Delicious LiveJournal Links for 11-9-2009

[andrewducker]

• Nokia shipped more than double Apple's smartphones last year.
  RIM in second place, Apple in third.
  (tags: apple nokia phones)
• Tough love is good for children
  It found that children from the richest backgrounds were more than twice as likely to develop the key characteristics compared to those with the poorest origins.
  
  Additionally, children whose parents were married were twice as likely to show such traits than children from lone parent or step-parented families, the report said.
  
  But it added that when parental style and confidence were factored in, the difference in child character development between richer and poorer families disappeared.
  (tags: psychology bbc children)

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

The first statistic would be much more interesting when compared to the stats (after two years' sales) of other companies that, with no prior experience in a market, entered a product into that market. I suspect that Apple is performing _well_ ahead of the average new competitor.

[andrewducker]

I would imagine they are, yes. They came in at the top end as _the_ brand to beat.

I'm largely interested in the stats because everyone talks about Apple as if they were the market leader, when they aren't. Their market positioning there is superb.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Um. That article is about total market share (I only just read it) – not about volume of shipments last year. Currently, Nokia have 40% of the market, with RIM and Apple at about 20% each. Surely that means that, allowing for the length of time Apple has been in the market compared to its more entrenched competitors, Apple is doing better in terms of sales than that article suggests?

[andrewducker]

I think the article I linked to is unclear, talking about shipment volumes in one place, and totals in another.

If you follow the link at the bottom you can see the actual shipment volumes:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10392252-94.htm
Which shows Apple shipping 7.4million, RIM 8.2million and Nokia 16.4million phones in Q3 09.

Which leaves Android with quite a way to go :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It'd be interesting to see the profit margins for the big three. I suspect (but don't know any may well be very wrong) that Apple make more $ per phone sold.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

What's interesting about the figures you quote in the link, is that Apple are third in terms of shipment volume but they only sell one model of phone (albeit with different storage size).

I've never heard anyone claim that Apple sell the most phones. It'd almost be an anathema if they did (as part of the iPhone's value is that it's a luxury item not something the proles have) - the claim about the iPhone as I understand it is that it's the market leader (in terms of quality) in the market segment it's in.

Even if the claim were about units shipped is it useful to compare Nokia's (who make lots of phone models from the most basic to the most expensive) shipment volume with Apples? I don't have a tight definition of what the name for the category is that Apple's iPhone inhabits (something like smart phone or music phone - but neither of those seem to define it well), but certainly the more basic Nokia phones are in a different category.

Similarly - don't RIM make Blackberries? Or is that wrong? I've never thought of the iPhone as being in the business phone space - although I imagine business people do get them.

[andrewducker]

Yup - those are Blackberries. And I'd say that they were in the same space - you can now buy Blackberries for home use, and many execs want iPhones.

The figures are, I believe, just for smartphone shipments, so you're only comparing against the high end Nokias, not the bottom end of the market.
To compile its data, IDC tracked smartphone shipments.

What I'd realy like to know is how much of HTCs market share increase was down to Android (the Hero).

[robhu.livejournal.com]

If they're in the same space it's because there is an overlap between 'business smartphone' and 'home smartphone'. I don't think the overlap is very large.

[andrewducker]

Certainly when the iPhone came out it was in high demand with execs here. And it's reviewed in business IT magazines. And it now comes with support with synching to Exchange, most definitely a business requirement, not a home one.

And I definitely saw the Storm reviewed as an iPhone competitor repeatedly.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I just found this out. Apple are in the lead in terms of profits from phone sales, by quite an enormous margin - Apple made $1.6bn while Nokia made $1.1bn.

More details.

"More profit on 7.4 mln iPhones than Nokia's 108.5 mln" Mmm, profit margins.

Nokia has got to be pretty worried...

[andrewducker]

Worried by making a 1.1Bn profit?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Worried that after 2 years a completely new upstart in the phone market has not only dethroned you but is now making 45% more profit than you. The worry would be about what will happen next year, and the year after that.

I'd also be pretty worried that Apple's R&D warchest can be much bigger than mine partly because they're making masses more cash than I am, but also because unlike Nokia Apple do not rely just on the phone sector - so they can draw in money and expertise from those sectors as well.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah - gotcha.

