Reggie Middleton Boom Bust Blog

In observing this phenomenon as a trend, you can see that HTC's growth in shipments has surpassed that of Apple's.  This growth rate is shared by other major handset vendors who have adopted the Android platform as well, ex. Samsung and Motorola. Long story short, manufacturers are finding gold in them thar Anrdoid hills!

Even when taking into consideration growth trend as a function of smart phone market growth HTC sees major improvements in its shipments and penetration. This empowerment of Android handset vendors combined with the near 900% growth spurt in Android from last year and its capturing the number one spot in the US last quarter. From Digiital Trends:

New reports from market analysis firms Gartner and IDC confirm what most industry watchers already knew: the second quarter of 2010 was a boom time for smartphone sales, with both firms agreeing worldwide smartphone sales increased 50 percent compared to the second quarter of 2009. The firms also agree that Google’s Android platform also benefited significantly from that growth, with Gartner saying Android has overtaken Apple’s iPhone to become the third most-popular mobile operating system on the planet—and the top-selling mobile operating system in the United States, beating out RIM’s BlackBerry line. But the king of the hill? Still Finland’s Nokia, with either 38.1 percent (IDC) or 34.2 percent (Gartner) of the worldwide mobile phone market.

Gartner attributes Android’s success to a variety of manufacturers bring devices to market at a number of different price points. “A non-exclusive strategy that produces products selling across many communication service providers and he backing of so many device manufacturers, which are bringing more attractive devices to market at several different price points, were among the factors that yielded its growth this quarter,” said Gartner research VP Carolina Milanesi, in a statement.

Below is a smart phone comparison chart generated on Cnet.com. I use Cnet for intelligence (although I believe that there editors have shown undue Apple bias in the past) because it is arguably the most visited consumer technology website, and as such offers the deepest views of user opinions and ratings, (hopefully) unfettered by editorial content, subjectivity and opinion. Here you can potentially get a glimpse of how people really feel about their products.

Notice how the 3 out of 4 of the selected Android phones have a higher user rating than the Apple iPhone 4. This flies in the face of both the marketing mantra and what you may hear from the editorial columns. The sample sizes of the reviews are large enough to be statistically relevant nearly 300 for the Evo and 222 for the iPhone 4), and the fact that the reviewers are able (and often due) offer verbose and specific reasons for their ratings make this a rich source of opinion discovery. I urge those who are still in disbelief of Android's onslaught or the ability for it to outsell iPhone (ex. a battle between the two on Verizon's popular yet overrated CDMA network) to review the nearly 1,000 user reviews of just these 4 phones (there are many dozens of others).

This bound to release a swarm of developers to the Android platform, which creates the reflexive relationship of reinforcing Android's growth prospects which in turn draws more development resources to the Android platform. Apple users are all too familiar with this effect.

Next, I will illustrate how Nokia is doing in terms of shipments in market share, and I will be releasing a 40 page plus forensic report of RIM that will determine if I was correct when I said After Getting a Glimpse of the New Windows Phone 7 Functionality, RIMM is Looking More Like a Short Play.

More on the Creatively Destructive Pace of Technology Innovation and the Paradigm Shift known as the Mobile Computing Wars!

1. There Is Another Paradigm Shift Coming in Technology and Media: Apple, Microsoft and Google Know its Winner Takes All
2. The Mobile Computing and Content Wars: Part 2, the Google Response to the Paradigm Shift
3. An Introduction to How Apple Apple Will Compete With the Google/Android Onslaught
4. Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Ultra-Mobile Computing Wars Just Yet
5. This article should drive the point home: An iPhone 4 Recall Will Hurt Apple More By Opening Additional Opportunity for Android Devices Than Increased Expenses
6. A First in the Mainstream Media: Apple’s Flagship Product Loses In a Comparison Review to HTC’s Google-Powered Phone
7. After Getting a Glimpse of the New Windows Phone 7 Functionality, RIMM is Looking More Like a Short Play
8. RIM Smart Phone Market Share, RIP?
9. Android is gaining preference as the long-term choice of application developers
10. A Glimpse of the BoomBustBlog Internal Discussion Concerning the Fate of Apple
11. Math and the Pace of Smart Phone Innovation May Take a Byte Out of Apple’s (Short-lived?) Dominance
12. Apple on the Margin
13. RIM Smart Phone Market Share, RIP?
14. Motorola, the Company That INVENTED the Cellphone is Trying to Uninvent the iPad With Android
15. Android Now Outselling iOS? Explaining the Game of Chess That Google Plays in the Smart Phone Space
16. There Goes Those Fancy eBook Aspirations from Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon: 100,000’s of FREE eBooks from the Public Library
17. How Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without Sheeple Investor’s Having a Clue
18. Empirical Evidence of Android Eating Apple, Literally!