For me, the sheer emotional tone of their rebuttals makes their arguments less credible. I don’t see anyone on Samsung’s side proselytizing with such religious fervor. Which tends to lend it an air of reasonableness in comparison.

The international sources of components aside, my natural inclination is to cheer on the American company success rather than it’s Korean competitor. And I do this while happily dictating my words to my Samsung Galaxy’s near perfect voice recognition. And I proof read my composition on my relatively large, brightly lit, screen. And should I wear down the battery, I can simply charge it with anyone’s borrowed micro USB cable, or just swap out the battery. Neither option is available to iPhone users. Indeed, the iPhone 5 can’t even be charged by an iPhone 4′s cable, nor can they be docked on any of the numerous iPhone docking devices which are now obsolete.

Apple seems to react to it’s own success by making yesterday’s Apple marvel obsolete. This is the same mistake they’ve always made. I bought a Mac G3 desktop once and was surprised that the G4′s monitor was incompatible with it.

Amazingly, despite these errors, Apple seems to rise from it’s own ashes like a phoenix time and time again. So I wouldn’t write them out so hastily.But just like all of it’s past resurrections it will have been on the shoulders of a new product, not the redemption of their product line.So to those defending iPhone with such religious zeal, I would advise them to pray for their current device’s future lest Apple again make them obsolete with their next model’s introduction.

The answer of course is that unit sales marketshare is a means to an end, but Android is not delivering the benefits to developers, manufacturers, advertisers, content providers, e-commerce vendors, consumers or Google that such high marketshare should be delivering.

Instead it is Apple’s iOS that completely dominates Android with 80% manufacturer profitshare (Morgan Keegan), 88% mobile e-commerce share (IBM), 91% tablet web browser share (Strategy Analytics), 6x the developer revenue (Distimo), 4x the number of developers (AppStore HQ), 97% business tablet activations (Good Technology), 74% business smartphone activations (Good), 67% of all in-app and web advertising revenue according to Opera, etc etc.

Samung’s and Android’s high marketshare numbers are no different and just as meaningless as when Nokia and Symbian had 60-70% smartphone marketshare in 2007.

-shipped vs sold
-high end vs cheap model
-web analytics
-profit
-looking at what people use
These above queries are not relevant to this article. Save it for another article that talks about your queries above.

It feels good to give an un-bias view regardless whether it is pro apple or pro android.

Enough said.

The bulk of Samsung’s unit sales are very vulnerable to poaching by Chinese name brands and no name OEM’s. Aall these low end phones run Gingerbread Android, so they are effectively interchangeable. There is no customer stickiness because the consumer cost to switch is zero. Apple is much less vulnerable to attack from the low end of the market becuase it has a very loyal customer base, plus a unique and highly sticky software ecosystem.

The question not addressed is what the meaning of that lead is. According to the author (as we can glean from his comments), more handsets on the streets raises the profile of Samsung. In other words, quantity would rule over quality?

I seriously question that. As others have pointed out, it isn’t so simple to build a meaningful brand and Samsung seems to be a long way from having the same kind of brand recognition and valuation as Apple has. So its hard to speculate on what it actually means in the long run.

Only time will tell but it is very well possible that there is more than enough room for both a volume manufacturer acting as a ‘fast follower’ and a high end manufacturer focussing on quality rather than quantity and innovation. Its a strategy that seems to work well for Apple despite of what the investor mood of day is.

So yes, if you look at the pure number of handsets in the market, you could argue Samsung is in the lead. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean its bad news for Apple that Samsung sells more in terms of (cheap) handset numbers, even in the long run.