Category Archives: Industry News

The Guardian has published some figures from Kantar WorldPanel Comtech which show that Android is grabbing market share at an even quicker rate than many previously thought. The figures are broken down by country and show a staggering trend towards Android. Even though market share is far from the whole story in any market, these numbers are staggering.

“New figures provided exclusively to The Guardian by Kantar WorldPanel Comtech shows Nokia’s market share for smartphones dropping from 10% to just over 1% in the US over the past six months, meaning it sold only about 160,000 top-end devices there. The story is the same for the troubled Finnish phone manufacturer in every country over a 12-month or six-month period, with a collapse in market share that bodes badly ahead of its quarterly financial results due this Thursday.

The story is no more encouraging for RIM, which according to Kantar has seen a huge fall in the number of sales in the US, the world’s biggest smartphone market. There its share has fallen from 32.5% in June 2010 to just 10.6% in March 2011, meaning that it only sold an estimated 1.4m devices there.

Apple is also being rapidly eclipsed by Android devices, though Kantar notes that the introduction in the US of its iPhone to the Verizon network provided an uplift to sales, so that it actually increased its market share there. But in other countries, notably the UK, Germany, France and Japan, the iPhone saw double-digit falls in market share – which could mean that even if it is selling more phones, it is not growing the number as quickly as the market is expanding.”

Whether using the InMobile Network as a basis to define ‘market share’ is correct I am not sure, but the figures are striking nonetheless. The infographic below tells you what you need to know, but there is much more detail here.

When searching for stuff on the internet Google is far and away the most popular portal. I use it, I presume most of you use it, but this article from The Guardian highlights just how much power it has to make or break other businesses.

“A number of prominent UK technology news sites have seen their Google rankings drop substantially after the search engine rolled out its “Panda” update, intended to demote sites which scrape content from others, to the UK and other English-language Google users.

The update also demotes one of the complainants to the European Commission, Microsoft-owned Ciao, which will almost vanish from many searches as a result of the downgrading.

But some sites – including Google’s own YouTube and the video site Vimeo, as well as other technology sites including Techcrunch and Mashable, and newspaper sites for the Mirror and The Independent – get a boost.”

Google has pushed its algorithm improvement to battle content farms out to all English language users. This is designed to reduce the search positioning for sites that offer little value or just copy content from other sites.

It is a big problem on the web and on average I receive about 20 track backs a day from other sites who just copy entire 247 articles and put them on theirs, and there is very little I can do about it.

From NYT- “When Google first made the change, it noted that it was “a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries.”

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful,” the company said on its blog. “At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites–sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Today, Google said that it has “gotten a lot of positive responses about the change” and decided to roll it out to a much larger audience. In addition, it has incorporated feedback from its Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which allows users to block certain domains from appearing in their search results.”

Analysts at Ovum have declared that LTE is overhyped and that only 11% of mobile broadband users will be using it by 2015.

I get the cautiousness, but think the above is too cautious. My words from April 2nd- “Maybe I am wrong and a slew of services that make us wonder how we ever lived without 4G will come forth, but I predict that 2015 will be the year that 4G becomes the bedrock of what we do on mobile phones.”

Research has been undertaken to work out the slowest towns in Britain. Milton Keynes wins, but this is only based on 3G speed, not the fact that the fashion in Milton Keynes tends to be decidedly 1980′s and the whole town is rather strange. If you live in Milton Keynes, please accept my apologies for saying what I see every time I have to go there…

“People living in Milton Keynes get the slowest 3G mobile broadband speed in the UK, according to new research.

The average speed for mobile broadband in the Buckinghamshire town was 1.73Mbps (megabits per second), compared to 3.6Mbps in Peterborough, the fastest town.

Mobile speeds are increasingly crucial to users as smartphones become ubiquitous.

The data was compiled by broadband comparison website Top10.com.”

Apparently 50% of men check the internet on their phones when on the toilet. PA has linked to the report which doesn’t surprise me at all because I see this happen all of the time. Last week I saw two guys at work using their BlackBerry’s while at the urinals which amazed me.

So, how about you? Have you ever used your phone when on the toilet? Yep, I have…

The latest comScore metrics for the smartphone industry in the US show a continuing trend downwards for RIM while Android continues to move upwards. iOS is steady with Palm and Windows Phone taking a hit as well.

It is difficult to see how this will pan out, and it will make little difference to Apple as it continues to dominate cash flow, but Android is looking stronger than many expected.

“69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011, up 13 percent from the preceding three-month period. Google Android grew 7.0 percentage points since November, strengthening its #1 position with 33.0 percent market share. RIM ranked second with 28.9 percent market share, followed by Apple with 25.2 percent. Microsoft (7.7 percent) and Palm (2.8 percent) rounded out the top five.”

Reggie Fils-Aime from Nintendo has made the following statements concerning the chances of a Nintendo phone in the future-

“We don’t want to be in the phone business, we don’t see that as an opportunity. Phones are utilities. Phones are not by definition entertainment devices.”

“It makes sense to enter a market when you feel you’ve got some sort of competitive advantage, from Nintendo’s perspective, we don’t see that we have a competitive advantage in telephony.”

This man’s job title is ‘President’ and he says things like that? How can you possibly say that phones are not entertainment devices in 2011, even if you choose to use ‘by definition’ as a get out clause?

And not having a competitive advantage is surely irrelevant for any company who has ambition. Apple didin’t, Google didn’t, Palm didn’t, but they all did at some point in time. Crazy words…

Here we go again…

Espoo, Finland – Nokia has filed a further complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) alleging that Apple infringes additional Nokia patents in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, tablets and computers.

The seven Nokia patents in the new complaint relate to Nokia’s pioneering innovations that are now being used by Apple to create key features in its products in the areas of multi-tasking operating systems, data synchronization, positioning, call quality and the use of Bluetooth accessories.

This second ITC complaint follows the initial determination in Nokia’s earlier ITC filing, announced by the ITC on Friday, March 25. Nokia does not agree with the ITC’s initial determination that there was no violation of Section 337 in that complaint and is waiting to see the full details of the ruling before deciding on the next steps in that case.

In addition to the two ITC complaints, Nokia has filed cases on the same patents and others in Delaware, US and has further cases proceeding in Mannheim, Dusseldorf and the Federal Patent Court in Germany, the UK High Court in London and the District Court of the Hague in the Netherlands, some of which will come to trial in the next few months.

“Our latest ITC filing means we now have 46 Nokia patents in suit against Apple, many filed more than 10 years before Apple made its first iPhone,” said Paul Melin, Vice President, Intellectual Property at Nokia. “Nokia is a leading innovator in technologies needed to build great mobile products and Apple must stop building its products using Nokia’s proprietary innovation.”

During the last two decades, Nokia has invested approximately EUR 43 billion in research and development and built one of the wireless industry’s strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 10,000 patent families. Nokia is a world leader in the development of handheld device and mobile communications technologies, which is also demonstrated by Nokia’s strong patent position.