IPhone and Blackberry Still Hold the Biggest Market Share - Research Paper Example

Consumer Behavior - Smart phones Most of the mobile phones today are addressed as ‘smart phones’, as they provide a lot of advanced computing power and connectivity. Literately, a smart phone could be a handheld laptop, because it is powerful enough to deliver varied functionalities akin to a laptop. The releases of dual-core processors in smart phones recently have reaffirmed this assertion (Osman et al 2011). Along with the smart phone elementary capabilities to form voice decision, video call, SMS, and MMS, smart phones are known to be the new way to communicate and gather information. The smart phones provide for extending the capabilities of knowledge processing functionalities like managing personal time schedule, accessing net contents, editing documents, utilizing location-awareness operation, and lots of other alternative exciting applications. These functionalities are delivered through the software put in on the smart phone. It is important to stress that the ever increasing importance of mobile software and alternative mobile contents are solicited by the prevalence of smart phone (Osman et al 2011). The market opportunities for itinerant software and mobile contents are huge and engaging. As an example, the sales for ringtone download in Europe and Japan totaled US$5 billion in 2003. Moreover, it is a worldwide size truthful market that is not only solely accessed by major corporations, however conjointly by tiny and agile developers. The success of this market is considered to be versatile enough to fulfill or surpass the necessities of customers with engaging pricing strategy. Thus, it is vital to grasp the behavior or perspective of customers toward specific reasonable mobile software (Osman et al 2011). Despite the sheer size of mobile software market, the prevailing body of data continues to be less and much between for the adequate understanding of the shoppers’ perspective towards the employment of assorted mobile software. Therefore the aim of this paper is to look at the perspective of consumer’s behavior toward different types of smart phones for various functionalities like email, games, applications, ringtones, and other software. This paper provides an explanation of the Smart phone market and the shoppers attitudes in the world. This information is especially valuable for mobile software developers and marketers in shaping their selling ways in an exceedingly simpler manner. Additionally, this study provides the elemental information that future works should be designed on to derive at specific issues (Carriera et al 2009; Dean 2010). Starting with question, which smart phones are highly appreciated in the market today? There are many smart phones in the market, high priced smart phones and affordable smart phones. When the subject arises about the high priced smart phones we list phones like iPhone, Blackberry and other expensive devices, whereas affordable smart phones include Samsung, HTC, and Nokia. Student population in the United States tends to buy Apple iPhones as shown by the smart phones sales figures from all ages. According to NPD market analysis organization, smart phone sales overall placed RIM Blackberry in the lead with more than thirty four percent of the total market share, followed by Android phones with twenty eight percent and then Apple with twenty one percent. Outside of the college-age demographics, Blackberry smart phones still are robust for business individuals. The growing range of Android-based phones has moved that platform from the iPhone and they have gained much popularity. Obviously, fast technological developments will see the figures shifting quickly, for college-age phone users as well as other users (Chang 2010). (Dean 2010) People living in United States are comprised of individuals who largely grew up with the web and technical advancements. Researchers by now understand that media multitasking is ordinary between this cohort and they need the best device for the purpose of carrying out their tasks at high speeds. The smart phones have proved to be very beneficial owing to the fast internet connectivity that they provide which results in quick access to the internet. The flexibility for smart phone users to “bookmark” or tag the data they realize attention-grabbing for afterward focused reading, viewing, or listening is also a very helpful tool. If we talk about Apple iPhone, the biggest drawback of this high priced smart phone that persisted in the beginning was the ability to do multi-tasking, where-as smart phones like Samsung and Nokia were highly capable of doing multi tasking. Apple quickly got rid of this drawback and offered multi tasking in later models for users ease but still the absolute choice to do multi tasking in a smart phone lies in the hands of low priced smart phones which include HTC and Samsung (Carriera et al 2009; Dean 2010). High priced smart phones like Apple iPhone offer users to experience high performance gaming which catch the eyes of consumers and gives the high priced smart phones an opportunity to hold the biggest share in market. After Google launched the Android OS, most of the low priced smart phones gained the ability to produce high performance gaming and capturing most of the market share. Blackberry on the other hand still remained the absolute choice for business people to share information and communicate. Some of the basic features that high priced smart phones offered are now being replaced by low priced smart phones which include the ability to play HD video, music playback, massive storage and other useful operations (Dean 2010). To summarize the whole research, the conclusion still remains that high priced smart phones like iPhone and Blackberry still hold the biggest market share. IPhone is the choice for young teenage people to use different high performance capabilities whereas blackberry keeps the hold of business and professional people for the use of E-mail and other information sharing functions. Low priced smart phones still have a long way to capture the market but all in all they are pretty much offering everything a high priced smart phone offers. Since smart phone is not only used to entertain the consumer, it still needs to have basic functionality of a phone keeping the rest of the functions side by side (Osman et al 2011). Bibliography CARRIER L.M., ROSEN L.D., BENITEZ S., CHANG J., & CHEEVER N.A. (2009). Multitasking across generations: Multitasking choices and difficulty ratings in three generations of Americans. Computers in Human Behavior. 25, 483-489. Chang, Vincent.,2010.Android Shakes Up U.S. Smartphone Market [online].Cellular-News. Available at:  [Accessed 12 December 2011]. Dean, Jenny. 2010. Smartphone User Survey: A glimpse into the mobile lives of college students. [online]. University of Colorado Boulder. Available at:  [Accessed 12 December 2011]. Osman, M. A., Sabudin, M., Osman, A., & and Shiang-Yen, T. 2011. Consumer Behaviors Towards Usage of Smartphones in Malaysia. [online] International Conference on Software and Computer Applications.IPCSIT. Vol 9. Available at: [Accessed 12 December 2011] Read More