The iPod, went on sale in November 2001, five years later Apple Inc. has sold its 100 millionth copy. Sony sold 100 million Walkman devices in about 14 years. Apple holds about 74% of the US retail market for MP3 players. SanDisk is a distant number 2 with approximately a 9% market share, while Microsoft has about a 2.3% market share. These are impressive statistics for Apple Inc. which do not show any sign of abating anytime soon and they have set their sights on surpassing Sony's 350 million + current Walkman sales figure.
Apple does not break down its iPod sales, but from what I understand the Nano is their biggest seller by far, then the shuffle, and third are the hard disk based iPods. Microsoft's 2.3 % market share with Zune is a misnomer since it is a hard disk based player and should be compared to hard disk based iPod market share. It would be very interesting to know what that number is. Still it probably is not a number Apple has to worry about. On the iTunes Store front, Apple Inc.has sold over 2.5 billion songs, 50 million television shows and 1.3 million movies.
Dell last week announced the demise of the Axim line of Windows Mobile PDAs with a post on their blog. The Axim X51v I own has been the best performing WM PDA I have ever owned and it is too bad Dell has chosen to get out of this space. I also found the following statement puzzling: "Why did we make the decision? Because of a steadily declining market for pen-based PDAs and noted over the past several quarters by analyst firms like IDC and Gartner.". This makes no sense to me since Apple is betting on the iPhone's success to be the touch screen. If Dell would have mentioned that they did not want to get into phones, I would have better understood given that HP has not been very successful in this area, but to say that pen based or touch screen demand is waning was a little strange. I have also heard this comment from Microsoft and how the Windows Mobile Smartphone (no touch screen) sales have surpassed touch screen based Windows Mobile phones. Personally I want the best of both worlds, a great one handed experience from a WM Smartphone and the extra control a touch screen gives me. Since Apple Inc. is betting the touch screen experience, it will be interesting to see how well their claimed innovations with multi-touch perform.
Last week mymobile911 provided news of the successor to the T-Mobile MDA which is no longer being sold by T-Mobile USA. The news and an updated release date of May 21 seems plausible. Unfortunately the device is not very impressive. It does not have 3G and the specs are about the same as the MDA. For myself the only advantage would be Windows Mobile 6.0 and a 2MP camera. My MDA is also getting well worn, so I may jump on especially if the $249 price is accurate. It is also very interesting how T-Mobile is really lying low on the 3G roll out. They must be having some issues.
This week:
- Thanks to Ilium Software, I will be upgrading my eWallet 4.1 to 5.0 and my NewsBreak from 1.2 to 2.0. I will be reviewing my experience with these upgrades.
- I will be finishing up my blog entries on the Verizon Aircard 595 on pocketnow.com.
- I will discuss my migration to my new Lenovo Thinkpad X60 with Windows Vista.
- My review of the BlueAnt Wireless T8 Micro Bluetooth headset should be published this week on pocketnow.com.
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