If you’re a fan of keenly focussed and very informed comment on mobile, then you really should sign up for the Mobile Industry Review weekly newsletter. This week’s edition really chimed with me as a vision of what a truly connected mobile life could be, and how the iPhone is a pathfinder, edging towards it.

As Ewan of MIR points out, the signifying role of the mobile of the future can be summed up in one word: Enablement. That is, allowing the mobile user to do whatever they need to do, seamlessly and easily.

But there’s a big problem, which may stop this party before it gets started.

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Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence. Despite Apple’s non-attendance at last week’s Mobile World Congress, the event made clear that the introduction of the iPhone has had a wide-ranging effect on the industry. There’s no way that I’d say that the iPhone “dominated MWC09“, but the difference this year is that there seem to be some considered responses. Thinking 5 years from now, will Apple be considered a company that kick-started a new wave of smartphones and user experience, but ultimately got left behind?
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I love the statistics behind an industry, watching trends, and so on. And yesterday saw AppleInsider publish a table from Gartner’s new stats on worldwide smartphone sales in Q1, 2008. It’s only a summary of the top 5 manufacturers, but it makes interesting reading. Nokia are top, of course, with their Symbian-based S60 smartphones selling 14.6 million units in Q1, with a fast-moving RIM in second place on 4.3 million units. And, the point of Apple Insider’s article, Apple are a relatively new entry at number 3, having overtaken all other established smartphone makers to achieve worldwide sales of 1.7 million in the quarter. So that’s HTC, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all beaten comfortably by the new contender from Cupertino.

What’s especially notable from the statistics is that Nokia and Apple don’t market their ‘smartphones’ as such. Read the full story