April 24, 2009
The predictions were dire, and the actual results were nothing to shout about.
But the cellular handset market weathered the first quarter reasonably well given the depth of the global downturn.
Research in Motion's Blackberry Bold had a good first quarter
According to ABI Research, 258 million phones were shipped during the three-month period. That is down 11 percent compared with last year. But it is ahead of expectations for 253.5 million handsets.
The research firm now thinks handset sales will fall 8 percent his year, compared with its previous projection of a 8.4 percent decline.
The second quarter, similarly, should show improvement over the first, though it will still be down 10 percent from a year earlier.
Samsung and LG did well during the first quarter, as did RIM with its Blackberry Bold, said Practice Director Kevin Burden.
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economy, news, wireless | Tagged: ABI Research, Cellular Handsets, LG, Mobile Phones, Research In Motion, Samsung | 
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Posted by Mark Boslet
March 25, 2009
As popularity grows, some predict app store chaos is on the way
With the sales of smartphones multiplying – especially in the U.S. – mobile app stores will serve a true mass market in just a few years.
According to In-Stat, sales of smarrphones with a clear app-store focus will reach 100 million units in five years – or about 30 percent of the global smartphone market.
That could quadruple the number of app store users.
Today the most active store is run by Apple for users of its iPhone. But Research in Motion, Palm and Microsoft and others are initiating and redoubling efforts to catch up.
With the coming wave of app stores, consumers will likely face a chaotic market place over the next year or so. Many will likely be confused about where to turn to find applications for their phones with hardware providers, service providers of operating system companies running competing stores.
But the market is anticipated to iron on over time.
2 Comments | news, wireless | Tagged: App Stores, Apple, blackberry, iPhone, Microsoft, Mobile Applications, palm, Research In Motion, Smartphones | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
March 24, 2009
Mobile applications are all the rage, but one unanswered question is whether apps creators will go for the write-once, run anywhere platforms now being developed.
The argument for a single platform sounds good on paper. Let the platform, not the app writer, adapt the application to the differing operating systems (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Research In Motion, Symbian) that run today’s mobile phones.
A new version of Rhomobile's platform now supports Google's Android
But some developers – particularly larger ones with more resources – say they have no intention of using them. In house developers know how to separate the core logic of the app from the interface that needs to change phone to phone.
The industry may come closer to answering the question with the release on Tuesday the latest version of Rhomobile’s open-sourced Rhodes 1.0 framework. The new version adds support for Google’s Android software.
“As a web and mobile app developer, I was attracted to the idea of leveraging our web development skills to build natively running applications,” Michael Morris, CEO of Carry The Day, said in a press release. Carry The Day developed two Rhodes-based mobile apps.
Let’s see who else pipes up.
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Posted by Mark Boslet
March 19, 2009
Research in Motion expects to unveil its App World store for Blackberry mobile applications this month, though it won’t offer a specific date.
“Very soon,” is all Senior Vice President Alan Brenner would say during an onstage interview at the 2009 Wireless Innovations conference in Silicon Valley.
Store will have quality and quantity, says Alan Brenner
What Brenner did say is that the smartphone maker expects to have both the quality and quantity of applications to attract users. He also said RIM will store applications in the cloud for users to download as often as they would like.
The use case goes like this. Suppose a user deletes an application. He or she can download it again for free. Or perhaps users have purchased more applications than they can store on their phone.
They can manage their applications in the cloud, deleting existing ones to make room for new ones and then reloading the old ones when they are through.
“We expect to have many high quality applications,” he said. “We expect to have the numbers, too.”
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Posted by Mark Boslet
March 18, 2009
Most people think of a Blackberry as a business tool used most by executives and managers on the go.
Blackberry is gaining market share, says Alan Brenner
But most people might be wrong. The perception is increasingly off the mark, says Alan Brenner, senior vice president at Blackberry builder Research in Motion.
“The enterprise focus of Blackberry is really maybe an out of date image,” Brenner said at the 2009 Wireless Innovations conference in Silicon Valley.
There are about 25 million active Blackberry users, he during an onstage interview. Fifty percent are enterprise user and 50 percent are consumers.
“We are increasingly doing both” consumer and business markets, he said, adding that this focus is visible in the devices the company has recently released.
As to the pace of business, smartphones remain one bright spot in today’s dark market place. In this environment, Blackberry is gaining share, he said.
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Posted by Mark Boslet
March 18, 2009
Apple’s iPhone App Store is a relatively orderly place, like the rest of iTunes.
But with handset makers, mobile carriers and operating software providers, such as Google and Microsoft, all building app stores of their own – mobile applications elsewhere are heading toward a cornucopia of confusion.
Too many app stores on the way
In other words, get ready for app-store chaos.
The problem comes down to this: too much choice. Where will the buyer of a phone running the Android software from Google turn to find applications? Should she look on Google, on the Web site of her service provider or on the Internet page of her handset maker - say Samsung or Motorola?
