Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his company’s recent earnings call that iPad sales haven’t really been affected by the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is no doubt contributing heavily to the success of Android tablets. It’s also likely the Barnes & Noble Nook Color and Nook Tablet are included in the Android figures. Instead, Cook admitted the iPad has had some cannibalization effect on sales of Macs, and he predicted that one day, the tablet market will be larger in volume than the PC market.

Compared to Android, Apple still has a dominant position in the tablet market, with a 57.6-percent share compared to Android’s 39.1 percent, according to Strategy Analytics’ most recent numbers. In terms of year-over-year growth, the tablet space has grown by 150 percent between the end of 2010 and 2011. In other words, even if shares were more evenly split, the iPad would still be seeing big gains in unit sales.

The PC market, on the other hand, contracted by around six percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to research firm Gartner. That’s despite 20 percent growth by Apple’s own Mac line of computers. Kevin Tofel recently pointed out here on GigaOM that half of computing device sales are now mobile. If the trend of growing tablet and smartphone sales continue, and PC sales continue to decline, we’ll soon be in a position where mobiles are considered a primary device by the majority of users.

Apple will continue to sell iPads. A new refresh expected in the coming months might even help it turn the tide of slipping market share, since while the low-cost Kindle Fire may be a success, other Android tablet makers still seem to be having a hard time putting out a product consumers can get genuinely excited about. Kevin wrote last week about how Android 4.0, while it improves the Android tablet experience, still has a lot of glaring pain points. Also, Android’s tablet-specific app library lags considerably behind Apple’s, and isn’t catching up anywhere near as fast as the market on the smartphone side.

The companies putting out Android tablets that fail to achieve the Kindle Fire’s level of success are the same ones being hurt by the slowing PC market, and they’re the ones that stand to lose the most. Amazon’s Kindle fire has reportedly sold as many as 6 million units through the end of 2011, according to estimates, which would make it the world’s best-selling Android tablet.

Apple continues to appeal to a steadily growing audience of tablet users, but Amazon is answering the call of those who were happier buying bargain-priced netbooks for their basic computing needs, rather than spending more on an iPad. That’s the market PC makers should have been trying to retain with their own tablet efforts, and also the one Amazon has positioned itself best to appeal to.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

Wu says in his note that Apple looks to be on track to have sold 29.5 million iPhones during its first financial quarter of 2012, up from his firm’s previous prediction of 28 million devices. Wu hasn’t changed Mac or iPad sales expectations, which remain at 5.2 million and 13.5 million units respectively, but the increased iPhone sales lead him to anticipate $38.8 billion in revenue, and $10.34 in earnings per share. Before today, Agee had been modelling $37.7 billion in revenue and $10 EPS.

The numbers are relatively conservative when compared to the bigger picture. Fortune rounded up a collection of analyst expectations ahead of today’s call on Sunday, and found that the average revenue prediction among independent analysts was $43.14 million, with $12.01 EPS and 33.35 million iPhones sold. Among institutional analysts, of which Wu is one, Fortune found average revenue estimates were at $39.23 million, with $10.19 EPS and 30.25 million iPhone sold. Wu’s new numbers will alter those figures slightly upward, since his original, more conservative estimates figured into Fortune’s calculations.

Apple generally makes a point of being conservative with its own estimates of financial performance going forward, but Wu suggests in his note we might not see as modest an outlook as usual. That’s because the iPhone 4S launched in China on Jan. 12, Wu says, and because his supply checks suggest an iPad 3 launch is very near, which could definitely boost next-quarter performance. The 4S launch in China, which sparked riots and caused Apple to shut down physical retail store sales, certainly seems to have been met with strong demand.

We’ll have coverage of Apple’s quarterly earnings and the company’s conference call with executives right here, so check back to see how expectations match up with reality.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• A clouded view of Google Music
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

The TrueView format, which launched a little more than a year ago, has quickly taken over as the dominant unit for video ads that appear on the site. With TrueView, ads generally play for about five seconds before viewers have the opportunity to skip them. The beauty of the TrueView ad is not only that viewers can ignore them, if they don’t find them relevant or appealing, but that advertisers don’t pay for skipped creative.

The incentive is then on advertisers to make good creative, and on YouTube to target the ads appropriately to increase engagement. So far, that appears to be working: Wojcicki said engagement ranges from 15 to 40 percent when viewers choose to actually watch an ad all the way through.

