iPhone Tops Windows Mobile Share; MS Releases iPhone App 269
walterbyrd notes that new data from Gartner indicates that the successful launch of the iPhone 3G was enough to push iPhone market share over that of Windows Mobile devices — the entire range of them. And reader Spy Hunter writes: "Seadragon Mobile is Microsoft's first iPhone application. Seadragon is a technology for streaming zoomable user interfaces, and this iPhone incarnation allows viewing huge collections of gigapixel-sized images over WiFi or 3G. If you don't have an iPhone, you can also try Seadragon in your browser via Seadragon Ajax."
Interesting (Score:2, Informative)
Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Now, the iPhone isn't my cup of tea at all; but I believe the term is "p0wn3d."
Re:congratulations (Score:5, Informative)
And as far as it being a 'real donkey punch' to the industry, MS actually writing an app for it pretty much confirms this, although they have also written ads in Flash despite marketing Silverlight
Re:Interesting (Score:1, Informative)
There is a Silverlight, AJAX, and iPhone version
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/
http://livelabs.com/seadragon/silverlight/
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-mobile/
Mr. Sid part deux? (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:tops? (Score:3, Informative)
What English are you using? "Tops" is a verb that means "bests" or "surpasses".
And in this case, the usage is perfect. The iPhone surpasses Windows Mobile Share; or, in other words, "tops".
Re:Innovation pays (Score:2, Informative)
I would *love* to see something that backs up this assertion.
Last I checked, Nokia has way more overall market share AS WELL more 'smartphone' market share.
Re:Innovation pays (Score:3, Informative)
Hilarious.
Re:Innovation pays (Score:4, Informative)
The iPod has forced every other mp3 player maker out of business!
Yeah, all the other makers except for Microsoft [zune.net], Sony [sonystyle.com], Creative [creative.com], SanDisk [sansa.com], iRiver [iriver.com], Archos, Toshiba, and a dozen generic Asian manufacturers...
What Gartner really said (Score:4, Informative)
"The success of iPhone 3G sales in the third quarter of 2008 propelled the Mac OS X to the No. 3 position in the global OS provider rankings. For the first time, iPhone sales exceeded sales of Microsoft Windows Mobile devices worldwide and in North America."
So in the 3rd quarter of this year, iPhone sales exceeded sales of MS mobile devices in the same period. Unless you define "market share" in terms of the last quarter sales only, MS devices still have a larger market share than the iPhone.
Re:Microsoft releases iPhone app FAIL! (Score:2, Informative)
How about if I quote MS's own Live Labs team? [getsatisfaction.com] Or perhaps another source [moconews.net] or yet another one? [cnet.com] or one more? [theregister.co.uk]
Just because you may not want to hear the news does not mean that it does not exist.
Re:Simple? (Score:5, Informative)
More phones every 3 days than iPhones in existence? Really?
Let's actually inject some numbers into the discussion, shall we?
As of October 21, 2008, there were 13 million iPhones sold. Let's be as charitable as possible toward your position and assume that not a single iPhone has been sold since then.
You state more Nokia phones sold in 3 days than 13 million. That works out to at least 1.58 billion Nokia phones sold per year.
According to Wikipedia, Nokia's sales in 2007 were about 440 million. So they would have had to increase by over a factor of 3 in 2008 for your numbers to be correct.
Furthermore, Wikipedia claims that this 440 million was 40% of global phone sales in 2007, meaning that global phone sales in 2007 were around 1.1 billion. So for your claim to be correct, Nokia would have had to sell about 50% more phones just from Nokia in 2008 than everybody in the entire industry combined sold in 2007.
Is that really the case?
Now, let's take that 1.1 billion figure, assume it's gone up a bit, and call it 1.5 billion phones sold per year at present. Three orders of magnitude give you 15 million smartphones sold per year in the entire world. That barely accounts for the iPhone, let alone Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm....
So again, three orders of magnitude? Don't think so.
Stop press: Article is misleading/wrong (Score:3, Informative)
The article linked in the summary is misleading and borderline outright false.
The suggestion in the summary, that the iPhone now has a bigger marketshare than the full range of Windows mobile devices is wrong. For starters, the stats available are only relevant to Windows mobile phones- this does not include say Windows mobile PDAs without phone features so to suggest the iPhone has outsold all Windows mobile devices simply isn't true.
More importantly though is the suggestion that the iPhone has a bigger market share than Windows mobile devices, this is only somewhat true. Apple sold more iPhones than Windows mobile phones were sold in quarter 3 2008 by 1%, it has not overtaken all time or annual market share yet. We'll have to wait until next year to find out of this is a continuing pattern, 1% is still a little close to call, but I'd guess the pattern will continue, the iPhone is popular and Windows mobile really has little new to offer.
Speaking of misleading though, in response to the parent post, I'm a little intrigued by this statement:
"And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry."
This doesn't seem to make sense, whilst they've outsold Microsoft Windows Mobile devices for the last quarter they haven't all time, but more importantly they have neither outsold all time or last quarter Nokia and RIM's devices. They're around 1.1million units behind RIM last quarter and 10.7million behind Nokia so it seems an awful jump to suggest they've blown past Nokia and RIM when they haven't surpassed them by any metric. I think the iPhone probably will overtake Windows mobile next quarter and make it a permanent thing and I think there's probably a good chance they'll overtake RIM too to be honest, although maybe a year or two down the road. I'd be surprised if Apple ever overtakes Nokia though either in monthly sales or overall marketshare- the gap just seems too big, although I could be proven wrong of course!
I don't disagree with the sentiment of either the article itself or the parent post, that Apple has done well and that innovation is good. What I do dislike very much is fanboyism distorting fact, isn't it enough that Apple has done well without having to blow it out the water and make it something much much bigger than it really is? I don't blame the people posting here, because I too am guilty of often not only not RTFA, but certainly don't research further, this time I did however and realised how misleading TFA actually is- perhaps it'll teach me to do this a little more often. It's a shame in a way the Slashdot editors don't do their job and check these things and temporarily or permanently blacklist sites if they continue to attempt to spread misinformation.
It only took a little further reading to see how abysmally fanboy infected the linked article is:
"Microsoft, in its zeal to get Windows Mobile onto as many phones as possible, is left with a phone OS that no one wants to use"
Really? there's still 4million+ out there last quarter that would disagree. The iPhone is only 600,000 units up, it's too small a lead to start making grand statements like that, one could equally say no one wants to use the iPhone when compared to Nokia's sales stats but it would be equally wrong, because 4.7million people clearly do.
"and more importantly, one that developers don't want to code for. Developers, who have long been getting chump change for their apps, are starting to see that they can make quite a bit of money developing programs for rival platforms such as the iPhone."
Again, I'm intrigued to know where they got this from- Windows mobile is a pleasure to develop for compared to some platforms, if Microsoft is good at anything it's developer tools. I'm sure a lot of developers want to or are happy coding for it but even the latter part of the statement that it's because of chump change seems odd in light of this article- http://www.the [theregister.co.uk]
Re:What Gartner really said (Score:1, Informative)
Market share is always defined based on sales during a (somewhat arbitrary) time period, tending toward trying to characterize current sales volumes. Anything sold prior to the measured period is installed base. So yes, the iPhone had/has a larger market share (for Q308).