All have stores. All will have apps. All will want the dribble of revenue apps can bring.
“It’s clear everybody wants to provide an app store,” says Max Mancini, senior director of platform and mobile at eBay. As to the chaos? “It’s probably just ready to begin.”
Eventually, the parties will get together and settle on umbrella app stores for each operating system or handset design, suggests Mancini. “They will have to combine into one store,” he said during an interview at the 2009 Wireless Innovations conference in Silicon Valley.
But until then, Apple’s App Store is going to look singularly calm – all 25,000 applications.
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Posted by Mark Boslet
March 12, 2009
Smartphones now make up 12 percent of the cellular handset market, but like everything else, growth has slowed.
In the fourth quarter, sales of phones like Research In Motion’s Blackberrys and Apple’s iPhone grew only 3.7 percent, according to Gartner. The pace was the product category’s slowest.
Still, 38.1 million phones were sold during the period – 139.3 million for all of 2008 – as consumers increasingly favored multi-function phones with Internet access.
According to Gartner, smartphones from RIM, Samsung, Apple and HTC took share in 2008 from Nokia’s more entry-level offerings. Nokia’s smartphone sales declined 16.8 percent in the fourth quarter.
The quarter also presented some difficulties for Apple. Sales fell from the third to the fourth quarters and the 2-million-phone inventory the company built up in the third quarter did not significantly diminish.
RIM’s Storm, T-Mobile’s G1, the first phone with Google’s Android software, and Samsung’s touch-screen products did well in the period. In North America, smartphones made up about 20 percent of fourth-quarter sales.
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Posted by Mark Boslet
March 11, 2009
SAP has tried but with limited success to bring its core back-office software to mobile devices – the Blackberry in particular.
With workers increasingly on the go, more was obviously needed. So on Wednesday, the German software giant took hat in hand and launched a key initiative with the help of software vendor Sybase to more fully integrate its business programs with Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s Blackberrys and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phones.
SAP is going mobile as Apple finds its way into the business world
The initiative is key in several respects. For one, SAP realized it no longer could rely on in-house capabilities to expand to the mobile world, says Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.
“Part of the problem lies with SAP’s inherent engineering mentality which required it to rely on its own tools and development environment (NetWeaver) to extend its platform to the mobile device,” says Gold. “The problem is, these tools were never quite up to the task.”
Equally important is the recognition of a fundamental change in the work place – and a backhand endorsement that Apple may finally have found a toehold in the business market, with its iPhone leading the way.
Apple’s App Store has been a big hit and is being copied by RIM. It also appears to have sparked the imagination of big software makers, such as SAP.
The first step of the SAP-Sybase partnership will be limited, says Gold. Only selected capabilities of SAP’s customer relationship management software will be available on mobile devices.
This is to expand over time.
1 Comment | news, software, wireless | Tagged: App Store, Apple, blackberry, Business Software, iPhone, Microsoft, Research In Motion, SAP, Sybase, windows mobile | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
February 16, 2009
Motorola’s share of the cellular handset market hit a peak of 22.6 percent in 2006 with the success of the RAZR phone.
It has been pointed downhill ever since, falling to 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter and perhaps 5 percent in 2009, says JRPG analyst Lisa Thompson.
Motorola's market share has fallen from 22.6% when the RAZR was hot to 6.4%, JRPG says
That’s why the company would be better off selling the division or closing it – instead of throwing more cash at it and endangering the company’s “precarious financial position,” says Thompson in a Wall Street research note on Monday.
Even if Motorola has an exciting new handset under development, the product isn’t likely to see the market until late 2009, which might be too late, she says.
Thompson’s note underscores the difficult predicament in which Motorola finds itself with the recession closing in and Apple and Research in Motion having out designed it in the cell phone market.
Motorola executives insist they will continue to put resources behind a turnaround the in critical phone business.
But Thompson says the company might be better off not. Motorola’s present “enterprise value” of $15 billion (its market capitalization is $8.8 billion) would rise 63 percent to $24 billion if it shed phones and channeled resources to its remaining divisions, she says.
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Posted by Mark Boslet
February 9, 2009
Google has long had an eminently useful calendar and contact sync for Research In Motion’s Blackberry.
Google Sync already runs on the Blackberry
Enter a new appointment on your phone and, presto, it is copied on your Google Calendar.
Now the search giant is releasing a Google Sync for Apple’s iPhone and for phones using Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
There also is a contacts-only version of the software for phones that support SyncML.
Google says the products are in a beta test mode – the typical way it introduces new features.
“Once you set up Sync on your phone, it will automatically begin synchronizing your address book and calendar in the background, over-the-air,” Google said in a blog entry. “Since Sync is a two-way service, you can make changes on your phone or in your Google Account” and the other will be kept up to date.
1 Comment | news, web 2.0, wireless | Tagged: Apple, blackberry, Calendar, Contacts, Google, Google Sync, iPhone, Microsoft, Research In Motion, windows mobile | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
