Android activation pace hits a plateau below Apple's iOS - Page 2

That's one hell of a misleading graph.

Since Nokia doesn't publish per month data, I assume that Daniel took Nokia's Q3 numbers and divided them equally between the three months. With no other data points on the graph, it looks like Nokia's activations are remaining level. However, from historical data, we know that this is not the case and that Nokia's smartphone business is expanding at about industry average (~45% YoY).

Essentially, Daniel has tried to extrapolate a trend from a single data point.

I think liberal art majors should be banned from doing any kind of data analysis.

I agree, this guy is nitpicking, seems he has an agenda.
You have to give it to the Apple haters, they attack either by using a sledgehammer as in the case of DaHarder (whose own grammar is atrocious), to this one by cincytee, very cunning.

It must be really hard to market something like this

cd andriod; make; make install

yet people are begging employers to let them use their iPhones in place of the company blackberry...

if employers gave out iPhones, the only people complaining would be the apple haters.

The reason android activations are reaching a plateau is because people are realizing that it's not an iPhone... its not as simple, not as snappy, not as pretty... they wanted an awesome phone with great apps, but for some reason (carrier, bias, or other...) they did not get an iPhone.

It's just like Mac vs PC... anyone whose used both for any reasonable amount of time know that Apple is superior. But some people are willing to put up with the others because of various reasons... be it Apple's tight grip on the experience or AT&Ts network...

what i want to know is how many android users will buy one the second time around. (especially once the iPhone is on Verizon).

i'd also like to know how many of these android users also have an iPod touch or iPad...

Yes, free can certainly help avoid confirmation bias.

Given that the Android activation number is pretty much all phones, I'd say that's a pretty good activation rate. Apple's rate should be higher, much higher. It includes three product categories (smartphone, tablet and media player). It'll be interesting to see where the numbers are in 2011 as Android expands into those categories and Apple expands to include Verizon as their partner.

+1

Seriously. WTF.

But then again it's DED. I doubt the guy has an honest analytic bone in his body.

And I really don't see the need to spin. It's not like Apple needs his help to move its merchandise.

Interesting graph. The x-scale is neither linear nor logarithmic, nor anything else I seem to remember from my primary-school classes.

Redrawing this correctly makes the data look like garbage, and then we wouldn't have anything to discuss... Ah, cheap journalism!

You know I hadn't thought about it that way. Both my iPad and Droid X were gifts. I LOVE the iPad.. and can't make this damn Droid work for anything. I love saying to people "I can't make this $hit up". Then I proceed to demo fault after fault after fault.

Want to take a picture? Press the camera button. Prepare to wait. 5+ seconds for first launch. And with system app after system app.. there is an obvious lag time each time I try to open an app.

Navigation, while nice, won't give you the best view if you put it in the car dock. That 'best' view is only when it is not car docked. (you cannot over ride this)

It's got at least 5 'junkware' apps which cannot be uninstalled without 'rooting it' (whatever the hell that means). I shouldn't have to break my phone or 'hack it' to remove unwanted applications. This is 2010.. not 1995.

Email works, but their touch screen keyboard is just awful. I've used the touch screen on my iPod touch for ages and never had this many issues with spelling. The learning curve is just very steep. Their prediction engine is not very forgiving.

Don't get me started on the battery. It lasts from 7AM, to 9PM... just barely. If I turn on wifi, it doesn't make it to 6PM before going critical. It also seems to like to reboot itself.

The hulster for it has a magnet in it.. so when you go to remove it.. surprise.. car dock mode, again.

Another complaint? Their marketplace app crashed on first launch. Joy. Then, after installing a few apps and discovering there is no way to tell what is running... I wanted to remove them. Good luck. It seems every area of the device had a different design team. It's obvious that they are trying to produce something for a variety of control interfaces which leaves it very counterintuitive.

At least it can make/recieve phone calls... and it does get email.

I think most everyone on the thread (as usual), is so busy being mad at Dan that they aren't making any sense themselves.

1) The article is about Android activations"plateauing" which is exactly what Googles announced stats indicate. Whether you hate Dan or not, that's a fact based on Googles own numbers.

2) People are talking about iOS "levelling off" (a point thrown in by a troll that has successfully thrown the thread off track), when in fact all that has happened is a temporary levelling off of *sales* (not activations) of handsets in the USA only. iPad on the other hand is flying out the shop doors by the millions.

3) iOS includes the iPad and the iPod touch and it's growth if far, far from "leveliing off," quite the opposite in fact. iOS is currently the third leading OS world-wide behind Windows and Mac OS-X. It's more popular, and more used than the sum total of all desktop Linux installations for accessing the web.

