By Reuters is reporting that some of Silicon Valley’s top Venture Capitalist firms are expecting a head-to-head horse race between Android and the iPhone as early as the end of this year. After beating the iPhone in Q1 in terms of market share (shipping 28% of devices ahead of Apple’s 21% with 65,000 devices per day), capitalists expects the upward trend to continue to grow at a tremendous rate.
Redpoint Ventures‘ Chris Moore is expecting Android to meet or surpass the iPhone in the middle of 2011, at the latest. Rich Wong of Accel Partners – who invests in the biggest online social network, Facebook – also reminds us that the iPhone has just as much room to grow as it does to fall as the elasticity of the mobile phone space never wears down.
It’s not going to be a winner-takes-all environment. I think the fragmentation in this mobile space is forever.
David Weiden of Khosla Ventures – who invests in the popular Jawbone headsets – also says that there is no clear winner to be seen for the near future. While each OS vendor has their place in market share, he suggests that the instability of the market’s fragmentation makes this a toss-up for anyone to grab and take all the way (at least, for a little while).
For Android, venture capitalists are confident that it has a real shot at being able to jump higher than the rest to grab onto a significant piece of the market share and maintain the hold for a long while. With Silicon Valley’s increased confidence in Android and its growth potential, there’s no reason it couldn’t become a reality.
If you have had an iphone for years you have most probably spent many hundreds of £ on apps so you are less likely to move from iphone, but if you have an android phone there is so much choice to choose from & you can take your apps with you, apple is going to have to release more that 1 phone by 2012 other wise it will be a 1 trick pony.
down apple, down. bad apple.
When talking to my ifriends they indicate the biggest barrier for them switching is the accessories, not the apps.
While apple was once great (at least in my eyes) they’ve fallen into a more dark empire-ish corporate kind of look now :p…They really to much on they’re ONE phone lol GO Android =)
The same reason why Apple cannot produce bigger size iPhone is that because existing iPhone apps known only the current iPhone screen dimension. I believe that iPhone 4G will be the same screen size or there’ll be apps fragmentation otherwise. Hail Incredible! Hail EVO!
The beauty of Android….. so many options…… 1 for anybody…..but its hard to just go buy one when you hear rumors of the next best Android coming soon.
Yeah I gotta say the accessories part is annoying. I want a dock for my Incredible because I hate letting it just sit on my desk. BUT Android is just fantastic. Coming from WinMo, I will never go back. Apple seems a bit more of the catch up role now kinda like MS was/is. They need to wow people to move them away from Android or get them from elsewhere. Android is always on the upper end of innovation and that is key in this battle
@IamWhatIam
The iPad says hello.
@kenta
4G Tablets with Android from VZW are coming this October. iPad will not be 4G if Apple is still stuck with AT&T since AT&T 4G offerings will be end of 2011.
It’s going to be hard for single-manufacturer-and-single-carrier Apple to compete against the flood of multi-manufacturer and multi-carrier Android phones, but the Android phone manufactures and Google really need to come together on a standard docking interface. The after-market accessory business is key to getting repeat buyers, as Apple has learned with the iPods/iPhones.
@ Bob H
Agreed. There are so many accessory devices for the iPhone [and iPod for that matter] and almost nothing for Android phones. Even in stores when I see off brand docking stations it always states iPhone/iPad compatible not Android compatible. I would love a really nice docking station for my Eris that I could place on my desk at work. Especially now that there is the “desk clock” app after the upgrade to 2.1.