Posted on June 23, 2008, at 11:41 am .
According to the latest study by Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, approximately 31% of U.S small businesses (or SBs, defined as companies with less than 99 employees) are now using smartphones, with an additional 11% who do not use them saying plan to purchase one — equating to approximately 400,000 U.S. small businesses using smartphones.
What do these growth numbers mean? Money, and lots of it. AMI-Partners forecasts that U.S. SBs will spend a total of US$375 million on these devices alone (without services expense) in 5 years. This is a rate 6 times greater than the estimated spending of medium businesses (MBs, or companies with 100 to 999 employees).
How this might affect RIM’s game, and a fine BlackBerry Limeade recipie behind the jump!
Posted on June 10, 2008, at 9:02 am .
The New York Times has an article out today spotlighting the growing trend of women with smartphones, and of course, it’s filled with iPhone-related data. For example, did you know that one out of every three iPhones were purchased by a woman? Significantly, this number is a result of a doubling of the number of women using smartphones in the past year, to 10.4 million (women accounted for only one in four of every iPhone purchase as recently as October).
Suggested reasons for the upsurge? Cheaper phones with more appealing designs, such as the now $99 BlackBerry Pearl, the elimination of the geek stigma to purchasing a smartphone, and an ever-increasing need to keep in touch with family members. Perhaps also the color pink:
We picked a shade of pink that fit in all kinds of settings — not too flashy,” said Mark Guibert, vice president for corporate marketing at RIM. “It was the only color that was purely driven by the female audience. Years ago the market was much more focused solely on function. Now there is more focus on lifestyle.
Pink: is there anything it can’t do?
(via NYT)
Posted on December 19, 2007, at 11:17 am .
There’s already been some griping about BlackBerry’s performance in Consumer Reports‘ ‘08 issue, and it might be well-justified. The BlackBerry Curve landed in 7th. place, the Pearl in 12th., the 8800 in 14th., and the 8830 in 19th. out of 20 smartphones tested. Two Treos (755p and 680), T-Mobile’s Wing, the BlackJack and the Moto Q 9m beat out the BlackBerry 8300, with the iPhone topping the list.
Basically, that means everyone who matters in smartphones did better than BlackBerry. Suprisingly, the Nokia N95 (which I had heard great things about) was down in 15th. place. The biggest thing to keep in mind before launching into a CR-hating tirade is that you really have to take these things with a grain of salt. CR’s overall scores were “based mainly on voice quality, ease of use, and talk time”, which can all vary based on user, location and carrier. I haven’t used any of the other top 5, so can’t really pass judgement. Anyone have some horror stories about the leaders, and why they might not deserve top marks?
Posted on December 18, 2007, at 12:14 pm .
Fellow Viigo partner, Jakajima, has recently published a white paper that aims to establish a system for objectively comparing smartphone OSes. “An innovative tool to benchmark Smartphone Operating Systems” puts a Nokia E61i, HTC S710, Blackberry 8800, Palm Treo 680, and a Sony Ericsson P990i device under the magnifying glass (the iPhone was released while testing was already underway, so couldn’t get in). The testing system is called the High Contrast Consumer Test, which involves getting first-time users to carry out real-world tasks in line with the smartphone’s specialties.
The testers are dubbed as “extreme”, in that they’re gunning for one particular kind of usage. By submitting smartphones to extreme users of various levels of knowledge, the HCCT is able to gage the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of using each OS. This is just a pilot project to set the groundwork, so we’ll have to sit tight until the labcoats have another go with the fully polished rubric. In the meantime, check out what are supposedly the top 24 smartphone features for professional users, in order of importance…
Continue reading ‘White paper experiments with smartphone OS comparison’
Posted on November 16, 2007, at 9:13 am .
