Apple’s iPhone has hit 30% marketshare in the US, according to ChangeWave. When laying out the current players, 4,225 consumers were surveyed, 39% of whom owned smartphones, and of those the top 3 answers were RIM’s Blackberry down ever-so-slightly to 40%, the iPhone up 5% to hit that 30% mark, and Palm steady at 7%. As sibling-site PreCentral.net points out, Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian weren’t even included on the chart (does that mean the percentages were too low and unchanged to graph, Changewave?)

Going forward, iPhone retains the lead for planned future smartphone purchases, though dipping from 44% in June to 36% in September). RIM’s second, with 27% up from 23%, and Palm again holds steady at 8%.

Customer satisfaction, however, remains Apple’s biggest advantage. The iPhone has a lofty 74%, way out ahead of second place RIM at 43%, LG at 39%, Sanyo at 36%, HTC at 35%, and Palm at 33%. Droid-maker Motorola is at 32%, Nokia at 29%, Samsung at 29%, and Sony/Ericsson at 17%. Ouch.

The bottom line according to Investorplace?

In the horserace among manufacturers, the release of the iPhone 3GS has led to a big jump in smart phone market share for Apple and has placed them within striking distance of Research In Motion — whose slew of models are still number one but have fallen to their lowest level in two years.

[Thanks everyone who sent this in!]

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iPhone US Marketshare Hits 30%, Tops Most Wanted, Huge Lead in Customer Satisfaction

[Here's a bonus TiPb of the Iceberg for you this week, courtesy of the humongous news coming out of Apple's Quarterly Conference Call]

Tuesday’s news that the iPhone has been selling well stupendously well, in case you weren’t paying attention, was really big. It’s tough to express how big. Some of the bullet points:

• They exceeded their sales goal of 10 million iPhones in 2008 already, with the holiday season still ahead of them
• They sold nearly 7 million iPhones in three months.
• They sold more iPhones than RIM sold BlackBerrys (yes, that’s the proper plural spelling)
• Based on revenue from iPhones, Apple was the #3 cellphone maker last quarter, behind only Nokia and Samsung.
• They achieved all this in 15 months.

Now, there are caveats to these numbers: there was pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G so these numbers almost surely won’t hold; RIM’s sales were depressed because of delays releasing the BlackBerry Bold. Don’t let these caveats mislead you, though, what Apple did with the iPhone 3G in the past three months is unprecedented in the mobile industry, it was pretty much unprecedented in any industry.

The most recent numbers we have show that RIM and the BlackBerry enjoy the undisputed lead in US Smartphone marketshare, while Nokia has the undisputed lead worldwide. Apple may have its work cut out for it going after Nokia, but it seems very clear that they are on track to seriously challenge RIM in the US market.

What’s amazing about that possibility is that RIM and Apple have very divergent strategies. RIM has dozens of different BlackBerry models aimed at nearly every demographic imaginable: from the Pearl Flip and Pearl for the low end all the way up to the Bold and Storm for the high end. They have phones available on every carrier. Most importantly, they have practically locked-up the enterprise market and are as effective as anybody (but Apple, perhaps) at targeting the consumer market.

To counter that broad, multi-pronged strategy, Apple has one model on a single carrier. Steve Jobs:

Well, I wasn’t alive then but from everything I heard, Babe Ruth had only one homerun, he just kept hitting it over and over again. So I don’t think that — I think the traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in a hundred different varieties. But as software starts to become the differentiating technology of this product category, I think that people are going to find that a hundred variations presented to a software developer is not very enticing and most of the competitors in this phone business do not really have much experience in a software platform business. So we are extremely comfortable with our strategy, our product strategy going forward and we approach it as a software platform company, which is pretty different than most of our competitors. [Seeking Alpha]

Apple’s dedicated to presenting the iPhone as a single platform as much as possible. That strategy appears to be working. Not only is it easier for developers to target a single device (or, if they do indeed introduce an iPhone HD, a single device with multiple resolutions), it’s radically easier for Apple to continue to develop the platform.

RIM’s platform challenges are much bigger. As Mike and I discussed in this week’s Podcast (forthcoming!), RIM’s BlackBerry Operating System may need to be completely overhauled in the coming years, but the recent BB Developer Conference did show that it has more legs than I previously gave it credit for. Still, BlackBerrys have a confusing array of Operating System versions that vary from device to device, from carrier to carrier, and from region to region. On top of that, they’ve recently added the Storm to the mix, which features a touchscreen and requires a different UI.

Although RIM does have an aggressive development roadmap that’s clearly a response to Apple, it remains to be seen if they’ll be able to roll out their improvements quickly enough to counter the iPhone onslaught.

In short — Apple has not only hit the ground running like a Formula 1 racer, they also are not towing a trailer full of backwards compatibility and multiple-device compatibility issues. If this were the entire story, I would have little hesitation in simply saying “Game Over, Apple Wins.”

