iPhone sales numbers not overtaking the marketplace yet - will Windows 7 Phone have a chance?
For all the hype of the iPhone (not to mention its antenna-challenged iPhone 4 model), it is far from first in the mobile phone market. Apple sold 8.4 million iPhones during its fiscal third quarter of the year, which works out to 93,333 iPhones sold each day during the quarter.
In contrast, Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently announced that the company is activating 200,000 Android handsets per day. That’s quite a bit more than Apple is selling.
Not to be outdone, the Symbian Foundation announced it shipped more than 27 million devices during the last quarter. This amounts to nearly 300,000 Symbian devices sold per day, 207 per minute or over three per second. Symbian includes Nokia’s S60 platform, NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA handsets, and other devices from Sony Ericsson and Samsung – e.g. the “not as smart” phones.
As much as we hear that the iPhone and Andoids are what everyone’s buying these days, for the time being at least, they aren’t the majority of the market.
Where will Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 fit in here? According to http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/072610-wireless-burning-question-1.html, Windows Phone 7 is shaping up as the most innovative mobile UI since … the iPhone introduction three years ago. Microsoft says the device, differing from earlier Windows Mobile devices, will be “a phone, not a PC” (or a PDA trying to be a phone).
Windows Phone 7 will have high integration with other Microsoft platforms such as Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Azure (not to leave out security and management), which may give it strong points for the corporate environment. It’s also supposed to be “cool” – something Microsoft has had limited success with in the mobile phone market. The question will be how cool it is ultimately perceived to be, and where it will land in this competitive market.
Meanwhile, rumors continue that Apple is speeding up the schedule to deliver the iPhone 5, as a response to the problems with the iPhone 4.
This fall will be an interesting time to see what happens with Microsoft in the smart phone market, and perhaps their last chance to get it right.
