“In the last quarter, the iPhone and Research in Motion (maker of the Blackberry) overtook Windows Mobile, while Nokia remains comfortably in first place in smartphones. At the end of the June quarter, Microsoft had to admit that Windows Mobile missed it self-set target of 20 million by 2 million,” Tim Nash writes for Low End Mac.
“In today’s mobile market, Microsoft is already outpowered by Apple’s financial returns,” Nash writes. “Last quarter Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones at an average price of over $650. With a margin of over 50% (analyst Charles Wolf of Needham & Co), this generates gross profit of over $2.2 billion. In the year up to June 30, Microsoft sold 18 million Windows Mobile licenses for $8-15 per license (Strategy Analytics) for a maximum of $270 million. With RIM reporting gross profit of $1.3 billion and Nokia selling 15.5 million units (mainly N series and E series) in their respective last quarters, Microsoft is falling more and more behind just as the market is expanding.”
Nash writes, “Windows Mobile 7 has been delayed. HTC, the Android G1 manufacturer, expected to release a WM7 handset in Q1 2008. Now the next release will, in the words of longtime Microsoft follower Paul Thurrott, “allow smart phones to render Web pages like they did almost a decade ago on traditional PCs”. The interim version after that looks as though it will ship in late 2009 (ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley). It looks like too little too late. The iPhone will be through the annual update by then, and the App Store will be closing in on or already past 1 billion downloads.”
Full article here.