Most earning calls deal with sales numbers and are fairly uneventful. Apple’s earning call today starring Steve Jobs was pretty ordinary until Steve decided to launch into a little tirade about Google, RIM and tablets.
Amongst the Apple TV facts (250,000 sold thus far) were some other gems from Jobs and I’m just going to run down a list of the things he said. First off, he absolutely tore into RIM’s business model. Here are some of the gems, AppleInsider has a complete rundown of the call if you head here.
In regards to the iPhone and RIM:
It handily beat RIM’s 12.1 million Blackberries sold in their last quarter. We’ve now passed RIM. I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future. It will be a challenge for them to create a mobile software platform and convince developers to support a third platform.
It’s hard to read that without smiling.
In regards to Google and Android fragmentation:
What about Google? Eric Schmidt said they're activating 200,000 devices per day and 90,000 apps in their store. Apple activating 275,000 iOS devices a day on average for the last 30 days with a peak of 300,000 per day on some of those. There's 300,000 apps on App Store.
Unfortunately there's no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter. We hope manufacturers will start reporting it, but it's not the case now.
We await to see if iPhone or Android was the winner in most recent quarter. Google loves to characterize Android as open and iPhone as closed. We see this disingenuous and clouding the difference.
On 7 inch tablet devices, ahem, the Samsung Galaxy Tab:
This size is useless unless you include sandpaper so users can sand their fingers down to a quarter of their size.
Nearly all of these tablets use Android. But even Google is saying don’t use Froyo, and instead to wait to use next years’ version. What does it mean when a software maker says not to use their release and you use it anyway?
The new crop of tablets will have near zero apps.
We think the 7 inch tablets will be dead on arrival, and manufacturers will realize they're too small and abandon them next year. They'll then increase the size, abandoning the customers and developers who bought into the smaller format.
It’s safe to say that Jobs doesn’t think the Samsung Galaxy Tab will succeed.
Anyway, pretty interesting to hear his thoughts on all of this especially the part about RIM because I think he is absolutely dead-on in his assessment. The other stuff, I leave to you guys.
What do you think? Agree with Steve’s views on the tablet market and Android?
For more info or to send a tip: admillios@gmail.com
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Comments
So if 7″ tablets need to come with sandpaper to be usable, I take it all new iphones are going to ship with a whole lot of the same… since all of these touch based apps are obviously useless on such a tiny screen.
Whether a 7″ iPad is a good move for Apple may be debatable, but for the company that introduced touch based mobile computing to millions via a 3.5″ screen, suggesting that a 7″ pad is “useless” is just plain absurd. Your reality distortion field generator needs new batteries Steve.
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