The survey of more than 1,000 respondents conducted in November also found that Google is a strong contender for being perceived as current and relevant, since it placed second. Microsoft came in fourth, and non-tech firms occupied the majority of the remaining top 10 positions.

Ipsos notes that the “leading edge” quality has a big impact on the perception of overall brand influence, and one that serves companies well. According to Ipsos Reid President Steve Levy, “while being seen as leading edge is only one factor in brand influence it is definitely one of the most important, something that Apple has recognized and excelled at achieving.”

RIM’s absence is telling, but not unexpected. The company’s devices are no longer seen as cutting edge tech, and the brand’s image can’t be dealing with its fast-fading fortunes very well. RIM still has a huge customer base, but its significance in the important U.S. market is tanking, and doesn’t look likely to ever catch up to Android or iOS again.

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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 sales stats, gathered by research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, are perhaps most impressive because Apple really only started selling its latest iPhone halfway through the month, on Oct. 14. Apple’s big month helped it grow its market share 2.8 percent versus the previous year in the quarter leading up to the end of October, climbing to 27.8 percent mostly at the expense of Android, which was down from 49.9 to 46 percent. That helped Apple climb to a second-place spot among U.K. smartphone platforms, with RIM falling to third place with a drop of 1.3 percentage points to 19.6 percent share.

However, Apple’s sales were mostly from inside its own camp, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech points out. Amazingly, 75 percent of those who purchased a new 4S in October had previously owned an iPhone device, and 14 percent were upgrading from the iPhone 4, which means a good percentage of them were probably buying out contracts early to get the device.

While it’s good for Apple that people who use their devices like them enough to return to the iPhone time and time again, the high rate of return customers could mean we’ll quickly see Apple’s October gains give way to Android successes on the back of devices like the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone packing Ice Cream Sandwich. Then again, Apple also now has a free entry-level iPhone as well as a cheaper mid-range option, so the 4S’s success may stand a better chance of being buttressed by those other options in the longer term.

Apple’s iPhone likely isn’t done posting big sales, especially since it’s high on people’s lists in terms of ideal gifts for the holidays, but it’ll have more competition in the coming months. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple can continue gaining back share in the face of the Android juggernaut, or whether this spike is just a one-time blip on the radar.

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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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It’s understandable that analysts would predict a similar sort of trajectory for the iPad that the iPhone has experienced; after all, a tablet is just a larger smartphone, and both categories of devices run basically the same mobile operating systems, at least as far as iOS and Android are concerned.

The only proven tablet OS

But the experience on both Android and iOS tablets for end users isn’t nearly the same as the experience on phones using both platforms. If Android feels a bit immature on smartphone hardware, it feels exceedingly so on tablet devices. IOS, on the other hand, feels tailor-made for each. Nothing about it seems hasty, or an attempt to quickly gain a foothold in a market the OS was shoehorned into in the first place, the way Honeycomb did. Ice Cream Sandwich could improve the situation, but at most, it will probably be an evolutionary update, if the history of Android OS iteration is any example.

In other words, Android has yet to prove it can even deliver a mature, feature-complete tablet OS designed to take advantage of larger-screened devices. That Gold suggests in his note that QNX and Microsoft will be able to each acquire 10 percent of the tablet market by 2015 is an even greater reach, since those platforms have even more to prove in terms of market relevance. RIM can’t even get email working on its platform until 2012, and Microsoft’s software is a risky desktop/mobile hybrid that has yet to see a public release. Predicting either’s ascendancy at this point to a solid but distant third is like seeing Zune and anticipating it would eventually be a serious contender alongside the iPod.

Distribution model differences

Predicting the iPad vs Android tablets market to proceed along the same lines of the iPhone vs. Android phones market also discounts key differences in the distribution model of both devices. Tablets, despite some support from carriers for 3G data plans, stand in for computers more than phones for most consumers, and that’s the way many people shop for them, too.

