Always Worth Remembering the lay of the land....

[daveon]

Worldwide Mobile Device Sales to End Users in Q2 2010 (thousands of units)

Company	'10 Units	10 Mkt Share	'09 Units	'09 Mkt Share
Nokia	111,473.8	34.2	105,413.4	36.8
Samsung	65,328.2	20.1	55,430.1	19.3
LG	29,366.7	9.0	30,497.0	10.7
RIM	11,228.8	3.4	7,678.9	2.7
Sony Ericsson	11,008.5	3.4	13,574.3	4.7
Motorola	9,109.4	2.8	15,947.8	5.6
Apple	8,743.0	2.7	5,434.7	1.9
HTC	5,908.8	1.8	2,471.0	0.9

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

From a corporate perspective Samsung have an excellent developer relations team and they seem to be doing all the right stuff. I'm off down to the Bay Area tomorrow for them to buy me dinner and introduce me to a bunch of people.

The real problem currently is the test team for Bada apps in Seoul. They've been over whelmed by the numbers of people sending in apps and they're working to a set of ill-defined test criteria executed by an inexperienced team for whom English isn't their first language. So it's a combination of the Apple "it must be just so" stuff and purely random crap. i.e. our TripIt app for Bada has been bounced twice now because the testers don't understand what TripIt is and keep failing the actual TripIt service because it doesn't work the way they want it to.

My favourite two are a failure that "users won't like this" and "we refuse to sign up for a test account" - the later was amusing given that they'd already had 2 test accounts.

They are making a serious effect to fix that, and I think that with that Bada and Samsung will be major players.

Nokia are doing some clever stuff around the Web Run Time - at least based on what I've seen so far. The question is whether it'll be enough. I don't know. But Nokia have a lot of room to maneuverer.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I wonder if they're going to hit cultural issues in interface and approaches - scaling test and approval can be difficult.

Nokia has room to manoeuvre; but they do spend a lot of time reversing into dustbins and fences...

[daveon.livejournal.com]

We're hitting the cultural issues in spades and that's a potential problem. Rumours I'm seeing on line show all sorts of horror stories with apps being rejected because buttons are a colour the tester didn't like...

That said, we got an email from the head of QA at Samsung a week or so ago to personally apologise for the mess they'd made of this. That's a pretty astounding move for a Korean company and you can bet that people lost their jobs because that had to go out.

I'm putting even odds on Nokia sorting this out at the moment. We're seeing them doing the right stuff, the question is if they manage to get the marketing right.

The challenge is more that people believe that the only Smartphone in the world is the iPhone and that's purely Apple's marketing machine and the Reality Distortion Field in action. I had an argument the other weekend with somebody who was so certain that the iPhone was the #1 Phone in the world by sales now that they refused to believe any other data. They also believed that the most important feature was the screen resolution...

It's an interesting psychological effect.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

well, the iPhone does have the wifis and the internets and it has more Gs... (I think that cartoon went on too long but I did love the 3 wishes bit ;-)

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

it's tangerine and blueberry again; when the iBook with a handle came out the Asian marketing team said what a brave colour Apple had used - think of it, blue!