As a side note, CEO Larry Page noted that YouTube still had a lot of growth ahead and expected an increase in advertising on the site. But Page said that growth wouldn’t necessarily come at the expense of TV budgets, as advertisers generally weren’t shifting spend from other parts of their video budgets when committing to YouTube.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• How publishers must adapt to multiple content discovery options
• A clouded view of Google Music

Stock prices may have been buoyed by news that Apple continues to regain mobile market share based on the strength of its iPhone 4S sales. Nielsen reported Wednesday morning that since the introduction of the 4S, Apple’s share of the smartphone market has climbed steadily in the U.S. The Nielsen report’s findings are very similar to U.S. smartphone numbers released by NPD last week.

Apple also has an earnings call scheduled for Jan. 24, at which many analysts expect the company to announce record sales across its device lineups. We’ll likely see some numbers revealed early at tomorrow’s special education event in NYC on Thursday, since Apple typically spends some time at media presentations talking up recent successes and revealing information like up-to-date App Store download numbers, for example. We’ll have live coverage of that event beginning at 10 a.m. EST.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• Social-TV apps and consumer behavior

The MacBook Air was the only notebook that saw increased shipments during the quarter, according to Digitimes Research, which said on Monday that notebook shipments slowed by 8.7 percent sequentially to 48.59 million units worldwide during the quarter.

In Apple’s last quarterly earnings report, it reported 4.89 million Macs sold, meaning if we use Digitimes’ estimate of 1 million MacBook Airs sold, the notebook represented roughly 20 percent of the total. We know Apple’s iMac is also performing well, but it’s logical to assume the Air is growing in influence in terms of the overall Mac picture. Expect that trend to continue, since analysts expect the so-called Ultrabook category to explode in the next six years.

Apple doesn’t usually break out sales of individual Mac lines from the overall Mac category total, but it will still be interesting to see if it has any official comment on the success of the Air during its quarterly earnings conference call on Jan. 24.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Why the Mac is infiltrating the enterprise

Here’s a look at what Rondee offers today. There’s one notable change from 2008: Users do have to sign up to use the service, but it is a quick and easy process. Just enter your email and wait for the confirmation email to access just the on-demand service (you can enter more information to get a full-featured account).

On Demand

For impromptu calls or calls that are scheduled through your company’s calendar, you can notify call participants directly and provide them with the Rondee call-in number. You can register multiple unique PIN codes and choose number combinations that are easy for you to remember. In addition, you can create and “assign” different PINs with unique attributes including whether or not you want the call to automatically record, if you want call statistics sent to you after the call and the sound effects you want to signify when people enter or exit the call (chime, chime and name announced, or no sound). So you can use different PINs for your virtual team, vendor calls or recording a podcast. You can even add a listen-only PIN code to a call to give to participants for a teleseminar style call.

After your call, you can go to your PIN dashboard to access call data and if you opted for recordings, the audio MP3 file that you can listen to and download.

Scheduled

Rondee can also schedule calls, emailing participants directly with the call-in information. As part of this feature, Rondee offers attendance tracking and agenda archiving, so the system can keep tabs for you on who was really on that call. You can set up recurring calls for weekly team calls or a regularly scheduled training session. You can also enable recording, allow participants to invite others to the call and decide whether or not to get call stats emailed to you.

Participants get an email invitation with a link to a landing page on the Rondee site. On that page they can also see the call details, a call agenda they can edit, a drop down menu where they can confirm their participation, and a place to add comments.

Premium

The premium service offers two key benefits beyond the free service. Rather than the free Rondee’s California phone numbers for the call, premium users get a toll-free number. Rondee charges 5 cents per minute. Premium users also get text transcripts of their calls, which are 97 percent accurate and are delivered within two or three days. Rondee charges $1 per minute for transcription, with a minimum charge of $20.

If you’re looking for a straightforward and easy free conference call solution with both the on-demand and scheduling features, Rondee is still in the running as a viable and useful solution.

How are you handling your conference calls? Pros and cons?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 2: benchmarking IT’s readiness for the new digital workforce

When pressed as to why Apple wasn’t prepared to produce more iPad 2s for launch when during the holiday quarter Apple sold more than 7 million, the response was that product “transitions are never simple.” Nonetheless, Apple executives are proud of the “progress on production,” asserting that it was better than with the original iPad. To that end, the company plans on expanding the number of countries next week, and add more during the quarter. If that seems contradictory, well, it is, and no time frame was given on when supply and demand equilibrium would be reached, except that Apple executives are “confident we’ll produce a very large number” this quarter.

Those like myself thinking Apple might add another iPad model this year, perhaps even an iPad 3, can forget it. If the product transition is this difficult for the iPad, it’s nearly impossible to imagine Apple attempting another transition during the holiday quarter.

