mocoNews.net just published a fascinating set of statistics on the US mobile Q3 sales. There is so much interesting data packed into two short paragraphs that you really should go take a look.
Highlights:
- Phone prices are up 40% compared to one year ago
- Smart phones are up from 4% to 11% of units sold in the US (definitions remain tricky, as I discussed in segmenting handheld devices)
- Features with significant advances include MP3 and Bluetooth
- the iPhone came in as the 6th most popular handset in Q3
- Nokia has 11% market share, in 4th place
- Motorola took 31% market share
Some of this advancement is from "the iPhone effect". Basically, users are seeing the iPhone, realizing how useful it can be, but not wanting to get the iPhone directly. So they go to the store and get something that either looks similar, or has similar features.
In a way, this is only good for Nokia as well. Despite the tiny market share, they have been positioning themselves as being a computing company, not a phone company. They are therefore poised to take advantage of the trend if the reinvest in the market.
Oh, and that 11% of devices being smart phones ... keep in mind that very few of those will be Series 60 devices since Nokia has such a small market share. S60s are typically counted as smart phones even when not purchased as such, so the increase of smart phone percent to 11 is by people actually intending smart phone purchase.