The BlackBerry’s days as smart phone of choice among consumers in the U.S. appear to be winding down. While Research in Motion’s popular device is still the leader in the smart-phone space, with 40 percent market share, its dominance is threatened by Apple’s iPhone, according to ChangeWave Research.
Though eBay reported a 29 percent drop in profit for its third quarter Wednesday, the company did deliver revenue that was reasonably higher than Wall Street’s expectations. Not that it mattered much. Investors took eBay out to the woodshed anyway, beating its shares down seven percent in after-hours trading.
Apple’s September quarter saw, among other things, the release of Snow Leopard, the latest upgrade to its OS X operating system and the first public appearance of CEO Steve Jobs, who’d been on a medical leave of absence for a liver transplant. It was also the first full period since the company launched the iPhone 3GS in late June. No wonder it was a blowout quarter.
Nokia describes the management overhaul it’s undertaking as a common “job rotation,” but coming as it does after its lousy third-quarter financial performance and a worrisome decline in smartphone market share, it seems perhaps just a little bit more. This morning the Finnish mobile phone giant tapped Rick Simonson, currently its chief financial officer, as head of its handset division. And the company named Timo Ihamuotila, currently global head of sales, CFO.
Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says the demand for mobile devices improved in many markets during the third quarter–but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company’s earnings. This morning, Nokia posted an unexpected 559 million euro ($836 million) loss for the period, its first in a decade. Worse, its smart-phone market share declined to 35 percent from 41 percent in the previous quarter.
Six months. That’s how long it’s going to take Acer to surpass Dell in market share. Speaking at a news conference in London, company President Gianfranco Lanci took a few moments to talk a bit of smack about his rivals. Said Lanci: “Between this quarter and the next, we can finally pass Dell.”
Add Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty to the list of analysts calling for Apple to broaden the iPhone’s distribution by ending carrier exclusivity deals. In a research note issued this morning, Huberty–noting that the iPhone’s market share grew 136 percent in France when Apple switched to multicarrier agreements there–said iPhone sales could more than double if the company took a similar tack in other countries.
Microsoft’s efforts to bolster Bing’s market share are no longer paying off as well as they have been. After months of slight but steady increases in market share, Bing’s percentage of the search market in the U.S. and abroad fell in September for the first time.
What Palm lacks in market share, it more than makes up for in mindshare. In fact, according to a new study from research outfit Interpret, Palm’s new Pre handset is second only to the iPhone in that metric, despite its disadvantages in the marketplace.
Apple has sold some 225 million iPods to date, making it one of the most popular electronic devices ever. And it’s sure to sell even more after the updates the company announced at this morning’s event in San Francisco. Among them: Larger, cheaper iPod touches and nanos with cameras and FM radios.
Another point worth pulling out from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s recent research note about Apple, this one regarding AT&T’s iPhone-exclusivity deal: Munster doesn’t see it lasting much beyond this year.
Now that Palm has finally realized there’s no longevity in forever shipping incremental improvements to the PalmPilot, the company has quite a future ahead of it. Never mind that it faces some particularly long, historic odds. Because according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, Palm has the “special sauce”–the means of orchestrating a second act, perhaps even one of Jobsian proportions.
Wise is the investor holding shares in Apple, Research in Motion and/or Palm, because these companies are the triumvirate of tech’s new world order. This according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, who in a research note today says all three are positioned for leadership in the “huge, nascent and underpenetrated” smartphone market.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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