Michal Ždanský According to the analyst Charlie Wolf z Needham & Company a fierce battle for survival will soon take place in the field of smartphones. We can expect that Microsoft and Google will start putting more and more pressure on manufacturers to produce devices with their operating system, and they will eventually have to lower the prices of phones to gain some market share.
This aggressive campaign should affect all other manufacturers with their own operating system, except for Apple. He should keep his position. Microsoft is starting to be relatively successful with its Windows Phone 7, despite the worse first two months of sales of phones with this system. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't released any numbers yet, but according to data from the Facebook app for WP7, there are around 135 active users.
Of course, this is not yet a number that would significantly threaten companies with a larger share of smartphones sold on the market, but Microsoft is said to be investing an additional 500 million dollars in marketing in order to significantly mix up the numbers in the future.
Google currently boasts 300 Android phone activations per day. However, it is speculated that soon Verizon, another American operator, should start selling the Apple iPhone in order to beat Google's OS numbers, among other things. So AT&T's exclusivity may be coming to an end, which can only be a good thing for the US market. T-Mobile and Sprint would thus remain the only US carriers without an iPhone, and there has been no mention of them winning the contract with Apple.
It is questionable whether the iPhone will also be blocked by Verizon, but Apple will probably have no reason to do so. Unlike other carriers, Verizon uses a CDMA network, so the device would not work on other carriers' networks. Anyway, perhaps the eventual loss of exclusivity will finally force AT&T to start improving its mobile data network, which is currently the worst among all four mobile providers.
So we'll see how upcoming events shake up the order in mobile market share. To give you an idea, you can see the market share of mobile phone manufacturers and the share of mobile operating systems for the third quarter of 2010 in the figures below.
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source: TUAW.com
I mean, nothing against it, but...
There are 4 main carriers in the states and they are always listed as such .. the aforementioned Sprint is missing ..
The article on tuaw states "if and when", which certainly does not mean that this is a fact, but rather something along the lines of "if and if, then when" .. if AT&T would surely lose exclusivity, then o this will be a long story not only on tuaw, but also on engadged, mashable and other servers .. but everyone here is only based on AT&T's statement that nothing has to be permanent, and that someone somewhere recorded a test prototype of a CDMA iPhone .. which could easily be somewhere also deployed 4G, LTE, etc. iPhone for testing, because from that testing is ..
Of course, if such a situation were to arise, the rest of the article is relevant .. anyway, this is just an analysis and prediction of the development, not the current state ..
Thanks for the factual notes, added to the article. I agree, it's still just speculation, but a lot of it seems like a logical step, plus a CMDA version of the iPhone 4 has been talked about for a long time. We'll see how everything turns out in the end.
And one more addition... It's CDMA (code division multiple access), not CMDA.
nice article, thanks!
300 android activations per day? Day?? Really?