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Apple moves into top five phone manufacturers thanks to iPhone 4

Publié: octobre 29, 2010, 8:51pm CEST par Ed Oswald

By Ed Oswald, Betanews

Despite the fact that Android OS is now outselling iOS devices as a whole according to most surveys, Apple is still managing to stay at the top of the heap in smartphone sales themselves. According to IDC's Worldwide Phone Tracker, Apple is now the fourth biggest manufacturer of phones -- smart or not -- overall.
In the third quarter of this year, the company shipped some 14.1 million units, likely due to strong sales of the iPhone 4. This was an increase of 90 percent over last year, and by far the biggest jump for any manufacturer.
In moving into fourth spot, Apple passed Blackberry maker Research in Motion, which while also showing substantial growth failed to match Apple's success. The Curve led RIM to record shipments in the Latin American maket, the firm reported.
"The entrance of Apple to the top 5 vendor ranking underscores the increased importance of smartphones to the overall market," IDC senior research analyst Kevin Restivo said in a statement. "Vendors that aren't developing a strong portfolio of smartphones will be challenged to maintain and grow market share in the future."
Nokia still remains on top, although its shipments grew about two percent year over year to 110.4 million units. That was still far above second place Samsung, which shipped 71.4 million devices during the quarter. Its overall share of the market did drop though, from 36.5 to 32.4 percent.
"Nokia's grip on the traditional mobile phone market has been somewhat loosened, as multiple Chinese vendors have gained ground, especially within emerging markets," IDC's Ramon Llamas explained. "To bolster its overall competitiveness, Nokia has been focused on improving its smartphone offerings."
IDC expects growth in the mobile device market to be primarily smartphone-driven by 2014, as consumers increasingly turn to more feature rich devices as part of the traditional upgrade cycle.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Why is Microsoft suddenly so hot for HTML5?

Publié: octobre 29, 2010, 7:30pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Well, it's not about customers.
Microsoft has quite aggressively touted HTML5 during PDC 2010, which wraps up today. It's seemingly inconsistent with Microsoft's revamped cloud strategy, which is very much about taking propriety software to the cloud. How then does Microsoft's platform-independent HTML5 approach reconcile with extending the proprietary Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack into the cloud?
Microsoft product managers talk about customer benefits, and perhaps some of them truly believe that's the reason for supporting HTML5. But there is a more fundamental reason: Apple. Some readers will cock back their heads and ask: "WTF?" Apple also is a big HTML5 supporter. Maybe, but the two companies have very different reasons, with similar objective: Gaining developer and user momentum for their mobile platforms.
For Apple, Adobe's Flash is a competitive threat. If Apple allows Flash free reign on the iOS app store, some developers would use Adobe's technology to create applications. Flash already is used to develop Web applications and has a huge developer following. As such, giving a centimeter to Flash would give it a kilometer. Apple doesn't want a competing development platform on iOS. HTML5 is a better choice, allowing Apple to support standards and its own platforms while beating back a potential competitor.
Suddenly, the context for Apple CEO Steve Jobs' repeated attacks against Flash is clear. I often puzzled about his motives. Last week's announcement that Apple will launch a Macintosh applications store within 90 days makes sense of Jobs' anti-Flash position, which is as much about the computer as the mobile phone. Flash apps are widely available for Macs (and Windows PCs), and Apple's app store will soon enter the competitive space, wooing developers and users. While pundits focused on Flash and mobile as reason for Jobs' anti-Flash rhetoric, he had yet another reason for striking out against Adobe's rich Internet applications toolkit: The Mac. This also makes sense in context of Apple shipping the new MacBook Air without Flash.
By comparison, Microsoft gains against Apple, not Adobe, by supporting HTML5. The problem: Mobile applications. Effectively, Microsoft has none for Windows Phone 7 -- as measured by a couple thousand against the iOS App Store's 300,000 or even the Android Marketplace's 100,000. Microsoft is starting too far behind the new mobile applications race to catch up, let alone win. Perhaps Microsoft's competitive position would be stronger if Windows Phone 7 could leverage more from Office or Windows.
Microsoft's best strategy is to change the rules of engagement -- to use David Thinking. In his 2005 book, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Tactics, political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft explains how seemingly weaker opponents can prevail against stronger ones by changing the rules of engagement. He produces excellent historical data showing that, in wars, when smaller rivals use such tactic they are more likely to win, even against mightier opponents. The Biblical example of David vs. Goliath is good analogy. Rather than fight like Goliath -- and almost certainly lose by dawning armor and sword -- David relied on his own strengths. A slingshot and stone kept him out of Goliath's reach but still on the offensive. I call this approach David Thinking.
HTML5-support lets Microsoft change the rules of the engagement, by moving the applications battle to the browser and to the cloud rather than to mobile applications. Microsoft's cloud platform is already ahead of Apple's. The strategy is also counterintuitive. Microsoft successfully built its business by popularizing its own proprietary technologies and extending the benefits (and customer and developer lock-in) through integration. There is no obvious Windows Phone 7 (or Internet Explorer 9) integration benefits to supporting cross-platform HTML5. That's OK. The short-term objective is to make mobile applications less important; apps favor Apple's rival software-services-hardware platform.
The David Thinking approach also explains something that Mary Jo Foley noted earlier today in the post "Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted." If Foley is right, Microsoft has sidelined Silverlight to Windows Phone 7 development, pushing HTML5 for Web applications. That resonates with a broader approach of leveraging Microsoft's existing development tools/platforms to mobile, while more broadly supporting HTML5 for RIAs.
Last week, Gartner predicted that mobile would be a trillion-dollar industry by 2014. It's a market Microsoft doesn't want to be shut out of. One question remains: Will the mobile Web be about the browser or applications? In April, I explained how Apple and Google are fighting over the future of the mobile Web by focusing more on applications or the browser, respectively. Like Google, Microsoft is betting on the browser -- for short-term strategic advantage -- while also trying to leverage existing applications like Office and newer cloud-based offerings. It's a bold approach worthy of praise, regardless of the competitive outcome.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Firefox 4 delayed: Is it ready for prime time?

