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Despite crappy economic conditions, the mobile equipment market – which IHS defines as not just consumer handsets and tablets but also cellular network equipment – is growing 13 percent this year and will experience an 18 percent spurt in 2014, growing to $444 billion, the firm projects. IHS chalks up the coming boom to mobile broadband, particularly the growing adoption of LTE technologies.

The LTE infrastructure market is still quite small, accounting this year for only $8 billion and a mere $4 billion in 2011. But the LTE ecosystem has a long tail. Device revenues are increasing due to the growing number of smartphone and tablet sales., which take advantage of 4G’s increased bandwidth. What’s more those same mobile broadband trends are increasing wireless semiconductor sales, increasing demand for more powerful applications processor, more advanced radio silicon and a bevy of different device sensors.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock user Reno Martin

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In a note to clients, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty shared the results of the Alphawise survey, comparing its results to Morgan Stanley’s existing estimates. Based on the survey, she suggests Apple could ship as many as 36 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2011, considerably higher than the 28 million predicted by Wall Street. Not only that, but she also says that according to survey data, the iPhone should do even better during the first quarter of 2011, selling as many as 41 million units worldwide.

The iPad stands to gain from the desire expressed by 27 percent of respondents to own a tablet in the near term, something that Huberty believes could put Apple on track to sell 81 million iPads globally in 2012, which is much higher than the 52 million Morgan Stanley was predicting independently of the survey. And if Apple wants to boost sales even further, Huberty estimates that a $100 price cut for the iPad could result in about 15 million more sales worldwide.

Of course, these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt. The Alphawise survey upon which they’re based depends on polling customers for their own opinions; stated intentions and plans about buying electronics at a future date don’t always pan out, and may also have been excessively optimistic since the survey took place immediately following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, before the year-end cash crunch resulting from holiday shopping really makes its effects felt. Still, the numbers do show that Apple devices are well-positioned among consumers, and developments in the new year like the release of an iPad 3 could definitely propel sales to new lofty heights.

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It beat the BlackBerry 8300 (Curve), which came in at No. 2. BlackBerry’s cumulative share still exceeds the iPhone’s, however, as the touchscreen Storm and entry-level Pearl also placed quite high on the list. Coming in at No. 3 was Motorola’s RAZR V3, despite its considerable age and lack of smartphone features.

By the numbers, the iPhone 3G took 4 percent of cell-phone ownership in the U.S. (it’s unclear how previous models and the 3GS fit into this breakdown), while the Curve had 3.7 percent. The gap was wider between the second- and third-place finishers, with the RAZR taking only 2.3 percent. Meanwhile LG had a strong showing, with four handsets appearing in the top 10, and a cumulative market share of 6.4 percent.

As to web activity on cell phones, Google topped the list of sites accessed via a mobile device, and competitor Yahoo came in second with its Yahoo Mail site. Gmail came in third, and YouTube won out in terms of destinations for mobile video, making it a very solid year for Google in terms of the mobile web.

Notably, no Android devices made the top 10 list of popular devices, but Motorola’s Droid arrived late to the game. Expect to see it, or possibly the Nexus One, somewhere on this list in 2010.

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Syncing in general has been improved in the sense that users can now drill down and sync more specific content. Music can now be synced by a combination of playlists, specific artists or genres. Podcasts can be synced by specific episodes and TV shows can be synced by specific episodes or seasons.

New altogether is the ability to sync iTunes U content which also has its own category, instead of being mixed in randomly between podcasts and music. Photo syncing has also been greatly enhanced, allowing support for specific albums, events or faces. Searching has also been enabled in many of these areas to allow you to quickly narrow down your choices. While these are all great features, they have really intensified the syncing interface. Hopefully it’s not too much for some users.

Still No Love for Audiobooks?

As mentioned in my wish list, I was really hoping for an improved way to sync audiobooks. Apple answered my hopes in an odd way. In the Music section, you can now search through your artists and, upon searching for a particular author, I was able to sync up those specific audiobooks. This isn’t a perfect solution though as a user may have multiple audiobooks from the same author. Why not just add another tab across the top? Apple added one for iTunes U. (I’m completely kidding. Remember, the interface is getting too complicated. iTunes 8 had eight tabs for syncing options while iTunes 9 brings the number to 10.) I personally feel the number of tabs across the top is too many, but I do feel audiobooks are important enough to warrant a more selective approach for syncing instead of just creating playlists for them.

Home Screens, Sweet Home Screens

Of course, the part most of you will really care about is the ability to organize your iPhone and iPod touch home screens via iTunes. This is simply amazing and is surprisingly quite functional. You simply navigate amongst the home screens, deleting or adding as needed and dragging applications between them. If you want to drag an item from the first screen to the fifth, just click and drag the app and hover over the fifth screen. It’ll pop up in the main view and you can place your app.

