Look’s like RIM is out on the prowl as rumors have surfaced about them talking to various cell phone manufacturers. What are they talking about? Probably selling their entire brand to the highest bidder. RIM has been falling off the market pretty quickly the past few years and, if this keeps up, they may be in big trouble within the next five years, if not out of business.
Dec 21
Dec 14
NPD just did a market study that has a few shocks here and there, but it was mostly expected as Android pulls ahead of all competition. Google’s ability to offer their OS across various price points gives them the advantage as Apple pulls in a strong second with their more limited choices. But what about the other smart phone OS’s? Does this spell doom and gloom for some?
Dec 07
Looks like Google is celebrating its ten Billionth download by offering several apps and games for 10 cents! I’m a big fan of Minecraft and seeing it go for ten cents made it an instant buy for me! Google’s Android has seen enormous growth this past year which is evident in it’s download frequency. This past year, almost every month, Android Marketplace has seen a 1 billion increase in downloads. That is incredibly impressive considering Apple iPhone, which has been around considerably longer, reached 15 billion this past summer.
Oct 12
RIM, British Tabloids and Sony are taking center stage recently and it isn’t the kind of attention any of them want. RIM had much of their Blackberry network shutdown, TWICE, in European, Africa and Middle Eastern countries. Sony has been hacked over and over again. Then we have News Corp. tabloids caught red handed in despicable phone hacking cases. These kind of things happen, and it isn’t unheard of for it to happen occasionally (minus the phone hacking thing). But this past year has shown more and more of these kind of tech disasters that no company wants to see more than once, if ever.
May 11
The official results are in, and the first quarter sales figures for 2010 are significantly in favor of Google’s Android smart phone. The war has waged for quite some time between Apple’s iPhone–with apps that pale in comparison to the amount of hype backing it up–and Google’s Android which has dedicated its operating system to various phone models and carriers across the board.
The iPhone, as many of you know, is paired only with AT&T service–and while Apple pushes its weight around the market, it rests firmly in the corner where only AT&T users and Mac Geeks dwell.
AT&T is big–really big. But Verizon is much bigger. You know those “coverage maps” you see in all the ‘Verizon VS AT&T‘ commercials? Those attempt to illustrate a whopping 92.8% of Verizon’s customers enjoying a relatively limitless wireless coverage zone.
iPhone’s biggest claim to fame is the App Store, featuring obscene numbers of user and professionally created applications for just about everything you’d ever want to do–from grocery shopping, to making fart-noises on the bus. The Google Android is gaining speed, however. They’re up to a healthy 50,000 applications and counting–and I believe they’ve even hosted their own fart-noise apps, so…good news there!
Because of Verizon’s dominant network, they have become a huge sponsor of Google’s Android–providing them with lots of advertising and marketing funds.
The last–and probably most important–factor that pushes the Android ahead is the pricing. Where the average price for a smart phone in 2010 is around $599 (retail price), the top-tier iPhones can be as pricey as $999 (used iphones for less than $200 and cheap droid phones). Because Google has the freedom to pick and choose its carriers and hosts models in varying price ranges, they have the potential to dominate every market.
The Android’s sales have outfoxed the iPhone, but not by much. With the first quarter percentages for the Android being 28%, and the iPhone’s being 21%, it is still a close race…but it is still only a race for 2nd place.
It should be no surprise that Reasearch in Motion’s Blackberry is still king of the smart phones with a first quarter sales rate of 36 percent. Across the board, new and refurbished Blackberrys make a huge impact on smart phone sales. They are efficient, inexpensive, and part of the largest networks in the country.
So, for now, Blackberry watches as Google and Apple duke it out–but there’s a lot more time left in 2010–and something tells me that the iPad won’t be the last tech gadget people are talking about this year.
Sources: Yahoo! Finance | ARS Technica | Android Community | Boy Genius Report
–Alex
