim lol. So what if that included laptops.
 
elhungarian said:
Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/5.0.16831/2444; U; en) Presto/2.2.0)

but but Steve said they sell more "mobile devices" than nokia and rim lol. So what if that included laptops.
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That was code for "we're no longer a CE company, we're now a 'wireless' CE company."

Or in other words, don't be surprised if MacBooks start shedding features that can be thrown over to other hardware on a network. The Air's lack of built in CD/DVD drive is probably a trend.
 
Speedy2 said:
I wish they'd only count smart phones in these statistics and not that dumb, unusable Nokia Symbian crap, that just happens to be equal to Nokia's high end phone offering and is therefold sold as bog standard phones for phony phoning only. Seriously, no one uses these "other features" on these devices. A nowadays mundane task like surfing the web on an N7x? Good joke!
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I agree. How many of these Nokia 'smartphones' users have a data plan?
 
KnightWRX said:
Unit market share is important. Number of units = number of potential devices where you can market your aftermarket/3rd party add-ons/software. This is good for both manufacturers/developers as it is for users.

Revenue share/profits is only important if you're a share holder.
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Tell that to Nokia. I bet they'd like to have some of them there profits.

They once dominated the cellphone market, they owned it. And now make less profit than a company that only entered the handset market three years ago.

People upgrade their phones every 18 months, and there is very little reason for people to upgrade to Nokia. Because Nokia have lost the top end.

They are in bad shape at the top end of the market. Which is bad news for profitability. But Nokia continue to sell a lot of middle-of-the-road units. Musicphones and the like. And of course, because the run Symbian, they can claim these are all smartphones.

C.
 
tzeshan said:
I agree. How many of these Nokia 'smartphones' users have a data plan?
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A smartphone is still a smartphone even if the user doesn't have a data plan.

You agreed to:

"I wish they'd only count smart phones in these statistics and not that dumb, unusable Nokia Symbian crap, that just happens to be equal to Nokia's high end phone offering and is therefold sold as bog standard phones for phony phoning only. Seriously, no one uses these "other features" on these devices. A nowadays mundane task like surfing the web on an N7x? Good joke!"


Interesting. could you name me one Nokia Symbian phone that isn't a smartphone? ( Hint: they all are!) So what you are agreeing to is BS!
 
Stella said:
A smartphone is still a smartphone even if the user doesn't have a data plan.

You agreed to:

"I wish they'd only count smart phones in these statistics and not that dumb, unusable Nokia Symbian crap, that just happens to be equal to Nokia's high end phone offering and is therefold sold as bog standard phones for phony phoning only. Seriously, no one uses these "other features" on these devices. A nowadays mundane task like surfing the web on an N7x? Good joke!"


Interesting. could you name me one Nokia Symbian phone that isn't a smartphone? ( Hint: they all are!) So what you are agreeing to is BS!
Click to expand...

How would describe the Nokia phone as a smartphone from user's point of view?
 
KnightWRX said:
RIM just keeps stretching their 2nd place lead over Apple quarter after quarter.
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Where exactly did you get that idea? Both in Q4/09 and 2009 Apple grew much more and narrowed the gap to RIM considerably, both in market share and in absolute numbers.
 
Stella said:
A smartphone is still a smartphone even if the user doesn't have a data plan.

You agreed to:

"I wish they'd only count smart phones in these statistics and not that dumb, unusable Nokia Symbian crap, that just happens to be equal to Nokia's high end phone offering and is therefold sold as bog standard phones for phony phoning only. Seriously, no one uses these "other features" on these devices. A nowadays mundane task like surfing the web on an N7x? Good joke!"


Interesting. could you name me one Nokia Symbian phone that isn't a smartphone? ( Hint: they all are!) So what you are agreeing to is BS!
Click to expand...

They just want to bend and twist the definition to find a justification for Apple's relatively poor showing this quarter in the smartphone marketshare stakes. It goes to show that those who were quick to write off Nokia as 'dead' are very foolish to do so and have a very narrow view of the smartphone market.

