This is the monthly archive for February 2011.
After discussing vendor sales market shares last week we’ll turn to operating systems today. They are more important to developers than device vendors, since the OS dictates which browsers can run on the device.
Nobody will be particularly surprised to hear that Android is 2010’s big winner, with iOS and newcomers bada and Windows Phone 7 winning modest amounts of market share. The losers are Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and the other OSs.
This week’s. And last week’s non-Nokisoft/MWC links.
A month ago Steve Souders announced he was going to shift his focus to mobile. That’s good news, because mobile peformance is pretty much a terra incognita, and we badly need more information. If the pre-eminent specialist on performance wants to figure it all out for us, we’ll be glad to leave the hard work to him.
After having discussed mobile browser traffic share statistics for weeks, it’s time to look at the other side of the medal: smartphone sales market shares. This entry gives the device vendor stats for 2010, the next one will discuss OS stats.
In 2010 298 million smartphones were sold worldwide, up from 175 million in 2009, for a growth rate of 70%. Biggest growers were the Android suppliers (Samsung and HTC especially), as well as Apple. Nokia and RIM lost heavily: they grew only a sluggish 47 and 30%, respectively.
Yesterday I received a Palm Pre 2, which, after some initial difficulties, I got to work. I combined it with the HTC Smart that I had received earlier, made sure the latest updates to Opera Mobile and Firefox were installed on my trusty Nexus One, and did some testing.
Just today I received a shiny new Palm Pre 2. Now Palm WebKit is notoriously underrepresented in my mobile research because up until now I didn’t have a device (except for a short and unhappy period in early 2010). Besides, webOS is the only OS that can give iOS a run for its money UX-wise. Reason enough to study it carefully.
Before being allowed to actually use the phone, though, I had to go through a user sign-up process that’s so amazingly hostile that I decided to record my adventures in the faint hope that someone at Palm will read it and make changes.
This week’s. Nokisoft/MWC edition.
On 12th and 13th of May the Mobilism conference will take place in Amsterdam. There are still some tickets left, although interest is high.
Conferences are all fine and good, but there’s nothing like learning new concepts and techniques at the feet of a world-class teacher in small groups. Therefore, today we announce two workshops for Wednesday 11th of May, the day before the conference:
Here are the global mobile browser market share stats for January 2011; as usual provided by StatCounter. I publish these stats every month, but the local stats from twelve selected countries only every quarter.
A few more thoughts on Nokisoft.
OK, so the deal is done. Nokia partners with Microsoft and trades in MeeGo for Windows Phone 7, I failed my test as a mobile analyst, and 2011 will make 2010 look like child’s play when it comes to disruption. Here’s a quick reaction to those aspects I find most interesting. No claim to completeness here.
For web developers this is bad news. Windows Phone 7 has the worst default browser of all modern smartphone OSs: IE7 (though, in fairness, Microsoft is working on an IE9 port). MeeGo was supposed to have a Gecko-based default browser, just as its precursor Maemo did.
This week’s. Quality, not quantity.
This Friday Nokia will hold a strategy and financial briefing in London, with major announcements about operating systems being expected. This will impact the mobile browser market, so it’s important to web developers. A bit of background is in order.
We close off our survey of the mobile browser market shares of twelve countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, South Korea, the UK, and the US. In all countries I studied the Q4 2010 aggregate stats and compared them to the Q3 ones.
In part 1 we studied three developing nations that each had Opera as their leading browser; in part 2 we discussed the US, the UK, and South Korea. Part 3 took a look at South America and China.
In this final entry we’ll study the Netherlands, the only market where Safari has an absolute majority, and two more Opera/Nokia markets: Egypt and Poland. We close off with an overview table.
Two factual errors, one serious critique and a bunch of new facts and figures about operator billing.
See the January 2011 archive.
This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, web developer, consultant, and trainer.
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