Android and Samsung lead the mobile market

Rick

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According to the latest MobiLens measurements taken by comScore, Google's Android and Samsung's handsets were on top in September, when it comes to current mobile subscribers.

For mobile operating systems, Android is the victor by far with 44.8% market share in the mobile space. Android and iPhone OS were the only platforms which showed signs of growth, increasing by 4.6% and 0.8%, respectively. Blackberry OS led the charge downward, shedding 4.6% of their users while Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and Symbian endured a mere 0.2% user loss.

For handsets, Samsung maintained its lead with the mobiles in the wild (25.3%) but the company's growth remained entirely flat. Conversely, Apple showed the most overall growth (1.3%) but placed fourth in overall quantity, behind Samsung, LG and Motorola. The increase for Apple does not include sales of the iPhone 4S, as the data collected was prior to its release.

comScore's findings also display an increasing trend in texting and data usage overall. More people are using their mobile phones to play games, utilize social networking, installing apps and listen to music than ever before.

The "MobiLens" survey was performed over a three month period and involved 30,000 subscribers across various mobile carriers. 

Top Mobile OEMs
3 Month Avg. Ending Sep. 2011 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Jun. 2011
Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers (Smartphone & Non-Smartphone) Ages 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens
  Share (%) of Mobile Subscribers
Jun-11 Sep-11 Point Change
Total Mobile Subscribers 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Samsung 25.3% 25.3% 0.0
LG 21.3% 20.6% -0.7
Motorola 14.5% 13.8% -0.7
Apple 8.9% 10.2% 1.3
RIM 7.9% 7.1% -0.8
Top Smartphone Platforms
3 Month Avg. Ending Sep. 2011 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Jun. 2011
Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens
  Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
Jun-11 Sep-11 Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google 40.2% 44.8% 4.6
Apple 26.6% 27.4% 0.8
RIM 23.5% 18.9% -4.6
Microsoft 5.8% 5.6% -0.2
Symbian 2.0% 1.8% -0.2

Mobile Content Usage
3 Month Avg. Ending Sep. 2011 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Jun. 2011
Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers (Smartphone & Non-Smartphone) Ages 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens
  Share (%) of Mobile Subscribers
Jun-11 Sep-11 Point Change
Total Mobile Subscribers 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Sent text message to another phone 69.6% 71.1% 1.5
Used browser 40.1% 42.9% 2.8
Used downloaded apps 39.5% 42.5% 3.0
Accessed social networking site or blog 29.1% 31.5% 2.4
Played Games 26.9% 28.8% 1.9
Listened to music on mobile phone 19.0% 20.9% 1.9

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You might want to change the article from saying iPhone OS to just iOS. It's sort of correct but Apple dropped the iPhone OS name back in June 2010.
 
9Nails said:
I'm a little surprised that HTC isn't in that list of Mobile OEMs.

Me too. I love my HTC Inspire (much more than my Samsung Infuse). However, I will NOT part with my Blackberry 9700! I'm sorry, but BB is still better for business use. So I use my BB 9700 throughout the week and my HTC Inspire on weekends. Works for me...
 
9Nails said:
I'm a little surprised that HTC isn't in that list of Mobile OEMs.

People have caught on to the fact that HTC loses in every category in the specs department. That coupled with a very resource intensive UI is not a good combination.
 
Who's gonna win the race? Who cares if it's a cheap piece of crap, I only want it if it's the most popular one.
 
Those rankings are all bullcrap since there's no mentioning for HTC, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson among others in them.
 
Unsurprising. I see TONS of Samsung smartphones on campus and in class. They've really exploded in the past couple years.
 
lawfer said:
Princeton said:
People have caught on to the fact that HTC loses in every category in the specs department.

Care to elaborate...?

I need to elaborate? You could just compare HTC specs to other devices. Well let's start from the top.

-Snapdragon CPUs with scorpion cores. Every CPU from other OEMs is based on the Cortex-A9 architecture. The Qualcomm processors used in HTC phones are based on Qualcomm's own Scorpion core design which is somewhere between an A8 and an A9. The scorpion cores are slower clock for clock than A9 ones and even though they are faster at times with the clock speed, in real world performance they're a great deal slower.

-The screens. HTC phones, with the exception of a few like the HTC Raider, use SLCD panels for their screens. SLCD screens can only do 18bit color or 2^18 colors. In contrast the IPS panels and OLED panels used by other manufacturers can do 24bit color/2^24 colors. It's a vast improvement, 64 times the amount of colors used on HTC phones. I won't even get into the viewing angles and contrast because that's been done to death.

