News tagged ‘sale’

Yesterday we posted information about smartphone sales in the last quarter 2010, and as you remember Android-based phones become more popular than iPhones. Now it became known that Apple's spokespeople commented on this data.

In its research NPD group studied over 150,000 completed surveys, that were undertaken online every month in America. Apple's representative Natalie Harrison thinks it is not enough data to make precise conclusions:

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide."

It is unknown why Harrison mentioned iPod touch when discussion was about smartphones market, but according to Reunters last week Harrison had referred to the IDC research. The latter also reveals that Apple losing its positions, but this time worldwide, with Nokia and BlackBerry sales ahead in first and second spots respectively.

NPD Group had recently revealed their new study, which shows that iPhone OS became the second most selling OS last quarter in US. To be precise 28% of all handsets sold were Android phones, and iPhones made only 21%. Research In Motion's Blackberries hold 36 percent of market.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently UK Times published a report about Nintendo's current situation. The company's president Satoru Iwata said that he had already won the war with Sony and now it is Apple's turn. Satoru called it Nintendo's "enemy of the future".

The war with Sony was ended after last holiday season, when Wii had outsold Sony Playstation by almost double, though this year the sales of Nintendo's device in the first quarter were down 21% in compare to the first quarter of 2009.

So now the competition is held between Nintendo DS and Apple's iPod touch and iPhone platform. The latter has advantage of relatively low prices for games (moreover, some of them are even free). There are also studies, that reveal that people who like to play would rather carry an iPhone than a DS.

According to a web-resource DigiTimes.com (which in turn cites Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News), panels for the iPhone 4G will be also provided by Chimei Innolux, which will join existing Apple's partners Wintek and TPK Touch Solution who have been supplying some parts for iPhone 3GS. The companies will take 15, 40 and 45 percents of total orders respectively.

All of the assembly responsibilities will be allegedly taken again by FoxConn, a company that has already had the successful similar experience with iPhone 3GS. The company already began receiving components for the iPhone 4G in April, though there is no information yet about the date of assembling it for final products.

The report also reveals that camera modules will be produced by Largan Precision (80%) and Genius Electronic (20%). TXC will continue to produce quartz components and its share will rise from 15% to 40%.

Next-generation iPhone is expected to be announced on Apple's annual WorldWide Developers Conference keynote, which will take place at San Francisco's Moscone West on June 7-11. It is rumored that the iPhone 4G will be available for sale soon after its announce.

According to a report by Marketwatch (which in turn refers to a figures revealed by Strategy Analytics), smartphones now take 18% share on the market of all mobile phones.

"Sales are driven by healthy operator subsidies, competition between vendors, and a rising number of cheaper models built around operating systems such as Google Inc's Android and Nokia Corp's key smartphone platform Symbian."

It is interesting that different smartphone makers sometimes compete on different markets. Strategy Analytics reveals that Nokia shows good results in India and China while Motorola focuses more on US.

As we wrote before, Motorola raised up its profits after producing its Android-based Droid/Milestone, which is frequently called the closest rival to Apple's iPhone.

Nokia's purpose is to gain the leadership on the markets that are only emerging. In the first quarter the company has 21.5 million smartphones sold, but these are mostly cheap models that were shipped primarily to South America and China. North America remains a "problem child" for Nokia. The company's sales make 40% of all the sales in this quarter.

RIM has 10.6 million BlackBerries sold and takes second place with its 19.7% share.

Globally Apple has 16,4% market share in selling smartphones in this quarter and became a mobile vendor number one in the US. The company made record 8.8 million iPhone sales. Among all mobile phone makers Apple hold 3% global market share.

Today Steve Jobs revealed that last Friday Apple's iPad reached one million sales:

"One million iPads in 28 days -- that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."

The company also revealed next facts:

• 12 million apps for iPad were downloaded from the App Store already;
• 1,5 million e-books were downloaded from the iBookStore;
• 5,000 applications were created specifically for the iPad (the number of apps for iPod touch and iPhone is more than 200,000)

There were no information revealed about a breakdown of 3G vs. Wi-Fi-only sales, but one analyst told that on Sunday 49 of 50 retail stores were sold out of both models.

Piper Jaffray's analyst Gene Munster predicts that the Wi-Fi iPad will be more popular and will take 60% of sales while iPad 3G-capable model will carry only 40% of overall sales. He also believes that Apple has already more than 1 million iPads, which proved to be true.

This spring quarter Motorola had reportedly sold 8.5 million phones, which makes it the second biggest US phone maker after Apple that sold 8.8 million iPhones in the same period.

According to a Forbes report, one year ago Motorola had better results - 14,7 million phones sold. But the profit this year is down only by 9% because the company had changed its strategy and now successfully sells more sophisticated smartphones instead of cheap phones.