You can also select multiple apps by holding down the Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) keys. Moving complete screens around is also a snap, just by clicking and dragging them. All in all, this feature works quite well and should give users no excuse for messy randomly placed apps on their iPhones (or at least quell frustrations of people who attempt to switch between pages while editing apps only to grab and app and move it instead).

Generally speaking, these new syncing options do give users more flexible options to manage content on their devices, but I’m curious to see if any of you feel the interface itself has become a little overblown?

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The Internet tubes have been awash with rumors of Apple and Verizon talks targeting a working relationship in 2010. While Verizon CEO Lowell McAdams has confirmed that they have talked to people at Apple, he’s otherwise not giving up any details about the discussions. BusinessWeek, however, who conducted the interview with McAdams, have found other sources that say Apple is working on two new products that might see distribution through Verizon Wireless.

News of the new devices comes via the oft-cited source of “people familiar with the matter” (as if people unfamiliar with the matter would be able to offer any information at all), one of whom reports actually having seen one of the devices. That one is supposed to be an “iPhone Lite,” details beyond which are not revealed. A “Lite” version of the iPhone has been a pet rumor of Apple followers since almost the advent of the iPhone itself, so it’s unsurprising to see them cropping up again. Presumably such a device would have less storage, maybe no camera, and perhaps lack Wi-Fi and other features.

The other device is another perennial favorite that basically sounds like an iPod Touch XL. Described by BusinessWeek as “a media pad that would let users listen to music, view photos, and watch high-definition videos” that also allows for VoIP calls via Wi-Fi, under which premise Verizon would most likely be involved. Maybe they’ll offer the thing as a piece of subsidized hardware in exchange for signing up for a wireless mobile broadband package, in a deal comparable to many European (and now U.S., too) netbook packages.

According to BusinessWeek’s sources, the new devices could come out as early as this year, with one possibly introduced as early as this summer. That makes sense if AT&T does indeed have iPhone exclusivity once again, since presumably nothing would prevent Verizon from working with Apple on other devices. Maybe Apple is taking a cue from BlackBerry maker RIM and other smartphone manufacturers that release different “exclusive” phone models with different carriers.

For now, the evidence just isn’t there to file this under anything other than wishful thinking, but it does make more sense than a netbook, given Apple’s very public stance against the devices. Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch brand is strong, and the App Store is a cash cow that would only benefit from having more devices funneling revenue its way. For the foreseeable future, iPhone OS represents far more growth potential than does OS X. Let’s just hope Apple recognizes that, too.

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Look out iTunes, there’s a brand new media manager in town, in the form of a public beta just released for OS X. The program is called doubleTwist, and it’s the brainchild of anti-DRM crusader “DVD” Jon Johansen.

Ars Technica had a look at it in length, and it seems to be fairly promising. The idea is the same one behind Pioneers of the Inevitable’s Songbird, namely to provide users with an alternative to Apple’s own iTunes, which is sometimes criticized as having an unnecessarily large memory footprint, among other failings.

The killer feature of doubleTwist, the one which really sets it apart from both Songbird and iTunes, is its ability to sync your media on pretty much any portable device of your choosing that’s capable of playing it back. In fact, doubleTwist supports syncing with literally hundreds of devices, among them the standard heavy hitters like BlackBerry, Sony’s PSP, Nintendo’s DSI, and just about any mobile phone you can think of. Except, and this is the odd part, for the iPhone and iPod, which are currently available for PC users only, though the Mac client with iPhone/iPod support is in private testing.

Curiously, doubleTwist does feature a mandatory sign-up before you can start using it. And, annoyingly, you have to wait to receive a confirmation email and click an activation link before the application will even let you get past an authentication screen. It wouldn’t have been nearly as aggravating if I’d just received the email right away, but I had to wait quite a while to even get started.

Aside from login issues, the program itself is intuitive and easy to use. It can automatically scan all of your drives, folders, and connected mobile devices for any kind of media to build a comprehensive library, organized by where it was found. Unfortunately, doubleTwist is DRM-phobic in its current incarnation, and will not find or recognize any DRM-enabled content, besides iTunes music, which it can presumably play by running Quicktime in the background.

The beauty of doubleTwist, from the perspective of someone who hates messing about with conversion software and often gets frustrating results when he does, is its automatic conversion feature when dragging and dropping media to different devices. If the device is one of the many doubleTwist has in its expanding database, your file will either just be transferred to it automatically if already in a compatible format, or converted into a file type the device will recognize. No muss, no fuss. Which is also a limitation, since you have no control over conversion.

I’m not sure it’ll ever replace iTunes as my primary media manager, since I’d miss Apple proprietary features like AirTunes support, but it does help me wrangle my gadget collection a little better, and with a lot fewer headaches. Let’s hope future updates fully realize doubleTwist’s early potential.

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