-The GPUs on the SoC, Qualcomm's Adreno chips. They're less powerful than the competition from powerVR and ARM, and this leads to lower performance when rendering the UI or doing any work that utilises the GPU. This further lowers the performance of the devices.
 
Princeton said:
lawfer said:
Princeton said:
People have caught on to the fact that HTC loses in every category in the specs department.

Care to elaborate...?

I need to elaborate? You could just compare HTC specs to other devices. Well let's start from the top.

-Snapdragon CPUs with scorpion cores. Every CPU from other OEMs is based on the Cortex-A9 architecture. The Qualcomm processors used in HTC phones are based on Qualcomm's own Scorpion core design which is somewhere between an A8 and an A9. The scorpion cores are slower clock for clock than A9 ones and even though they are faster at times with the clock speed, in real world performance they're a great deal slower.

-The screens. HTC phones, with the exception of a few like the HTC Raider, use SLCD panels for their screens. SLCD screens can only do 18bit color or 2^18 colors. In contrast the IPS panels and OLED panels used by other manufacturers can do 24bit color/2^24 colors. It's a vast improvement, 64 times the amount of colors used on HTC phones. I won't even get into the viewing angles and contrast because that's been done to death.

-The GPUs on the SoC, Qualcomm's Adreno chips. They're less powerful than the competition from powerVR and ARM, and this leads to lower performance when rendering the UI or doing any work that utilises the GPU. This further lowers the performance of the devices.

Well thanks for the info, but you still haven't elaborated on your point. How is it that any of this is responsible for HTC not being the leader (or among the leaders) in the mobile market? Granted some HTC phones are underpowered* in comparison, but in actuality, enthusiasts and people to whose that information is relevant, only make up, arguably, no more than 10% of the smartphone consumer market. And that's stretching it.

*Those specs are only important to those who know about them. General consumers mostly base their decisions on capabilities, looks, and battery life (not in that order). The difference of a, say, OMAP4 SoC and a Snapdragon SoC, one clocked at 1.5 Ghz and the other at 1.2 Ghz, respectively, is perceptibly negligible in every day use. The only way you could perceive the difference between these, is because of the GPU on each respective SoC. But then again, so far, HTC Sense has been handled perfectly fine in phones like the Inspire or the myTouch 4G, which use a similar Snapdragon. I know because I've used both.

Although I do agree with you that Adreno 205 is undepowered in comparison to the competition, so far all phones that carry it handle the OS just fine. It's not only on Android, but also with WP7, as such is the case with the Samsung Focus S which uses a Snapdragon MSM8255T with Adreno 205, and it handles the OS like butter. And even the latest generation Blackberry phones (the Torch 9810, Bold 9900, Torch 9860) which carry a 1.2 GHz MSM8255 (without the "T", which is 300+ MHz slower than the ones in the 2nd Gen WP7 phones, but sill uses Andreno 205) Snapdragon SoC, and it still handles the OS like nothing.

Only benchmarks tell the actual difference, and benchmarks are prominently used by people such as yourself and myself. However, until I see some evidence, I don't see how their SoC choice has been specially detrimental to their market growth. So, again, could you elaborate on that?
 
lawfer said:
Princeton said:
lawfer said:
Princeton said:
People have caught on to the fact that HTC loses in every category in the specs department.

Care to elaborate...?

I need to elaborate? You could just compare HTC specs to other devices. Well let's start from the top.

-Snapdragon CPUs with scorpion cores. Every CPU from other OEMs is based on the Cortex-A9 architecture. The Qualcomm processors used in HTC phones are based on Qualcomm's own Scorpion core design which is somewhere between an A8 and an A9. The scorpion cores are slower clock for clock than A9 ones and even though they are faster at times with the clock speed, in real world performance they're a great deal slower.

-The screens. HTC phones, with the exception of a few like the HTC Raider, use SLCD panels for their screens. SLCD screens can only do 18bit color or 2^18 colors. In contrast the IPS panels and OLED panels used by other manufacturers can do 24bit color/2^24 colors. It's a vast improvement, 64 times the amount of colors used on HTC phones. I won't even get into the viewing angles and contrast because that's been done to death.

-The GPUs on the SoC, Qualcomm's Adreno chips. They're less powerful than the competition from powerVR and ARM, and this leads to lower performance when rendering the UI or doing any work that utilises the GPU. This further lowers the performance of the devices.

Well thanks for the info, but you still haven't elaborated on your point. How is it that any of this is responsible for HTC not being the leader (or among the leaders) in the mobile market? Granted some HTC phones are underpowered* in comparison, but in actuality, enthusiasts and people to whose that information is relevant, only make up, arguably, no more than 10% of the smartphone consumer market. And that's stretching it.

