China to pass US in smart phone shipments in 2012

China and India have been leading shipments of cellphones for a long time. This is another very interesting data point that shows that China is now leading in the shipment of smartphones. This brings an valuable question: what are the key applications used on these phones: social media, games, enterprise applications, all of the above?

Here's a CNET article talking about the top 5 hottest smart phone apps in 2011: LBS, messaging, photo, lifestyle, blogging. Apple and Google are still leading in Gartner's Mobile Consumer Application Platform

Smart phone shipments top PCs for the first time ever

We have reached a very interesting inflection point: more smartphones are shipped every day than PCs. This is radically changing the way applications should be designed, distributed and consumed. Developers are already designing their applications with a mobile interface first. With the back-end moving to the cloud and the front-end to mobile devices, we are at a very important junction in the world of IT. On a less serious note, there are now more Apple iPhones sold per second than there are babies born in the world.

AT&T to bring out Nokia phone with Windows

Last week, Steve Ballmer joined Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in unveiling the Lumia 900, their newest phone at a press event in Las Vegas (ahead of CES). The device represents Nokia and Microsoft's best chance yet to break Google and Apple's hold on the U.S. smartphone market. The new phone will use AT&T's LTE wireless data network. Since this is Nokia and Microsoft's (last?) chance to disrupt the most lucrative phone market, I can't wait to get my hands on one of them and experience the new device. I also would like to hear about their developer plans.

Amazon sought to buy BlackBerry maker RIM

Looks like more bad news are piling up for RIM. It makes sense for Amazon to control another corner of the network triangle. I just wish they had better options than RIM at this point. I haven't seen a good plan and value proposition from Amazon or RIM to recruit the developer community to develop on their products. Until then, their products (tablets or phones) will lack a vibrant application ecosystem.

The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger Is Dead

It's official, AT&T has ended his bid to acquire T-Mobile USA. I had some doubts that the deal would have difficulties going through the Feds approval back in March. The $4B break-up fee might be bad news for AT&T but I'm more concerned about how T-Mobile is going to recover from the deal. I'm pretty sure they have been hemorrhaging subscribers leading to the FCC decision and the announcement won't help bring new users.

Will BlackBerry survive 2012?

Good article here. The answer is no. According to research group Canalys, RIM's share of the smartphone market in the US fell to 9.2% in the third quarter from 24% in the same period last year. You don't recover from this kind of numbers, not unless you have a great plan in the works.

There might be room for another developer environment on top of iOS and Android, but it is not going to be RIM (Microsoft is not going to abandon a market that could grow into a trillion dollars). RIM totally missed the apps boat and doesn't have an attractive value proposition for users and developers. Why would you spend time and money porting your apps on a platform with a declining number of activated users?

Android Market hits 10 billion downloads

Last summer, I discussed the 15 billion downloads from the iTunes App Store, and today, Google confirmed that Android Market hit the 10 billion mark. What are the chances that Android Market overtakes iTunes App Store:

• Android App downloads are growing faster than iOS' (took almost a year for Apple to double download but just over 6 months for Android)
• More Android devices activated every day than iOS'
• Open vs. Closed

but:

• Apple is delivering always innovative and flawless products and other vendors are playing catch up
• Superior user experience across all Apple's products