Strategy Analytics has crunched most of the fourth quarter results announced this week (including Apple’s), and figures the iPhone maker is now the top smartphone manufacturer, but only by a sliver. In Q4 2011, Apple claimed 23.9% of global smartphone market share, and Samsung trailed only slightly, with 23.5%. That’s just counting Q4, too; for the whole year, Samsung beat out Apple by a single percentage point.

Beyond smartphones, in the world of mobiles at large, Apple was relatively far behind. iPhones constituted 8.3% of the world’s handsets, while Nokia still clung the top spot with 25.5%, followed by Samsung with 21.3% global market share. Although that shows the iPhone still has a long ways to go, it did boast the best growth out of the three; during the same quarter last year, Apple only constituted 4.0% of the global market.

The folks at Strategy Analytics stepped in for a few comments. Associate Director Alex Spektor said “Apple’s growth was fueled by intense demand for its refreshed iPhone 4S, as well as the availability of three generations of iPhones at a variety of price points at operators like AT&T in the United States,” but there’s a lot of promise internationally, too. Tom Kang, another director, said ”China is becoming a key market for Apple this year, and we expect Apple’s share to grow rapidly in 2012, despite countless copycat rivals.” Nokia’s having a rough time holding onto their top spot, despite generally positive reviews of their first Windows Phones. According to Executive Director Neil Mawston,  “Nokia’s global handset shipments declined 8 percent annually to 113.5 million units in Q4 2011. Volumes were buoyed by the sales of Nokia’s low-end dual-SIM models in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, but were a little soft overall, as initial shipments of Microsoft Lumia phones could not offset declining Symbian sales.”

It’s rarely a surprise to see Apple doing well in terms of sales, but they’ll have to keep working hard in order to stay ahead of Samsung. We’re seeing lots of different Android phones coming out of Samsung to address different price points, and though Spektor’s right that there are older iPhones still on the market, they lack the forward-compatibility of many Android handsets.

It’s worth noting that according to Strategy Analytics, the overall smartphone market grew 63.1% in 2011, versus 71.4% growth in 2010. Do you guys think smartphone momentum is starting to plateau, or is this just a slight bump in the road?

Source: Strategy Analytics via Apple Insider

Many big-name companies are switching to the iPhone, and though BlackBerry is the biggest competition in the enterprise arena, iOS is doing a great job of cutting Android out of the picture. According to the latest data from Good Technology,  the iPhone 4S was just as popular new device among businesses as it was among consumers in the last quarter, commanding 31% of enterprise activations. The iPhone 4 has had a bit of a head start, but even then, only accounted for 17.6%, followed by the iPad 2 with 14.9% share. The top Android phone was the Samsung Galaxy S II, which only accounted for 1.7% of Good’s business customers. The data spanned October 1 through to December 31, and included thousands of companies that had at least 5 activated devices.

The Good data also broke down smartphone activity by sector, which showed that 35% of all mobile activations in the last quarter were in financial services, followed by business and professional services at 16.2%. The iPhone 4S specifically managed to be fairly popular in the business and professional services market, snagging 25.7% of all corporate iPhone 4S activations. Unfortunately, Good didn’t have any metrics on BlackBerry activations, but seeing as they’re essentially the alternative to RIM’s enterprise server software, I would wager their BlackBerry activation data would be lower than average anyway.

While Android smartphones were still pulling in more interest than iPads, it was a pretty close race, and combined with the massive popularity of iPhone activations, iOS is firmly planting itself in businesses. I’d love to see some more large-scale studies comparing iOS penetration in enterprise compared to BlackBerry, especially internationally, since RIM claims much of their popularity abroad. Data from November (PDF) suggests iPhone is leading BlackBerry in businesses, but there haven’t been a lot of other studies backing up that research.

How many iPhones are you guys seeing around the office? Is it a common sight, or does BlackBerry still reign supreme? Maybe Android has started to make some inroads…?

Source: Good

As you might expect, anyone in the market for an iPhone is leaning towards the latest and greatest. A recent survey conducted by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners shows that 89% of U.S. consumers who bought an iPhone between October 14 (the day the iPhone 4S launched) and December went with the 4S, while 7% picked up an iPhone 4, and 4% bought a 3GS. Of the iPhone 4S buyers, 21% bought the 64 GB model, 34% went with 32 GB, and 45% bought the 16 GB version. The CIRP co-founder, Mike Levin, provided some additional context to the study.

