Credit: Priceonomics

Priceonomics, which keeps track of the resale value of items like cars, bikes and gadgets, published a report Wednesday that shows how the value of iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerrys hold up over time. Short answer: iPhones, even years-old models, retain their value the longest, which means iPhone owners can recoup the most money when they go to resell their phones.

Here’s the method they  used:

We measure depreciation by comparing a phone’s current used price to its new price (without a contract) the day it was released. We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. We split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). We then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.

The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear – the winner is the iPhone.

After crunching the data they came up with a series of charts, like one that shows that after owning a smartphone for 18 months, iPhone owners can resell theirs for 53 percent of the original price, Android owners for 42 percent and BlackBerry owners for 41 percent of the original price.

That part won’t be news to people who make a habit of reselling their old iPhone before or right after buying a new one a new one. There are sites like Gazelle.com, eBay and NextWorth.com that regularly buy used iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android phones in order to resell them. The iPhone is always the easiest to resell and will go for a decently high price if you time it right.

But all is not lost for penny-pinching Android owners. One caveat to the data that Priceonomics found is that less expensive Android phones sold by prepaid operators do hold their value much better than their pricier Google-powered brethren, probably because those phones are highly subsidized by the operators. Specifically, the Motorola Triumph, HTC Wildfire and Samsung Exhibit 4G on average keep up to 86 percent of the original value.

Be sure to check out the original post for more interesting data.

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• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
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GE seems a somewhat odd entity to be pioneering Mac deployment, since it still carries associations of being the lumbering giant and paragon of ’80s and ’90s big business it was under Jack Welch. But the company has a now one-year-old project that allows employees to choose either Mac or Windows PCs as their work computer, and according to the Wall Street Journal, it now has about 1,000 Macs in active use, with that number expected to rise.

That’s just a small fraction of GE’s 330,000 total computers, but it’s a start, and the gap will likely narrow as employees become aware of the program; GE hasn’t been trumpeting the news internally yet. For a rough comparison of where future adoption might take the Mac at GE, consider that 10,000 GE employees now use iPhones as their official work device, after the company began supporting them in 2008. There are 50,000 BlackBerry devices in use, but iPhones have made up considerable ground in four years time.

Private industry is one place Apple’s presence is growing, but it’s also having big impact in government. At the level of local government, especially, the idea of using iPads to take over some tasks and replace paper is catching on. Software provider Granicus recently released its iLegislate iPad app targeted specifically at government customers, and told us it’s already in use by over 1,500 governments.

One of iLegislate’s customers, the government of Maricopa, Ariz., says the use of iPads by 15 members of its local government, including the mayor, council members and city directors and managers, has allowed them to increase transparency by making more materials available to the public digitally, and save over $5,000 annually in printing costs, plus more in staff time just assembling print packages. Maricopa’s experience sounds strikingly similar to what we heard about Cornelius, N.C.’s findings following a pilot project of its own using the iPad as a tool for making local government more efficient.

Maricopa has experienced a whopping 4,000 percent growth in population during the past decade, and the iPad, partnered with the Granicus software, is seen by the city as a way to help quickly scale its infrastructure to cope with the expansion. Apple’s iPad holds appeal as a way to quickly cut costs, with a green, future-proof solution that can leverage IT initiatives already in place at governments.

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Smartphone penetration rose significantly compared to two years ago, Nielsen noted. In 2009, just 18 percent of mobile phone users were packing smart devices, while in 2011, that number had risen to 44 percent of U.S. residents, with more than half of adults between 18 and 34 counted among them. The iPhone in general has done a lot to propel that adoption.

Credit: Nielsen

Of individual device vendors, Apple is still very much on top, despite the fact that Android as a platform has eclipsed its market share on devices. Apple’s iPhones account for 28.6 percent of all postpaid smartphone subscribers, compared to 15.8 percent for BlackBerry, the next closest competitor, and 15.8 percent for HTC, the Android handset-maker with the largest manufacturer share. All together, Android devices accounted for 44.2 percent of U.S. postpaid plans between August and October 2011.