But there is one area where Apple is still going to have a tough time of it: the enterprise market. There are a couple of reasons for this, but both of them have to do with companies feeling ‘locked in’ to the BlackBerry ecosystem. The first (and perhaps smaller) lock-in is BlackBerry Messenger, a BlackBerry-specific IM-like protocol that does indeed see heavy use. Our friend CrackBerry Kevin noted that while he was in New York he met a ton of people who purchased BlackBerrys specifically so they would be “in” with all the Wall Street types who use this form of communication extensively.

The second, and bigger, lock-in is the array of features tied to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Internet Server (BES and BIS). This includes not only push email and PIM, but comprehensive device management, enterprise applications, and (soon) a protocol to push any information whatsoever to a BlackBerry (much like Apple’s now-late push notifications). Much has been said about the iPhone’s Exchange support, but push email via Exchange isn’t a magic bullet. In fact, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile has had Exchange support for several years now and they recently introduced MSCMDM, which offers comparable device management to the BES. These features haven’t so much helped Windows Mobile gain traction as they have helped stem the bleeding. Of course, we can have another discussion about why Windows Mobile isn’t gaining traction against RIM (Hello UI), but for now I’ll just make the smaller point that simple Exchange integration doesn’t cut it.

Apple also has not traditionally be able to ‘get’ enterprise on the Mac front either — fundamentally many see them as a company that’s not focused on the enterprise. That may continue to be the case — in fact I think it will be — so don’t expect RIM to be forced to close up shop as quickly as Apple has established themselves. This is a fight that will go on for awhile.

Wither Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Android? I honestly believe all of the above have the potential to become more than 15%-ish players in the US smartphone market, but I don’t think any of them will be able to pull it off in the next year or so. Heck, even if they never pull it off, 15% of the US smartphone market is totally legitimate given its rapid growth. But for right now, the big boys are Apple and RIM.

One last thing to mention: as John Gruber notes in his excellent analysis, if you dig a bit into the numbers it becomes clear that the iPhone is soon going to be Apple’s biggest business and the platform will soon become their most important platform:

So the question is: Despite continuing strong iPod sales and record-breaking Mac sales, how long until the iPhone is undeniably the primary product and platform made by Apple?
My answer: Not long.
And I think Apple’s executive team sees it the same way.

Agreed. Looking back, it’s amazing we didn’t see this coming the moment Mac OSX became a great platform with 10.2. The Mac is an elegant operating system with a creative and engaged developer community; it’s only sold on incredibly good hardware; it ‘just works’ and rarely crashes. That’s exactly what has long been needed in the smartphone market.

Whereas the Mac faces a market where the superstructural elements prevent it from rapidly gaining marketshare, the smartphone market is much more fluid. It’s no surprise that the iPhone is coming on strong when you think of it in this light. It seems surprising because we assume that the smartphone market is like any other market that has come before — it’s not. People can switch phones more easily than they can switch computers if only because of the lower prices, and they do.

Companies are different, though, they hold on to their platforms — both PC and Smartphone — for 4-5 years before they consider a change. Now that we have number portability, the last real thing keeping people from switching smartphone platforms every few years is Enterprise lock-in. RIM’s managed to get it, Microsoft less so, and so the question becomes twofold:

1. Will that lock-in hold?
2. If the iPhone can’t crack Enterprise, will the consumer / small business market be enough to push them up to #1?

The answers are “For at least a few years” and “Yes.”

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iPhone Marketshare: Will Apple Take the #1 Spot From RIM’s Blackberry? – TiPb of the Iceberg

There could be plenty of reasons why iPhone market share has slipped. For one, the shortages could be a big part of the puzzle here, people aren’t buying iPhones because there aren’t any iPhones to buy. Another reason could possibly be educated consumers who realize that the iPhone 3G is imminent thus delaying their purchase. Not to kick the iPhone when it’s down, but the price and carrier-locked nature of the iPhone could also play a role in its diminished market share.

Regardless, the iPhone is still driving smartphone interest and increasing the market’s sales and its competitors are posting lower market share than a year ago. My personal take? I want to see device-by-device sales numbers. The iPhone is a one man army against multiple fronts from RIM and Palm yet still manages to be more than competitive. Narrow down the numbers and specifying the models could paint an entirely different picture.

Or maybe not. iPhone 3G to the rescue? What do you think?

Read

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Uh Oh: iPhone Market Share Slips

We’ve heard it before, Google has an iPhone fixation. Well it’s looking like that fixation works both ways – apparently the earlier numbers we saw that said the iPhone was on the web more than any other mobile web browser were, how shall we say it? ….Ridiculously conservative.

Google sees 50 times more web searches from iPhones than they do from any other mobile browser:

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. – Financial Times

If you still doubt that the iPhone was the #2 smartphone in the US, you can stop now.

Just. Wow.

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Google Sees 50 times more iPhone Searches

We’re looking at just over 6 months of sales and the iPhone is rocking the marketshare in the Smartphone category like you wouldn’t believe. According to Canalys (whose numbers we’ve admittedly doubted before, but these results look pretty solid), the iPhone has reached 28% marketshare among Smartphones in the US and 7% worldwide. That puts it at #2 in the US and #3 worldwide. They’re even ahead of Motorola.