Yup, I'm sure they have been worried about Apple as a competitor at the top end, because Apple did arrive from nowhere with a great product (albeit lacking in some important ways with 1st generation).

It's certainly inspired competition, which has been nice. The newer Android phones look rather good. I'm hoping that by the time I get to replace my phone they've got the last of the kinks out of them :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The thing is - Apple came out with the iPod originally as a 'top end' product, but after a short while they started to have iPod variants that went down to the lower end of the market (like, now, the nano).

If Apple wanted to eat Nokia's lunch they could (and probably are) develop(ing) a similarly lower end model. Also, with the enormous profit margins on the iPhone (Apple make 45% more profit while selling 6.8% as many phones) Apple could conceivably drop the prices quite a lot and eat even more of Nokia's lunch in the mean time.

[andrewducker]

Does Apple really want to move out of the large) niche it's in though? They could release a cut-down iPhone, but what would they remove without making the phone incompatible with large chunks of the app store? Would cutting prices actually make them more money?

It's like netbooks. Apple could undoubtedly release a netbook that would kick serious arse, but they'd mostly be cannibalising their own sales, which is presumably why they haven't...

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Apple do want to be a premium brand - but they've shown with the nano et al that you can be the premium brand at different levels in the market. The nano is a 'budget' mp3 player - it just happens to be one of the most expensive budget players :) I suspect they have teams working on something similar for phones. I'm not sure what a lower end Apple phone would be like - perhaps it'd be smaller having a less high resolution screen? Who knows.

The key I think is to release something that fills the need of the lower end users but isn't tempting to the higher end users because it lacks crucial features. So the nano has no nice colour screen and video playback for instance. I don't know what the equivalent would be here - but that's what Apple are good at - thinking of things no one else has, and implementing them very well in a stunningly short period of time.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

All the reviews I've seen (and my personal tests of Android) make it look very much like a grade B product next to Apple's. I doubt, given Google's history with software development and the way Android works - that it'll ever be 'better' than the iPhone. However it could be that it's cheaper or not much worse - in much the same way that Linux gets market share although arguably for most users the experience is quite a bit worse than using Windows or Mac OS X.

Nokia's N900 on the other hand is (I've heard) excellent. I had a n800, which ran the same operating system - and that was fantastic. However it's a super premium end phone - if that's to get traction Nokia will need to massively reduce the cost.

[andrewducker]

I didn't much fancy the G1 - but all the reviews of the later phones show that Android is rapidly increasing in usability and power. The reviews of the first Android 2.0 phone are all rather glowing. Still a few bits and pieces to work out, but good enough that my next phone will almost certainly be an Android.

Unless Maemo overtakes it by then, of course :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The reviews I read of Android 2.0 still all said "not as good as the iPhone" which is unfortunate as you'd expect a new release to leapfrog ahead until the competitors new release leapfrogs ahead of that.

The only thing that non-iPhone phones potentially have going for them atm that is really significant AFAICT is that they can have better screen resolutions (and Flash).

[andrewducker]

The reviews I've seen have said that some things the iPhone does better, some the Droid does better.

The main thing that non-iPhones have going for me is that I can install any app I like on them. If Apple did that then I'd have one already.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

BTW - did you read any review that considered the Droid to be superior to the iPhone? Every review I've read is like this one: "It's the question that everyone will ask, so we might as well get it out of the way now - is this an iPhone or HTC Hero killer? And the answer is no."

[andrewducker]

Seen a couple that say that The Droid is better at some things and the iPhone is better than others. The inbox is supposed to be better for dealing with everything in one place (but I suspect that's a matter of taste). And there's the usual stuff about background apps and more freedom and having a physical keyboard. But if those don't matter to you then I suspect the iPhone still aces it.

[andrewducker]

Just remembered the other thing Apple doesn't do - background apps.

Having to relaunch an app because I wanted to check my email would annoy the hell out of me.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

That is annoying.

Apple's argument is this tradeoff is why the iPhone gets excellent battery life.

[andrewducker]

I can understand that argument. But I'd rather have them say "If you run multiple apps the battery life will drop" or even pop up a "Background app X is sucking the battery dry, kill it?" than mandate that I can't run them.