Carriers, then, don’t have nearly as much say in which devices get pushed as they do with smartphones. In the past (and still today), if you wanted an iPhone, in many markets you were stuck with one or two carriers. If you wanted network choice, you had to go to a different device. Also, carriers have tended to favor Android because it offers them more customization options, allowing them greater controller over the customer relationship.

So long as the tablet isn’t inextricably tied to distribution through network operators, Apple will have an advantage, since it has the strongest marketing, sales and retail network of any device OEM.

Usage still far ahead

As we reported yesterday, Apple’s iOS market share by usage is still well ahead of Android or any other competitor, as measured by website access by platform and by browser. Those numbers combine both tablet and smartphone figures, but since Android is acknowledged to be faring much better versus iOS in smartphones than in tablets, it stands to reason that the iPad is skewing things heavily in Apple’s favor.

We sometimes see reports that claim Apple is losing ground, but more often than not, those numbers reflect shipments, not actual sales to consumers, as Kevin Tofel pointed out. Many of the Android devices reported as shipped are likely sitting on store shelves, whereas Apple’s numbers represent devices actively being used by consumers.

Determining the actual gap here is made even more difficult when you consider that new Android tablets are constantly coming to market. Combine old stock with new, throw in a glut of essentially obsolete devices in the form of the discontinued HP TouchPad, which could be had for just $99 during the last couple of months, and you get even more of a statistical minefield that probably doesn’t represent long-term trends in any accurate way.

Apple is best positioned to innovate

The iPad has a huge lead in its current form, and Apple has lots of money to spend on R&D, which makes it the best-positioned tablet-maker to introduce category-innovating new form factors, features and technologies. The competition can try to shake things up, too, and have done so with different sizes, detachable laptop docks, etc., but if the groundwork isn’t laid, these variations on Apple’s successful model have little chance of succeeding.

Predictions that draw parallels between the smartphone realm and the tablet market are missing the point; the real future makeup of the tablet landscape will be drawn by unconventional attacks like Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire, which counts not on mimicking Apple’s success, but on consumer willingness to sacrifice on features in order to get a low-cost, content consumption device.

Even so, I think the iPad will weather these and other assaults and continue to reign beyond the 2015 mark, for the reasons outlined above and my past arguments about why Apple’s tablet is still more appealing than the Amazon offering.

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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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The numbers mean that Apple’s iOS devices (including the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad) together make up more than half of all web use originating from mobile devices. This is especially impressive when you consider that Apple’s mobile market share when measured strictly by device sales puts it well beyond Android, which powers smartphones and tablets from a wide range of manufacturing partners in more global markets.

Android, in contrast, accounted for only 16.26 percent of overall mobile web access in September, although that’s up slightly from August, when it was responsible for 15.98 percent. RIM’s BlackBerry platform lags behind at 3.29 percent.

What do these numbers mean? Basically, Apple device users seem to be much more prone to using their devices to access the mobile web. That’s also backed up by Apple’s continued dominance in mobile browser market share, where Safari ruled in September with 55.59 percent of all mobile browser impressions.

Usage stats are a good place for Apple to lead; it means customers are comfortable and happy with the experience that iOS provides, which should lead to greater loyalty and repeat business. It also means Apple is better able to woo developers and advertising partners, who recognize that the best mobile OS is the one most able to capture a user’s attention.

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Apple has an 89-percent retention rate, according to a survey conducted by UBS Research. The research firm polled 515 smartphone owners asking which phones they owned and their next likely smartphone purchase. While the sample size is very small, it does give us a view into broader trends in the smartphone market.

In general, retention rates appear to be falling for most of the OEMs. Relatively, Apple’s retention rates have held up incredibly well even as its market share has risen. Interestingly, when we look at all consumers who are considering changing handset OEM provider, Apple remains a significant net beneficiary. Alongside Apple, only Samsung and HTC also appear as net beneficiaries (more users won than users lost). Interestingly, of our respondents who are current Apple subscribers, only 6% indicated that they intended to move to a different OEM, with 4% saying they were undecided. This suggests that the retention rate for Apple could end up being as high as 93%. [UBS Research]

RIM has seen its retention rate drop from 62 percent to 33 percent over past 18 months, when UBS conducted a similar survey in March 2010. In comparison to Apple, Android (ecosystem-wide) has a retention of 55 percent and HTC has a retention rate of about 39 percent. Samsung has a retention rate of 28 percent. Nokia, which had an implied retention rate of 42 percent, has seen it drop to 24 percent. Ouch!

