A little over two years ago I wrote a column in The Business Monthly about my mobile phone blues. My trusty old hip pocket Motorola Razr had been slowly crippled by the vestiges of time, so I found myself in the market for a replacement. At that time, in the late winter of 2009, I think I may have been one of only two commercial real estate brokers in HoCo who didn’t have a Blackberry.
The other was my colleague TW.
And then there was the iPhone. The iPhone came on the scene in 2007 and quickly made the Blackberry look like a dowdy old maid. Within two years it seemed as if all the cool kids had sleek iPhones. Nothing else came close…for awhile.
The problem was that I was locked into a Verizon contract. The iPhone was only available to AT&T customers. I was left with inferior technology while anxiously following any news that Verizon and Apple would strike a deal. As early as last May I was still openly admitting to having iPhone envy.
So perhaps you’d think that when Verizon finally rolled out their iPhone earlier this year that I’d be one of the first in line to snap one up.
I wasn’t.
A funny thing happened on my way to the iPhone, while waiting I discovered the Droid X. Apparently I’m not the only one either. In Wired Magazine this month, Fred Vogelstein writes “the Droid halted Apple’s march toward smartphone dominance. In fact, it is by some measures outpacing its rival, powering 23 percent of all smartphones worldwide in 2010—more recent estimates are even higher—compared with the iPhone’s 16 percent.”
“Users activate more than 300,000 new Android devices every day; by comparison, as of October, combined iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch sales accounted for about 275,000 daily activations. Even Steve Jobs seems rattled; last October, he dropped in on an investors’ phone call to deliver a rant on what he sees as Android’s flaws.”
On the other hand, Apple still has a dominant lead in the highly lucrative apps market. Vogelstein writes that “iTunes apps have brought in almost $3 billion. Android apps have garnered just over $100 million.”
As for me, for now at least, I think I’ll just hang on to what I have until circumstances dictate otherwise.
