Journalism is a trade rather than a profession, a bit like bricklaying
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Android will dominate smartphones
ANALYST OUTFIT Canalys claims that Android will continue to grow at more than twice the rate of its major smartphone competitors in 2011.
This is as inevitable as rain in an English summer, income tax and an Apple fanboy downloading Coldplay from Itunes.
Canalys Principal Analyst Chris Jones said that despite market concerns over software fragmentation and the arrival of the Iphone 4 on Verizon in the US, Google-backed Android already claims a 25 per cent share of the global smartphone market, with over 20 million shipments of Android-based devices worldwide.*
"The growth of Android has been phenomenal, but so too has the number of related devices launched with different hardware and software specifications. This has led to the market perception of it as a fragmented platform, though we believe that growth will continue as the pace of Android OS upgrades slows," he said.
Android has been out since September 2008 and many versions have followed.
Gingerbread is already Google's eighth update, with its forthcoming Honeycomb tablet-focused release set to appear on devices in coming months.
The rapid evolution has required increasing resources from both device vendors and application developers to support the operating system.
The need to be different from rivals has pushed vendors to create customised user interface overlays for their Android devices. However this has hampered vendors' efforts to stay up-to-date with the latest Android iteration on current devices.
But Android devices are still managing to sell well as vendors working on Android have used the open source operating system to force prices down and bring smartphones to the mass market
Android shipments grew more than 1,000 per cent through the first three quarters of 2010 over the same period in 2009.
He said that with this momentum behind it, the installed base of Android-based smartphones and tablets will rapidly increase. µ
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Android will be the choice for "cheap" smartphones, but not "non-cheap" smartphones? A lot of people are about to get $100 iPhone 4's from Verizon in the US. That's cheaper than many, if not most, of the Androids. In this case, the iPhone is the "cheap" phone.
The iPhone has been on multiple carriers in other countries for years. The addition of the iPhone to Verizon will havve little impact on GLOBAL figures.
Are you all daft?
Lest I remind you, the iPhone is coming to Verizon. That is the game changer. AT&T will lose a ton of iPhone customers as those who could only get the iPhone on Verizon bail on AT&T en masse, early termination fee and all. But what will really put the breaks on the iPhone is when it comes to Sprint. Then the iPhone will exist on 3 of the four US networks. That will put pressure on T-Mobile and then the iPhone will rule the USA, at least. LOL!!!
Just wait until some upcoming patents expire - may other phones sitting in containers waiting for that day. Android will probably dominate, and Micro$aft will battle w/Apple
Growth has happened in the past despite things that are now perceived or are going to happen in the future, so growth will continue unchanged?
How would the now anounced but not yet shipping iPhone on Verizon have effected peoples buying decisions, say, 3 months ago? Ditto the perception of fragmentation has only recently started raising its head.
Android will almost certainly be the system of choice for cheap smart phones but there are some indefensible assumptions that growth rates will be unchanged by the competition, technology and current events. The same kind of assumptions predicted that railway trains would be traveling at the speed of sound and there would be a station at every house by 1900.