4) People are talking about Dan making a chart based on "one data point" when in fact the chart argues *Googles* data, and not iOS at all. The data is right there on the chart sourced from Google itself. Whether he chose to put a dot on the graph for iOS or not is completely irrelevant to the graph and what it purports to show.

5) People are saying the scale of the graph has been jiggered with, when it clearly hasn't.

All this adds up to me as... "Dan said it, so it must be wrong," and "get him!"

Pointless angry argument about pretty much nothing at all to do with the article.

Well said.

You tell 'em, Prof Peabody.

i like to know what crazy policies you are referring to? Possibly making it harder to steal from apple with the anti-jailbreaking stance?

if this is one of your issues, then what you are saying is that I want carte blanche to steal. Jailbreaking, how can one even defend such a policy? Look at the name jail-breaking.?

I'm in this group having owned Macs for the last 15 years using them at home while using PCs at work in the IT and information security fields. Macs are built well and marketed well, but they also cost more. I never minded paying a little more feeling like it was worth it, but in the last year or two the luster has worn off. I recently found my four year old imac needed to be updated and couldn't see spending $1k+ so I found a Windows 7 box for $500 and it's fast, has a good graphics card, plenty of storage, etc. I'm ok with the fact that the case is not as sturdy as my old G5 since it's a short term disposable product. If I was buying a watch or binoculars or camera lens, I'd look for something built to last 20-30 years (same goes for phones, in 1-2 years it will be long gone). Windows 7 is great, user friendly, has all the freebies, etc. No issues.

Yes, I've owned two Android phones now, original droid and now Galaxy S Fascinate. Having the iphone coming to my network does not sound appealing in the least, but I will tell you what would. If it had a 4 inch display, better google voice integration, ability to side load apps without jailbreaking and $100 price tag with 2 year commitment. This would put it on par with my current choice and if Apple revamped its whole approach toward developers and opened up a little, I might fall back in love. This may happen a couple years after Jobs retires.

Oh yea, I do have old (2nd gen?) ipod touch. It's my alarm clock and bedside email/twitter reader. Has lots of other apps that never get used. My kids also love their ipod touches.

Speaking of kids, my son is 11 and I know he would love an iphone, but it's just not feasible right now on ATT. However, I found a deal through bestbuy.com $189 for a Samsung Intercept android phone on Virgin mobile for $25/mo including taxes, NO CONTRACT, no activation fee, unlimited text and data, and 300 minutes. He can pay the monthly fee himself, or not. He can still call 911 even without a paid plan and he can use wifi if no 3g. It's a lower end android phone and inexpensive over 2 years, perfect for an 11 year old. Since it's a pre-paid plan, he can't go over his minutes so no worries about a big bill.

BS. That is what you say when you don't have high market-share. The Mac makes a lot of money as a niche product. Fine. Would Apple be happier with more market-share? Of course they would. They announce it every time their market-share goes up.

Apple cares about market-share. That is why they have 4 different types of iPod at different price points and were very aggressive about being competitive on price and being in every store - including Costco and WalMart. That is what you do when you care about market-share, and they still profit and have high customer satisfaction.

You really think Apple is happy to see Android copy their ideas and tear into the market? Uh right. That is why they sued HTC. That is why Jobs freaked out on Google. Apple wants iPhone to rule the market. There is nothing wrong with that. iPhone redefined the category - it should rule the market.

Apple has to care about market-share because they know so well that if you don't pay attention to holding market-share you can get locked into being a niche product.

But really your point doesn't make sense because supporting other carriers does not reduce customer satisfaction - it will increase it - and, I would argue, there is more money to be made supporting 100% of the market instead of the 30% of the market who are prisoners of ATT.

DISCLAIMER: I'm new here and have been in corporate technology for both Microsoft (certed) and Apple for twenty or so years.

Without additional info on your 4 year old iMac needing updating - can't speak to your difficulties there. I have a G4 Laptop and desktop, both of which are still running well on Tiger and have had no issues still. They are used by my kids to do all the usual stuff they like to do. I topped off the RAM and swapped out hard drives, but not to the tune of a grand or more... on both. Simply owning Apple products for a period of time is no sort of validation about whether you are on a par with Apple's CEO, BOD or management in terms of deciding what is best for the company and how to deliver that to consumers successfully. And I think you would have to realistically admit Apple has done a far better than average job at delivering to the vast majority of it's consumers.

So what you seem to be saying is that you would prefer to go with disposable technology than invest in a longer term solution represented by an Apple product - and if that's your use profile then go with it. Moreover it sounds like you have set your expectations up for an iPhone on Verizon to be a complete failure by the Apple iPhone (which it will - as Apple has shown no inclination to meet your specifications in any future platform). In fact you cite form factor and features which are solely Android-based, which is why you will buy another Android and not an iPhone. Again, if that is what suits you - great!