Publié: octobre 29, 2010, 5:08pm CEST

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Net1News

It should have been a week of relatively good news for the Mozilla organization. The former senior vice president for mobility at enterprise database producer Sybase, Gary Kovacs, signed on to become Mozilla's new CEO next month, replacing John Lilly and serving under Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker. Having headed up Sybase's mobility and integration efforts during that company's buyout by European software giant SAP last summer, Kovacs is certain to inject a much-needed dose of corporate prestige and structure in to the organization.
But immediately, Kovacs may find himself leading Mozilla's greatest uphill charge in its short history. Its premier product, the Firefox browser, is in the midst of a development cycle that has put it behind all its competitors - including, for the first time, Microsoft - in relative performance. This week, however, the Firefox 4 private betas were making headway, beating both Internet Explorer 9 and Apple Safari/WebKit performance scores, on the way to catching up with Google Chrome and the first alpha builds of Opera 11.
That road back will apparently be longer than recently planned. . . though actually about as long as originally planned. Last May, Mozilla planners took the bold step of cancelling Firefox 3.7 in order to concentrate on Firefox 4, a more streamlined build that provided a more aggressive and customizable platform for extensions - which may begin to be called "Firefox apps." At that time, the new point release planned for 2011 was moved within the 2010 window, with a promise to complete an aggressive and expedited round of betas in October.
As the abundance of Halloween decorations indicates, October is nearly over. For Firefox 4 to meet its development milestones and proceed to the next stage, following Mozilla's best practices, the current builds must report fewer crashes. . . and they're not. Since every aspect of Mozilla development is open source, even the field statistics gathered by the organization in real-time, are open to the public. Unlike the case with stable Firefox builds, beta builds in the field typically have fewer extensions and add-ons. . . so Adobe Flash or Adobe Reader can't be blamed for Firefox's tumbling, like in the past. With the code for Firefox 4 Beta 8 still under development, and Beta 7 in the can, Mozilla can't move out of the public Beta 6 stage until Beta 6 reports fewer than 3 crashes per test user, and until Beta 8 reports fewer than 5 per user.
"Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down and strong progress is being made daily," product manager Mike Beltzner reported in a post to the organization's planning group Wednesday afternoon. "However, based on the delays in completing the 'feature complete' Beta 7 milestone against which our add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule."
Mozilla's recently updated itinerary indicates the schedule that developers had been working under up to this week, which already wasn't anywhere close to Beltzner's projections from last May. An unprecedented public Beta 10 had been scheduled for the second week of December. Now, there's a big blank in the column for when that cycle is expected to begin. And as far as the final product release is concerned, Beltzner is refraining from committing to a window even as wide as Q1 2010.
"Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind," he wrote Wednesday. "Please note that, as always, this schedule is subject to change based on feedback from users and community members."
Firefox 4 has actually made tremendous strides in the performance department, as it had to do in order to stay competitive in this fierce environment. Public Beta 6 posts a performance score on the Net1News index of 3.067, representing about three times the overall performance of the 2008 model of Firefox 3.0.19. Meanwhile, "private" Beta 8 (still publicly downloadable) posts a 4.347 score overall, with much of those gains on the strength of Firefox's graphics. The new edition will co-opt the graphics processor for rendering graphics; and Beta 8 now not only co-opts the GPU for rendering on the HTML 5 Canvas element, but also clearly ordinary HTML 4 rendering as well. In Net1News tests today, the latest nightly build of Beta 8 reduced CPU utilization in rendering 25 moving objects in plain HTML from a total of 13.44% (where 100% is full utilization) to 0.29%.
Click the chart above for a complete categorical breakdown.
Google Chrome also co-opts the GPU for graphics rendering (at least, that's what Google claims) but its efficiency is nowhere near that of Firefox 4 Beta 8. Although in that same test, the latest dev build of Chrome 8 was faster (1.758 relative to Firefox 3, versus 1.321), its average CPU utilization totaled 13.22%.
But some problems have also become evident in Beta 8, the resolution of which could improve Firefox's scores even more: In the SlickSpeed test, for example, Beta 8 fails to execute the CSS selector instructions in version 2.8 of the DOMAssistant library; Beta 8's scores for other libraries are actually fair, and no other browser failed to run that library.
In the comprehensive results, the alpha build of Opera 11 (Opera software thankfully isn't calling this a "pre-alpha" like last year) remains the overall leader with a 5.010 score. That lead is built mainly on the strengths of Opera's "pre-digesting" ability for re-usable code segments, which is strongly evident in its overwhelming SlickSpeed test scores: 18.574 versus 8.267 for the latest Chrome 8 dev build, and 8.562 for the stable Chrome 7. The strengths and weaknesses of all brands are now quite apparent: Firefox 4 Beta 8 is posting much faster computational scores than even Beta 6, though Chrome is by far the fastest browser computationally. (The Net1News test suite does not contain Google's V8 computational test battery, where Chrome posts frankly ridiculously better numbers than most any other browser.) Opera has the lead in rendering speed and performance, but now, Firefox 4 Beta 8 has the highest efficiency scores by virtue of its successful GPU co-opting experiment.
The browser that is now eating the dust that Firefox was eating two weeks ago, is Apple Safari hosting the dev build of WebKit. With an overall score of 3.711, WebKit just barely beats the IE9 public beta, and had been behind IE9 in previous weeks.
This article originally appeared in Net1News.
©Copyright 2010 Ingenus, LLC.
©Copyright 2010 BetaNews, Inc.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Apple pushes into global phone shipments top 5

