Now jump ahead to the present: You and your friend still own those same phones, but which one out of the two feels like a worthless piece of crap? The Motorola Droid. This is the case with many Android and BlackBerry devices — they lose their value after a short period of time — and a new study from Priceonomics supports this.

Priceonomics studied cell phone resale values after usage for 18 months. It found that after that period of time, iPhones retain 53 percent of their original value. Android phones have only 42 percent of their initial worth and BlackBerrys have 41 percent. This means an 18-month-old iPhone would sell for $312.

Additionally, the total cost of ownership for BlackBerry and Android devices are far higher than that of an iPhone. Apple’s handset only costs an average of $13.20 per month, while BlackBerry is around $17 per month and Android phones are around $18 per month — the latter being 40 percent more than the iPhone.

Priceonomics had this to say about the study:

At Priceonomics, we firmly believe that resale value is the best objective indicator of product quality. If you wanted to figure out the best cell phone, you could look at all the reviews, test out all the phones, talk to all the experts, but still your assessment will be subjective. Or you could let the market tell you which phones are the highest quality by seeing which ones best retain their value over time.

Taking that belief into consideration, it’s clear the iPhone reigns in terms of overall quality, even in the long run.

[via Priceonomics]

Juniper’s report found that the introduction of operator billing across storefronts such as the Android Market and Ovi Store had led to a dramatic rise in revenues. Likewise, the mass deployment of in-app billing options meant that, for many storefronts, post-download revenues had surpassed those of PPD (Pay-Per-Download).

When it comes to tablets, at the moment they account for just 7% of global app revenues, but this market rise to 25% by 2016.

As for HTML5 and its prospects, Juniper believes it [HTML5] has a bright future with content publishers being able to offer content on-site rather than be reliant on storefront distribution.

Finally, the research company says that more than 31 billion apps were downloaded to mobile devices in 2011.

Fast forward to 2012 and consumers can’t get enough apps: over one billion downloads per month on average. More importantly, this has created what is now known as the app economy. Thousands of jobs have been created over the past five years for app development and the numbers are growing at an incredible rate.

According to a study from Michael Mandel of Atlantic, there are now 311,000 app jobs. These include everything from development to marketing to sales, so on and so forth. That’s slightly over double the amount of strictly technology-related jobs in the entire country: 155,000. Plus, that’s more jobs than the Internet publishing field, electronic shipping field, wireless carrier field, and software publishing field — that’s right, mobile apps have greater demand than desktop software.

The app economy can only grow as long as consumers keep buying smartphones. Thankfully, smartphone growth is anything but declining. In 2009, smartphones accounted for 18 percent of all mobile phones in use and the #1 handset at the time was the Motorola Razr V3. Last year, smartphone market share jumped to 44 percent and the #1 handset was the Apple iPhone 4.

The best part of all? This is only just the beginning.

[via Atlantic]

A study from The Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies (got all that?) finds that reducing the number of mobile carriers would help ease the strain on wireless spectrum. The outcome specifically concludes that when there’s less competition among carriers, prices drop and thereby allow for more money to be invested in fixing the spectrum crisis. This would also allow each carrier to gain access to a bigger amount of spectrum.

“No one has formally studied how spectrum shortages affect competition in wireless communications. Our study is the first, and its findings are significant,” said Phoenix Center President Lawrence Spiwak. “If mobile carriers have too little spectrum, then the standard view that more competitors leads to lower prices is precisely backwards. Clearly, policymakers need to re-orientate their thinking about competition in the wireless industry.”

More than any other carrier, AT&T has suffered tremendously over the past few years. After Apple released the first iPhone in 2007 exclusively on its network, data usage exploded. As a result, the speed and stability of AT&T’s network went downhill. The carrier has been aggressively working toward improvement, but as more data-hungry smartphone users pour in every day, AT&T — and for that matter, many other carriers — probably feel like they are biting off more than they can chew.

So, what do you think about this and the potential impact it could have on mobile competition?

[via FierceWireless]

The fact that Siri has had such a large impact on Wolfram Alpha in only a few months not only proves iPhone customers are actually using Siri, but how useful Wolfram Alpha’s technology is. It may also prove a long-term threat for Google, as technologies like Siri could become a disruptive platform that stands between users and search engines.

I’ve always been interested in Wolfram Alpha because it’s called an answer-engine rather than a search engine. This implies that there isn’t a need to search — you just get what you asked for. I own an iPhone 4 so I don’t have access to Siri, but I’d be willing to bet I would use Wolfram Alpha much more often if I had an iPhone 4S. Its website, wolframalpha.com, isn’t exactly the easiest URL for beginners to remember. Plus, since Google, Bing, and the like are all baked into most web browsers, it’s more convenient to use those search engines.

Now the tables could be turning, as technology generally simplifies as it evolves over time. The next logical step for search engines is to remove the search part of it and just get users directly to the answer they are looking for. This isn’t a viable solution for every query, but Wolfram Alpha executes this in as many ways possible. Google should feel a little bit threatened by Siri and Wolfram Alpha. Combined, search engines can seem second-rate.

