The big party

Money quote:

The Numbers Are Really Big. Insane, I mean. The billion-plus phones sold per year. The number of active subscriptions, which is greater than half of the human population. The number of new Android devices that check in with Google every day. The line-ups outside Apple stores for every new iOS device. The hundreds of thousands of apps. The ridiculous number of new ones that flow into Android Market every day. Everywhere I look, I see something astounding.

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/30/Mobile-Market-Share

But the important thing isn’t Android vs. iPhone.  Smartphones, while wildly profitable, are only a fraction of the market.

The smartphone is not the start of the mobile phone industry. The mobile phone business is the most dynamic, most competitive race for the soul of the future of the most widely spread consumer technology ever. Televisions sell 300 million units per year. DVD players sell about 250 million units per year. Personal computers including laptops, netbooks, tablets like the iPad and desktops – sell about 300 million per year. Videogame consoles sell far less than 100 million per year. Mobile phones sell more than all of those – combined! Mobile phones sell 1.3 Billion units this year. To put it another way, more new mobile phones sell this year, than the total worldwide installed base of all personal computers in use worldwide.

There are 5 Billion mobile phone subscriptions in use on a planet of 6.8 Billion people.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/understanding-smartphone-market-share-battle-not-for-phones-is-for-platform.html

Carrier relations are where the platform wars have been won and lost in the past.  Likely where they will be won and lost in the future, though I wonder what would happen if Google decided to build a low-end Android “world phone” that uses google voice and SMS/MMS for always-on connectivity, depending on store and forward data connectivity whenever it finds open wifi for all the social applications.  A “smart” dumbphone that doesn’t need expensive smartphone data plans.