Motorola had best selling results four years ago when it was selling Razr model. In 2006 it was releasing 46 million phones per quarter. But these days mobile providers push companies to deliver cheap phones and because of it Motorola's profits are falling down.

The company  had big plans on its Milestone/Droid device which ships with Android OS. It was heavily promoted by Motorola and Verizon as the best Android phone available, but the company sold only 2.3 million devices in the spring quarter, which is only 27% of the total phones sold.

Wow! Hours after iPad 3G sales launch and it has already been jailbroken! Below is a video of MuscleNerd where jailbroken iPad 3G runs Cydia.

MuscleNerd used the jailbreak called "Spirit". It's a tool that makes untethered unlock of iPad, iPod Touch 3G and iPhone 3GS and DevTeam promises it will be available soon. Stay tuned for further instructions how to save your SHSH Blobs and then use Spirit to jailbreak your device.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another report made by Nikkei reveals that most of the Japanese online electronic stores stopped selling iMacs, iPods and other products because of an Apple's request. At the moment Yodobashi Camera Co., Kojima Co., Bic Camera Inc. and Yamada Deni Co. Web sites point that Apple products were totally sold out or they are not for sale and may be available only in retail stores. Though Joshin Denki Co. and Amazon.com's Japanese store are continuing to sell iDevices.

There is also information from China Business News that China Unicom carrier will reduce the iPhone price from 6,999 yuan (~1050$) to 1,000 yuan (~150$). The company hopes that the smartphone will help it to boost its 3G network. Now China Unicom also considers making reduced rates for those of the subscribers who already have 3G devices to advance the growth of its data network.

Recently Oprah Winfrey declared herself a fan of iPad in the front of millions of TV viewers. She called the device "amazing" and said that its hardware will "change the way kids learn." TV host admires its backlit touchscreen and thinks it has great opportunities for reading, playing games and sharing photos.

Some time ago Oprah has been promoting Amazon Kindle on TV, and once the sales of this device were boosted so strong the company had problems with keeping up with demand. When she has been speaking about iPad she also mentioned Kindle in the past tense, like she "HAD a Kindle". But later her spokesperson said she still uses both devices.

Oprah's Book Club may be viewed in iBookstore for iPad, and its books may be purchased for a standard fee.

Today mobile ad firm AdMob has released another Mobile Metrics report that consists of information about the software and hardware that had been used by Apple's handsets owners in March.

The study reveals that only 2% of all Apple devices with iPhone OS are first-gen iPhones. But it is important to notice that since the first sale of iPhone OS-based device Apple sold over 85 million of its worldwide. If we'll take the period between June 2007 and July 2008 (time when iPhone 3G was shipped), then it turns out that company sold 6.1 million of iPhone 2G, which is approximately 7% of the total sum of handsets that were sold.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech journalist Philip Elmer-Dewitt continues to count and then sums up:

"If 7% of those iPhone 1Gs are driving 2% of AdMob's traffic that suggests that nearly one in three is still ticking - and visiting the Web."

Obviously, the popularity of the first-generation iPhones will be further reducing without iPhone OS 4.0 support.

AdMob also found that the most popular iPhone in March 2010 was iPhone 3GS, which generated 39% of all traffic. This is much higher result than 9% in September 2009.

Other information can be seen above on the graphs.

Finnish company Nokia admitted last week that the competition on the high-end smartphone market is high enough and it is finally affected on quarterly earnings. In the first quarter of 2010 Finnish cellphone maker earned 465$ million. In the same period of the 2009 they earned 162$ million. Well that can be explained by an economical situation in the world, but this year results were expected by analysts to be higher.

Nokia conceded the average selling price of their cellphone products dropped down from 66 to 62 euros. The numbers for smartphones are more significant - from 190 (first quarter of 2009) to 155 euros (first quarter of 2010).

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is pretty obsessed about this fact:

"We continue to face tough competition with respect to the high end of our mobile device portfolio".

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer had a financial conference call with the press and analysts. Here are some interesting facts we gained from the conversation:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the developers named Vimov made some quick math and figured out that in two years the iPad apps market will probably be worth at least $1 billion by 2012. It can even be much higher if the iPad will gain the same success as the iPhone had a year ago.

Vimov, who developed the Weather app for iPad, says Apple makes $136 million in a year from the first thousand of apps available for the 500,000 iPads that have been already sold in the US.

“If the iPad App Store were to be like the iPhone’s, then 40-60% of the sales would occur internationally, so on average that figure would rise to become $272 million per year.”

As you remember, the iPhone helped Apple to gain 4 billion downloads in 19 months.

Apple online store has been updated and now it contains information about the shipping date of iPad 3G to U.S. stores - it is May 7. Three days later Apple will start taking international pre-orders for the device.

Apple also reported it has already sold 500,000 iPads since April 3, and the international sales will start in the end of May.

It is interesting that some people who have already pre-ordered 3G versions of iPad say their order statutes are still indicating the delivery will be later this April.