Sony Ericsson loses $235 million in 4th quarter, 5% market share

[famousringo]

dharh said:

famousringo said:

Don't put too much stock in that graph. It's tracking ad requests recieved by AdMob, not actual usage or marketshare of mobile OSes. So it can give you an impression of where the market's going, but it may also be heavily biased towards certain platforms. iPhone and Android look way stronger here than they actually are, while RIM is heavily underrated.

It's also worth noting that AdMob just got bought up by Google.

That is true, and id want to see multiple sources to make a definitive claim that android and iphone are decimating the mobile OS market. However, all the momentum i've seen has been from android and iphone OS. None of my friends (all in the IT biz) care for RIM anymore. RIM is losing mindshare and momentum that I know for sure.

This page tracks web usage of various operating systems. It's a pretty good indicator and less prone to bias, IMO:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

I think that RIM represents a big chunk of that Java ME traffic, and not just that little Blackberry slice, but I'm not 100% clear on that. 0.03% just seems way too small for all the smartphones that RIM sells. RIM may not be exciting for us tech-heads, but they have good branding and promotions, cheap hardware, and a tight grip on business customers.

All the smartphone OSes have seen strong usage growth in the last year except WinMo, which is pretty much flat. It's still barely ahead of Android at this point, so Google's OS hasn't quite lived up to the hype just yet, despite all the mindshare amongst the tech-savvy.

AdMob's numbers were a good way to track where the money in the smartphone market is, it's just that now that they're owned by Google, you can expect them to start serving a disproportionate number of ads to Android, just as I expect Quattro will be serving more and more ads on iPhone.