Google's Android leapfrogging over iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows

By the end of this year, Google's Android smartphone operating system will in a single year have leapfrogged competitors like Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry and Microsoft Windows phones in global popularity, and will challenge Nokia to become the world's most popular mobile OS by 2014, research firm Gartner said Friday.

In its annual global smartphone forecast, Gartner said the explosive growth of Google's mobile operating system will give it 17.7 percent of worldwide sales by the end of 2010 -- up from 3.9 percent at the end of 2009. Google says it is currently seeing more than 200,000 Android phones activated every day.

With manufacturers like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola planning to offer budget Android phones this fall, Android will become a mass market technology that by 2014 will have double the global market share of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system that powers the iPhone and the iPad, Gartner said.

Android's rise to the No. 2 smartphone operating system in terms of global sales by the end 2010 is two years sooner than Gartner predicted a year ago.

"It's a matter of Android really going more into the hands of the mainstream user," Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a telephone interview from London. "The iPhone will remain focused toward the higher end of the market, while through the end of this year and into 2011, all that growth you see in Android will come from the fact that most of the vendors who are backing it will release cheaper smartphones."

By the end of 2014, Gartner says Android and Nokia's Symbian operating system will each account for about 30 percent of global smartphone sales, while Apple's iOS will be third with about 15 percent of the global market, and RIM will be fourth with about 12 percent. The projections account for Gartner's expectation that Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, will begin to sell the iPhone in coming months, Cozza said.

The research firm IDC is also forecasting strong growth for Android relative to Nokia's Symbian operating system, although not quite as strong as Gartner's prediction, saying that Android smartphones will comprise 24.9 percent of global smartphone in 2014, compared to 32.9 percent for Symbian.

Both Gartner and IDC agree, however, that Android is rapidly eating into the market share of Nokia and RIM.

"That flood of Samsung handsets, HTC handsets, LG handsets, Motorola -- it's just this sort of irresistible wave," said Will Stofega, a mobile analyst for IDC said of the growth of Android smartphones. "It's difficult to say that they are not going to become more and more dominant as time goes on."

Google declined to comment on the reports.

Analysts say there are always a number of issues that could derail Android's growth. Those include Oracle's recent federal copyright lawsuit against Google charging that the Android operating system was built on Oracle's Java software without permission, "fragmentation" concerns about the different versions of Android being sold, and questions about whether Google will be able to maintain amicable relationships with the variety of manufacturers and wireless carriers that support Android phones.

But Stofega said there is little doubt that Android's rapid growth and its popularity with software developers who build smartphone apps contributed to Apple's uncharacteristic decision this week to loosen its grip on control over software development for iPhone and iPad. Google said there are now more than 80,000 apps available to download in the Android Market, still much less than the Apple App Store, but more than double the number available this spring.

"The developers tell us they love Android. It's easier to learn; it takes less time, and one of the complaints we hear quite a bit about is (Apple's) app certification process as a real thing that costs them time and money," Stofega said. Developers figure "why not go to Android and make a bet there? Get on the wave and see what happens."

Motorola Pulls Out Another Full Page NYT Ad Aimed At Apple’s Head

Oh my, how I love some good ol’ fashion mudslinging.

“Flash Websites? There’s A Phone For That.”

To any ne’er-do-blog-read layman, the full page ad that Motorola just put in the New York Times might just seem oddly worded. To anyone who has even considered considering themselves a gadget geek — or has, at least, turned on their TV anytime in the past year and a half and seen Apple’s “There’s An App For That” campaign — there’s no question who this one’s aimed at.

This isn’t the first time Moto has done this. Heck, it’s not even the second. Moto pulled out two separate full page ads (here’s one, and the other) during the iPhone 4 Antennagate madness, lambasting Apple with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

This one isn’t quite as clever as either of the first two; the whole matter of Flash on the iPhone is neither original nor fresh, by any means, and “There’s an App for that!” jokes are up there with “Yo Momma” jokes and Borat quotes on this list of “Jokes that one guy just won’t stop using”. But Flash is something that nearly all consumers would recognize (Thanks, Youtube and/or Farmville!), so juxtaposing your handset’s support for it against the competitions lack thereof probably isn’t a bad idea. Even if Flash on Android doesn’t really work that well.

Greater proportion of free apps on Android than iPhone

A new report from mobile analytics outfit Distimo shows that the Android Market has a much larger percentage of free applications available than Apple’s App Store.

57% of applications available for download on Google Android Market are free of charge, versus 28% of iPhone and 23% of iPad apps. Of the apps available on RIM’s Blackberry App World, 26% are free; the same percentage as those in Nokia’s Ovi store. The proportion of free apps on the Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace clock in at 34% and 22% respectively.

As well as comparing free versus paid apps across storefronts, the Distimo report looks at price-points of the paid apps and reveals that the average price of Top-100 grossing apps on the iPhone is $4.01, although the report notes that this figure is skewed somewhat by the inclusion of a couple of obscenely-priced applications such as concierge application iVIP Black (weighing in at a hefty $999.99) and security app iRa Pro (a steal at just $899.99).

The large proportion of free Android applications can largely be explained by the relative immaturity of the platform and the Android Marketplace. Paid-for applications cannot be distributed in all territories yet and users must sign up for a Google Checkout account in order to purchase Android applications. Currently, only 13 of the 46 countries where Android Market is available support distribution of paid apps, and only developers from 9 countries can publish them. As the Marketplace matures, it is expected that more developers will publish chargeable applications on Android.

Pinger’s Textfree Is Massive, Now Over 3.5 Billion Messages Sent

It’s a promise sounds too good to be true: free, unlimited texting to and from your iPhone. And even if a service did manage to offer it, it certainly couldn’t be sustainable, could it? Pinger, a startup that launchedback in 2006 as a voicemail service but has since pivoted in a big way, would beg to differ: the company has managed to become immensely popular on the iPhone by offering free text messages to users through an application called Textfree. And it’s just blown past another major milestone: users have sent 3.5 billion text messages using Textfree since it launched in March 2009.

So how do the do it? The key, unsurprisingly, is ads. Textfree has gotten such massive distribution that it can now turn a profit by placing ads in the application (the company has been profitable since December). Textfree doesn’t insert ads into your conversations — rather, it shows basic display ads which get 1.4 billion ad impressions a month. The application has been downloaded 7 million times which gives you an idea of its reach, but it’s also extremely engaging: users open it an average of ten times a day.

Using Textfree isn’t quite as straightforward as ‘normal’ text messaging, but users don’t seem to mind. The service assigns each user a new telephone number, free of charge. From then on you can text as much as you’d like, and can receive inbound texts that are sent to this special Textfree number. This can obviously be slightly irritating if you already have a phone number (i.e. on an iPhone), but remember, there are millions of devices running iOS that don’t have phone service, namely the iPod Touch. And Textfree gives all of those users the ability to text as much as they’d like, provided they have a Wifi connection.

The iPod Touch has proven to be Textfree’s bread-and-butter — 70% of its users are on the device. And Pinger says that carriers actually like their service, because it turns all of these iPod Touch users into extra nodes — they may be sending free text messages, but they’re certainly going to be sending and receiving messages from users who are on traditional carriers.

Textfree originally launched last year as a premium application that would charge users $6 per year for unlimited texting. That proved to be quite popular, but Pinger found that it could do even better by shifting the app to a free model and relying exclusively on advertising to generate revenue.