Nielsen Reports On The State of The Smartphone Market

[Jon Westfall]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/us-mobile-market-oct2010-1.png' target='_blank'>http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire...t-oct2010-1.png</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"According to October 2010 data from The Nielsen Company, 29.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones that run full operating systems. The most popular smartphones are the Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry, which are caught in a statistical dead heat with 27 percent of smartphone market share in the U.S. Twenty-two percent of smartphone owners have devices with the Android operating system"</em></p><p><em><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//wpt/auto/1291258538.usr7.png" style="border: 0px solid #d2d2bb;" /></em></p><p>Interesting - last I'd heard the Feature Phone market still had about 10% higher saturation, so it looks like the era of the Smartphone will soon be upon a much wider spread of Americans than ever before seen. So what are your predictions for the other circle? I see Green + Blue taking up some space soon to be vacated by Red, and perhaps even eating into Grey!</p><p><em></em></p>

[txa1265]

Android will obviously continue growing, whereas I see that since the Blue is WiMo (i.e. not WP7) it will shrink for a while before finding a market. The 'others' will continue to shrink, as will RIM. As for Apple ... depends on getting iPhone on other carriers. Personally I think that if the iPhone was on Verizon when Droid launched a year ago that Android would only be ~15 % or less.

The other interesting thing is that as smartphone share increases, data plans become more expensive and restrictive ... and this will become more and more of an issue. iPhone was bemoaned as a hog, but apparently doing the same stuff on Android is worse in terms of data use, and WP7 is worst of all. So those 'how much does it cost' charts are going to get a whole new meaning if things progress this way.

[mas98110]

Can you elaborate on the Win Phone 7 using more data? Is this due to the OS or the Xbox feature. Thanks

[txa1265]

There were reports (like this (http://www.schooleymitchell.net/?p=1077)) about how even with similar usage Androids sucked more data than the iPhone, and the thought was that some of it was inefficient handling and some was 'phantom' stuff like over-zealous polling and so on.

The WP7 concern was about how much stuff was 'cloud based' and especially all of those live tiles. But so far there is no huge outcry about it, with one blogger (http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010/11/04/windows-phone-7-data-usage-first-update/)showing no more use than the iPhone ... but it is hard to call that even a 'sample', let alone representative or statistical!

I couldn't find much else from after the WP7 launch, so we will have to wait a while to know for sure.