Nielsen takes its results from monthly surveys of more than 300,000 consumers, as well as data from devices belonging to users who opted into market research and data from phone bills from 65,000 volunteers.

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During the month of October, Apple iPhone accounted for 29.6 percent of traffic from mobile devices, with the iPad accounting for 24.1 percent. The iPod touch added another two percent to the total for Apple devices. Apple’s iPhone was the most popular device overall, and the iPad second. RIM’s BlackBerry devices came in third, with 7.6 percent combined.

Broken down by country, Apple’s lead is even stronger in some places. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, 64.5 percent of mobile Internet traffic occurred on Apple devices, with the iPhone accounting for 34.3 percent. In Egypt, Jordan and the UAE, the iPad was the most popular device overall, accounting for 28.7, 24.7 and 18.8 percent of mobile traffic, respectively.

Effective Measure’s measured audience for the Middle East-North Africa region is 43.7 million spread across sixteen countries. For Apple to own such an impressive share of the market in an area where BlackBerry has traditionally been in high demand is an impressive achievement.

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The iPhone 4S’s lead in terms of buzz is measured by the number of times it gets mentioned on blogs, message boards and groups, Twitter, Facebook and posts at online news sites. Nielsen used a list of the top 20 recently acquired smartphones from the third quarter of 2011, and a few popular ones released late, including the Google Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Nexus and iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S grabbed 40 percent of all mentions in terms of devices on the list.

The 4S wasn’t the only iPhone mentioned in the list, however. The iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS also nabbed a lot of attention in online published items, resulting in Apple’s phones making up almost two-thirds of all mentions of smartphones in the six-month period covered by the NM Incite study. Combined Android phones, including the Galaxy Nexus and Droid Bionic were responsible for a quarter of the buzz, while BlackBerry devices came in third with a combined 10 percent.

This study shows that Apple’s iOS smartphones still command an impressive percentage of media and consumer mindshare when it comes to connected mobile devices, despite Android-based handsets pulling far ahead in terms of worldwide market share according to recent counts.

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Cross-platform: check.

Touch, has one thing going for it right away (besides a great bargain on a good domain name, touch.com) in that it’s immediately available for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. No “Android version coming soon” or “BlackBerry? Why bother?” for them, and that’s a very good thing in terms of encouraging user adoption. That’s mostly because it isn’t entirely new; it was PingChat, but has been rebranded as Touch, along with the introduction of its new “experience” sharing features. But long-standing leaders in the space like WhatsApp Messenger also have cross-platform access covered, and also boast a lot of momentum, so it alone won’t guarantee success.

Group messaging: check.

Another thing Touch has covered is group messaging. You can add people to group chats, see participants at a glance via profile pics, and leave group chats whenever you wish just by swiping to delete the message thread in your main list view. It all works well, and as advertised (though Touch’s servers are having some sporadic trouble at launch, so there’s been a few issues with messages getting through) but you won’t find too much that isn’t available in Facebook Messenger here.

With one-on-one messages, you’ll get “Sent/Delivered/Read/” receipts, just like you would on BlackBerry Messenger. You can’t, however, turn off read receipts like you can on iMessage if you’d rather not let someone know whether you have or haven’t check out what they said.

Photo sharing: check.

Touch’s major changes revolve around “experience sharing.” Essentially, this is photo sharing, wherein you choose a picture from an existing album or take a new one, upload it to Touch and select friends to share with. You also choose a name for the experience, and then friends you share it with can comment. It also reports whether or not your friends have viewed what you share. In this way, Touch sort of competes with Path, or with Instagram, but with a much more private audience, since you handpick individuals to share with.

A capable product in a crowded market

Touch is a good app; it’s cleanly designed, easy to use and strips away unnecessary features and frills to make conversation the real focal point of the experience. But it’s also in a tough spot; I found it hard to find anyone I know using it, despite its having taken over PingChat’s reported 12 million users. Plus, for photo sharing, Path’s gorgeous version 2.0 has it beat in almost every way, besides the ability to be more selective with who sees your photos, and a landscape mode for browsing and composing.

