Apple iPhone Leapfrogs RIM BlackBerry in Smartphone Rankings - eWeek

Apple, Research In Motion and Android phone producers such as Samsung put in strong performances during a third quarter that showed smartphone sales to be very much dictating the global handset market. The handset market also seems to be rewarding phone vendors that are constantly innovating and producing the strongest possible portfolio of smartphones.  

The launch of the iPhone 4 helped Apple, according to Oct. 28 reports from research firms IDC and Strategy Analytics, join the list of top-five performers for the first time. Apple, such as competitor RIM, only contributes smartphones to the handheld market, and both vendors posted highest-growth rates among the top five vendors during the quarter.  

?The mobile phone makers that are delivering popular smartphone models are among the fastest-growing firms,? Kevin Restivo, an IDC senior research analyst, said in a statement. ?Vendors that aren?t developing a strong portfolio of smartphones will be challenged to maintain and grow market share in the future.?  

Nokia has learned this lesson well. While the long-time market leader, Nokia saw its volumes grow below the market average for the ninth consecutive quarter, despite posting ?record smartphone shipments of 26 million units,? according to Strategy Analytics. Looking to again be a serious smartphone contender, Nokia has introduced four high-end models, the N8, C7, C6-01 and E7, which it hopes will significantly impact its fourth quarter.  

?The N8, C7 and C6-01 will be attacking Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung, while the E7 will set its sights on RIM, HTC and others,? wrote Analyst Neil Mawston, author of the Strategy Analytics report.  

LG Electronics, Mawston points out, saw shipments shrink 10 percent compared to a year ago, and ?like Motorola and Sony Ericsson before it, has missed much of the boom in premium 3G smartphones,? causing it ?financial pain.? As competitors such as Samsung begin releasing 3G tablets, Mawston warned, ?LG must be careful not to repeat this error.?  

Samsung, with its line of Galaxy S smartphones and Galaxy Tab tablet, was quick to jump on the Android craze, and consequently shipped 71.4 million units during the quarter?an all-time high for the company. It also more than doubled the number of converged mobile devices, or smartphones, it shipped. During the fourth quarter, it will bring still more smartphones to market, though its Wave 2 will launch with Bada, its in-house OS.  

IDC estimated that the global handset market grew 14.6 percent during the quarter, with a total of 340.5 million shipments, which Strategy Analytics put the figure slightly lower, at 327 million.  

Again, according to IDC, market leader Nokia shipped 110.4 million handsets, to claim 32.4 percent market share and was followed by Samsung, with shipments of 71.4 million units for 21 percent market share. Third-place LG shipped 28.4 million units, for 8.3 percent of the market, and Apple, jumping ahead of RIM to claim fourth position, shipped 14.1 million units to claim 4.1 percent market share?and post a remarkable 90.5 percent year-on-year growth.  

Fifth-place RIM, with 3.6 percent of the market, shipped 12.4 million units, for a year-on-year growth of 45.9 percent. While IDC reports that RIM shipped a record number of units during the quarter, and showed particular growth in Latin America, in the U.S., Strategy Analytics highlighted that its ?relatively weak touchphone portfolio for consumer users? has challenged the company, particularly following a lukewarm response to the Torch. 

With its fellow top vendors, RIM will need to proceed smartly though the fourth quarter, or risk being chucked off the list.  

?There is a long tail of second-tier players emerging who are knocking on the doors of the top five players,? Strategy Analytics? Mawston warned. ?ZTE, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Huawei and Alcatel are all shipping volumes that are within touch distance of the leading group.?  

ZTE in particular is growing at an above-average rate, Mawston noted, and ?stands a good chance of entering the top five in coming quarters.?   

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UAE Scraps BlackBerry Ban While RIM Says Security Unchanged - Bloomberg

The United Arab Emirates will not suspend Research in Motion Ltd. ’s Blackberry service this month. Photographer: Jonathan Gainer/Bloomberg

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Betty Liu reports on the latest breaking news and top stories in today's Business Briefs. (Source: Bloomberg)

Research In Motion Ltd. averted a ban on its BlackBerry smartphone in the United Arab Emirates after the country’s phone regulator said the company’s messaging services now comply with local regulations.

“All BlackBerry services in the U.A.E. will continue to operate as normal,” the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, which had threatened to ban the service over security concerns, said in a statement on its website today. The regulator didn’t give further details of how the company and local wireless operators addressed the government’s concerns.

RIM said today it continues to follow the principles for working with government officials it laid out in an Aug. 12 statement and wouldn’t comment further on confidential regulatory matters. In that statement, RIM said it doesn’t do “special deals for specific countries” and there have been no changes to the security of its corporate e-mail system.

“Contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers’ encryption keys,” RIM said in August.

RIM’s encryption technology has raised concerns in several countries that BlackBerry may be used for terrorist attacks or other illegal activity. The U.A.E. regulator’s decision, which averts a ban planned for Oct. 11, comes after Saudi Arabia canceled a planned shutdown of BlackBerry service and the Indian government said it would push back a deadline to suspend BlackBerry service as it works toward a solution.

Some Kind of Workaround?

“RIM has previously been clear that it would not change the architecture of the BlackBerry services to placate countries,” said Tony Cripps, an analyst with technology research firm Ovum in London. “We can only hypothesize that some kind of workaround has been agreed” to between the UAE and local carriers to monitor messages sent with the BlackBerry “at a point in the delivery process that is outside of RIM’s control,” he said.

RIM rose $1.44, or 3 percent, to $49.36 at 4:30 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has dropped 27 percent this year.

The U.A.E. regulator said it wants to acknowledge RIM’s “positive engagement and collaboration.” The regulator didn’t say whether the deal allows it to monitor messages sent by BlackBerry users.

In a Sept. 24 interview, co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie said RIM can’t give governments access to corporate customers’ e-mail systems because only those customers -- not RIM -- hold the security codes for reading their employees’ BlackBerry messages.

“I’m not the keeper of that key, I don’t have that key,” he said. “If you want them to break open their servers, you’ve got to go to them.”

Indian Security Trial

Saudi Arabian authorities said Aug. 10 it wouldn’t impose a BlackBerry ban, citing the “positive development” in meeting the country’s monitoring needs. India’s government said Aug. 31 that it’s conducting a two-month test of a tracking system offered by Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM.

A ban would have hurt the image of the U.A.E., home to the business hub of Dubai, as place that is business-friendly, said Mohammed Ali Yasin, chief investment officer at CAPM Investments in Abu Dhabi.

“The fact that we are continuing with the services is important to say we are part of the world community,” he said.

The companies involved would have lost “significant business” if the ban had gone through, he said.

Encryption Technology

Emirates Telecommunications Corp., the U.A.E.’s biggest phone operator, known as Etisalat, and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co., based in Dubai and owner of the Du brand, had introduced packages that would allow customers to replace BlackBerry devices with smartphones offering similar services.

Etisalat said in an e-mailed statement today that its alternative packages will no longer be available and that all its BlackBerry services will continue to operate as normal. Du said in a separate statement that service for both consumer and enterprise customers will function normally.

An Etisalat official who declined to be named said he did not know about any possible monitoring and referred questions to the regulator. “We only provide the service,” the official said. Calls to a Du official went unanswered today, the first day of the weekend in the U.A.E.

The U.A.E. set the Oct. 11 shutdown deadline in August after the regulator said the encryption technology didn’t comply with national-security laws for giving authorities access to electronic messages.

RIM has about 1.1 million users in India and a combined 1.2 million in the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, according to estimates by RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky. The company has over 50 million subscribers globally.

To contact the reporters on this story: Zahraa Alkhalisi in Abu Dhabi at zalkhalisi@bloomberg.net; Hugo Miller in Toronto at hugomiller@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Maedler at cmaedler@bloomberg.net: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net

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Post Tech: Android takes smart-phone lead from BlackBerry, iPhone - Washington Post

Android phones have replaced the BlackBerry and iPhone in popularity among new users, according to new data by Nielsen.

Statistics show that Google's operating system for mobile phones has become a greater threat in the dynamic and competitive market for wireless smart phones.

In August, 32 percent of new users (people who bought a phone within the past six months) purchased a device running on Google's operating system, more than double the portion of new users surveyed in January.

Research in Motion's BlackBerry operating system and Apple's iPhone were behind at about 25 percent of the market each.

Overall, BlackBerry continues to dominate the smart-phone market for new and longer-term consumers with 31 percent of all sales. But that portion is down from 36 percent in January. Google's Android sales have more than doubled from 8 percent to 19 percent of all customers.

Fierce competition is not only being displayed in sales but in patent disputes between phone makers. Microsoft, which has trailed all operating systems, sued Motorola for allegedly infringing smart-phone patents related to e-mail, calendar and other applications. Apple and HTC have a back-and-forth patents dispute. In March, Apple sued Taiwan-based HTC, the manufacturer of such Android phones as the HTC Hero and Google's Nexus One (since taken off the market), alleging that it had infringed on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.

Separately, Apple was ordered by a Texas jury to pay more than $625 million to a computer science professor for alleged patent infringements.

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