Samsung takes smartphone crown in Q3; Android marketshare in Asia triples

[KeithTalent]

Worst part is that it's 3 year contracts compared to 2 year in the states, and once you add some features to those $50 basic smartphone plans you end up with $75-100 monthly fees after taxes... insane.
Good thing there are companies like wind and mobilicity with their $30-35 unlimited plans, wtf is robellus thinking.

Yeah, I was just looking at Wind. The Hercules looks to be $599 outright and apparently can work with Wind, so I may just grab one and switch over. Whole system drives me nuts though.

KT

 

[jpeyton]

I believe these carriers will eventually make their own ecosystem on their phones outside of google. Very similar to what amazon did with the kindle fire. They need to find some way to pull in more profit and this is the easiest way to do it. The carriers have absolutely no incentive to not install bloatware and other crap on their phones.

They already are to a certain degree. Samsung, HTC and Motorola all have their own "skin" on Android (TouchWiz, Sense, Blur). Samsung has their own movie service, HTC their own music service, Motorola is adding their own cloud service, etc.

However, adding their own services on top of Android is about as far as the handset makers will go. The glaring difference between Amazon and HTC is that Amazon has spent billions acquiring content and building digital delivery services that rival the quality/selection of Apple. Even if a company like HTC decided to spend billions building datacenters across the globe and acquiring movies/music/books/etc., there is no guarantee their investment will return a profit. That's a 10-11 figure risk that they don't need to take, considering that piggybacking on Google's ecosystem has brought them stratospheric growth.

Their interests are only aligned in the sense that android is helping them sell phones.

Oh, is that all? Samsung, HTC and Motorola would be fighting over Apple's table scraps if Google had not developed Android. Would Samsung have shipped 20 million Bada phones this past quarter without Android? Nope.

Google is pumping out major revisions to Android every six months; most handset makers would be lucky if they could ship a single polished working revision once every two years. Even a company as talented/capable as Apple can only ship one major update per year.

If android stays the dominant source of their phone sales they will continue to be partners. If something else bigger and better comes along that will increase the phone makers profits, you sure as hell know they will jump ship. There is no loyalty in this game.

Absolutely; that's smart business in any industry, not just smartphones.

 

[lothar]

Let's be real here. Google is making a land grab. The partners don't give two shits about the land grab. Why would they? The partners (HTC, Samsung, etc&#8230 make zero dollars on the 'google ecosystem'. Samsung's profits do not increase because there are more people in the 'google ecosystem'. Their profits increase when they sell more phones. Plain and simple.

I believe these carriers will eventually make their own ecosystem on their phones outside of google. Very similar to what amazon did with the kindle fire. They need to find some way to pull in more profit and this is the easiest way to do it. The carriers have absolutely no incentive to not install bloatware and other crap on their phones.

Their interests are only aligned in the sense that android is helping them sell phones. If android stays the dominant source of their phone sales they will continue to be partners. If something else bigger and better comes along that will increase the phone makers profits, you sure as hell know they will jump ship. There is no loyalty in this game.

I was under the assumption that Google shares Ad revenue with it's Android partners, no?
If not, then why the heck are the partners not using their own homebrew crap instead of having Google maps, Search, Gmail, Market, and others pre-installed?

 

[Fire&Blood]

I was under the assumption that Google shares Ad revenue with it's Android partners, no?
If not, then why the heck are the partners not using their own homebrew crap instead of having Google maps, Search, Gmail, Market, and others pre-installed?

Not just OEM's, carriers get a piece too. And OEM's know their own stuff can't match the popularity, quality, updates and innovations of google's apps.