iPhone

Apple said Thursday that it has shipped over 450,000 iPads since the device went on sale this past Saturday, spurring 3.5 million app downloads for the new tablet device by its earliest adopters.

via AppleInsider | Apple sells 450,000 iPads in 5 days, users download 3.5 million apps.

Jobs also updated with 600,000 downloads of iBooks.  The first day sales of books was 250k, so it's keeping a bit above 1 book per device.  First day apps was 1 million, so the app attach rate is now 7.8, well above the 3 from day one.  Keep in mind that the iPhone attach rate grew to over 50 so it's early days to see how iPhone compares to iPad as an app magnet.

A bit less than one year ago, on April 23rd 2009, Apple reported 1 billion apps downloaded.

158 days later, on September 28th 2009, Apple reported 2 billion apps downloaded.

99 days later, on January 5th 2010, Apple reported 3 billion apps downloaded.

93 days later, on April 8th 2010, Apple reported 4 billion apps downloaded.

The download rate for the past 93 days was 10.7 million apps per day.

Given 85 million iPhones and iPod touches sold, the 4 billion app downloads amount to 47 per device.  (Although that number is likely to be considerably higher due to many iPhones/iPods having gone out of use--an attach rate of well over 50 seems like a good estimate).

"We've sold over 50m iPhones to date, and if you add the touch, over 85m iPhones and iPod touches. If you're a dev, that's a plum market to go after."

iPods now make up 41% of the iPhone ecosystem.  This number has been creeping up.

At one point in time, J2ME (now Java ME) and WAP were the starting points for a discussion on mobile strategy and the web. Then, for a brief period of time, you talked about HTML/CSS. Now, for a growing majority of mobile strategies that don’t require a global presence on widely varying devices, the discussion begins with iPhone. Smart client is now iPhone app, and in many cases, the app is primary to the experience, not secondary to the browser. And iPad app may soon replace iPhone app as the starting point.

Frankly, as the adoption rate of iPhone increases and if iPad follows suit, it will become increasingly difficult to argue in favor of a starting point other than iPhone OS. The NPR iPad app, for one, provides a much more pleasant user experience than NPR.org.

via Cameron Moll: Designer, Speaker, Author The Mobile Web vs. the Objective-C Web.

iPad Apps, iPhone Apps, Deals and Discovery at App Shopper - Popular Recent Changes for iPad.

Far higher growth than the iPhone at launch.

What RIMM doesn't say (and, as far as I can tell, no one else has noted) is that Apple has surpassed them in total smartphone revenues. This quarter RIMM reported sales of $4.1 billion in revenue for their whole company. Apple surpassed them, selling $4.6 billion worth of iPhones in Q4 2009 and, more recently, $5.6 billion in Q1 2010. Remember, the iPhone didn't exist until mid 2007.i Phone sales have gone from zero to $5.6 billion in about 900 days. It's very hard to compete against that explosive growth.

Link

Apple’s official carrier in South Korea, KT, revealed yesterday that iPhone has now surpassed the half-million (500,000) sales mark. This makes South Korea, a nation with 47 million total mobile subscribers, number 8 globally in first year iPhone sales.

via iPhonAsia.com » Blog Archive » iPhone passes 500K sales in South Korea.

There have been several chauvinistic campaigns in Korea that attempted to undermine iPhone’s success. Yet, ironically, these well-funded initiatives may have backfired

Apple: When Will They Build Their Own Mobile Search Engine? - Tech Trader Daily - Barrons.com.

The opportunity here is not to do web search better than Google, but to find a way to index the information that lives on the iPhone ecosystem.  With potential for millions of apps and hundreds of millions of iPhones generating usage patterns a separate mountain of information is emerging independent of the current cloud.  The mobile cloud has different hooks and different relevance measures.

Mobile search will be as much about new algorithms as about getting a new way to spider the data.

It seems Apple is better positioned to leverage this emerging space than Google.

Never mind the gossip and tales of intrigue. Ignore the stories of betrayal and affairs. Forget the animosity and ego tripping.

No, the real reason you should be nervous if you are betting on Google long term is that Schmidt gave his first iPhone away.

By August of 2007 it's reported that "Schmidt had long ago given up on the Apple handset because he couldn't stand the on-screen keyboard. His wife had tested a prototype, but didn't care to keep it. Schmidt, we're told, ended up giving his iPhone to [his mistress] as a gift"

Here is a guy who has in his hands one of the first iPhones and he treats it with contempt.

He did not get it.

Nor, it seems, does he get the iPad.

Google does not understand where computing is going.

I don't mean this in a small way. I mean this in a big way.

link: Smartphone traffic is up 193% in a year - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech

What is important to observe is not the share numbers in the link above but the absolute growth and trend.

Doing a bit of algebra from the data Admob provided we can calculate that:

1. The overall traffic admob handled was 14.1b up from 6.6b a year ago. (114% growth)
2. Smartphones generated 6.78b impressions in February, up from 2.3b a year ago. (193% growth). The iPhone OS generated 3.4b impressions.
3. Feature phones generated 4.9b, up from 3.5b (43% growth)

Although it's dangerous to equate "usage" to these impression numbers, the overall trend is that most of the growth is happening on smartphones. Of those, the iPhone OS and Android are taking 75% share of eyeballs, at least on Admob's network.

The iPhone platform generated as many impressions in February as all feature phones generated a year ago. It does not seem a stretch to predict that iPhone will overtake all feature phones in overall impressions in the near future.

Apple Inc. is still negotiating lowered-priced content deals from media companies for its iPad ahead of the device's April 3 launch, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on its Web site, citing unidentified sources close to the matter. Apple has already sold hundreds of thousands of the devices on pre-order, according to the Journal. The sources also told the newspaper that the iPad may outsell the iPhone within the first three months after launch.

My emphasis.

link: Apple still negotiating iPad media deals: WSJ - MarketWatch

That does not seem to be quite a huge feat.  The iPhone sold 1 million within 74 days and approximately 1.4 million in the first quarter.

With "a few hundred thousand" pre-sold it seems rather likely to me that an additional million for three months is not a stretch.