Friday, July 9, 2010
Android gamers rejoice OpenFeint is your savior
Sprint officially announces Samsung Intercept
The Samsung Intercept was announced yesterday via a Sprint press release and is sure to bring some new customers their way. The Sprint Intercept will be officially made available on July 11th and will run you about 99 bucks before taxes and after a mail in rebate (oh how sprint loves those rebates). So out of pocket on the 11th you would be looking at paying around 200 bucks for this little guy. But is it worth it? Sure it is, the new Sprint Intercept features a 3.2-inch touch screen, a 3.2 megapixel camera and a full QWERTY key pad via its slider design. Looking at the design and price you probably would not expect much is going on, on the inside of this Intercept however, those looks can indeed be deceiving. It’s not the most powerful phone on the market obviously, but smart shoppers will be happy to know that the Intercept runs 800MHz processor. The new Sprint Intercept is running the Android operating system version 2.1 and could very well see a Froyo update when available. The Intercept has stereo Bluetooth capabilities and can accept up to 32GB of external storage.
Behold the Blackberry Curve 9300, Oxford 9670 and Bold 9800 “Torch”
iPhone Losing Marketshare to Android OS
Apple currently has 24.4% of the market, down 1% from February. Microsoft is holding in at 13.2% which is a 1.9% decrease. Palm has a tiny 4.8% and lost 0.6%. And finally, RIM fell 0.4% to 41.7%.
While these figures do not count whatever market share Apple may have gained since the June launch of its wildly popular iPhone 4, they do make it clear that Apple has some serious competition from Android. This might be a sign that touchscreen devices and app stores might be influencing consumer buying more than anyone previously thought. However, to put this all into perspective, realize that of the 234 million cellphones in use, only 49.1 million are smartphones. RIM’s large chunk of the smartphone market only equals out to 8.7% of all phones in the country.
So what is Apple to do in light of these numbers? They probably do not come as much of a surprise. Since a wide array of phone manufacturers make devices that run Google’s Android operating system, new devices that run the OS come out in regular intervals. New iPhone launches are yearly affair. Getting another carrier, like Verizon Wireless (rumored to be happening around January) would make the iPhone more popular among consumers that dread AT&T’s congested network or are already locked into a contract with Verizon.
I will be looking forward to the next batch of marketshare numbers that come out to see how much of an impact the iPhone 4 is having on the ever growing smartphone market. In the meantime, let me know if you think if Android is going to outpace the iPhone by the coming year, if it will take more time than that, or if Android will eventually lose some of its charm and remain a strong, but not dominant player.