Samsung Galaxy S III dethrones iPhone 4S as smartphone sales champ for Q3 2012
engadget.com
engadget.com
If you add iPhone 5 sales for that quarter to the iPhone 4s sales you get 24 million, 6 million more than for the S III. You have to look at this data with extremely narrowly focused, Android tinted lenses to make this look like any kind of victory for Samsung.
It does show that at last a flagship Android phone is managing to sell in iPhone-like numbers. That's a good thing for Android and for the health of competition in the smartphone market. Samsung are doing well.
I don't understand why you're so quick to defend Apple by changing the metric, despite nobody saying that this is any sort of "victory" for Samsung. It's an obvious result of the iPhone 5 release, it will be on top of the charts the next quarter as usual. If you're going to make it an iPhone vs. Android thing then you should compare the sales of all iPhones and all Android phones, you can't pick and choose a few from each category.
So when one phone reaches iPhone-level numbers, despite the fact that you could easily replace it with another similar specced Android phone, it makes it all the more impressive.
That being said, as an Android user, I don't really like this outcome. The fact that one Android manufacturer is getting close to Apple's sales numbers is pretty meaningless to me, and the fact that one Android manufacturer can sell 50% of Android phones is actually pretty worrisome. I'd rather have 5 top manufacturers with 15% or so market share each. Apple users may be fine with an "Apple monopoly" in the iOS market, but I'm not fine with a Samsung monopoly in the Android market.
But I guess it's all about the Pareto principle and other power laws like that, so it may be just a fact of life. At least it might be a lot easier to change who is the biggest Android company a few years down the road, if Samsung slips.
Given that those have been wildly inaccurate in the past (see the evidence in the Apple Samsung trial) it somewhat undermines the point of the article and the title itself.
It seems like the new iPhone that comes out each year being lighter, thinner, faster with a sharper, brighter screen and better build quality and better software than the previous phone, and every other phone on the planet isn't enough. It's boring. There's a sentiment out there that Apple has to do something radically, magically new that delights us with childlike wonder every year on a consistent production line schedule. If they don't, they're a washed up hasbeen that has betrayed Steve Jobs' legacy.
And no, bringing out devices that are lighter, thinner, faster, etc, etc is not radically new. It's what they did last year, and the year before that, ad nauseam. What did they do for is this month, that nobody has ever done before, is all that counts. Don't give us better. Better is next door to mediocre and only a few steps away from bad. So better might as well be bad. We demand magical!
I honestly don't think I'm straw-manning here. Is that not what the "iPhone 5 is boring" brigade mean? I honestly don't know what to say to that. It's kind of hard to comprehend that grown adults can think about things that way. It mainly seems to affect Apple users too, people who have bought Apple products. It's as though they're disappointed and upset that what they got was only an excellent, high quality product.
Note: I'm not saying Apple haven't made missteps. The iOS 6 release with mapping issues and various other niggles has shown that they're not perfect, but then when were they ever? They've always had their fair share of awkward updates and failed products.
The S3 outselling the iPhone 5 would be a pretty big deal.