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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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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 new Waterloo location (at the Conestoga Mall) seems significant, considering that the city’s biggest claim to fame is being the home of RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphones and software. Apple’s other stores in Canada to date have generally been located either in major urban centers, or in communities bordering such metropolitan areas. Waterloo, a university town with a reputation for being Canada’s Silicon Valley, thanks in large part to RIM’s presence there, still only has a population of 98,000, swelling to around 120,000 during the post-secondary school year. Apple’s first Canadian store to venture outside of the major cities and their suburbs certainly comes with a provocative address.

Apple’s other new stores opening this Saturday include two in the U.S., and two abroad. Here’s the rest of list:

• Fashion Place, Murray, Utah
• Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall, Anchorage, Alaska
• Southland, Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia
• I Gigli, Florence, Italy

Apple’s planned retail expansion in 2011 includes a lot of international growth, and this crop of openings definitely reflects that. Any readers planning to pay a visit to any of these locations during their inaugural weekends?

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As the graph above shows, the picture today is quite different from 2007, when Apple first introduced the iPhone, and Nokia was the undisputed king of mobile. Four years later, of the top mobile vendors, Apple has two-thirds of the profits.

It’s also interesting that while Samsung is hot on Apple’s trail in smartphone sales (with just over 19 million sold last quarter compared to Apple’s 20 million), the Galaxy-maker is far behind Apple when it comes to actually reaping profits from device sales, with just 15 percent of mobile profits for the quarter. After Samsung comes beleaguered RIM with 11 percent, and HTC with 7 percent.

Check out Asymco for a full breakdown of the industry’s most recent quarter.

Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Tracy O. Chart from Asymco.

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From Apple’s 10-Q filed with the SEC Wednesday:

On June 27, 2011, the Company, as part of a consortium, participated in the acquisition of Nortel’s patent portfolio for an overall purchase price of $4.5 billion, of which the Company’s contribution will be approximately $2.6 billion. This asset acquisition is subject to approval by various regulatory agencies.

Google may have lost out to the Apple-led consortium on Nortel, but it’s back on the hunt. It’s been reported that both Google and Apple are also interested in scooping up another collection of intellectual property up for sale, that of mobile-phone designer InterDigital.

It’s clear Apple is ready to play defense on its products, as COO Tim Cook warned Tuesday, “We want people to invent their own stuff. We’re going to make sure we defend our portfiolio from everyone.”

But bulking up on Nortel’s patents, and potentially InterDigital’s, shows Apple is prepared to go on the offensive too.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Robert S. Donovan

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Android was the only other platform that gained share of smartphone subscribers during the quarter, growing 5.1 percentage points to 38.1 percent of the total pool and retaining its number one spot among mobile operating systems. All other major players besides Android and iOS lost share, with Research In Motion taking the hardest hit with a 4.2 percentage point drop for its BlackBerry OS, while Microsoft and Palm each shed 1.9 and 0.4 percent respectively.

While Android gained more ground than iOS in a smartphone market that grew 11 percent during the last quarter, Apple was the single biggest riser when it came to smartphone hardware growth. Apple rose 1.2 percentage points from 7.5 percent to 8.7 percent for the period ending in May, while Samsung, the market leader, remained flat at 24.8 percent. LG was the only hardware vendor besides Apple in the top five to gain ground, rising 0.2 percent, while both Motorola and RIM slid slightly.

The three-month period was a good one for Apple by comScore’s measures, and iOS continues to show positive growth despite Android’s expanding reach. Other recent studies and reports indicate that Apple may be beginning to claw back some of the ground given up to Android, too. But with iOS 5 and the wide release of Google+ on the way soon to shake things up, the smartphone game is becoming a very tricky one to call.

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