The point you miss is the one where you may not be representative of the average potential iPhone user on Verizon - which is what Apple naturally is targeting, and that your issues with Apple and the iPhone may in fact not be at all the issues of a vast majority of user candidates. This doesn't invalidate your needs, wants or desires - it just places you in particular outside of Apple's target market and therefore of little concern to them. Which is why the next iPhone will not have your preferred "4 inch display, better google voice integration, ability to side load apps without jailbreaking and $100 price tag with 2 year commitment". Apple has done its research about user experience, accepted feedback from existing users and made its decisions based on engineering, consumer feedback and intelligent decision-making based on what their market targets and goals are. Not sadly the needs, wants and desires of a blog-participant on AI with the moniker of bstring. Now at some time in the past it may have felt that way to you, but that was merely a momentary coincidence, and frankly you sound much happier now in the state you are in than before - so I commend you for being a good consumer and picking what best serves your needs.

Junkie-

Verizon wanted control. They wanted to run their own App Store. They wanted to put their logo on the iPhone. They wanted to have the relationship with the customer after the sale (i.e. handle service calls etc, instead of Apple). Apple told them to go pound sand, and Verizon responded "likewise".

Apple got what they needed (i.e. what was right for the consumer) out of AT&T, and the rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately, the compromise they had to pay to AT&T for this level of control was an exclusivity arrangement, which has (finally!) come to an end. Now, Verizon has to cave to Apple's requirements in order to get the iPhone, and it looks like that's going to happen.

Thompson

Flash.

i am not disputing VZ rejecting Apple initially or their desire to control things.

Apple made the right call starting with ATT, especially since GSM is more strategic for a global launch. My issue is with the length of the exclusivity. That was a mistake in my opinion. I am guessing neither of us are privy to the terms of the agreement or the negotiations but if the terms were 5 years, that was too long. And if there was a way to exit early, it would have been worth it.

I don't think VZ would have been so demanding of control in 2008 - 9. Any of the other US carrier would have given Apple whatever they wanted to get the iPhone on their network.

Hong Kong --- for the LONGEST time --- had an exclusive iphone carrier. It wasn't until last year that a second iphone carrier entered the picture.

Given that Google had already answered that question and given the vast number of Android phones that carriers stripped out Google stuff (and put Bing on them) --- we may be under-counting Android activations numbers by quite a bit.

I thought quite a while about that semicolon, actually. A comma would leave a run-on of two whole clauses, and so that was not an option. The only choice was to make two sentences. I didn't take that route because I thought the clauses were too closely related. If you'd prefer the two-sentence solution, I couldn't argue. Just personal preference.


Silly is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. I think the "L" problem would kick in only in sans-serif faces. Otherwise, the "I" looks like, well, an "I." Indeed, the rules may change, but the marketing gimmick of starting product names with a lower-case letter will likely be long past before that mountain begins to move.


Like any good editor, I would rewrite it to avoid the whole issue! Given a choice, I'd do that with iProduct names, too.

Online grammar fight! How could I resist?

My choice for the controversial semicolon would be to break off that last "linguistic construction" modifying phrase, since I think it dilutes your main thought. Making the further clarification of construction its own man saves you from the run-on and makes for a more manageable flow.

Thus,

I don't care how cool these gadgets are (and, yeah, they're pretty cool), or how influential Apple aesthetics are at the moment, they do not trump centuries of linguistic construction. Such construction has a pretty vital purpose: to alert readers to a new chunk of thought.

Stronger, no?

You're kidding, right? Features, customizability, openness, more options, more hardware, a better OS, faster, and on and on.

Sure, iPHone looks nice and has a beautiful UI, but it all ends there.

The US is the ONLY remaining country where the iPhone isn't on every carrier. We're the exception.

That's actually quite true. In fact, in China, they use their own version of Android which isn't counted in the overall total. Millions have been sold there alone.

Well, yes, but if it has all the Google stuff stripped out, is it still Android? Basically the same as asking, should Ubuntu installations be counted as Debian Installations? I don't think so. OPhone is an Android descendant, but it isn't Android.

Um, Google copied Apple? I don't think so. They're all copying each other. The only thing Apple really brought to the market was true multi-touch. Just about everything else already existed in some fashion. The patent wars going on right now reflect just what is happening: HTC sues Apple, Microsoft sues HTC; Motorola sues Apple, Apple sues Motorola and on and on ad nauseum.
You could say that Apple "copied" Google by putting multi-tasking on the latest iPhone because Google had it since the beginning. Or, that Google copied Blackberry because they had it before Android even existed. No one is really "copying" (i.e., "stealing") anything.