*Those specs are only important to those who know about them. General consumers mostly base their decisions on capabilities, looks, and battery life (not in that order). The difference of a, say, OMAP4 SoC and a Snapdragon SoC, one clocked at 1.5 Ghz and the other at 1.2 Ghz, respectively, is perceptibly negligible in every day use. The only way you could perceive the difference between these, is because of the GPU on each respective SoC. But then again, so far, HTC Sense has been handled perfectly fine in phones like the Inspire or the myTouch 4G, which use a similar Snapdragon. I know because I've used both.

Although I do agree with you that Adreno 205 is undepowered in comparison to the competition, so far all phones that carry it handle the OS just fine. It's not only on Android, but also with WP7, as such is the case with the Samsung Focus S which uses a Snapdragon MSM8255T with Adreno 205, and it handles the OS like butter. And even the latest generation Blackberry phones (the Torch 9810, Bold 9900, Torch 9860) which carry a 1.2 GHz MSM8255 (without the "T", which is 300+ MHz slower than the ones in the 2nd Gen WP7 phones, but sill uses Andreno 205) Snapdragon SoC, and it still handles the OS like nothing.

Only benchmarks tell the actual difference, and benchmarks are prominently used by people such as yourself and myself. However, until I see some evidence, I don't see how their SoC choice has been specially detrimental to their market growth. So, again, could you elaborate on that?

First of all if you think Sense runs well on any device then you should actually take a look at your phone. Go check logcat outputs, all the animations in the Sense launcher run at 30fps, it's locked to that. In contrast the ones for Touchwiz 4 run at 56fps or 63fps depending on the kernel version your device has. Consumers can tell that the animations for HTC Sense run slower than other phones like the iPhone or the SGS II or even the Nexus S. All they need to do is set them beside each other and check

Second of all you completely ignored everything I said about the screens. The screen on a device is a HUGE selling point, I think the iPhone 4 showed us that back in 2010. And any customer who walks into a store can tell that the HTC devices have the inferior screens out of the bunch. It doesn't take a highly educated person to see the poor color reproduction, contrast and viewing angles than the SLCD screens on the HTC phones provide.
 
Princeton said:
lawfer said:
Princeton said:
lawfer said:
Princeton said:
People have caught on to the fact that HTC loses in every category in the specs department.

Care to elaborate...?

I need to elaborate? You could just compare HTC specs to other devices. Well let's start from the top.

-Snapdragon CPUs with scorpion cores. Every CPU from other OEMs is based on the Cortex-A9 architecture. The Qualcomm processors used in HTC phones are based on Qualcomm's own Scorpion core design which is somewhere between an A8 and an A9. The scorpion cores are slower clock for clock than A9 ones and even though they are faster at times with the clock speed, in real world performance they're a great deal slower.

-The screens. HTC phones, with the exception of a few like the HTC Raider, use SLCD panels for their screens. SLCD screens can only do 18bit color or 2^18 colors. In contrast the IPS panels and OLED panels used by other manufacturers can do 24bit color/2^24 colors. It's a vast improvement, 64 times the amount of colors used on HTC phones. I won't even get into the viewing angles and contrast because that's been done to death.

-The GPUs on the SoC, Qualcomm's Adreno chips. They're less powerful than the competition from powerVR and ARM, and this leads to lower performance when rendering the UI or doing any work that utilises the GPU. This further lowers the performance of the devices.

Well thanks for the info, but you still haven't elaborated on your point. How is it that any of this is responsible for HTC not being the leader (or among the leaders) in the mobile market? Granted some HTC phones are underpowered* in comparison, but in actuality, enthusiasts and people to whose that information is relevant, only make up, arguably, no more than 10% of the smartphone consumer market. And that's stretching it.

*Those specs are only important to those who know about them. General consumers mostly base their decisions on capabilities, looks, and battery life (not in that order). The difference of a, say, OMAP4 SoC and a Snapdragon SoC, one clocked at 1.5 Ghz and the other at 1.2 Ghz, respectively, is perceptibly negligible in every day use. The only way you could perceive the difference between these, is because of the GPU on each respective SoC. But then again, so far, HTC Sense has been handled perfectly fine in phones like the Inspire or the myTouch 4G, which use a similar Snapdragon. I know because I've used both.

Although I do agree with you that Adreno 205 is undepowered in comparison to the competition, so far all phones that carry it handle the OS just fine. It's not only on Android, but also with WP7, as such is the case with the Samsung Focus S which uses a Snapdragon MSM8255T with Adreno 205, and it handles the OS like butter. And even the latest generation Blackberry phones (the Torch 9810, Bold 9900, Torch 9860) which carry a 1.2 GHz MSM8255 (without the "T", which is 300+ MHz slower than the ones in the 2nd Gen WP7 phones, but sill uses Andreno 205) Snapdragon SoC, and it still handles the OS like nothing.

