Microsoft should be ashamed of this

[andrewducker]

From.

[Poll #1769786]

Comments

[andrewducker]

It is always dangerous to assume that Microsoft has been knocked entirely out of a market - but the MS/Nokia tie-up is going to have to pay off _really_ well for them to make a comeback any time soon. Halving the number of phones they sold in a market that grew by over 50% is almost impressive.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I wanted a POSSIBLY on question 1, they're good at come backs and have damn near infinite resources.

I'm getting a Windows Phone 7 today, mostly for play purposes but I have heard a LOT of good things from former iPhone users who work over the water and are converts.

[andrewducker]

Let me know what you think of it.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

So far so meh...

I'll need to spend some time setting it up properly, which I haven't done, but so far I'm not feeling the love.

But that is going to have to wait until after WorldCon.

[steer.livejournal.com]

A few years ago you might have assumed Nokia unassailable -- mind you note that Symbian still outsells ios which surprises me. I imagine these figures would look different if you converted units to price since ios typically more expensive than android which is more expensive than symbian.

Also remember that MS makes $$$ from every android phone sold without having to lift a finger.

[matgb]

note that Symbian still outsells ios which surprises me

This. symbian is outselling everything except Android, and that's in the quarter after it was announced Symbian was dead. Nokia has massive marketing clout in a lot of markets. I suspect when they launch their Windows phones the market position of Nokia will start to recover from where it is.

Does show how the tendency of companies to completely ignore Symbian for app development, even at a basic level, is daft--friend of mine wanted the Symbian Spotify app yesterday, it's gone from everywhere it should be even though it's compatible and working fine, why would you do that to 20%+ market share?

[steer.livejournal.com]

While it's potentially 20% market share, I suspect the people buying Symbian now are late adopters who are not prime app purchasers. You are correct though that there's likely significant suppressed demand for good apps. The interface on my last Symbian (N95 8Gb) was still pitiful for buying.


Shame, developing for Symbian is really fun. There's a nice freely available SDK. There i a big issue though that what works on one does not necessarily run on another (in the Java spirit of "write once, run somewhere") because of differences in memory and screen size. Still, I had great fun coding for them.

[matgb]

I suspect the people buying Symbian now are late adopters who are not prime app purchasers

Or early adopters who're upgrading? #Note the 20% share also applies to current smartphone usage in the UK, which'll include people using phones bought two years ago, etc. Iswitched to a 5800 when I upgraded from my SonyEricsson Walkman featurephone about 3 years ago, I now have an N8, there're chunks of people out there who've been happily using Nokia's for years and the ONS stats out recently said they have a 20% usage share, which is down from, what, 50% of smartphones two/three years ago?

And I've been installing apps since I got my first phone that supported J2ME, I'm not the only one-it may be that Orange, specifically, did a bit of work promoting their app store in the early days (of course, it wasn't called an app store, but...)

But yeah, the Ovi store is still terrible to navigate.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I imagine these figures would look different if you converted units to price

Yup. The figures are even less reliable, but in terms of money changing hands, iOS has well over half the total volume. And when you account for the fact that Apple's margins are waaay higher than Android manufacturers', it starts to look like almost all the profit in smartphones is being made by Apple.

[andrewducker]

About 2/3:
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/29/apples-profit-share-among-top-mobile-phone-vendors-rises-to-66/

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

Seems to me they're doing the exact opposite of what Google are doing - bringing out hundreds of new phones every month.

Everytime I go on Engadget or Gizmodo there's a new Android device either being announced or released. That sort of momentum means that odds are when someone is buying a new phone they can pickup either 'the latest' Android phone, or an older WinMo device.

Having played around with a friend's Samsung WinMo device though, I'm really impressed. The device was slick and smooth, really easy to use and the keyboard was fantastic. If they can sort out their app store it can only get better.

One thing that's stopping me buying one, is that after a year of iPhone ownership I'm tied into an ecosystem that I've dropped probably about £70 into for apps. That's harder to leave than it sounds.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, WinMo does actually look good. But I'm not prepared to buy a phone that makes you go through an app store to buy/install apps, and then filters said app store.

Which knocks both Windows and iPhone off my list.

(I have bought into the Android ecosystem, but not so much that I couldn't switch phones if there was a compelling reason to do so.)

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

I do get frustrated about the features that my phone doesn't have, simply because they're 'pay-walled' by Apple/ Orange. But compared to phones I've had before there's enough benefits to outweigh the few negatives.

Whether I'll feel the same way further down the line I don't know. But my usage scenario doesn't often rely on features that are blocked by Apple.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Today's Google move and the sheer horror we've had with Android for the Renovation app suggests that Google have had quite enough of dealing with the wild west of app development.

Not to name drop too much, but I did point out to Andy Rubin himself, shortly after their launch, that I didn't think the strategy of letting the app market prevent fragmentation would work.

It hasn't.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I don't have a mobile phone, but if I do get a smartphone in the near future I'd be strongly tempted to go with a Windows Phone... alas, yes, it is tied into its own infrastructure but given that I already subscribe to Xbox Live and Zune it's an infrastructure I already have ties to. WP would also integrate very well into the Windows network I have at home.

WP on Nokia hardware would be even more tempting.

-- Steve can resist, though; his resolve is bolstered by Canada's decidedly unenlightened mobile market with some of the world's highest data plan charges. Alexander Graham Bell must be rolling in his grave...

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I've been using a device running the developer build of the next release of WP7, code-named Mango, for the last couple of weeks, and I'm cautiously impressed. Social media integration is good and unobtrusive, and the platform is responsive - and above all fast.

I'll need to see more apps to try out the multitasking and the new agent-based live tiles, but they do seem to have the right balance between business and consumer in an intuitive user interface.

[andrewducker]

It does look shiny.

I won't be getting one though - too locked down for me.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Same level of locked-downedness as Android these days, thanks to the work the Chevron-WP7 guys are doing!

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I'm currently on Windows Mobile 6.5, which gives me both what I need and what I want.

What I need is native support for Active Sync to an Exchange server that actually works properly. Lots of people claim to offer this.

What I want is a platform that's not locked down, that doesn't mantate a single source/channel for additional apps. Progressively fewer people seem to offer this.

I'll stick with my WM6.5 phone for now.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that I hate telephone calls, so don't own a mobile at all, and that I won't buy a tablet until I can find one that runs a completely free OS (Android would be fine, but everything I've seen is Android + proprietary crapware).

[andrewducker]

I'm very tempted, with my next phone, to buy it outright, so that I don't get Orange's rubbish on it.

Not so sure about the HTC stuff - Sense works fine for me, and I replaced the Launcher anyway. I might go for one of the Google ones that doesn't have any of the manufacturer stuff on it at all.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

All the problems with had with the Reno app were HTC induced crapware around Sense UI blocking JavaScript from running properly.

Be warned.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Possibly not relevant, but I've been very unimpressed with Microsoft's idea of marketing. If Microsoft ran Apple, they'd have named iPhone the "Apple Macintosh PowerBook Newton Smartphone" instead.

(My employer is guilty of similar things.)

[andrewducker]

This was made internally at MS:

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Fantastic!