iPhone with iOS4.2 tops the smartphone market
The latest data from Nielson has found that the almost inevitable has happened: the Apple iPhone has finally passed the RIM Blackberry and is now the king of the smartphone marketplace.
Despite it’s many detractors when it came out of the gate in 2007, the iPhone from Apple has done very well, thank you. Especially when coupled with the latest version of its operating system, iOS4, the iPhone has hit every major mark that can be expected from a smartphone. These features now include much better phone management software for use by corporate IT departments, thus striking at the very heart of the Blackberry’s golden marketplace, corporate business. With the iPhone now shining in the boardroom, the Blackberry may finally have been relegated to a permanent second place.
Both the iPhone and all 90-plus Android phones taken together have been dealing RIM fits in the marketplace for many quarters, with the Blackberry lineup slowly, month after month, losing ground to (at first) the iPhone and then to Android phones as well. Nielson’s survey indicated two major areas where both the iPhone and the aggregate of all Android phones were now beyond the Blackberry in the minds of uses and potential buyers, according to an iSource story:
Among users planning to get a new smartphone, current smartphone owners showed a preference for the Apple iPhone (35 percent), while 28 percent of both smartphone and featurephone planned smartphone upgraders indicated they wanted a device with an Android operating system as their next mobile phone.
Apple’s iPhone and devices with the Android operating system were the “most desired” among likely smartphone upgraders …
It is difficult for a company to stay number 1 in the marketplace when the majority of users want phones from other manufacturers. RIM finds itself in the unenviable position of being viewed as the old fuddy-duddy of smartphones, while the iPhone represents the epitome of both style and usefulness. RIM has introduced a number of new phones meant to combat this erosion in their position, but none have been successful.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
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