Every so often when browsing Techmeme, I will come across a pair of stories that, though they may not be next to each other on the page, are nonetheless made to be juxtaposed with each other.
That was the case for this pair of stories. On the one hand, “iPhone soars to 16.6% of smartphone market.” On the other, “Palm revenue craters as Treos fall out of favor.”
According to the first article, Apple is now second only to Nokia in the worldwide smartphone market, and second only to RIM (the makers of the BlackBerry) in the US market. Not only has Apple reached these lofty heights, the article claims, but it has in fact “saved the smartphone industry from a decline this past summer.”
In the US, Apple is now also second only to RIM, earning about 30 percent of the country’s smartphone sales through the iPhone versus the BlackBerry lineup’s 40 percent. Windows Mobile and Palm OS are continuing to decline with Microsoft’s platform holding 17 percent and Palm less than 10 percent.
This leads into the second article, which notes that Palm’s revenue for the quarter that just ended was only about $190 million, instead of the $331 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted. Palm assigns blame for this shortfall to “reduced demand for maturing smartphone and handheld products,” according to their press release—which seems a bit odd given how well Apple and RIM are doing.
The Treo Pro, which Palm boosters had hoped would help Palm’s market share, is not even mentioned in the article; instead it notes that the $99 Palm Centro is probably the only thing keeping Palm afloat right now. Palm’s hopes rest with the new Nova operating system set to arrive in the first half of 2009.
The term “game-changing” has been thrown around entirely too much for comfort in recent months. But nonetheless, the iPhone represents a new paradigm of smartphone, and is clearly gaining in popularity—and with its Treo line, Palm is still clinging to the same one that it has been using ever since it ditched PalmOS.