And to say that a smartphone is only a smartphone if it has a data plan attached to it is like saying that an iPhone is no longer a phone when you take the sim card out. It boggles the mind what craziness some people will invent to bolster up their argument.
 
mrochester said:
They just want to bend and twist the definition to find a justification for Apple's relatively poor showing this quarter in the smartphone marketshare stakes. It goes to show that those who were quick to write off Nokia as 'dead' are very foolish to do so and have a very narrow view of the smartphone market.

And to say that a smartphone is only a smartphone if it has a data plan attached to it is like saying that an iPhone is no longer a phone when you take the sim card out. It boggles the mind what craziness some people will invent to bolster up their argument.
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So what is your definition of a smartphone?
 
Stella said:
Nokia doesn't have any feature phones running Symbian.

All Nokia Symbian phones are smartphones.
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That's exactly the point of criticism. Most of these phones aren't even remotely smart and playing in a completely different part of the market (legacy phones, chiefly used for calling+texting). Still, the pundits call them smartphones. There is obviously something wrong with the definition.

I wonder how much the smartphone market really grew, if you counted out those dumbphones.
 
KnightWRX said:
I have 3 people around me that have iPhones without data plans. I don't think that's quite an indicator of smartness. :rolleyes:
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Your anecdotal evidence is worth absolutely nothing. :rolleyes:
I wonder how you explain that lead in marketshare in "page hits from mobile devices" UNLESS of course, most iPhone users have a data plan and are actually using it.
 
tzeshan said:
I believe they are using older iPhones not the iPhone 3GS. Right?
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One of them has a 3GS actually, the other 2 are 3G. Fancy that, people buy them 2nd hand and only activate voice plans on them. Cheaper per month and they rely on WIFI for data.

Again, not an indicator of smartness.

Speedy2 said:
Where exactly did you get that idea? Both in Q4/09 and 2009 Apple grew much more and narrowed the gap to RIM considerably, both in market share and in absolute numbers.
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Narrowed ? No. Apple are losing ground to RIM, numbers from Q3 :

canalysq309.001.png


In 2008, Apple was ahead of RIM. In 2009, they were back behind. Look at Q3 2009 numbers vs Q4 2009 numbers. RIM actually stretched their lead on Apple.
 
KnightWRX said:
Unit market share is important. Number of units = number of potential devices where you can market your aftermarket/3rd party add-ons/software. This is good for both manufacturers/developers as it is for users.

Revenue share/profits is only important if you're a share holder.

Again, this is being spun as a positive when Apple just showed their first signs of weakness with the iPhone. This is sweeping everything under the rug just to try and say the iPhone is still as successful (at being in 3rd place) as it was before when it fact Q409 showed us that RIM (that was behind Apple at some point in 2008) and Nokia are both still the market leaders.

And I have a newsflash for you : the iPhone isn't any smarter than Symbian devices. There is no such thing as smartphones really. It's all artificial seperations created to make the numbers seem bigger. All cell phones sold after 2002 have pretty much been smartphones (with data access, Web browsers, e-mail, texting, games, apps, SDKs, etc...).

Have fun playing Ostrich with your head in the sand.
Click to expand...

Symbian is trash. Horrible to use, horrible to develop for.

Nokia spreading its cheap garbage under the heading of "smartphone" is most certainly not impressive.

And I have some serious reservations about RIM's buy-one-get-one-free strategies, including some of their so-called "smartphones" in the lower end of their lineup.
 
tzeshan said:
So what is your definition of a smartphone?
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Well the standard definition of a smartphone was a phone that was expandable by installing 3rd party applications. However, even 'dumbphones' can do that now, and the original iPhone couldn't, but was still considered a smartphone. Multitasking of ALL applications was another thing that set the smartphones from the dumbphones, but the iPhone can't do that, yet is still considered a smartphone. I guess the best way to describe a smartphone is a device that covers a range of additional functions other than basic calling and texting, but that category is now so broad that that would make practically every phone out there a smartphone. I think the term smartphone is now quite outdated, and we should consider all devices as just mobile phones.
 
Well done Apple. It seems that the non-smartphone market is slowly declining as more handsets released fall into the smartphone segment. :cool:

[off topic]
Odd that this thread isn't full of replies considering the age of the news.
 
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