Android Phones and the Smartphone Market
Commoditisation of Android offering in the Smartphone market is leading to low profits claims Needham & Company’s Charlie Wolf who told investors last week that the smartphone market is at a critical point at the moment, driven by the flood of android Programming devices and the recent arrival of Windows Mobile Phone 7.The smartphone market could soon follow the flat panel TV market where vendors are struggling to make a profit. The one exception claim Analysts will be the Apple iPhone programmers.
Wolf predicted that, the Windows Phone 7 will gain some market share in 2011, at the expense of Android. However several analysts disagree claiming that the only way that Microsoft will grow market share is by “buying” shelf space with carriers like Telstra who are being offered big incentives to stock the Microsoft Smartphone offering.Wolfe claims that Android Mobile Phones moved “into a vacuum created by the implosion of Windows Mobile Application Developers” and that Microsoft will not give up trying to win that market share back.He claims that the Google platform will become “horribly fragmented” as vendor after vendors attempts to grab market share with an Android Smartphone offering.