if connected

Today’s round-up of recent wireless, smartphone, tablet, and other mobile data.

There’s a summary of the data at the top with more figures, analysis and links to all of the sources included further down after the break.

1. comScore: August 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

In one of its key countries, the US, RIM is really struggling. RIM sees a decline of 1% in share of the mobile handset market and a dramatic 5% fall in share of smartphone OS platforms in just a three month period. But these figures pre-date the introduction of RIM’s completely new portfolio of low end Curves and higher end Bold’s and Torch’s all running BlackBerry OS 7.

Despite widespread sentiment that Apple is losing out to Android in the US, the company’s share of the total US mobile market edged up by 0.7% between May and August. This reflects continued strength for the iPhone 4 although the handset design is a year old.

2. Apple: Latest iOS, iPhone and other Apple statistics from the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event

Apple’s own figures from the iPhone 4S launch re-enforce how well it was doing on the eve of Steve Job’s death. Some of the many metrics (many stats further down after the break):

• 250m iOS devices sold, including iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch models.
• 18m total app downloads cumulatively.
• 500,000 iOS apps in the store, of which 140,000 are for the iPad.
• 67m Game Center users.
• >16bn songs sold by the iTunes music store.
• $3bn paid out by App to app developers to date

3. Nielsen: In U.S. Market, New Smartphone Buyers Increasingly Embracing Android

Data on new smartphone buyers shows that Android is growing dramatically and now represents 56% of recent smartphone acquirers. However, Apple is maintaining its smartphone market share (28%) when comparing recent smartphone acquirers and all smartphone subscribers. Result: More bad news for RIM and Microsoft Windows Phone, it’s these other smartphone platforms that are being squeezed by the rise of Android, not Apple.

4. J.D. Power: The Right Blend of Design and Technology is Critical to Creating an Exceptional User Experience with Smartphones and Traditional Mobile Devices

Customer satisfaction is greatest for thin and light devices, even among smartphone users. Current feature phone owners demonstrate the same trend as smartphone owners for portable devices but have a lower tolerance for weight with their satisfaction levels dropping off when devices weigh over 4 ounces compared with a threshold of 5 ounces for smartphone owners.

My take: This explains partly the success of the iPhone 4. Apple’s handset is a particularly thin and light smartphone that has wide appeal to normal mobile customers, not just savvy users. J.D. Power data picks out the iPhone as the highest rated phone for satisfaction.

5. Nielsen: 40 Percent of U.S. Mobile Users Own Smartphones; 40 Percent are Android

Apple and Android are neck and neck in appeal for those adults that intend to buy a smartphone in the next year: Both appeal to 30% of prospective buyers. But among an “Innovators” group of early adopters 40% intend to buy an Android smartphone compared with 32% for iOS. My take: This data demonstrates that the iPhone has broader appeal across mainstream users than Android.

Read the rest of this entry »

Next week Apple will announce new iPhones. There will be a backlash. There will be praise. Much of significance will be lost in the noise.

Instead, Apple’s metrics should focus rivals’ attention on the importance of multi-year strategies.

Competitors are forever seeking to emulate Apple. But too many deploy me-too tactics, rather than following a consistent and sustained long term strategy:

• HP fired its CEO under a year after appointment. There’s only time to kill things, not build them, in such a short period.
• Nokia dithered on MeeGo. In 2009, Nokia partnered with Intel on MeeGo, then killed MeeGo just a year later, to focus on Microsoft Windows Phone instead.
• Samsung’s Galaxy S of 2010 resembles the Apple’s old iPhone 3GS of 2009, not the designed-from-scratch iPhone 4 that the S actually competed against at the time the S arrived in the market.

Part of the problem is that Apple keeps its strategy to itself: New products seem to appear out of Apple’s magic hat fully-formed at high profile launch events as if they’ve been born an adult, with no incubation or nurturing period. There are rarely betas or pre-announcements months ahead of availability, unlike the perpetually beta services of others. But we know Apple takes years to create these products. The iPad’s origins pre-date the iPhone and go back to around 2004 — six years before it launched — while serious development began in 2007, again years before competitors had anything publicly available that they could copy.

By mistaking tactics for strategy Apple’s many competitors are doomed to poor results. The time needed to build products as deeply and well designed as Apple’s can’t be completed overnight. Software design takes years to do. The supplier relationships that Apple is securing are long term. The investment that Apple is placing in key component design — moving into chip design with the A4 and A5 — is not something that any company could achieve without clear multi-year strategy.