“An amazing 19 percent of all iPhone buyers upgraded from the iPhone 4, a phone barely a year old at the time of the launch. Forty-two percent of iPhone buyers broke existing carrier contracts to get the new iPhone 4S. And 19 percent of these iPhone 4S buyers sold their old iPhone in the secondary market. Early upgrades, broken contracts, and selling used phones — all allow buyers to purchase the new iPhone 4S, when conventional wisdom suggests that these users would follow the two-year contract cycle, or at least purchase the cheaper models.”

Quick show of hands – how many of you upgraded from the iPhone 4 to the 4S? Know any friends who did? Any regrets? Other surveys show iPhone 4S satisfaction is through the roof, so I doubt it.

Source: AllThingsD

Distimo released an interesting report today that examined the overall effects of different app promotions across the iPhone and iPad App Store, as well as the Android Market. One of the most striking stats from the report was that “44% of the iPhone applications that have been on sale lost revenue during the sale, and 23% saw a decline in revenue by more than 20%”.

Distimo factored in how much of a price cut each app received, and put it into the above graph. As you might expect, the sharper the price cut, the greater the revenue. The graph shows that, among those that cut their price by 80%,  just as many apps lost 20% or more revenue as gained more than 100% revenue.  On the whole, putting apps on sale is still a good thing, though; the average iPhone app increased revenue by 22%, iPad apps increased by 19%, and Android app revenue went up by 29%. As you might expect, all three categories see a significant spike on the first day.

The report also examined the effects of having apps being featured. As it turns out, Android apps see a much higher boost in rank from being feature than on the iPhone or iPad. On average, an iPhone app has its rank bumped up 15 spots in the first three days of being featured, while iPad apps go up 27. Android apps? They climb 42 spots, on average. Only 11% of featured iPhone apps climbed more than 50 ranks, compared to 26% of featured Android apps.

Any app developers in the house reconsidering putting their app on sale now? I’m definitely more inclined to do my app shopping when cuts are down at the $0.99 range, but what about you guys?

Source: Distimo

HP CEO Meg Whitman admitted in a recent interview that if you count tablets, Apple may very well bust past them in PC sales after holiday sales are tallied up. A bunch of analyst estimates suggest Apple could break 20 million combined iPad and Mac unit sales over the holidays. That would put it over the   14.7 million that HP had churned out last quarter, and well ahead of other manufacturers like Acer, Dell, and Lenovo. Of course, if you don’t count the iPad, and only Mac sales, Apple falls well behind the whole lot.  Over the holidays, it’s estimated Apple cleared little over 5 million Mac units.

I’m still a little dubious about counting the current breed of tablets as full-blown PCs, despite being great computing devices. There’s no lack of Macbook Air owners that aren’t inclined to also carry around an iPad, and Windows 8 is showing that other big-boy laptops will soon be able to slim down to the size of tablets borne of smartphone operating systems.

These are interesting estimates to consider, but we won’t know for sure how well Apple’s Mac and iPad sales did until they announce their quarterly results on January 24. What do you guys think – is it fair to lump in the iPad with Mac sales when talking about the PC market?

Source: TechCrunch via Asymco

Late last night, Casey posted about the the fire Apple’s Cupertino campus. Now, more information is becoming available. According to Apple Insider:

The building [where the fire broke out], also known as Valley Green Six, is one of the most famous buildings on the Apple campus, as it is known to house a number of hardware-based research and development projects that are underway at the company.

Not good news, but now that everyone is out, safely and soundly, perhaps I can overact with: Merciful Buddha, I hope they got the iPhone 4G (and 5G?) out in time!

As to the cause, while MobileMe jokes and quips about someone trying to boot up one of the secret new quad-core MacBook Air’s, turns out:

Hal Rooney, deputy chief for Santa Clara County Fire, said the fire may have started under an air conditioning unit on the second floor. Local television station KNTV reported that maintenance crews had been working on the air conditioning systems in the building earlier in the day.

Again, everyone here wishes well all the Apple employees, their families, and loved ones, and speedy recovery for the Apple R&D team and their continually universe-denting R&D team.