INTERVIEW: Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer at analyst house Informa, talks about some of the latest trends affecting the mobile voice and data markets.
Speaking in advance of his address to the Insights’09 conference next month in Lisbon, he discusses the impact of the iPhone, the rush to open app stores and carriers’ attitude to mobile VoIP.
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Vodafone is joining the increasingly busy application store game by launching its own venture in a number of European markets later this year.
The mobile operator will take a 30 per cent share of all app revenue – mirroring Apple’s App Store.
Apple will almost certainly break with its exclusive AT&T agreement and allow other carriers to support the iPhone, according to analysts.
Citigroup’s research firm say that while the arrangement with AT&T has benefitted Apple, the company is likely to open its smartphone to more US operators within the next two years.
Helped in no small part by aggressive promotions, RIM’s Blackberry Curve became the best-selling US smartphone in the first quarter of 2009 – overtaking Apple’s iPhone.
The Curve’s popularity helped increase RIM’s consumer smartphone market share by 15 per cent over the previous quarter to almost 50 per cent, according to market research firm NPD.
The iPhone has come top of JD Power’s customer satisfaction study measuring consumer tastes.
The Apple handset ranked highest among smartphone consumers judging five factors: ease of operation, operating system, features, physical design, and battery function.
With a launch date for Palm’s much anticipated Pre still to be announced along comes news that Palm is preparing a second Pre-like handset for release this year.
The smaller and slimmer device will be pitched at a different part of the smartphone market, according to Techcrunch.
Zoho has extended mobile support for its free web applications to all the major smartphone platforms.
Initially only available for the iPhone and Windows Mobile, Zoho Mobile now supports Android, BlackBerry and Symbian mobile platforms as well.
Mobile app revenues are expected to climb to more than USD $25bn by 2014 – fuelled by the launch of a raft of new application stores.
But while one-off downloads currently account for the majority of revenues, that will change with the increasing utilization of in-app billing, according to Juniper Research.
Sandisk expects increased demand for its mobile storage products as a result of continued growth in the smartphone, MIDs and notebooks sectors.
The flash memory provider said demand for its mobile solutions was actually increasing – as were prices.
Vopium has become the latest mobile VoIP provider to introduce an iPhone application.
The addition to its supported handsets comes as the company was named winner of this year’s European Mobile VoIP Technology Innovation Award by Frost & Sullivan.