This one's going out to all three of you on his site who are watching the mobile computing boom.
What boom? The mobile software market that grew 160% in the course of a single year. That's almost twice as fast as smartphone sales grew in 2010:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/apple-maintains-lead-in-mobile-app-store-revenues-but-its-share/
| Store | Marketshare | Revenue (millions USD) | YoY Growth |
| Apple App Store | 82.7% | $1,782 | 132% |
| Blackberry App World | 7.7% | $165 | 360% |
| Nokia Ovi Store | 4.9% | $105 | 719% |
| Google Android Market | 4.7% | $102 | 862% |
Damn! Look at those growth numbers. But first lets get some caveats out of the way:
- There are some bit players not accounted for here. Windows Phone 7 is just finding its feet, and I'm sure somebody somewhere is still buying WinMo 6 software. Ditto for Palm's WebOS. There are also some small, independant app stores not present, such as Cydia and GetJar. 2011 promises even more bit players, such as the Android app store Amazon is working on.
- Ad revenue ain't here. Mobile ads are also growing explosively and their absence probably skews this table against Google's favour.
So how sustainable is this pace of growth? Pretty sustainable, I'd argue.
In the richest countries, smartphone penetration is only about 25% of the whole mobile phone market. Poorer countries are behind the curve, but still show big potential as smartphone prices keep coming down. The biggest barrier is the price of data contracts, but installing data networks will surely become affordable in developing economies just as cell towers did.
But smartphones aren't the only growth driver here. Tablet computers are the sizzling tech device of 2011, and seem to be stealing the wind from the sails of the PC market. They've gone from 2 million units shipped in 2009, to 17 million in 2010, with estimates of 50+ million units for 2011. And they almost all run on software derived from smartphones.
Personal computing is in the process of its biggest transformation in thirty years, and it's all very exciting.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