Besides the iPad, there were only a few points of interest during the call, including:

• Apple Retail will have its tenth anniversary and one billionth visitor next month, and, as has been the case for a while now, “about half” of people buying Macs in stores are new to the platform.
• On Steve Jobs, executives see him on a regular basis. He’s involved in major strategic decisions, and wants to be back as soon as he can.
• China now accounts for a tenth of Apple revenue.
• Demand for the MacBook Air remains strong, while consumer response to the new MacBook Pros has been “excellent,” and the Mac has outgrown the PC market for 20 straight quarters.
• iPhone growth is “off the charts” in two places, the U.S. and China, up 155 percent and 250 percent, respectively.
• Don’t expect an LTE iPhone anytime soon, as Apple is “not going to make” the kind of design compromises the first generation chipsets require.
• The iPod touch continues to account for more than half of iPod sales.
• On the recent patent lawsuit with Samsung, Samsung “crossed the line,” so Apple went to the courts after trying to resolve the issue.

Finally, when pressed on the analogy of the Android being like Windows PCs in the 90′s and the iPhone the Mac during the same period, Apple executives sidestepped. Citing the iOS platform as a whole, app counts, the value of and integrated versus “fragmented” platform, Apple executives “feel good about where we are.”

That answer was typical of the call, which was short on real information, but short on genuinely interesting questions, too. Nary a white iPhone or Apple TV question was heard, despite recent talk swirling around both. Hopefully, Steve Jobs will be back for some trash talking of the PlayBook come July.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Rumored Apple Tablet: Opportunities Too Big to Ignore
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

Mac sales are expected to be between 3.5 and 4 million units, up from 2.9 million last year. More interesting, IDC is reporting ten percent growth year-over-year for Mac sales in the U.S., and while Toshiba also saw growth, HP, Dell, and Acer saw declines of 2.4, 11.8, and a CEO-firing 42.1 percent, respectively. According to IDC, “media tablets” like the iPad could be one factor in those declines. However, the reverse appears to be true for Apple, with the iPad having yet another “halo effect” on Mac sales. This ensures the Mac will remain a major focus for Apple, good news for Mac users, but which Macs will receive Apple’s attention in the future?

While Apple doesn’t break out numbers on individuals models, 70 percent of Macs sold last quarter were laptops, with the redesigned MacBook Air likely leading sales. Analysts expect the trend towards portability to continue, even though desktop sales are actually increasing. Nonetheless, the continued decline in market share likely means less focus on Mac Pros, Mac minis, and even the iMac. The Xserve, of course, is no longer part of the picture at all, having been discontinued.

Also in decline, or at the least stagnating, are iPod sales, likely to be between 9.5 and 10 million units, compared to 10.9 million last year. Sales of iPods have been slowly declining since 2008, but that decline is tempered by the increased average selling price of iPod units. That is attributed to the iPod touch, which accounted for half of all iPod sales in the holiday quarter last year. That’s great for the iOS platform, far more important to the future than Apple controlling 70 percent of the declining market for media players. The interesting question will be whether, despite alleged e-mails from Steve Jobs to the contrary, the iPod classic will be phased out. For that matter, merging the iPod nano and shuffle into a single device starting at $99 doesn’t seem like an impossibility, either.

For the iPhone, the opposite might happen with the introduction of news models and price points. Sales for last quarter will likely be between 16 and 20 million units, but it’s hard to be too optimistic because of the uncertainty over Verizon iPhone sales. Apple, never shy about being self congratulatory, has been silent on sales, though Verizon has said the iPhone 4 was the “largest retail launch” in company history. But even if Apple sold 20 million iPhones last quarter, that would be ten million fewer than Google is reporting for Android activations. Those numbers are likely the reason Tim Cook was hinting about the iPhone being “not just for the rich” earlier this year. A low-priced, current generation of iPhone would definitely help keep the iPhone from being relegated to niche status in an Android world.

As for Android doing to the iPad what was done to the iPhone, it hasn’t happened so far, though estimates on iPad sales are all over the place, anywhere between 5 and 10 million. Arguably, if iPad sales are near the holiday quarter’s 7.3 million, that will put the iPad on track for 30 to 35 million units sold this calendar year. That kind of success took years for both the iPod and iPhone to achieve, but let’s hope Apple isn’t getting fat on margins and lazy. Competitors like Samsung and beleaguered Acer are finally bringing tablets to market with lower price points than the iPad. Price will be the challenge for the iPad in the second half of the year, a challenged that could be met with another iPad 2.