There are some things that work in Touch’s favor, however, including the ability to limit sharing but in a better way than most dedicated private messaging solutions provide. Also, there’s an HTML5 version in the works, which could open up Touch’s cross-platform appeal to a very broad audience, since it’ll allow desktop and all tablet users to participate, too.

Touch has a lot of polish and a lot of promise, and beats the user experience of WhatsApp in my opinion, judging by my trials on Android and iPhone devices. But its staying power will depend on whether or not it can convince more users to jump on board; tough to do at this stage in the group messaging competition.

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IPass’s Mobile WorkForce Report, released Wednesday, gets its data from a survey of more than 2,300 mobile enterprise workers at 1,100 companies between the end of September and the end of October. We know many of the world’s richest companies are on the iPhone bandwagon already; Apple said last month that “90 percent of Fortune 500 companies” are deploying iPhones for their workers. But iPass’s report gives a bit of a broader picture of  differently sized companies that have iPhones on their network.

IPhones’ popularity for mobile workers isn’t just a result of taking market share from RIM. The overall market is expanding too. From the report:

Today 95 percent of mobile employees have smartphones, up from 85 percent in 2010, with 91 percent using their smartphone for work — a 26 percent rise compared to 2010.

At our Mobilize conference in September, a panel of mobile IT execs declared 2011 the year smartphones cemented their place in the enterprise. “2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, said at the time. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

Tablets, according to iPass, are on the rise, but have a ways to go to be at the smartphone level of penetration in the enterprise, with 44 percent of those surveyed using an iPad at work, compared to 33 percent in the second quarter of this year.

The reason mobile devices are surging in adoption among enterprise workers isn’t necessarily because IT budgets are expanding. According to iPass:

This is due in part to the adoption of “bring your own device” policies by enterprises. Currently 42 percent of mobile employees use individually-liable smartphones for work, up from 34 percent last year.

BYO smartphone policies have grown rapidly in the last year thanks to IT departments being faced with people wanting to use their own iPhone or Android phone from home for work, something RIM never figured out. “RIM never got people to want to pay for the device themselves,” Julie Palen, SVP of enterprise telecom expense management company Tangoe, said in September. “That’s what Apple brought. And Android and Google followed.”

To learn more about the needs of the mobile work force, be sure to attend our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

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Of course, the outage was annoying and inconvenient, and hopefully Apple learned a valuable lesson about managing a large-scale, persistent data service managed from its own server facility, and this will never happen again. But the extent of the outcry as the outage wore on, as well as the attempts on Friday to follow up and try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, show that Siri’s effect on the mobile landscape is not insignificant.

It could be the case that Apple’s servers couldn’t handle the demand that Siri was putting on the system, as some users who contacted Apple support about the problem were told. That would indicate that Apple underestimated the scale of demand for Siri, which suggests the personal assistant is being used a lot. But even if the problem is independent of demand, the fact that the news of Siri’s going down spread as far and as quickly as it did, and elicited so much response from the user community, indicates that it is finding a place in people’s lives. Some of the media attention could be attributed to the fact that people love when a winner like Apple stumbles, but user concern seems genuine.

When Apple first announced the personal assistant software, I admit to thinking that Siri had limited value beyond triggering an initial feeling of novelty that would fade quickly. After using Siri myself, I found that it actually had a lot of real use value, even in countries where it hasn’t yet gained localization features. The indignation of users affected by the outage indicates that I wasn’t the only one who found myself leaning on Siri a lot more heavily than I expected to.

It’s not as widespread, but the outcry about Siri’s downtime reminds me of the web-wide groans that go up every time the Twitter fail whale makes one of its visits or when Tumblr takes a tumble. That’s a minor PR problem for Apple in the short term, but in the larger picture, it’s a very good thing that people miss Siri when she’s not around.

