Tech QQ

Gartner just released it’s Q3 report over mobile and smartphone sales. Mobile phone sales are up 35 percent and smartphone sales are up a whooping 95 percent and now totaling 19.3 percent of overall mobile sales.

Hardware wise Nokia is dropping about 10 percent market share. Apple continue to flourish with almost twice as many units sold as last Q3, but only increasing market share slightly. HTC is more than doubling the amount of sold units compared to last Q3, and almost doubling the market share.

Looking at the figures from an OS perspective the rise of Android is clear. Even though some have had very good sales (Apple) and other still doing quite decent (RIM) it’s obvious that Android is the strongest trend. Symbian is loosing almost 10 percent market share, RIM although selling over 3 million units more is still loosing 4 percent market share. Apple gaining about 1 percent market share even though doubling sales. Meanwhile Android sold over 19 million units more than last Q3 and thus increased market share by 22 percent to 25.5 percent.

This changes the placings in the top 5 sold units by OS category making Symbian still no1 at 36.6%, Android second at 25.5%, iOS third at 16.7%, RIM at 14.8% and at fifth place Microsoft Windows Mobile at 2.8%.
I’m predicting that Microsoft will rise considerably from the 2.8% to Q32011 with the sales of Windows Phone 7 driving their sales.

Windows Phone 7 so far is a very good OS, and has great potential with good performance and a steady influx of new apps to it’s marketplace. However, there are still a few things that feel very “v 1.0” about it so Microsoft needs to keep development pace up and start getting patches out there.

I’m very interested in seeing if the WP7 update process will be as good as the regular Microsoft PC OS updates, if so they’ll have a major advantage over competition. However, they need to start using it soon!

---

Article about smartphone statistics for Q4 2010.
More articles about statistics on mobilemancer.

According to Apple employees a firmware fix for the reported "death grip" issue on the new iPhone 4 is planned. Some one stated early this week as eta.

But later on those comments were pulled form the Apple forums. So that could mean that some one spoke too soon, or without mandate. If people are unlucky it could mean that the theories were right, that this is strictly a hardware issue and can't be fixed.

Let's stay positive and hope they're able to sort it with a firmware upgrade, as it would be sad to see the entire first batch suffering from this issue. But some how I don't think the Steve has the same smile nowadays as he had on the picture up top...

With the release of iOS 4 there are a lot of updates to apps being released, enabling them to take advantage of the new features.

For a complete list of all the apps that have been tested and proved working on iOS 4 you can run the following Google search.

A small sample of some of the apps that have been upgraded to use new functionality are:

• Pandora
• Dropbox
• Wordpress
• LinkedIn
• Evernote
• How to Cook Everything
• Internet Radio Box
• Tweetaholic
• National Rail
• TuneIn Radio

On June the 7:th the Steve divulged that iOS 4 would be available today for iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPod Touch users.

It's rumored that the update will be available after 18.00 CET(according to Telia, a swedish provider). To check if it's available, just hook up your device to your computer and start iTunes.
But make sure you have updated your iTunes to version 9.2 as it is required to support iOS 4!

If you're not up to speed as to what iOS 4 might offer you, have a look at this vid for a 10 minute briefing of what's new in iOS 4.