In summary, my predictions for next week are:

• Revenue, EPS: $24.9 billion, $5.05
• Macs: 3.75 million
• iPods: 9.95 million
• iPhones: 17.55 million
• iPads: 7.05 million

What are your estimates for Q2 2011?

And don’t forget TheAppleBlog will provide highlights of the earnings report and the conference call, including any trash talking from any Apple execs on RIM’s Playbook.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The new IT manager, part 1

1. The Steve Work Ethic

Considering the turbulence Apple faced Monday and Tuesday, it’s difficult to imagine that every analyst would choose to not ask questions about the impact Jobs’ medical leave of absence would have on the company, yet none did, at least not directly. However, one question was posed about “long-term planning” about products.

“In my view, Apple’s doing the best work ever,” said COO Tim Cook, adding that the company was “very happy” with the product pipeline, and then he said this:

“The team has an unparalleled breadth and depth of talent and innovation that Steve has driven in the company, and excellence has become a habit, and so we feel very confident about the future of the company.”

Present or not, the influence of Steve Jobs still guides Apple.

2. Apple and the Dragon

When queried about how Apple can manage to sustain the insane growth of the present and the past, the answer that came up repeatedly was Asia, specifically China. The company stated that years ago Apple identified China among emerging as its “top priority” and the results are “absolutely staggering.” China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan generated some $2.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, quadrupling performance over last year. The number of visitors and sales at Chinese Apple Stores exceeded those of every other store, including flagship stores in the U.S. and Europe.

Besides China, sales in Japan were up 83 percent year over year, with strong growth for the Mac: up 56 percent. Korea was also singled out as being very receptive to the iPhone, and Japan was mentioned as well, but clearly, China is the focus of new markets for Apple going forward.

3. The Mac Is Back

Actually, it never left. For a jaw-dropping 19 consecutive quarters, the Mac has grown faster than rest of the PC market. For the most recent quarter, the Mac achieved 23 percent growth, compared to a meager three percent for the rest of the industry. Apple sold more than 850,000 Macs in retail Apple Stores, and once again, for nearly 10 years, “about half” of those purchasing Macs were doing so for the first time.

As to what people were buying, the biggest sellers were the MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air. Apple executives described the Mac as a “phenomenal” part of their growth. That growth included 2.9 million laptops sold, representing 70 percent of Macs sold during the quarter. Consumers loved new features like “instant on” and the speed of solid-state drives according to Apple. Look for SSDs to migrate to other Mac portables soon, most likely with faster CPUs from Intel.

4. The Unstoppable iPhone

After selling more than 14 million iPhones from July through September, Apple topped that by selling more than 16 million iPhones during the holiday quarter, and they could have sold more. More than six months after launch, the iPhone 4 is still supply-constrained, and Apple executives have no idea when supply and demand equilibrium will be reached.

It almost certainly won’t be this quarter, with the launch of the Verizon iPhone. In fact, a question regarding expanding sales of CDMA iPhones to countries like China was only partially deflected. While Apple is “always looking for opportunities,” it was implied that current iPhone supplies preclude any major expansion in the short term. For the first time, Apple may be looking at an iPhone that sells out across the model year.

5. Other Tablets Still Suck

Trash-talkin’ Steve Jobs may not have been there to put the smackdown on competing tablets, but Tim Cook filled those shoes admirably. According to Cook, competing tablets currently fall into one of three categories:

1. Window tablets that are “big, heavy, expensive, and have poor battery life,”and that require input devices like a stylus. Consumers are simply “not interested.”
2. Android tablets that, by Google’s own admission, run an OS not designed for tablets in sizes that are “less than reasonable,” failing to provide a “real tablet experience.” They are “scaled-up smartphones” and Apple is ”not concerned” about  them. I wouldn’t expect a 7-inch iPad this year.
3. Vapor. That would be tablets previewed at CES or earlier, and possibly the BlackBerry PlayBook, though RIM was never mentioned.

6. 160 Million iOS Devices Sold

To put that number in perspective, the number of iOS devices passed 100 million last June. In September, that number was 120 million, and now it’s 160 million. By the time the next iPhone launches in June or July, it will be at least 200 million, perhaps as many as 250,000 million.

That’s the takeaway from this quarter’s conference call: six facts worth remembering.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• 5 Companies That Ruled Mobile in 2010
• 5 Connected Consumer Companies to Watch in 2011
• 5 Connected Consumer Companies That Ruled 2010