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Actually, having nearly a third of respondents claim interest in purchasing a product doesn’t sound all that bad — until you consider that of those not looking at an iPhone, 48 percent said they were thinking of a BlackBerry for their next device, and 37 percent were considering an Android device. Note that there is some overlap as some consumers vacillated between more than one platform for their next smartphone purchase.

Of those who weren’t impressed with the 4S, the survey found that 64 percent had hoped for more features. Still, Siri and the new camera ranked highly with respondents. Only a much smaller 27 percent of those who said they were disappointed with the device hoped for a complete overhaul, in the form of an “iPhone 5″ device with a new look and big changes, so it actually seems like a few more 4S-exclusive features would have sold more buyers. Some features, however, like Bluetooth 4.0 (or Bluetooth Smart as it’s being branded), and AirPlay Mirroring have yet to make their presence felt, since there are few accessories or software so far that really take advantage of them.

The iPhone 4S still broke records during its launch, selling 4 million handsets in its first three days of availability, and AT&T in the U.S. at least has revealed it has been a strong seller in the time since, as well. There’s little doubt that Apple could have made more of a splash with a complete redesign, but such a move doesn’t seem to have been necessary or advisable from a business standpoint, if initial sales are any indication.

The results of this survey might better reflect the negative effect Apple’s hype machine can sometimes have on a product launch: Reports and rumors swirl at such a frenzied pace that expectations grow out of control. Now that the most tantalizing bits of Apple news make it to mainstream media channels, those inflated rumors could be having more of an effect on general public perception of the company’s upcoming products.

So far, we have the actual sales data to counter claims that the 4S isn’t impressing shoppers, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on the long-term sales to see if negative impressions have more of an effect once the pale is off the rose.

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Forty percent of respondents indicated a desire to take flight from the beleaguered RIM, which recently unveiled its next-generation BBX (the name of which itself is under fire) platform for smartphone devices. Of that group, 64 percent said the iPhone was the device they’d switch to. Just under a quarter indicated they’d consider switching to Android, and a distant 5 percent said a Windows Mobile handset would be their next phone of choice.

That’s no surprise, since iPhones, along with iPads, are still far and away the preferred mobile devices in terms of new enterprise activations, as a recent report affirms. The media attention and early sales success of the iPhone 4S probably also have a lot to do with Apple’s mobile devices being at the fore of consumer minds, and the addition of iMessage in iOS 5 provides a handy BBM replacement for RIM fans to slide into.

RIM is also facing a huge transition that will be a challenge for the company as it adopts BBX. BBX will require new apps (it’s QNX-based, like the PlayBook OS) and users of current-gen BB OS 7 devices likely won’t be able to upgrade. While RIM makes the jump from its old platform to the new, Apple will have a good opportunity to win over even more enterprise users to the iPhone and to iOS.

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Here’s a quick summary of what’s new:

• Typing indicators let you know when someone’s replying. This is something a lot of similar apps and services have, including iMessage which is built in to iOS 5. It can come in handy by preventing you from saying more than you need to.
• Users that are online are now listed, as well as those who are reachable via mobile app. That should help you know if you should be expecting an immediate reply or not. People you talk to most frequently are also now displayed at the top of your contact list, just like they are in the web interface.

The update is small, but does make changes where it matters most, making Messenger more useful for actually communicating with your Facebook contacts. There’s also now a version available for BlackBerry, which means all the major smartphone platforms can now join the conversation. The update is available now in the App Store.

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The next iPhone also stands a good chance of convincing many current Apple’s customers to upgrade, too. Fifty-one percent of current iPhone owners plan to move to an iPhone 5, according to InMobi’s results, released Wednesday. But the device’s appeal to both current iPhone users and people in other mobile phone camps has a lot to do with it being a brand new device. Interest waned considerably when respondents were asked to consider purchasing an iPhone 4S, or a minor upgrade based on Apple’s iPhone 4 design.

