Android, iOS and Windows Phone all increased their U.S. smartphone market share

ComScore has released its MobiLens report on U.S. smartphone market share, for the three months ending May 2012. Here's a summary:

• Android increased its market share to 50.9%, from 50.1% in the three months ending in February 2012. 
• iOS increased its market share to 31.9% from 30.2% in the previous three months. 
• Windows Phone 7's market share increased to 4% from 3.9% in the previous three months. (It remains to be seen whether Microsoft's market share will continue to grow, now that consumers have learned that no existing Windows Phone devices will be able to run the forthcoming Windows Phone 8 operating system.) 
• BlackBerry's market share declined to 11.4% from 13.4%. 
• Symbian's market share declined to 1.1% from 1.5%. 

In terms of hardware vendors, Samsung and Apple increased their market share, by 0.1% and 1.5% respectively, while LG (-0.3%), Motorola (-0.8%) and HTC (-0.2%) all lost market share. (Neither RIM nor Nokia are in the U.S. top five, so they've not been reported on by comScore.)

Want to know why Xoom and PlayBook are struggling? Watch their ads

It's well-known that sales of Motorola's Xoom Android tablet have been disappointing. RIM hasn't yet announced any sales figures for its PlayBook tablet, but the early word is that its sales are also very slow. If you want to know the reason for both products' struggles, all you have to do is look at their television ads and compare them to those from Apple for the iPad 2. I'm not talking about the "artistic" value of the ads--I'm talking about the content, and what that content says about the products.

Motorola and Verizon have two Xoom ads on U.S. television; the content of both are similar, but I'll focus on the more current version. It starts with a man with an angry/aroused look on his face, breaking a notebook computer into four parts, which turns into a Xoom. Then he holds the Xoom in front of himself, still with that angry/aroused look. The commercial switches to a close-up of the screen, and a hand moving quickly between a movie, mail, a game, a video call, another movie...you get the picture. Then, it finishes with Angry/Aroused Man holding the Xoom in front of himself again.

The PlayBook ad dispenses with Angry/Aroused Man--all it shows is a close-up of the screen and a hand moving between various windows: A movie. Some images. A game. Another movie. Yet another movie. And then, the PlayBook tagline. It doesn't show a single business-oriented application, not even email, even though that's RIM's strength.

Compare that with Apple's long-running campaign for the iPad, and now the iPad 2. Apple's commercials show apps. Every commercial shows a different set of apps, for education, entertainment, medicine, business and so on. And that's the key to why the iPad 2 continues to sell extremely well, and the Xoom and PlayBook are struggling.

Both Motorola and RIM released their products well before they were ready. In the Xoom's case, the Honeycomb version of Android itself was rushed out, and developers didn't have sufficient time to build tablet-aware apps. The PlayBook shipped without native email, calendar and directory apps. That functionality is supplied by a user's BlackBerry phone, but for whatever reason, RIM decided not to show it. (If you're not a BlackBerry user, the only way to get that functionality today on a PlayBook is with web applications.)

Apple focuses on all the different ways in which an iPad 2 can be used. Motorola and RIM, without the library of tablet apps that Apple has, are focusing on eye candy. Both companies appear to have approached the tablet market in much the same way as PC manufacturers approach the PC market: Their job is to supply good hardware. The operating system is taken care of by Microsoft, and the applications are taken care of by everyone else, so they focus on the hardware. Motorola and RIM, by and large, got the hardware right: Big, viewable displays, fast dual-core processors, front and back cameras, etc. RIM, with its QNX acquisition, got the operating system right, while Motorola relied on Google, which didn't quite get there with Honeycomb.

What neither Motorola nor RIM got right was the apps, and that's the point of differentiation for tablets. The lesson for tablet manufacturers: If all you can show in your television ads are movies and games, you're not ready to ship.

Why you shouldn't announce products without delivery dates and prices

Yesterday, Apple announced the iPad 2 in San Francisco. I won't go over the details, since it seems like every news outlet in the U.S. has already covered them. However, I want to point out one thing that Apple does consistently that its competitors still do all too rarely: Apple announced hard retail availability dates and prices for the iPad 2, iMovie and GarageBand for iOS, as well as the availability date for iOS 4.3. When the event was over, everyone knew when the products would be available and how much they'll cost. Apple regularly does this; in fact, it's rare when Apple announces a product without giving hard prices and availability dates.

Compare that to what its competitors have done. When Samsung announced the original Galaxy Tab Android tablet, it didn't release any prices or availability dates. The information leaked out over the next several weeks. Motorola and Verizon didn't announce prices or availability dates when the Xoom tablet was shown at Mobile World Congress; that information leaked out of Best Buy weeks later. LG's G-Slate came out with German pricing but no U.S. pricing or availability date. Samsung's new Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn't have either availbility dates or prices.