Despite the Android evangelists and Apple naysayers, Apple’s metrics are nothing short of outstanding:

Read the rest of this entry »

This week the first significant feature update to Windows Phone 7 should roll out to users’ phones. Or perhaps it will be next week, Microsoft is being vague. Either way, this should be a reason for Microsoft to market the hell out of their innovative and worthy smartphones.  Instead, the world is being distracted by Windows 8 and competitor activity, rather than the update variously called Mango or version 7.5. Microsoft is at risk of presenting multiple personalities to the world.

“We haven’t sold quite as many as I would have liked in the first year… I’m not saying I love where we are but I am very optimistic on where we can be. We’ve just got to kick this thing to the next level.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO,  at Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, September 14, 2011.

To date, Windows Phone hasn’t sold as well as Microsoft hoped and wanted. Microsoft really needs Mango to succeed or Windows Phone 7 may itself stagnate and eventually die, despite its highly differentiated social network integration, hubs, and Metro user interface (UI).

The use by Windows 8 of the same Metro interface pioneered on Windows Phone 7 should boost adoption of Microsoft’s smartphones. By confirming Microsoft backing for the Metro UI it should help app developers to create apps for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Having more quality apps should then boost Windows Phone sales. It’s the classic virtuous circle.

And Windows Phone really needs more apps, and more quality apps too: as of September 2011 there are just over 32,000 apps available compared with over 425,000 for Apple’s iOS; over 250,000 for Android; even the iPad has over 90,000 apps in Apple’s App Store.

This virtuous circle won’t happen unless Microsoft amends its strategy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we heard about the latest additions to Apple’s product empire. Today, we saw the latest extensions of the ecosystem that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop referred to in his eloquent burning platform memo:-

“Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.”

He was right that this is more than a fight between individual products like mobile handsets.

“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.”

But ecosystem is far too weak a word. It implies that all a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google must do is to find a fertile field with favourable weather and let their product seeds grow. If that were enough, Google would not be struggling to foster more than a handful of Android tablet apps, and Apple wouldn’t be sitting on over 90,000 iPad-optimised apps. The difference in app quantity and quality would be much narrower.

Today at WWDC we see how the Apple ecosystem is run. It has a leader, a philosophy, a business model, a model of customer identity. All of these things are critical for success. Switching back to the fertile field metaphor: Apple adds a lot more to the ecosystem than simply choosing suitable environmental conditions for software and hardware to prosper. And, those extra ingredients are why Elop is wrong, or at least not sufficiently visionary in his memo. This is a far greater clash than one between ecosystems. More later when the fuss over WWDC has died down a little.

This post was originally published on my Forrester blog.

At MWC, multiple companies have launched mobile application stores that seek to build upon Apple's iPhone success (Microsoft, Nokia, Orange, mPortico, Surfkitchen, Adtonic, PocketGear and others). These join existing announced app stores (including RIM, Google Android, Palm).

These are more than simple me-too initiatives.

Mobile app stores are not new. Palm, Handango and even Nokia with their Download! service pre-date Apple. Like the iPod, Apple was a follower — rather than first mover — that succeeded due to terrific execution and a clear strategy and market position. Apple benefits from the ease of commercial iPhone application distribution. Developers now prosper in a virtuous circle:

• iPhone application store is easy to use on phone or PC. It offers consumers reviews, user ratings, reliable download & install and low price points. Developers benefit from reliable content protection.
• Developers sell more applications and so prioritise more r&d for iPhone over other phones. This leads to a greater catalogue of applications.
• The greater wealth of third party support increases the benefit for consumers of owning an iPhone, thus driving iPhone sales.
• A greater installed base of iPhones increases the audience of potential application buyers, leading to increased application sales.

To succeed, owners much ensure that their store's convenience to consumers is high. Superb execution will be critical.

What is it that makes one app outstanding? What is it that deliver a better experience than clicking a link to a mobile website? It’s not the home screen icon as it’s easy to place bookmarks onto an iPhone home screen and in fact half of the icons on my first page are indeed web bookmarks.

