iPhone Now In 2nd Place In The US Smartphone Race, 3rd Globally
Figures released from research firm Canalys show that Apple’s iPhone in now second only to RIM (Blackberry) in the US smartphone market.
In the 4th quarter of 2007, the iPhone surged to a 28% share of the US converged device market behind RIM’s 41%, but ahead of 3rd third placed Palm on 9%. The iPhone was ahead of all Windows Mobile device vendors combined with a market share of 21%.
Despite its still limited official availability, Apple moved into 3rd place globally, behind Nokia (52.9%) and RIM (11.4%). Apple’s 6.5% global smart phone market share put it 19,000 units ahead of the struggling Motorola.
Canalys did however warn that Apple might be hard pressed to maintain its strong showing:
“Experience shows that a vendor with only one smart phone design, no matter how good that design is, will soon struggle. A broad, continually refreshed portfolio is needed to retain and grow share in this dynamic market. This race is a marathon, but you pretty much have to sprint every lap.”
See our previous iPhone coverage here.
(via NY Times)
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Facebook Now Supports LinkedIn Style Friend Suggestions
Facebook has quietly added the ability for users to recommend friends to other friends, a social networking feature that comes straight from LinkedIn.
AllFacebook suggests that the new feature is Facebook recommending friends to users based on common friend sets, and yet in context the feature is listed along with the toggle for receiving emails “when someone..” suggesting that this is more LinkedIn style than any sort of automated service from Facebook, but I could be wrong.
In related Facebook news, one of two new iPhone ads from Apple feature Facebook on the iPhone. According to TUAW, this is the first time an iPhone app has been featured in the ad, and the voice over states “Apple announces in the commercial, “If you love Facebook so much that you check it all the time on your computer, just think how great it would be to check it every time… you’re, well, nowhere near your computer.” Whether this is just Apple cashing in on Facebook’s popularity by association, or given the very clear plug for Facebook part of some sort of tie-up is not yet known.
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One Million Unlocked iPhones: Beautiful.
According to a new report issued by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi, one million iPhones of the 3.75 million sold have been unlocked to run on non-official networks.
A debate over Apple’s sales figures has raged this past week after it was revealed that AT&T had only activated 2 million iPhones, and only 315,000 iPhones had been purchased in Europe, leaving a gap of 1.435 million. Some earlier reports suggested that the majority of the missing iPhones may be sitting on shelves, but this new report puts a completely different light on the figures.
According to The Register, unlocked phones “represent a significant drag on the profitability of the device” with Apple “receiving $300 to $400 in carrier payments for each iPhone sold, they generate 50 per cent less revenue and up to 75 per cent less profit than normal. The 1m phones translates into as much as $400m in lost revenue.”
In perspective, the figure is small in comparison to the earlier report this week of PirateBay having over 10 million users, and yet unlocking an iPhone isn’t as easy as downloading a pirated movie or album. It’s also not illegal, at least in most countries. That one million people would rage against the machine and unlock iPhones is a beautiful figure that must surely go some way towards proving that locked devices and standards are a flawed idea. We’ve seen DRM defeated as the music industry realized that consumers want open, flexible standards. Mobile phone operators are the next in line in the domino affect of open that is now sweeping all corners of technology. Apple is expected to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, and on this basis that would mean slightly over 2.5 million unlocked iPhones. Steve Jobs long argued against DRM, so lets see whether he will eventually concede that an open iPhone is a smart idea as well later in the year, and even if he doesn’t, people will still keep unlocking iPhones. Now if only I could find a way to upgrade from 1.0.2 to 1.1.3 and keep my iPhone working in Australia 
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Google Now Offering iPhone Version Of iGoogle
Spotted by Google Operating System is a new iPhone specific interface for Google’s personalized webpage product iGoogle. The page can accessed directly from http://google.com/ig/i, although iPhone users should be immediately redirected to this page when trying to access iGoogle.
The new iPhone interface is a step up from Google’s previous offering of a mobile specific page at google.com/m (our review here) which only offered limited customization options.
iGoogle for iPhone will compete with Netvibes, who launched their one iPhone specific version in August 2007.
First impressions: this is good. As someone who has long given in to the Google borg all the major services I use (email, RSS reader etc) are through Google, and now iGoogle will give me a start page that links into those service. Google fans will love this, however if you’re not a heavy Google user nothing to see here, move along.
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FlyTunes to Bring Internet Radio to Your iPhone
A new service called FlyTunes and announced today at CES in Las Vegas will make it easy to play internet radio on your iPhone or other cellular/wifi-enabled device.
The free, ad-supported service won’t be released until January 21st (you’ll be able to get it here as a download…not sure how that’s supposed to work for the iPhone; looks like it will need to be hacked). But it’s already being touted as a challenge to satellite radio, which costs a significant amount of money, requires special hardware, and provides a more limited range of channels than can be found on the net.