Big draws for consumers considering iPhones include better battery life, more processing power, a higher-resolution screen and stronger phone service. It’s a bit surprising that customers would want better resolution than what the iPhone 4′s Retina Display currently offers, but perhaps they’re just hoping for a larger and more legible screen.

It’s no secret that consumer appetite for a new iPhone is strong, but these latest numbers reveal that Apple could win at a considerable cost to its competitors. But it’s also very revealing that users expect a lot from this release; an extra long upgrade cycle probably has a lot to do with that.

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The complaint lists Apple’s iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch, iPad and iPad 2, and RIM’s Blackberry Curve 9330 and Blackberry PlayBook as infringing on five Openwave patents. Those are, according to Openwave:

• Patent that generally allows a user to use e-mail applications on a mobile device when the network is unavailable – such as when a user is on an airplane.
• Patent that generally allows the mobile device to operate seamlessly, and securely, with a server over a wireless network.
• Patent that generally allows access to updated versions of applications on mobile devices.
• Patent that generally allows consumers to experience an improved user experience in navigating through various pages of information without delay.
• Patent that enables data in the cloud to be accessed or shared by different devices such as mobile handsets or computers.

The suit asks the ITC to bar the import and sale of the accused devices. In a statement, Openwave CEO Ken Denman said it ultimately wants licensing fees for the technology:

Openwave invented technologies that became foundational to the mobile Internet. We believe that these large companies should pay us for the use of our technologies, particularly in light of the substantial revenue these companies have earned from devices that use our intellectual property. Before filing these complaints, we approached both of these companies numerous times in an attempt to negotiate a license of our technology with them and did not receive a substantive response.

Neither Apple or RIM were immediately available for comment.

Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user The.Comedian

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U.K. adults in general displayed little willingness to jump on the mobile payments bandwagon, according to the YouGov survey, which was commissioned by digital banking company Intelligent Environments. Of those surveyed, 21 percent would pay bills through a mobile device; 25 percent would transfer funds; 36 percent would check their bank account balances; 17 percent would pay other people for goods and services (like you can already do using Square in the U.S.); and 13 percent would make contactless payments (via near field communication, or NFC, for example).

The Square dongle lets you accept credit card payments on your iPhone with the companion application.

Users of Apple iPhones showed much higher interest in all areas, however. Almost half – at 46 percent — indicated they would pay bills using their devices; 62 percent would transfer funds; 69 percent would check account balances; 45 percent would make payments to other people; and 31 percent would make contactless payments.

Other smartphone users, including those who have Android and BlackBerry devices, also show stronger interest in making mobile payments than their feature phone-toting counterparts, but Apple is still well ahead of the curve. Age also plays a role, with 18-24 year olds most interested in mobile banking services being available on their devices.

As my colleague Ryan Kim has noted on multiple occasions, the biggest challenge facing companies hoping to make money from mobile payments is user adoption. People are slow to adapt to change when it comes to money matters, because the perceived risk of fraud tends to be much higher with new technology that hasn’t yet seen wide use. Any advantage in overcoming such perceptions is a boon to mobile payments operators, and, if this study is accurate, iPhone users seem to have a built-in resistance to negative preconceptions.

While the jury is still out on whether Apple will include NFC in its next-generation iPhone, that doesn’t mean companies in the space can’t take advantage of it for mobile payments. An NFC-enabled SIM card is in the works that could give carriers a leg up in pioneering iPhone mobile payment solutions, and other options are also available.

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• A Global Mobile Handset Platform Forecast, 2011 – 2015
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Android and iOS combined represented a total of just under 62 percent of all worldwide smartphone sales in the second quarter of 2011, doubling the combined market share percentage of the Google and Apple smartphone platforms during the same period last year. Android and iOS were the only two major platforms that saw significant growth year over year, too. Nokia’s Symbian plummeted from 40.9 to 22.1 percent of global smartphone sales, while Research In Motion’s BlackBerry platform also stumbled from 18.7 to 11.7 percent. Microsoft didn’t fare well, either, falling from 4.9 to just 1.6 percent.