Publié: octobre 29, 2010, 5:03pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Apple is now No. 4 in global handset shipments -- not smartphones, but all mobiles. The share gains also put Apple ahead of Research in Motion in third-quarter data that IDC released late yesterday (presumably while I covered Microsoft earnings). Apple's ascension pushed Sony Ericsson out of the top 5 for the first time since IDC started tabulating mobile shipments six years ago. The top 5 achievement is huge validation for Apple, which before the June 2007 release of the original iPhone had no presence in the global handset market.
However, the more significant measure is yet to come, and it might explain comments CEO Steve Jobs made during last week's Apple earnings conference call. Jobs expressed displeasure about how some analyst firms count phones. "Unfortunately there is no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter," he asserted. "We hope that manufacturers will soon start reporting the number of Android handsets that they ship each quarter. But today that just isn't the case. Gartner reported that around 10 million Android phones were shipped in the June quarter, and we await to see if iPhone or Android was the winner in this most recent quarter."
Whether or not intended, Jobs' assertion is misdirection. Based on these comments and others made on the conference call, he is dissatisfied with how Gartner tabulates its numbers. IDC measures manufacturer shipments, while Gartner measures actual phone sales. As such, Gartner's figures tend to be much lower than either Apple's or IDC's. By sales reckoning, iPhone might not rank as high, because of the difference between units in inventory and those actually sold.
Still, No. 4 is no small achievement. Before today's announcement, Apple ranked in the top 3 based on smartphone shipments. Global handsets is a significantly larger category. During third quarter, manufacturers shipped 340.5 million phones, according to IDC. Shipments grew by 14.6 percent year over year. Apple, RIM and Samsung shipments all grew considerably faster than the broader handset market -- 90.5 percent, 45.9 percent and 18.6 percent, respectively. While Apple executives may gloat over passing RIM -- as Jobs did on last week's Apple earnings call -- BlackBerry was no laggard, growing nearly three times as fast as the broader handset market. RIM also shipped a record number of BlackBerries during third quarter. RIM shipped 12.4 million handsets compared to 14.1 million for Apple.
"The entrance of Apple to the top 5 vendor ranking underscores the increased importance of smartphones to the overall market," Kevin Restivo, IDC senior research analyst, said in a statement. "The smartphone is becoming the focal point of the personal communications experience. As a result, new market growth will be increasingly generated by smartphones. This year, we are expecting the smartphone sub-market to grow 55 percent year over year."
Still, IDC's manufacturer shipment data gives an incomplete picture of the broader handset market, and Jobs was right to wonder about those numbers. Competitively, mobile OS shipments will put Apple's iOS in perspective of other mobile operating systems -- Android in particular. There, Apple may find itself the one running behind instead of ahead with respect to RIM.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010