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Author: Horace Dediu

Apple surpasses RIM in total smartphone revenues

What RIMM doesn’t say (and, as far as I can tell, no one else has noted) is that Apple has surpassed them in total smartphone revenues. This quarter RIMM reported sales of $4.1 billion in revenue for their whole company. Apple surpassed them, selling $4.6 billion worth of iPhones in Q4 2009 and, more recently, $5.6 billion in Q1 2010. Remember, the iPhone didn’t exist until mid 2007.i Phone sales have gone from zero to $5.6 billion in about 900 days. It’s very hard to compete against that explosive growth.

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Palm’s entire market cap is comparable to the amount of Apple’s free advertising in the last 48 hours

The product is getting in depth coverage from CNBC, Fox News, The NY Times, The LA Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Dave Letterman Show, The Jimmy Fallon Show, and practically every local news station and newspaper around the world.  Not to mention prime time product placement in ABC’s Modern Family as well as a cameo in the most memorable Jay-Z moment at the 2010 Oscar’s.

And Apple has only spent to run one ad (which itself went viral on YouTube).

(credit: Jason Schwarz newsletter (subscription only))

iPhone passes 500K sales in South Korea

Apple’s official carrier in South Korea, KT, revealed yesterday that iPhone has now surpassed the half-million (500,000) sales mark. This makes South Korea, a nation with 47 million total mobile subscribers, number 8 globally in first year iPhone sales.

via iPhonAsia.com » Blog Archive » iPhone passes 500K sales in South Korea.

There have been several chauvinistic campaigns in Korea that attempted to undermine iPhone’s success. Yet, ironically, these well-funded initiatives may have backfired

RIM Reactions: Goldman Downgrades to 'Sell'

Goldman Sachs: “Evidence that the structural competitive issues are starting to weigh on its growth prospects. We estimate that RIM’s U.S. business declined 15% [quarter-on-quarter]—the second q-o-q decline in a row, and the first [year-over-year] decline. While RIM attributed that to an inventory reduction at a North America customer, we think the magnitude of the decline points more to lower demand at Verizon as a result of its endorsement of Android; our checks showed a dramatic reduction in the number of RIM [models] at Verizon last quarter and better sales for Motorola’s DROID than for RIM at many Verizon stores.”

via RIM Reactions: Goldman Downgrades to ‘Sell’ – MarketBeat – WSJ.

RIM remains the best feature phone company out there.  Too bad that feature phones are not going to survive against mobile computers.

Apple: When Will They Build Their Own Mobile Search Engine?

Apple: When Will They Build Their Own Mobile Search Engine? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com.

The opportunity here is not to do web search better than Google, but to find a way to index the information that lives on the iPhone ecosystem.  With potential for millions of apps and hundreds of millions of iPhones generating usage patterns a separate mountain of information is emerging independent of the current cloud.  The mobile cloud has different hooks and different relevance measures.

Mobile search will be as much about new algorithms as about getting a new way to spider the data.

It seems Apple is better positioned to leverage this emerging space than Google.

Business customers eager to try Apple iPad

“Apple has blown through the barriers with the iPhone, and the same thing is going to happen with the iPad,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer for Salesforce.com. “This will be huge for business, and a major new category that will be a catalyst for many different aspects of the industry.”

link: Business customers eager to try Apple iPad