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Phone cameras: Apple continue to dominate

I was carelessly browsing through flickr’s camera stats, and I thought I’d go back and revisit the post I did 6 months ago, where I thought that flickr’s stats on cameraphone usage said something about the loyalty of the iPhone userbase.

So, the latest breakdown of the most popular cameraphones used to upload to flickr is still dominated by Apple:

The 4S has now overtaken the 4 as the most popular camera, just in the past month, but 4 usage isn’t really falling off, it seems to have plateaued.

The long tail of 3G and 3GS continues, with the nearest Apple competitor, the Galaxy SII only garnering the same number of daily uploads as the 3G.

Now, if anyone from flickr is reading this, what would be interesting is a comparison of iOS vs. Android vs. Windows Phone devices, as it will be interesting to see how this changes over time, particularly as there seems to be just more and more feature parity and less USP across the smartphone market.

I also thought that it was interesting that uploads from cameraphones to flickr are altogether higher than dSLRs, with the iPhone 4S dominating, and have been for some time:

Once an iPhone user, always an iPhone user?

I happened to come across an interesting graph while looking at the stats which photo-sharing site Flickr collect from the EXIF data that sometimes arrives with the uploaded images.

One of the things contained in the EXIF data is what sort of device produced the image, who made it, what model, etc. Flickr analyses this in the “Camera Finder“.

Here’s the graph of the most popular cameraphones used on images posted to Flickr over the past 12 months.

One thing this seems to confirm is that iPhone users seem to be a faithful bunch.

The other thing it confirms is the theory that many iPhone users don’t upgrade their handset with every generation, but are likely to “skip” a generation – borne out by the step decline in iPhone 3G images matched by a step growth in images posted from the 4S, while the iPhone 4 only sees a small dip coinciding with the release of the 4S.

The 3GS has a steadily dwindling userbase, and it will be interesting to see if and how these jump ship. I still have a 3GS. In the main I’m happy with it and what it does, and there’s nothing which tells me I need to upgrade to a 4S. I guess that places me into the “long tail” of 3GS users.

It’s also interesting to note the Apple domination of the top 5. I wonder if that graph will look the same by this time next year?

I am the market Nokia lost

Remember when more than 50% of mobile phones in people’s hands said “Nokia” on them? When 50% of those phones had that iconic/irritating/annoying signature ring tone – often because folks hadn’t worked out how to get them off the default – long a prelude to yells of “Hello! I’m on a train/in a restaurant/in a library“.

Well, this week, a memo from the new Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, has been doing the rounds online, which sums up the ferocious drubbing the once dominant Finnish company had in the handset market, at the hands of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS, and how it is now poised on the telecoms equivalent of a blazing oil platform.

I am part of the market that Nokia lost, maybe even forgot. I have a drawer which could be called “my life as a mobile phone user”, littered with old Nokia handsets, many of them iconic in their own right… the 2110, 6110, 6150, 6210, 6310i (probably one of the best handsets Nokia ever made), 6600, and three Communicators, the 9210i, 9500 and E90.

Why did I stop using Nokia?

Well, the last Nokia handset I tried was the N97, and since then I’ve been an iPhone convert.

While those around me used swishy iPhones, my previous loyalty to Nokia was rewarded with a slow and clunky UI, a terrible keyboard, and the appallingly bad software to run on your (Windows only) PC for backing up and synchronisation.

Nokia couldn’t even focus on keeping up with the needs of it’s previously loyal and high-yielding power users, for whom migrating handsets was always a pain, never mind the fickle throwaway consumer market.

Is it any wonder folks have deserted Nokia?

They have made themselves look like the British Leyland of the mobile phone world.

On a complete sidebar – any guesses on which airline will start up a HEL-SFO service first? There have got to be yield management folk looking at this in the wake of this news!

Update: 11 Feb 2011, 0855

As the pundits predicted, Nokia have announced they have aligned themselves with Microsoft, and their Windows mobile platform.