But taking a closer look at the combined Android and iOS 62 percent market share reveals that Google’s mobile OS, not Apple’s, is doing most of the heavy lifting. Android was the biggest gainer overall by a significant margin, growing from 17.2 to 43.4 percent of smartphone sales, while iOS showed more modest growth, going from 14.1 to 18.2 percent.

Still, Apple did more than double its total number of units shipped, from 8.7 million iPhones sold in the second quarter of 2010 to 19.6 million during the same time frame in 2011, even without a new hardware release. Apple also managed to climb to fourth overall in global mobile-device sales during the quarter, compared with a sixth-place ranking last year. Samsung, arguably Apple’s biggest competition in terms of hardware manufacturers, actually lost ground, falling 1.5 percentage points in worldwide handset sales year over year.

According to former Nokia executive and industry watcher Tomi Ahonen, who weighed in on the Gartner numbers on Thursday by combining them with sales data reported by major mobile manufacturers and other research firms like IDC, Apple is also on top of the heap when it comes to smartphone manufacturers, with 19 percent of market share for the second quarter of 2011. Ahonen also ranks iOS second in terms of overall operating system share, with 19 percent, edging out Nokia’s 16 percent. But even by Ahonen’s cumulative estimates, Android still has a dominant lead, with 41 percent of mobile OS share.

It’s easy to see this data point as yet another example of Android’s growing triumph over Apple in the smartphone battle, but that’s much too simplistic a view. Apple is still showing significant growth in worldwide smartphone sales, and it accounts for an increasing part of the device manufacturer picture. Android’s scattershot approach definitely has won it a presence in more markets at prices more affordable to a range of buyers, but Apple is still dominating the revenue picture. Also, some are beginning to think that Android might be poised to suffer a painful, drawn-out death by a thousand cuts from patent licensing issues, and Google’s recent decision to speak out against patent law seems to back that up.

Android may be doing most of the work when it comes to buoying the good ship smartphone, but Apple still seems to be plotting the course. As long as the growth of iOS stays positive and Apple keeps selling more and more hardware, the iPhone has nothing to fear from Android’s successes, in the same way the Mac line has nothing to fear from the PC industry it continues to be dwarfed by but also outpace.

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“The bulk of this change comes from an additional 115 million GSM 2G units going into emerging markets,” a research note from the firm says.The problem with counting the phones sold in China is that a sizable chunk of them are “Shanzhai” phones, or knock-off phones that are cheap to make and popular in China and in neighboring emerging markets. The manufacturers of these handsets don’t have official licenses to build phones from the Chinese government and typically do not sell them through what we might think of as traditional retail channels.

But even though Deutsche Bank has talked to contacts in the country to get a better feel for the true number of phones being made and sold, it says it’s still difficult to know the true size.

“It’s also worth pointing out that we could still be missing some number of shanzhai phones…In a note following our recent China trip, we pointed out that many of the China handset makers sell $20 phones. These go to emerging markets prepaid customers, and we know no data source capable of tracking these units,” Deutsche Bank said.

Zeroing in on the true size of that market is not the only factor increasing this year’s forecast though. Phones using LTE technology are rolling out faster than anticipated in the U.S. Previously, Deutsche Bank was expecting 3 million LTE phones this year, now it’s doubling that number.

In addition to the worldwide numbers in basic handsets growing, consumers still just can’t get enough of smartphones. Smartphones shipments will grow by 30 percent this year over 2010 levels to a total of 423 million units, with Android phones accounting for 220 million of those, Apple iOS phones for 80 million, Nokia 70 million, and Research in Motion selling 50 million BlackBerry handsets, according to Deutsche Bank.

This year’s growth isn’t expected to slow any time soon either. DB is upping its estimate for smartphone growth in 2012 too. Anticipating smartphone prices to drop below $150 next year, the group is expecting overall unit sales growth to hit 36 percent.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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