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Author: Horace Dediu

RIM Torch on pace for 500k units in August

“In our view, investors are missing the way BlackBerries are eating into Nokia’s messaging phone share in Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia now that the E-series demand is slowing,” he writes. “We believe the Torch is on pace for 500K units in August,

via Research In Motion: MKM Still Bullish; Cites Growth Outside U.S. – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com.

Torch selling 500k units a month may be good news to RIM but it’s hardly a barnburner.

The news about Nokia losing share to RIM is another curious data point. First, because it identifies two competing smartphone classes (E-series and Blackberries) as “messaging phones”. That’s like saying that HP is losing share to Dell in the “email PC” business. Though the classification of general purpose devices by single uses is probably fair here since these devices are not much good for anything else.

Smartphones will outsell PCs next year

If we add Apple’s 230k “activations”, Android’s 200k, Symbian’s 300k and estimating 130k for RIM adds up to 860k per day.

It won’t be long before we’ll see smart mobile devices selling at the rate of 1 million per day (I’d bet by the holidays this year.)

Gartner is estimating the global PC market to total of 367 million units this year (though it may need downward revision based on recent data).

If the 1 million/day benchmark holds, and all indications are that it will, then the total smartphone/iPad/touch market will be greater than the total PC market next year.

Sony wavering on recognizing iPad market

Sony in May:

Sony is “not convinced there is a large enough market to justify bringing out a tablet,”

Sony would say No to Walkman today
Sony in September:

Sony Corp., said yesterday it hasn’t decided yet whether to offer its own tablet computer. It needs to be a “very appealing product that is going to be widely accepted, as opposed to a me-too product,” said Kazuo Hirai, president of Tokyo-based Sony’s Networked Products & Services Group.

Hirai said 23 companies are planning to bring tablet computers to market, making a price war inevitable.

via Samsung, Toshiba `Me-Too’ Tablets Use Price to Fight IPad – Bloomberg

I’d bet that Sony will soon join the stampede to make iPad knockoffs. They probably did not read today’s Appleinsider piece on Apple’s plans to increase iPad production to 3 million units per month.

iPod touch made up 37.7 percent of all iOS devices sold so far

On September 1st, Apple announced that 120 million iOS devices were sold to date.

We know that there were 59.6 million iPhones sold through June (from SEC filings)

We also know that 3.2 million iPads were sold.

If we assume about 8 million iPhones and 4 million iPads were sold during August and July, the total number of iPod touch sold is 45.2 million.

That is 37.7% of total units.

In April I wrote that 41% of all iOS units sold were iPod touch to date.

The expansion of iPhone distribution plus the addition of iPad as reduced the platform footprint for the iPod, but it’s still a sizable chunk. More than one in three iOS units in use are non-cellular devices. As the iPad rolls that number could move toward 50%.

Where are the iPod touch knockoffs?

The latest iOS numbers and the new iPod touch launch demonstrate what a huge hit the iPod touch has become. It’s safe to assume that about half of all iPods, or between 4 and 5 million units in the current quarter, are sold as touch versions.

The iPod touch has been around about as long as the iPhone. It was launched three months after the first iPhone 2G, almost exactly three years ago. While the iPad has been in the market less than six months, a large number of potential competitors have been launched running Android and there seems to be a real rush to market. Six months is about as quickly as any hardware product can be reasonably engineered.

So the question is why is the iPad being cloned while the iPod has remained in the market by itself?

The value of the iPod is arguably as high with a healthy margin and consistent pricing. The volumes are comparable with tens of millions already sold so there is no obvious economic disadvantage to the iPod vs. iPad. Indeed, the iPod touch is a large (1.6) multiplier to the whole iOS platform. The demographics are very sweet too with a clear upsell opportunity.

One explanation might be that the iPod is a music device and that market has been locked up with iTunes, putting up a huge barrier to entry. However during the music launch this month, there was almost no mention of the iPod touch as a music player while it was loudly touted as a game and app platform. Browsing and Facetime are also huge uses for the device.

So in the iPod touch we have a mini iPad–ironically, the dig at the iPad was that it was nothing more than a large iPod touch.

So if cloners are rushing to copy the iPad, why not its smaller incarnation?