Only benchmarks tell the actual difference, and benchmarks are prominently used by people such as yourself and myself. However, until I see some evidence, I don't see how their SoC choice has been specially detrimental to their market growth. So, again, could you elaborate on that?

First of all if you think Sense runs well on any device then you should actually take a look at your phone. Go check logcat outputs, all the animations in the Sense launcher run at 30fps, it's locked to that. In contrast the ones for Touchwiz 4 run at 56fps or 63fps depending on the kernel version your device has. Consumers can tell that the animations for HTC Sense run slower than other phones like the iPhone or the SGS II or even the Nexus S. All they need to do is set them beside each other and check

Second of all you completely ignored everything I said about the screens. The screen on a device is a HUGE selling point, I think the iPhone 4 showed us that back in 2010. And any customer who walks into a store can tell that the HTC devices have the inferior screens out of the bunch. It doesn't take a highly educated person to see the poor color reproduction, contrast and viewing angles than the SLCD screens on the HTC phones provide.

I would think you know better by now, Princeton...

First, I never said HTC Sense runs well on all phones, I specifically mentioned it runs perfectly fine on phones with the now aging Adreno 205. You said on your last comment that one of the "reasons" people have caught up on, has been the lackluster graphical performance of Adreno GPUs on HTC phones compared to the competition. All I said was that that is incorrect, as I have used 2 phones which run HTC Sense perfectly fine on an older Adreno GPU.

I have used the myTouch 4G, which uses an older Adreno 205, and it runs the OS perfectly fine. And you are talking to be about FPS, when to consumers that is clearly irrelevant. The question that challenges your point here is: Does the Adreno run the HTC Sense smoothly? Yes. There's really nothing you can say to take away that fact. But let's just say that my word isn't enough, then here is a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDE8IdoArag&t=5m22s that showcases how that aging snapdragon SoC handles the UI. It's also worth mentioning that that phone is not on Gingerbread, and still performs great.

In contrast the ones for Touchwiz 4 run at 56fps or 63fps depending on the kernel version your device has. Consumers can tell that the animations for HTC Sense run slower than other phones like the iPhone or the SGS II or even the Nexus S. All they need to do is set them beside each other and check

Second, nice argument there, Princeton. Comparing an aging Snapdragon SoC with only one core, to a Galaxy S II dual-core with Tegra... very nice....

Thirdly, I didn't ignore your statement about the HTC screens. I just couldn't refute it, hence why I didn't bring it up. Quite different. And screen is a big selling point, but please don't use the iPhone as your example. Everybody knows the iPhone sells because it is the iPhone. The iPhone 4S sold 4 million units in just 3 three days, and I assure you, it wasn't because of the "re-launch" of the Retina Display. And while it is a big selling point, it is not responsible for HTC's market share, which brings me to my last and initial point:

There is one thing all of your points have in common, and that is they still don't prove anything.

You still haven't provided concrete facts as to how any of this has caused HTC not being on top of the mobile market share. I <i>know</i> why it isn't on top, but you clearly have some misconceptions.
 
And you are talking to be about FPS, when to consumers that is clearly irrelevant.

I'm talking about FPS because if the UI is rendered at a higher framerate the animations will be smoother. It's not irrelevant to consumers at all. They might not know what frames per second is, but they can see with their own damn eyes that one phone is smoother than another.

Second, nice argument there, Princeton. Comparing an aging Snapdragon SoC with only one core, to a Galaxy S II dual-core with Tegra... very nice....
I wasn't comparing them to a Single Core snapdragon SoC. I was comparing them to their relevant competition which are Snapdragon S3 dual core chips with the Adreno 220, I brought up SoCs first, you're not allowed to take my argument and confine it to only single chips using the Adreno 205. Also the Galaxy S II doesn't use Tegra 2, it uses Exynos 4210, Samsung's in house mobile processor.

I also compared to the Nexus S which is a single core chip based on a modified Cortex A8 core. Stop strawmanning by refuting arguments I never made or changing ones that I did make.

Now the most hilarious part is when you posted the youtube video to try and prove me wrong. On his first try to pull down the notification bar the phone's touchscreen didn't respond. On the second try there was very noticeable stutter in the pulldown animation. Later one he's scrolling through the app drawer and it's clearly running at a low framerate. It's sluggish and has noticeable stutters at times. Protip, when presenting evidence make sure it supports your argument, not the other person's argument.

Arguing must be easy when you start resorting to refuting arguments that you made up your self or modified to suit your own.
 
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