• Offer an offline experience. Too often I’m in an area with a 2g signal or no signal at all. Bookmarks are useless. But an application that stores information locally on the phone and so just works truly anywhere anytime — even without coverage — is outstanding. Automatic sync is the ideal experience, but it has to work completely reliably: Sync that mangles data is worse than useless.
• Are fast to respond to screen taps. Jumping from one web page to another always results in a delay. On the desktop clever use of plug-ins and javascript combine with low broadband ping times to overcome this issue. On a mobile, network responsiveness is much slower and even the iPhone’s Safari browser is lacking. Storing content locally enables both a really speedy experience as well as offline working.
• Tie into handset hardware functions like GPS or speedy 3D graphics. Native apps still have close handset integration to themselves.
• Make me smile. Seriously. So many iPhone apps have a real sense of fun about them, even dull utilities. It doesn’t have to be the app itself, other updates from an apps’ developer may write to me with a human voice.
• Are designed for use on the move. Apps need to remember state without the user needing to hit ‘save’ or navigating to a particular point in the UI. A phone call could come in at any time. The app needs to be able to be interrupted on an instant’s notice. Fast app loading must be a given.
• Works with my other websites and existing data on day one. Apps that force me instantly to switch everything just don’t get tested out. They need to work with what I’m already committed too. Over time, I may be prepared to take the time to migrate data.
• Are free or have free trial/lite versions. I don’t care how good the reviews are. Unless there’s some free way of trying something out I’m unlikely to play with an app. For me, even a 59 pence charge is an extra barrier too far for testing something out on top of the time to download and install.
• Are loved. Apps that are regularly updated and improved tend to endear themselves to me. I love the feeling of enjoying improvements for free.

So, what characteristics am I missing?

Stanza – An ebook reader that’s fast, free, and offers over the air download of out of copyright books. Recently, they’ve added compatibility with eReader copy protected paid books (but I’ve not tried that aspect). Terrific. The iPhone screen and pocketable size makes for a great reading device for novels: anything that has pictures or is more than a single column of text needs a larger screen.

NYTimes – I have something of a love-hate relationship with apps that mimic websites. This one, despite a buggy early life, is a keeper for its offline abilities. It downloads a version of the paper that I can read underground on London’s tube where there’s no mobile network. Still could do with work: there’s no way to tell the app which parts of the paper to download first, whether or not to bother with photos, and what proportion of the content is ready for offline reading. It’s good but could be great.

Evernote – What I really love about Evernote isn’t the iPhone version itself, which is only OK, but the overall Evernote experience. Add photos, files, text, whatever and it’s all available via phone, web, Windows or Mac application. There’s no need to remember to sync or save something, it’s all just there. Start typing a note on the PC and crash mid-way, and the partial note is still preserved for access on all the others. There’s character recognition for text in pictures. It’s just tremendous. So, why is the iPhone app not amazing? Limited local sync and editing. Evernote is improving its software all the time so this will improve. Evernote is deservedly one of the rising stars of the last year.

WordPress – I’ve tried the free blogging apps for Livejournal, Typepad and WordPress but the latter’s the best. None of the them are perfect but the killer feature for an app over the website itself is offline mode and here WordPress seems to work the best (but it still needs improvements). The app has support for pictures, categories, holding a local archive of posts, and for saving drafts. In my experience, the save drafts locally feature doesn’t work, but saving drafts online is fine.

Units – which is a free converter for most things such as weight, volume, speed etc. etc.

SplashID – Stores passwords securely. What I love is that SplashID runs on virtually every smartphone plus there are both PC and Mac versions and it all syncs. I’ve switched from Palm to Symbian to Windows Mobile and now iPhone over the last few years: SplashID has worked for me on all of them without me needing to re-enter my data.

Twittelator – My favourite twitter client (*). It’s not popular for some reason, but it has a strong UI, location-awareness, and offers a rich featureset. (* – I’ve tried too many others to remember them all).

Remote – Apple’s iTunes-controlling application means I have my complete music collection playable in any room I have an Airport Express and connected speakers. This combination of kit is one of those rare set of products that Apple has underhyped and undermarketed over the years.

Last.fm – Offers a large part of the experience in reasonable but not great sound quality. The UI is adequate but despite mimicing the iPod controls manages to be a little idiosyncratic. Works well on WiFi. I’ve love to see a similar smooth 3G experience.

There are a few new ones I’m testing now, that may be keepers, but for which it’s too early to say:
- Truphone – watch for some great feature additions very soon (I’ve seen a preview of the next version).
- WiFinder – monitors for open access points and advises if they are really providing an Internet connection.
- Orb – Slingbox-style placeshifting for PC files.
- Joost and Babelgum – A couple of years ago these were poster childs of online TV. They’re now niche audience-focused, but there’s some good content hidden behind all the swimsuits and music videos.

That’s it for now. I’m saving games for a future post. What’s your list of best mobile apps for iPhone or for another mobile?