NEW YORK: The biggest news might have been the changing of the guard in the global phone industry. Apple, the one big phone company not represented at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, has just regained number one spot in global smartphone sales, after three years playing second fiddle to Samsung, Research Company Gartner said.
The results for last quarter Apple 74.8 million phones sold, Samsung 73 million are close enough that Samsung and Apple might be said to be in a statistical dead heat, but they do represent a worrying trend for the Korean phone maker, which this time last year was 12 percentage points clear of Apple. The other phone makers showing off their wares at the congress, particularly the Chinese companies such as Lenovo, Huawei, Xiaomi and Gionee, are generally pinching their sales from Samsung rather than Apple.
It stands to reason. With the standard of mobile phones having improved steadily over the years, and with the Android software that runs on most of them having improved steadily too, to the point where phone makers can no longer justify changing the software radically to make their phones stand out from the crowd (Samsung’s Galaxy S6 is the closest thing to a pure Android phone the company has ever released), fungibility has crept into the market, and the only large company immune from it, it seems, is Apple.
Consumers’ willingness to switch between Android phones helps to explain the proliferation of non-Android devices at this year’s Mobile World Congress, including a handful of phones and tablets from the likes of Alcatel, ZTE and Huawei running the Firefox operating system, plus the Blackphone 2, which runs a modified version of Android known as PrivatOS, featuring enhanced security, and the Jolla Tablet, which runs a gesture-centric operating system known as Sailfish OS.
The interchangeability of Android phones helps explain why HTC, maker of the highly regarded One phone, used the congress to expand its horizons beyond Android mobile phones, announcing a virtual reality headset and a fitness device.
And it helps explains why Microsoft, one of the few phone makers that doesn’t rely on Android, feels it might have a chance of crawling out of Gartner’s “Others” column in years to come.
In an interview with the Weekend AFR, the Microsoft executive vice-president in charge of mobile devices, Stephen Elop, said that not having to rely on Android put the company in an almost unique position to win mobile phone customers.
“There are very few companies in the world who have the control and the engineering capability to do amazing things with hardware, who have control of and the ability to invent around the operating system and the platform, as well as the cloud-based services that tie it all together,” Mr Elop said.
“There are very few companies who have all of those pieces. There’s just a few, actually.”
The trouble for Microsoft, and for the rest of the phone industry is, Apple is one of those few.
