Survey shows iPhone threatens BlackBerry; Palm holds steady
A recent survey shows that while Research In Motion continues to lead as the smartphone of choice among consumers, Apple's iPhone is quickly catching up.
ChangeWave Research on Tuesday released the results of its week-long September survey of 4,255 consumers, which showed that RIM retains its lead in smartphone ownership with 40 percent market share. That's actually a dip of 1 percentage point since the last survey in June, and the lowest share RIM has registered in two years.
Despite having more models of smartphones, RIM is facing serious competition from Apple, whose iPhone has 30 percent market share among those surveyed. That's an increase of 5 percentage points since June, when the new iPhone 3GS was released.
(Credit:
ChangeWave Research)
Among the same group, Palm has maintained a 7 percent share since June. Though it didn't see any growth even with the introduction of the Palm Pre and more recently the Pixi, the two new WebOS-based phones are helping the company to not lose share. Palm has seen its market share of smartphone ownership erode steadily from its peak of 36 percent in June 2006.
When including all manufacturers, the smartphone market is clearly gaining momentum. ChangeWave reports that 39 percent of those polled in September now own a smartphone, an increase of 2 percentage points since June, but more importantly, double the ownership of consumers polled two years ago.
And that momentum is something that PC makers are taking notice of, according to research also released Tuesday from Gartner. The analyst firm believes that more PC makers will start making smartphones to tap into those consumer dollars being spent in that segment. There's far more opportunity for them to court first-time smartphone owners than first-time laptop owners.
Smartphone revenue is expected to reach $191 million by 2012, which is more money than the $152 million users are expected to spend on laptops, according to Gartner. Apple, Sony, Dell, and Acer are the device makers that currently, or have announced they will, sell laptops as well as smartphones.
Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica. 
...brace for mindless flameboys touting their faves as superior to all in spite of the evidence...
RIM holds steady.
Palms drop is a mirror image of Apple's growth in the reverse.
...sort of. Read the numbers - it's a slow drop over time for RIM.
(I use a Blackberry and don't own an iPhone, so before you go name-calling...)
I wonder where the Windows Mobile numbers are in all this, and why the US-only caveat isn't mentioned as prominently...
I think a more telling statistic would be how many personal users are paying for a blackberry and how many are paying for an iPhone, the only thing in my opinion keeping up the RIM numbers is the mass corporate backing.
The line forms directly behind me (though I will say that in spite of the pricetag, BES is a hell of a lot easier to manage than Exchange's ActiveSync).
OTOH, I can see a point in the future where using Exchange ActiveSync push will end up costing money (just not right now, for obvious reasons...)
As an IT department support load, the iPhones just work. Users don't have questions about how to use them; no training is necessary. They rarely get buggy or display errors. Windows Mobile was a disaster. Even after providing detailed training, users still couldn't figure out how to use basic features. The phones were also buggy as hell. BlackBerry phones basically did the trick, but they were drab and boring to use. They were phones with email, nothing more.
Today a former employee called me up to ask a favor. When he left the company, we had to take his iPhone back. In passing, he mentioned to me, "I couldn't resist, man. I had to go out and get an iPhone myself." For most people, once they use an iPhone--really *use* it--they will "love" the experience and not want to leave it. Notice that I say "most." There is a small group of techies, power users, and physical keyboard lovers for whom the iPhone will not provide satisfaction. For them, they can have Google Android or Palm WebOS. My sense, however, is that they are the minority.
Regarding their low share in general, consider also that prior to the debut of the Pre, almost all the US carriers were selling some sort of PalmOS device (T-Mobile, Verizon, ATT, Sprint) and many were also selling Palm Windows Mobile devices too. But now Sprint is not only the sole source for the Pre, but they also in a way carry the burden making up sales for all of the other discontinued Palm devices as well.
Considering that, I'm not that surprised that their share is still relatively low. I think that will start to rise as WebOS apps start to proliferate, which is starting to happen.
Palms is mature, they do make a good OS, and that they are holding now is a good sign. We shall see if the trend reverses. The iPhone showed us what's possible in a new way, now it's a race for the rest to catch up to iPhone for easy of use and Apple to catch up to the rest for what they could do years ago that you can't on an iPhone.
Both sides now have holes to fill in their mobile phone offerings.
1) did you take that class on how to interpret numbers and graphs?
2) did you take that class on collecting broad data (like for across the entire market) vs. collecting data on only the items you wanted to?
She is obviously an iPhone fan girl; any other person would have researched every kind of phone OS in the market before coming up with this weak data and weaker interpretation. I have lost all respect for CNET reporting because it is seriously lacking in content, depth, and objectivity. They all just seem to be "buzz-hounds" who don't pay attention to details whatsover (sorry for the generalization...some of you do a good job but the majority do not!).
It is most certainly NOT the job of a CNET reporter to write a story about a report from ChangeWarve, NPD or any other industry tracking agency by researching everything they can find on the subject and debating the report. The report is the report plain and simple.
I absolutely hate NPD figures for computer games. The numbers are complete rubbish in my mind due to the fact that they don't collect data from several of the top brick and mortar retailers and they do not collect data from any digital distribution channels such as Steam or Direct2drive etc. Yet when they release a report to the public each month I do not attack the reporter that writes the story and shares the NPD figures.
In 2012, Gartner forecasts 525.68 million smart phone sales. If $191 million is accurate, that means that the phones cost $0.36 each. $363 is more likely the cost per phone, which would lead to revenue of $191 BILLION.
They're in a tough position right now. Do they make fundamental changes to how they development their phones in order to stay in the apps arms race at the risk of alienating their existing user base or do they stay the course and risk becoming obsolete if software choices become the dominant factor in purchase decisions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07OE7jvl02M&feature=related
- by krosafcheg October 29, 2009 9:29 PM PDT
- Mark my words, the minute that Apple get full encryption on that device and some Enterprise management tools, RIM is over.
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