CES 2012 Press Day Full of Developments

Before The 2012 International CES even officially started there were some interesting developments on press day.
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It’s an Android-Android-Android World in Smartphones . . . At Least for Now

In thinking about how Android has turned the U.S. smartphone market on its head over the past eighteen months, the musical anthem that most readily comes to mind is James Brown’s “This is a Man’s World.” This really is an Android world . . . an Android-Android-Android world . . . at least from a smartphone OS penetration perspective. At least half of all smartphone purchases in the past three quarters have been Android-based. Read more »

The perfect storm: LightSquared to Motorola to Google to cable wireless

Watching a new cable initiative develop is like watching a hurricane form in the Atlantic Ocean. First you need the pieces that could create this new initiative and then you need to fit them together in a way that would create a new cable business model. Even when all the pieces fit together and forecasters think they have a track, however, the end results are never a sure thing. Just ask those along the East Coast who prepared for Armageddon and lived through a heavy rainstorm named Irene (and others who prepared for the worst, but still had to deal with floods and power outages for days). Read more »

Galaxy S II Charts a New Course

They may be “vibrant” and even “epic,” but will they “captivate” and “fascinate”? It’s certainly no surprise that the Galaxy S II smartphones — the successor to Samsung’s breakout cross-carrier handsets — exceed their predecessors in nearly every specification. The Galaxy S II has a newer version of Android OS, double the number of processor cores, twice the RAM, higher digital-still and video-capture resolution, a larger screen, and a thinner profile. But there are other differences in the lineup that are not so quantifiable. Read more »

Bat wings in the cloud

Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility represents not the beginning of Google competing with Android licensees, but the exponential increase of it. From the time that Google launched the Nexus One, Google was signaling to its licensees that it was not afraid to stir the pot of conflicting interests. Read more »

Longer term, look to the connected home part of the Google-Motorola deal

It’s easy and correct to see Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility as a mobile play. After all Android and Moto phones are tongue-and-groove joined. What Google does with Moto phones and Android in the short term—and how the other phone makers and service providers react—is enough to hyper-energize the entire telecom market. Read more »

Booking Business on Android

Whether you consider Android a deliverer of differentiation or a fiend of fragmentation, you could find much evidence in the diverse ways that two leading bookstore rivals have not only expanded the operating system’s ecosystem, but used it as a vehicle for digital retailing.
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Kickstarting Windows Phone 7

The Android operating system was strolling along far below the radar of Apple and RIM in the first few quarters of 2009, after it had launched on T-Mobile with the G1 and seen Sprint hop on board with the Samsung Moment; however, its rapid ascent to the top of the smartphone market share ladder kicked into high gear, when Verizon Wireless not only adopted the operating system, launching it amidst the spendy advertising campaign for the Motorola Droid, but also began offering a buy-one-get one promotion that reached well into the following quarter.

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A Mobile Milestone: Smartphones Reached 50 Percent Unit Share in July

Today NPD reported that the iPhone 4 was the best-selling handset in the third quarter, according to NPD’s Mobile Phone Track, which tracks sell-through of handsets to U.S. consumers; however, during the quarter, the Android platform surged forward in its market share gains, capturing 11 more percentage points to finish out the quarter with 44 percent of the market. Many of Android’s gains came at the expense of RIM, as the freely licensed operating system has made exceptional progress outside of the iPhone’s stronghold.

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A Phone Call To Action

This week NPD reported on Q2’s smartphone OS market share. It was a big quarter for Android, which is now installed on one of every three smartphones sold in the U.S. Android’s gains clearly came at the expense of RIM, which dropped nine percentage points quarter over quarter, and has seen an even more precipitous drop from a year ago. And yet, even with smartphones now growing to account for 42 percent of the U.S. market, Samsung and LG continued to lead the overall U.S. handset market without a significant smartphone presence, certainly in relation to their feature phones.

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