Apparently it’s true, according to a recent study from In-Stat. Over the next five years, the OS-based smartphone market is forecasted to make upwards of 30% growth each year (except Palm of course), leaving the standard cell growth rate in the single-digit realm. This boom for feature-rich mobiles is good news for carriers, who can expect to see an increase in average revenue per user who’s making use of all those fancy bells and whistles.
“Because of the value users are finding, organizations are slowly taking ownership of smartphones and data applications used for business purposes,” says Bill Hughes, In-Stat analyst. “Rather than having overcomplicated reimbursement plans, more organizations are finding it more expedient and economical to treat wireless voice and data services as a business expense when they use smartphones.”
Posted on September 4, 2007, at 3:13 pm .
With the summer drawing to a close, the numbers for the initial wave of iPhone sales are shaping up, and they’re pretty impressive. iSuppli is reporting 220,000 out of 2 million surveyed have bought one, which translates to a 1.8% grab of the market. On top of that, they’re forecasting 4.5 million before the end of the year and 30 million units in the public by 2011. Earlier, we were looking at a total of 6% market penetration, and with a start like this summers’, it’s entirely likely. Just to put these numbers in perspective…
“The two models of the iPhone on the market sold more than Research in Motion’s Blackberry series, the entire Palm portfolio and any individual smartphone model from Motorola, Nokia or Samsung.”
Posted on August 29, 2007, at 12:40 pm .
A recent ABI Research report is forecasting huge progress for Linux as the OS of choice for smartphones, claiming 31% of smartphones will be running it by 2012 thanks to a compound annual growth rate of 74%. Both Nokia and Palm have been flirting with Linux adoption for awhile. In fact, being more of an open product was one of the key changes Palm needed to embrace, according to a certain open letter. The report just goes to show that doing so early will get them on board with developers. Now, the BlackBerry’s fairly closed in terms of its OS and odds are it’s going to stay that way. How much of a lead could open source adoption give Palm over RIM?
Posted on August 21, 2007, at 2:36 pm .
We all know that Palm’s not doing so hot, but the Engadget crew has laid out all of Palm’s problems and what they need to do to get back in the game. It might not be BlackBerry-related, but the open letter is a really concise way of identifying what customers’ baseline expectations are for smartphones these days, and there are more than a few things on the list that RIM’s managing to do that Palm isn’t. Don’t mess with the keyboard, make your handheld look nice, add Wi-Fi, support multitasking, embrace developers, cultivate multimedia, get with Google, and make better ads all seem like things that RIM is doing, but there’s also a couple things that BlackBerry could take a hint from. Do you guys think there’s anything RIM could learn from Palm’s mistakes?
Posted on August 2, 2007, at 11:13 am .
With all the focus lately on Apple and the iPhone, it’s easy to forget that RIM has other, likely more serious, threats to their enterprise smartphone dominance. Sure, Motorola is in a bit of financial trouble, and Microsoft is burdened by the albatross that is Windows Mobile, but what about Nokia? Large, powerful, Finnish… Sounds like competition to me.
Nokia recently announced their Q2 financial results, and the results are good. The company reported a 28% jump in net sales to $17.2 billion USD, along with a rise in operating margin from 15.3% to 18.7%. Their net profit jumped to $3.87 billion USD, compared to $1.56 billion a year previously.
But what’s most staggering are their device numbers. True, not all of their devices sold are competitors to the BlackBerry, but it’s hard to argue with 100 million devices worldwide and 38% of the total global device market.
Check out Nokia’s device numbers after the jump.
Posted on July 11, 2007, at 9:40 am .
With so many significant developments this year, I thought it might be a good time to take the pulse of the smartphone market and its main competitors.
RIM: 
Upside: With record sales and their stock hitting all time highs, life is good for the folks at RIM right now. They are the entrenched leader in the enterprise market and will be for many years to come. Competitors cannot make up overnight for the years of engineering and refinement that have gone into the BlackBerry solution. They also are poised for growth in emerging global markets.
One obstacle they face: the fact that Apple will undoubtedly put a dent into their sales in the consumer market.