[via PhoneArena]

Eight in ten women now say they have an interest in consumer electronics and 41 percent of them indicated they were “very interested.” This is an increase of about 10 percent from CEA’s 2007 The Truth About Women and Consumer Electronics study. You can bet that the rise in smartphones and tablets is helping this cause because these are much more personal devices.

Men typically spend more than women per year in electronics, but the gap is shrinking. Men previously spent around $200 more on average than women, but this latest study tightens the gap to about $61 with men spending $728 per year and women spending $667. 61 percent of women indicated they were at least a part of the decision-making process for buying gadgets, so even if they aren’t doing the spending, women very well could be a driving force behind it.

There’s plenty of important women working in the CE field, too. IntoMobile‘s own Kelly Hodgkins is a prime example and she can corroborate portions of this study.

“Just in the last few years, many of my non-technical friends are now rocking an iPhone, iPad or Android device. I also get lots of questions about which camera to buy and which eReader is the best. I can see more and more ladies now stepping up their interest in devices and most are not swayed by pastel products,” Hodgkins said. “They may grab a purple case, but they are looking for devices that fit in their palms and their purses, not ones that look pretty in pink.”

[via TechCrunch]

The study also shows that Android devices lead the iPhone when it comes to first-time smartphone buyers. In the study, Android trounced the wildly popular iOS phone by grabbing 57 percent of first-time buyers, while the iPhone reported only 34 percent during the same period. This is most likely due to the vast array of choices when it comes to Android handsets and price points.

The research also showed that smartphones continued to climb in Q4 2011, reaching 68 percent of the total mobile phone market, which is an increase of 18 percentage points since Q4 2010. To no one’s surprise, the latest iPhone (iPhone 4S) came in as the number one selling phone. The top five handsets for the quarter included the Apple iPhone 4S, Apple iPhone 4, Apple iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy S II and the Samsung Galaxy S 4G.

All in all, this study isn’t bad news for Apple but it’s horrible news for other Android phone makers. Samsung is proving to be head and shoulders above the rest of the manufacturers out there when it comes to making Android devices. Other companies will have to adjust in order to stay relevant.

[via NPD]

Google said that 41 percent of people turned to their mobile devices during the game to look up information about Super Bowl commercials and that rose from 25 percent before the game. The search giant didn’t explain why but I’m pretty sure I know: most people don’t want to be using a laptop during the game but there’s nothing wrong with pulling out your smartphone to get some more information.

Did you use your phone during the game to look up a Super Bowl ad? Check out the infographic below and let us know your experiences in the comments.

[Via Google]

“Smart phone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone,” VP and Principal Analyst of Canalys, Chris Jones, commented. “In the space of a few years, smart phones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition.”

The 488 million smartphone shipments are up 63 percent from the 299.7 million in 2010. PC shipments grew too, but by 15 percent. Even with tablet growth at a staggering 274 percent in 2011, the PC still couldn’t keep up with the enormous demand for iOS and Android handsets. However, Canalys interestingly predicts slowed smartphone growth in 2012 “as vendors exercise greater cost control and discipline, and put more focus on profitability.” The rise in $299 Android phones seems to support the latter suggestion, but only time can tell.

Whatever happens in 2012, it’s clear that the future of computing is changing.

[via Engadget]

Of course, what’s great news for Apple is horrible news for other manufacturers, as Dediu’s chart of the eight largest OEMs above shows a vast difference in cash-flow. It turns out that Apple is eating everyone’s lunch when it comes to profits, with only five phone makers seeing any kind of profit at all in the mobile phone business. The only company that’s even remotely challenging Apple is rival Samsung, with a 16 percent profit share, while all the others are either barely getting by or in the red.

That said, we must keep in mind this research is based off of all phones sold around the world, not just smartphones  – so the data is even more telling. Apple is a juggernaut in the mobile phone biz, it’s crushing companies which should have the advantage of using Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating systems. And when it comes to profits, manufacturers are getting their clocks clean as the gap continues to widen.

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[via Forbes, Photo via Shutterfly, Sven Hoppe

The report goes on suggesting that the monitoring of cardiac outpatients is currently leading the field, though in time the management of diabetes and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder) and other chronic diseases will play an important role in the market. In the meantime, report author Anthony Cox says that more trials are needed to further convince the medical establishment of remote patient monitoring benefits.

Further findings from the report include:

• Mobile healthcare and medical app downloads will reach 44 million in 2012, rising to 142 million in 2016.
• Clarification from the US FDA on which mHealth apps will require FDA approval is still required but is expected to add further impetus to the market.
• Developing markets continue to benefit from SMS-based education programmes, while app-based services will appear in the medium term.
• EHR (electronic health records) have yet to gain significant traction even in developed markets but in the long term will become an important component of mHealth offerings

As usual, you can get additional information from Juniper’s website.