LG says WP7 will outperform Android

LG has reportedly told Korean sources that “it expects WP7 to outperform the two rival smartphone operating systems” – one of these platforms is definitely Android (I’m not sure about the other platform LG is referring to; Symbian? iOS? BlackBerry?).

via LG to bank heavily on Windows Phone 7, says WP7 will outperform Android » Unwired View.

While Samsung believes WP7 is doomed, LG believes it will RULE!

This might go some way to explain why LG is in such dire straits when it comes to smartphone share.

Samsung plans for Android, Bada, Windows Phone and Symbian phones

“We are not seeing visible demand for Symbian,” she said.

via Samsung says to focus on Android, bada software | Reuters.

I was ready to dig into this, but the same person is quoted saying this of Microsoft’s new Windows Phone:

“There is still some professional, specialized demand there,”

Whaaa?

Windows Phone is anything but professional and specialized. It’s designed to orphan business users and is targeted to mainstream use.

Another example of head-scratching random marketing word generation.

Property rights for your living room

The new Apple TV has created a cottage industry of pundits debating the future ownership of your living room. This topic of to whom your living room belongs has been around since the 90’s when Microsoft sought to plant a flag on your TV set and claim it in the name of Gates with a cable box software platform. A few billion dollars later they came away with not a single deed, not even to your couch.

Talk of ownership flared up again in the last decade as various game consoles and boxes paraded in front of consumers. There were wars waged over DVD formats, encoding formats and DRM. Then came hulu and Apple TV and roku and who knows what else I missed.

It’s all bound to go badly. Here’s why this property will remain off limits:

  • The ownership is not for the space but for the time and attention of the audience. The time spent consuming televised content is what’s at stake.
  • That time is increasingly being fragmented. It was first broken into tiny pieces by cable channels that divided audiences into niches.
  • Erosion of cohesive audiences continued with DVD rentals and Netflix. Home theaters ate into both broadcast and outside-the-home entertainment
  • Attention was attacked with PVRs like Tivo.
  • Demographics were exploded with game consoles with age groups separating into different modes of consumption.
  • Migration of other portable devices like laptops, smartphones and iPads into the couch room are now further degrading the value of the “living room” as a significant target for advertisers.
  • Internationally there never was a unified living room. Consumption patterns and even broadcast business models vary widely.

Ultimately there’s really nothing in “the living room” worth fighting for. The disruptive play here is the crumbling of monolithic audiences that used to define “prime time”. It’s not a new box to take over from another box.

The technologies that are coming to invade the living room have already broken it into parcels that lack cohesion.

Just like the division of land among numerous generations of heirs creates land only useful for residential development, it’s time to abandon dreams of owning the farm. That farm has long ago stopped being fertile.

Nokia says: "My activations are bigger than your activations"

While Jobs and Schmidt were having a contest over their mobile platform activation numbers…

Pshaw to all that, says Symbian. The company points out that according to Canalys’ research, there’s 300,000 Symbian devices activated on a daily basis, which equals 109.5 million phones activated annually.

via Sad Nokia Wants You To Know It’s Activating 300,000 Smartphones Daily.

I long for the good old days when we used to just measure units sold per quarter.

The race to a billion users

I took the venerable Consumer Platform Adoption Ramps chart and added Android and the latest data on iTunes, iPod and iOS.

To make it more readable (but conceptually more complicated) I put the data on a log chart.

Discussion

The time span covered is nine and a half years. The top of the graph marks the one billion threshold. Reaching one billion in less than 10 years is an interesting challenge for any platform and, at first glance, it seems that both iOS and Android have a shot at it. This does not seem likely for any of the other platforms.

The challenge is that as penetration grows, it’s natural for the slope for the lines to become shallower. Some platforms are simply not able to address one billion users:

  • i-Mode, AOL and other technologies with localized value networks are clearly limited to populations in their home countries.
  • iTunes is limited by the use of a PC, which has a small footprint in under-developed countries (dependency by iOS on iTunes should throw up a red flag here).
  • The iPod was embraced and extended by more ubiquitous mobile phones.

In contrast, mobile phones in general and smartphone platforms in particular have potential to reach a billion users (per platform.)

To wit, note that iOS and Android have similar curves to date and are both likely to overtake iPod and any other contender.

So for the obligatory theological question: Will Android follow the curve of iOS or will it diverge and continue on a steeper trajectory? Does it matter?

Discuss…