Also, the iPhone is beating the pants off of the PalmOS (down to 9%) and also Windows Mobile (21%) in the United States. The only question left is whether or not Apple can gain on RIM’s imposing 41% share. That will require converting a lot of business users.

Actually, the other question is whether or not Apple can maintain that share without releasing a 3G iPhone in the near future. The drumbeat of analyst, stockholder, and most importantly consumer desire for the 3G iPhone is going to get steadily louder in the coming months.

Canalys [via GearDiary]

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iPhone Marketshare Climbing Fast

Apple just posted their quarterly results, and the results are great. Apple sold a staggering amount of Macs this quarter. iPod sales are still growing. They sold 400,000 more Macs than they’ve ever sold, 2.1 million altogether. They’re selling their stuff like gangbusters in Europe. They earned a dollar per share over the last quarter. Apple has sold about 1.4 million iPhones, and the small-to-medium business segment loves the iPhone. Oh, and perhaps 250,000 of those iPhones were sold to unlockers. So yeah, business as usual. Look for more of the same next quarter, I’ll predict — once Leopard is out, there’s going to be a stronger-than-usual rush to get new machines as people upgrade.

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Apple Posts More Record Growth

Highlights from a report from a report by Strategy Analytics:

• iPhone tops AT&T sales chart at 13% of AT&T’s device sales
• 4th best-selling phone in U.S., selling 1.1 million units. Total # of iPhones sold: maybe 1.325 million
• based on current trajectory, iPhone will be #1 best-selling phone in the next quarter or two
• current #1 is still the RAZR V3
• two age segments standing out that are purchasing iPhone in droves: 20-30 and 50-60.

Having owned a RAZR and been frustrated with the poor software shipped on it, I will do a little dance when it’s no longer #1.

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iPhone is AT&T’s Top Earner

figure 1: The Orange Treo 680 is what I used before I got an iPhone. This and a featurephone, actually, for when I wanted to take a non-useless picture of something. I used both AT&T and T-Mobile.

Let me put on my Carnac the Magnificent hat and guess that you were on T-Mobile too. There’s an interesting survey report done by the NPD group recently that caught my eye, specifically because it names Treos. I still have love for Treos, but I’m off the wagon in terms of using one regularly at least until their Linux OS ships. But here are the fact nuggets that they report:

• iPhone owners were 10 times more likely to have owned a Treo
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to use a T-Mobile phone, such as the Sidekick
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to switch from T-Mobile or Alltel
• iPhone owners were no more likely to buy an iPhone if they had a Blackberry

They don’t break down the numbers for you much in the press release, but as always these reports are meant to be bought and sold by industry analysts and stock market guys and stuff. I’d like to believe that they have a breakdown of PalmOS and Windows Mobile in there, but they don’t specify in their press release. The only quote nugget is from NPD’s Director of Industry Analysis Ross Rubin:

“The iPhone’s Internet and media capabilities have resonated with consumers — especially those who previously owned Treos and Sidekicks. Its advanced operating system makes it competitive with smartphones for many tasks, while its sleek design and lack of expandability is reminiscent of fashion phones”

Speaking personally, I had a devil of a time with getting media on the Treo. It’s just not convenient to use it to consume media at all. You need the special headphones, you need to drag your files into which directory on the SD card again, or worse, you use Palm Desktop to do it. My loathing for Palm Desktop and Palm Conduits really knows no bounds. Even with the iSync conduits, it was still a pain. Oh, and my loathing for Blazer — that knows no bounds too. I wrestled with Java to get Opera Mini installed, juggled my 4-5 SD cards, trying to remember what was on which one, etc. I wanted to like Windows Mobile, but missed the screen resolution and couldn’t cope with the interface. Syncing on the iPhone is quick, easy, and seems to take much less time than anything on Palm Desktop would ever do.

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iPhone Owners: Likely Once Treo Owners

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Apple To Double iPhone Production?

Apple unveiled a new press release, they’ve just sold their one millionth phone. It’s worthwhile to note that Jobs tends to set easily achievable goals so that they can be demolished. He wouldn’t want to eke by on the “million phones by the end of September” thing on Sept. 28th, that’s not news. If he’s sold one million phones by the 10th instead of the 30th, then he’s 20 days ahead of schedule. And then you think, “Oh, the iPhone must be selling really well.” And that’s just one aspect of his Reality Distortion Field. At any rate, the press release is after the break.

Apple Sells One Millionth iPhone
CUPERTINO, Calif., Sept. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple(R) today announced it sold its one millionth iPhone(TM) yesterday, just 74 days after its introduction on June 29. iPhone combines three devices into one-a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod(R), and the best mobile Internet device ever-all based on Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface and pioneering software that allows users to control iPhone with just a tap, flick or pinch of their fingers.

“One million iPhones in 74 days-it took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We can’t wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season.”

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market this year with its revolutionary iPhone.

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Apple Sells One Million iPhones