Wandering Data

I keep a graph of Gartner’s quarterly smartphone sales numbers. The latest  numbers from are here, for Q2 2009. They are reported in a slightly different way. so some of the lines can’t be extrapolated easily. It’s almost as if they don’t care about my graphs. Anyway, here is what they tell us about the [...]

Sometimes it seems like the Carnival thing came and went, but I’ve been impressed by the mobility-focused one called Carnival of the Mobilists. The schedule is here: Host Schedule 2009 at Carnival of the Mobilists, and you can subscribe to this blog to get updates when a new one comes out. This week’s carnival (here) [...]

In a comment on a post by Leena Rao, prominent tech commentator Michael Arrington says this about the new Mobile GMail. This [the new Gmail mobile web app] is so timely. I’ve been fighting MobileMe all morning and am about to give up on desktop apps entirely. syncing is for chumps. The irony is that [...]

Are here. The key table is in the middle of the article. Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor, 4Q08 (Thousands of Units)    Company 4Q08    Sales   Market    Share  4Q08 (%) 4Q07   Sales  Market    Share  4Q07    (%)    4Q07-4Q08 Growth   (%)  Nokia 15,561.7 40.8   18,703.3    50.9 -16.8 Research In Motion 7,442.6 19.5 4,024.7 10.9 [...]

is using a mobile phone, according to the UN. The Guardian reports: The speed and scale of the world’s love affair with mobile phones was revealed yesterday in a UN report that showed more than half the global population now pay to use one. The survey, by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of [...]

I never thought I’d feel sorry for Microsoft, but I should never say never. The mobile team at Microsoft is getting some rough press lately. First, it loses all kinds of buzz in the consumer market thanks to Apple, BlackBerry, and Android. Then CNet reports that the next release of the mobile OS (Windows Mobile [...]

Here’s a graph of BlackBerry sales numbers (devices, new subscriptions, total subscriptions) pasted together from company quarterly announcements.    Next quarter will be interesting, what with the end of the financial world as we know it and all that. Meanwhile, according to Piper Jaffray as reported by CNBC, Apple may have sold 5 million iPhone 3G [...]

No inside information here, just sniping from the sidelines and reading the trade press. And these opinions are, of course, strictly personal. I admit it. I doubted if Android would ever make it into a real device that people pay real money for. Mobile phone operating systems are tricky things. It’s all very well being [...]

Another recent report is comes from IDC, on the US smartphone market. IDC report by device, which as I said in the previous post is not so interesting to us software types. But a few months ago they did give the New York Times some data broken down by OS and I have put that together with IDC’s [...]

A bit late to this, but last week Gartner reported on the global smartphone market, broken down by device manufacture and also by OS. Us software types care more about OS than manufacturer, so the chart below shows “Palm OS” devices, not Palm-supplied Windows Mobile devices. And that’s why people like Samsung and Motorola are not in [...]