There’s never been a better time to be a developer in the mobile space. There have been a number of news items over the past day or so – here’s a brief roundup.
First off, Apple went and blew everything out of the water with their Q3 earnings report. They sold 3.27 million iPads – only 200,000 short of the 3.47 million Macs sold in the same three months. And when you consider that Mac figure covers iMac, Mac Pro, Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air, it is really incredible. They also sold 8.4 million iPhones, only 1.01 million short of the 9.41 million iPods they sold, which is the closest the two figures have ever been.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also released some new figures this week, revealing China now has over 800 million mobile users (and 420 million internet users). This is the largest number of any country, and exceeds the Chinese government’s predictions. However, the number of 3G subscribers is relatively low at only 25 million, but this is blamed on poor rollouts of 3G-capable networks.
The one piece of bad news for mobile this week is that Google’s Nexus One phone is no longer available to purchase through Google directly. It is still available through select carriers worldwide (Vodafone in the UK). This is countered by the recent news that Android Market has approached 100,000 apps and surpassed 1 billion application downloads.
So all this on top of the recent release of the Windows Phone 7 Tools Beta and Windows Phone 7 Marketplace announcements, the mobile space is looking increasingly like the place to be for developers right now and in the coming months to the end of the year.
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