Distilling market noise into market sense

The VisionMobile blog is a space where VisionMobile analysts and industry insiders exchange views on the fast-changing mobile market and the trends that define the future direction of telecoms.

AthanP

Hi Matos,
Always enjoying the infographics you guys put together. Very smart presentation and good info in them.
Are you including non-certified Android in the numbers you quote above?
Thanks

 
23Oct
Alex Kerr

I'm not sure how much I trust your figures, or how reliable your data is, in relation to the actual reality in the world. I am not saying they are definitely wrong, but you can provide some assurance of why anyone should take your data as being representative of reality?

In a general sense, it is very easy for stats to be wrong or misinterpreted. For example, some people use Opera's state of the mobile web report as somehow indicative of actual handset ownership and usage, when it is obviously just a picture of those users with Opera installed, used, and working internet connections on a phone.

For example, where is your Symbian installed base from exactly? I have seen higher figures than that quoted recently. You may be right and another source wrong, but how can we be sure?

Furthermore, careful with your Nokia featurephone/smartphone figures. Multiple analyst houses have recently classified the entire Asha touch range as being smartphones, and it is clear from a spec comparison that they are indeed fully fledged smartphones, and indeed better specced than many low end Androids. I presume your figures above do no acknowledge any of this.

Furthermore, why no figures for Nokia Store apps, and yet Blackberry is mentioned? Nokia Store is much bigger, with over 6 billion cumulative downloads, over 120,000 apps (clearly bigger than Windows Phone app store yet you make special mention of the latter above). http://www.developer.nokia.com/Distribute/Statist

Also, be very careful about giving the impression that the whole world is shifting to smartphones rapidly and en masse. That simply is not true. For example Tomi Ahonen's latest data (which has proven perhaps the most reliable in the industry) shows that there are 3.9 billion phones in use in the developing and emerging worlds (vs. 1.6 bn in the rich industrialised world). Of that 3.9 billion only 12.6% are currently smartphones, whereas 87.4% are featurephones. "But they're all going to be smartphones in a couple of years, right?". Wrong. Very wrong. The shift to smartphones of the much, much larger market in the non-rich world, was a grand total of 1% (one percent, no typo) in 2011 and so far in 2012 about 0.6% (zero point six percent) and on course for 1% by the end of the year. So that's a current figure of 3.9 bn total, of which 3.41 bn are non smart, and that is changing at 1% a year. So only 87 years until they all have smartphones (joke, but with a serious point). Low end Android is soundly beaten on almost all fronts by the power and capabilities of featurephones (easily proven fact). My point is, readers of the above chart need to be very, very wary of conclusions they draw from it…

Also, if we the industry step back a moment and see what we are actually looking at in terms of handsets and their true capabilities and usage, we can see very clearly that what we call smartphones are actually just a set of specific brands of phone (iPhone, Android, etc).
And what we call featurephones are clearly fully fledged smartphones in every way, shape and form. They are fully smart and are used as such regardless of what marketing depts, observers, analysts etc decide to call them. There is a real digital apartheid going on with the featurephone/smartphone divide at the moment, and it needs to change asap.

 
23Oct
Slavo

"Despite low device sales, the Windows platform already has over 100 available apps in Windows Marketplace".

Please correct the above to 100,000.

 
23Oct
VisionMobile

@AthanP – Thanks for the kind words! I'll look into your question and let you know

@ Alex – Thanks for the comment.
- Our market data is based on figures by IDC, Strategy Analytics, Canalys and Gartner, Tomi Ahonen, Horace Dediu, vendor releases and data from OEMs and platform vendors.
- Re Symbian installed base: there was a typo which has now been corrected. These are actually Ahonen figures – so the infographic should've read 260M. We've uploaded an updated version.
- Re Nokia Store figures: We are aware that there's a large percentage of Nokia apps that are ringtones, wallpapers and other media files that we don't consider apps. We could not get precise app figures, so we chose to omit rather than report something that we consider misleading.
- Re growth in smartphone sales: Our figures state that nearly 40% of mobile phone shipments in Q1 2012 were smartphones, up form 30% in Q3 2011 – this is a strong indicator of a shift towards smartphones. Yes, the developing & emerging economies will need some time to catch up, but the fact is that smartphones sales are growing stronger and it would be wrong to dispute or ignore this fact.
- Re Asha line: Nokia introduced the Asha line as 'smarter feature phones' (http://press.nokia.com/2012/02/27/nokia-expands-its-asha-range-with-smarter-feature-phones-that-improve-ways-to-work-learn-and-play/). Nokia does not include the Asha line in their "smart device" category.
- Re the "digital apartheid", you make an interesting point. Our views on platforms, their evolution and capabilities are presented in our "Clash of Ecosystems" report which you may find here: http://www.visionmobile.com/product/clash-of-ecos….

Thanks,

Matos

 
24Oct
wfa31sk

Hi Matos,
I would love to know if you are the only one working on this infographics ? And by the way i enjoyed the infographics, found it very smart presentation "clever" good job on that.
Thanks

 
28Oct
VisionMobile

Thanks – updated

 
30Oct
VisionMobile

Hi there – there's a whole team who does the research for our publications- this is an analyst company after all! I'm the one who visualises the infographics – thanks for the kind words!

Matos

 
30Oct

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