Iphone Vs Android

While Apple's iPhone still only accounts for about 4% of global phone market share they now rake in roughly 50% the profit share. Asymco has charts up for the top 8 mobile phone vendors broken down by market, sales and profit share and while Google's free Android OS has just crushed Nokia's Symbian in overall numbers I'd much rather have Apple's bank account. You?

[Asymco, Android Central]

While sales of Android-powered phones are increasing, Android Market's paid app sales aren't keeping pace so an unhappy Google seems to be considering several very Apple App Store-style changes to help give things a jumpstart. Speaking to Forbes platform manager Eric Chu said these changes include in-app purchases. iPhone and iPad users have shown they'll often chafe at spending $1 to $10 on a game but will happily download a free game and then spend $10-$100+ dollars on in-app purchases to make their farms, castles, and mushroom homes look nicer.

My New Year's resolution for TiPb is to be nicer to Google in 2011. Last year was an amazing year for the world's largest, most powerful internet company. Thanks to relentless software improvement, Verizon's Droid marketing, and top-of-the-line hardware like the Galaxy S, Google's Android OS became the fastest accelerating platform in the mobile space. They also unleashed improvements to Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube, and so many other already excellent services at a speed and quality level that, frankly, no other company could have matched.

Android is already the biggest iPhone competitor and if technology and emerging markets combine to create $100 off-contract Android phones, will Apple need an iPhone nano to keep both user and developer mindshare?

Seth Weintraub at Fortune kicked over this latest Android anthill with an article on how cheaper chipsets and Google strategy could align to make those $100 Android smartphones a reality, shoving the migration from feature phone to smartphone into overdrive. That's interesting in established markets like US and EU, where the idea of walking into a store, laying down very little cash, and walking out with a "good enough" handset, sans additional contract obligations, is a mainstream dream come true. In emerging markets in Asia and Africa, that's the gold mine. Forget a PC on every desk and in every home -- soon it will be a smartphone in every hand.