It's not just the Android tablet vendors who can't get their numbers straight. RIM has been showing the BlackBerry PlayBook for months, still without hard prices or a release date, although a date of April 11th has been leaked. HP held a big event in San Francisco to launch its new WebOS-based smartphones and TouchPad tablet, but gave no prices. As for the ship dates, HP was unwilling to get more specific than "Spring" or "Summer".

It's difficult to take a product announcement seriously if the manufacturer isn't willing to say how much it will cost or when it will be available. I understand the problem when products are sold through mobile carriers, who have their own release schedules and pricing plans. However, Apple works with carriers around the world and has managed to be able to announce consistent release dates and prices.

In hindsight, given the difficulties that Samsung had with the original Galaxy Tab and that Motorola is having with the Xoom, it wouldn't have hurt to delay the announcements until price and availability dates were set. In the Xoom's case, it probably wouldn't have hurt to wait until it ships with LTE built-in and until there's a decent population of tablet-optimized Android apps. Rushing product announcements out in order to "freeze" the market and prevent consumers from buying competitive products may have worked once, but today, when new products are released continuously, consumers won't wait. For example, they're going to compare the second-generation iPad 2 and its 65,000 tablet-optimized apps with a version 0.9 Xoom--not quite ready to ship and with less than 100 tablet-optimized apps--and in the vast majority of cases, the iPad 2 will win.

Google and its partners went through this with Google TV, which should have been announced as a product concept to encourage app developers, but instead was rushed to market at too high a price, with inadequate content partnerships and insufficient user experience testing. RED preannounced its Scarlet camcorder years before it was ready, and ended up educating its competitors, frustrating its customers and frittering away its market credibility.

If you can't announce a hard price and release date, you shouldn't announce a product. It's as simple as that.

RIM tosses its hat into the tablet market with the PlayBook

At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, RIM announced and demonstrated its new tablet, the PlayBook. Based on the QNX operating system that RIM recently acquired and a new Software Development Kit called WebWorks, the PlayBook will compete directly with the iPad, but no prices or availability date (other than early 2011) were announced.

The PlayBook will have a 7" 1024 x 600 display with capacitive touch-sensing, a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex A9-based processor, 1GB of RAM and dual cameras (3 megapixels front-facing with videoconferencing support, and 5 megapixels on the back of the tablet.) The company didn't state the amount of flash memory that will be available, but prototypes shown at the conference were marked "16GB" and "32GB".

RIM claims that the PlayBook will support OpenGL graphics, POSIX and HTML5, as well as Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR applications. Engadget says that the user interface looks a bit like "a mashup of HP/Palm's WebOS and BlackBerry OS." They also got a chance to see the tablet in action (albeit in a static demonstration behind thick panes of plexiglas.)

The question for RIM is what the tablet market is going to look like in early 2011, and how well the PlayBook will slot into the market at that time. Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) should be released in early 2011 and will unleash the flood of cheap Android tablets that we've been waiting for all year. January is a big month for Apple announcements, and we're likely to see the next-generation iPad, almost certainly with cameras, at that time. From what was said today, the PlayBook is not so much forward-looking as it is a response to things that the current iPad can't do. It would be nice to see RIM advance the state of the art, but unless there's a lot to the PlayBook or WebWorks that hasn't been seen yet, today's announcement wasn't encouraging.

Android beats iPhone in consumer adoption in Q1 2010

According to the NPD Group and the San Francisco Chronicle, sales of smartphones running Android moved into second place in the U.S. for the first time, beating iPhone OS but still behind RIM's BlackBerry. (RIM's sales share has been flat or has fallen for the last four quarters.) Android has been taking market share away from both iPhone and RIM for the past two quarters. Here's a chart from NPD Group:

Keep in mind that the NPD survey covers only consumer purchases, not large corporate purchases. If it did, RIM's numbers would undoubtedly look better. It's unclear how iPhone would fare, but I suspect that it's outselling Android into the corporate market as well.

So why is Android now beating Apple for new sales in the U.S. consumer smartphone market?

1. Android phones are available from all four major carriers, while Apple's iPhone is still exclusive to AT&T
2. There are a variety of Android phones with different designs and price points
3. Verizon has been running "buy one, get one free" promotions with Android phones that are getting a lot more units into customers' hands
4. Potential iPhone customers may be holding off on purchases until the announcement of Apple's new phone next month

Apple still has a large lead in applications over Android, and the iPad's success has focused developers' attention on the iPhone platform. However, momentum may shift to the Android platform if Apple continues to restrict options for development tools, Google's partners continue their sales gains, and Google itself delivers a strong Android platform for tablets. HP is rumored to be planning to launch a Palm WebOS-based tablet in Q3, and if they do, that could breathe some life into the WebOS platform. And, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is scheduled for release in Q4, and that could also impact the smartphone industry. What's very clear is that it's now a three-platform contest, and it could become a five-platform race by early next year.