FlyTunes will serve up audio content from the thousands of internet radio stations on the web and tailor its selection to your preferences (you can tag favorite songs or songs that you never want to hear again). The service will pre-cache a default of 30 minutes of content from a particular station, with more caching available when you think you might lose cell service while traveling. The company claims that caching 30 minutes of music will only take just over a minute, although this speed strikes me as only possible for 3G-enabled phones, not EDGE-enabled phones like the iPhone. This caching will also allow you to rewind and fast forward through a station.
Since the service will be free, FlyTunes plans on delivering targeted advertising along the lines of Google AdSense. It’s unclear whether the company intends to display ads visually or deliver audibly, or both. In whichever case, it has characterized its advertising possibilities as providing a viable business model for internet radio.
Now if only Rhapsody and other streaming music services would work with the iPhone as well, I would be much closer to never needing to purchase music tracks ever again.
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Google Pre-Launches New iPhone Interface
We heard a rumor that Google was going to launch a new interface for users accessing the site via an iPhone in the next few days. But an anonymous tip let us know it actually launched without any warning or announcement this evening.
If you visit Google.com from an iPhone, you now get a menu of services to choose from - home (search box), Gmail, Calendar, Reader and More (docs, sms, goog-411, news, photos, blogger and notebook). It’s basically all of the core Google services, accessible from a single easy to use menu.
The new application has what is now considered a signature look for the iPhone. Much of the interface elements were created by Joe Hewitt at Facebook (see his Facebook product here).
Accessing the site through other mobile devices continues to deliver the old Google Mobile interface.
More pictures of the interface are below, created with a simulator. Real but poor quality images are here.
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iPhone Delivers: Bigger Browsing Share Than Windows Mobile
When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark.
According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.
In perspective the iPhone still only holds a small marketshare in the area that counts (sales) but those users are becoming a far more influential and reachable target audience than users of other phones, such as the LandRover iPhone campaign in our earlier post also shows. With a 3G version on the iPhone due in 2008 that will finally deliver broadband mobile browsing speeds to the handset, this is a product that will just continue to grow in importance.
(via Computerworld)
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AdMob + iPhone + LandRover = Good Results
A iPhone focused LandRover campaign powered by San Mateo based mobile advertising startup AdMob has seen some interesting results (video demo above).
AdAge has some details on the campaign here, but I obtained some raw figures from AdMob. Of those users who clicked on the Land Rover advertisement, 23% responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page. 88% of those users watched the video, 9% entered their zip code to find a nearby Land Rover dealership and 3% used the click-2-call action, all of who were highly qualified leads. Of the 3% who clicked to call through the advertisement, 50% of the calls lasted more than 30 seconds and 20% of the calls lasted for more than a minute. Sales figures from the campaign were not available, but consider that the campaign was only 400,000 impressions; if LandRover had managed to sell one or two cars it would make the campaign more than effective.
The results would seem to indicate that the iPhone has become a more effective means of targeted mobile advertising campaigns than regular phones; the integration with Google Maps and the display of video provides a richer experience for both the viewer, and for the company seeking to expose their product.
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Pack Your Tinfoil Hat Away, iPhone Now Apparently Doesn’t Phone Home…Well Maybe
Damn, it was a fun conspiracy while it lasted. Despite previous reports (our coverage here) Gizmodo is now quoting a German site Heise Online that claims that the iPhone doesn’t phone home.
According to Heise Online the iPhone doesn’t send an IMEI (the phone’s unique identifier) back to base but only application specific, but personally unaware data.
I’m not an expert on hidden data sending tools so I’m not even going to pretend to know which side to take, but certainly the original claims, that started at Hackintosh and was supported at other sites came with some cool graphic evidence (below). More interesting still was the claims that hackers are now working on ways to tackle the issue: if they don’t exist, why are they working on it…or was it all a case of creative reporting? Who knows, I’ve still not been game enough to update my iPhone from 1.0.2.
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Whip Out The Tinfoil Hats, The iPhone Phones Home
Apple’s much loved iPhone has a hidden feature, and it’s not going to be welcomed by everyone: it phones home.
According to 9 to 5 Mac, the iPhone sends the users IMEI number, IP address and stock quote preferences amongst a number of things via a hidden string to Apple via the Weather and Stock apps. The information could be used by Apple to build user profiles that includes data on travel, financial and banking preferences, work details…even personal browsing information (if you’re using your iPhone to surf porn be warned).
Hackers are now apparently working on a way to block this functionality. In the mean time the only way of stopping data being sent to Apple is to delete the stock and weather applications via jailbreak.
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