Since you've padded your list of half a dozen or so bullet points with redundancies (more options/more hardware), an entirely meaningless term (openness) and a few purely subjective ones ("better", "faster") I kind of doubt that "on and on" goes anywhere but back up where it came from.

Japan and Korea are still single iphone carrier.

Ok, fair enough. Let these articles do the talking:

Great and informative video from CNET, a well-known iPhone loving site:
http://cnettv.cnet.com/ep-20-5-reaso...-50094365.html

And Fortune magazine:
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/...une/index.html

And, for the record, more options isn't redundant with more hardware--"options" can include carriers and features.

Except that before the iPhone smart phones all pretty much looked and functioned alike and sold to a narrow niche, and now they pretty much all look and function like the iPhone and smart phones are selling like mad.

Which I'm sure is coincidental.

Yeah, I noticed that Wiki did that in their article on e.e. Thanks for the nice response. Other posters should note that it is possible to have a disagreement without being disagreeable. Love a nice civilized discussion!

Thanks to Addabox for his/her contributions too.

Sorry, but the facts and the reviews speak for themselves. Oh, I forgot CNET's latest "10 Best Smartphones of 2010" where iPhone4 is #4 and Android makes the top 3 and 7 out of 10.

Yeah, the notoriously iPhone loving "Android Weekly."


I'm not sure what point you're trying to make-- there are, of course, articles online that prefer one phone over another. Is it your contention that it's somehow an authoritatively settled matter that Android is vastly better than the iPhone? Because that is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous.


So it's redundant with "features." Like I say, you've teased out overlapping areas to pad a list that you end by claiming "goes on and on."

Denial ain't a river in Egypt.

That would be the notoriously iPhone loving Cnet again?

The "facts" and "reviews", or course, say any number of things. I wasn't aware that Cnet had become the final arbiter of quality, and there are, of course, any number of reviews and users that find the all over experience of the iPhone to be preferable ("better", if you prefer) to Android, "features" notwithstanding.

Moreover, I'm not sure why your'e responding to the observation that the iPhone has become the template for every smartphone out there with "Nuh uh, Android is so better." Kind of a non sequitur.

Ah. I hadn't realized we were gonna go all highbrow and shit. See ya.

If you actually read the article, you'll find that Nokia itself claimed to have sold an average of that many phones throughout the summer. If there was growth to be claimed, Nokia would have. That is not extrapolation, it is reporting what Nokia said.

I did a Google search of RoughlyDrafted.com and couldn't find any mention of Kinect. I did see a half dozen references of Project Natal, the code name of Kinect. Nowhere did Daniel "predict" that this would be "still born [sic] vaporware" or that it would "flop." Are you intentionally lying, or does it come natural?

In one article, he describes MS' Xbox division as "a home entertainment business that has rarely made any money despite billions in investment. Its brightest star is an imitative effort to copy the interactive controller that Nintendo debuted for the Wii back in 2006. When you hear vaporware incantations of Project Natal, it means youve stumbled into a seance of the faithful trying to reanimate Microsofts relevance as the god of imitations."

So rather than calling Kinect a "flop," he called it Microsoft's' "brightest star," albeit an imitative effort to copy the Wii controller.

Also, a year ago, he said of pundits: "It also gets tedious to try to string along a pretense of excitement about such duds as Surface and the vaporware dreams of a year or two out: Project Natal, Windows 7 SP1, and Windows were getting serious now Mobile 7, while still maintaining a straight face."

Calling Natal "vaporware of a year or two out" was certainly accurate to do a year ago.

Shortly before that, he wrote "Microsoft is also well known for advertising bullshit it cant deliver. Bill Gates talked up OS/2, floated a vision of Cairo that never materialized, falsely proclaimed himself the Moses of tablet computing, and blew so much vaporware at competitors (Bob, ActiveMovie, DirectMovie, Surround Video, Chromeffects, WinFS, SPOT, Mira, PlaysForSure, Advanced Streaming Format, Soapbox, Longhorn, Surface, Natal, Courier) that it wouldnt exactly be a surprise if the company decided that the best way to compete with bad news was to generate some distracting good news that just never seemed to materialize after peoples attention spans moved on."

Project Natal was certainly "vaporware aimed at competitors," even it if eventually materialized in what must be a nearly profitless product more than a year later. The company has managed to sell it to a tiny fraction of the Xbox 360 installed base (2 million of about 45 million Xbox 360s).

But since Daniel never referred to Kinect as being a "flop," you should certainly stop repeating the lie that he once did.

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/4/12 at 12:53pm