iPhone and Android smartphones continue to
see high adoption in the United States, according to Nielsen. On the flip side,
RIM continues to see BlackBerry’s share drop.
Apple’s
iPhone and devices based on Google’s Android operating system are running away
in a rapidly growing smartphone market that is now as large at the feature
phone space, according to numbers in the latest Nielsen Wire report.
And the
iPhone’s growth appears to be coming at the expense of Research In Motion and
its BlackBerry portfolio, which is nearly tied with the “other” category in the
percentage of people who say they’ve bought a smartphone over the three months
leading up to the Nielsen survey.
The
numbers changed—significantly for Apple and RIM—when Nielsen surveyed people
who had bought a smartphone in the previous three months. Forty-eight percent
of those people surveyed in February chose an Android-based device, keeping in
line with the Android numbers in the overall smartphone market.
However,
43 percent of new owners said they bought an iPhone, while 5 percent said they
chose a BlackBerry device.
The
numbers reflect what analysts and journalists heard March 29 during a
conference call with new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who said that the BlackBerry
maker needed to pull away a bit from the consumer market and focus on its
strength in the enterprise. Heins’ comments were part of a larger discussion
about the need to restructure RIM in the wake of struggles over the past couple
of years, as Apple and Google-driven devices have eaten away at BlackBerry’s
market share.
In the
previous fiscal quarter, RIM saw its bad news continue, seeing a 25 percent
drop in revenue over the same period last year and posting a $125 million loss.
The company shipped 11.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and more than 500,000
BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
During
the conference call, Heins admitted that RIM under the previous regime was
behind on the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, with a growing number of
employees looking to use their personal smartphones and tablets for work. He
said RIM will refocus on its enterprise expertise and address the consumer
market in select areas, and mostly through partnerships.
“We
believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we try to be everybody’s darling and
all things to all people,” Heins said. “Therefore, we plan to build on our
strengths, to go after targeted consumer segments, and we will seek strong
partnerships to deliver those consumer features and content that are not
central to the BlackBerry [value] position, for example, media consumption
applications.”
Smartphones
are rapidly growing in popularity, according to Nielsen’s numbers. According to
the survey, 49.7 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones, as
of February. That compares with 36 percent of subscribers in February 2011, a
38 percent increase year-over-year.
More
than two-thirds of those who bought a mobile phone in the three months leading
up to the survey bought a smartphone, Nielsen said.
South
Asian News Agency (SANA)
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