A Surge in Smartphone Adoption Rates in Canada

This week, the Internet marketing research giant and data specialist, comScore, released its MobiLens service data, revealing key trends in the Canadian smartphone industry. As of September 2011, eight million Canadians owned smartphones – a figure representing 40% of the total mobile market in Canada. The highly anticipated data reveals that the Canadian smartphone adoption rates are increasing aggressively; with a seven per cent increase in just the past six months! One surprising fact to come out of the comScore data was that RIM still leads the pack with a 35.8% market share, albeit, followed closely by Apple’s 30.1%. Also, although Google’s Android is sitting in the number three spot with only 25%, it is important to note that Android has doubled its market share during the last six months; corresponding fluidly with the global surge in Android device purchases within the past few months. (FYI: Android gobbled up more than half of all global smartphones sales in Q3 alone!) The dying fossil Symbian is ranked at the fourth spot, with 4.2%, followed by the new kid on the block, Microsoft (at 3.2%).

In terms of content use, it seems Canadians are using the phones to consume a very wide and diverse range of content and information, and of course to no surprise, the smartphone users are outdoing the feature-phone users in every form and aspect of mobile content consumption, as shown in the chart below.  With such a fast pace of smartphone adoption and such diverse and broad range of smartphone use, the Canadian market is shaping to be the perfect place for businesses to embrace mobile technology and provide the added comfort and value that the Canadian consumers are soon going to automatically expect.  Instead of waiting for mobile access to become a mainstream consumer service before you invest the necessary resources, which you will inevitably have to do, we suggest hopping on the mobile train in its relative infancy, and taking advantage of its current indie and avant-garde profile to garner some serious respect and up your street cred, or as we say in the marketing world “gain some competitive advantage by becoming and early adopter.”  For being so forward thinking.

The news everyone has been waiting for has finally come out today: Nokia, the biggest handset maker in the world, both for “dumbphones” and “smartphones” announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft using its Windows Phone platform.

Based on Nokia and Microsoft’s latest deal, Windows phone will be the primary operating system for Nokia’s smartphones. This news shook up the mobile world, especially Intel that has just been thrown under the bus. The Nokia/ Intel strategic partnership a while back to create the MeeGo platform for smartphones was Intel’s effort to partner with the handset maker, but with Nokia dating Microsoft right now, it seems that Intel was just stood up!

Stephen Elop and Steve Ballmer announced the news on Nokia’s blog in a post. Below is the detail from the blog:

»  Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.

»  Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. Nokia will contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.

»  Nokia and Microsoft will closely collaborate on development, joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap to align on the future evolution of mobile products.

»  Bing will power Nokia’s search services across Nokia devices and services, giving customers access to Bing’s next generation search capabilities. Microsoft adCenter will provide search advertising services on Nokia’s line of devices and services.

»  Nokia Maps will be a core part of Microsoft’s mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter advertising platform to form a unique local search and advertising experience.

»  Nokia’s extensive operator billing agreements will make it easier for consumers to purchase Nokia Windows Phone services in countries where credit-card use is low.

»  Microsoft development tools will be used to create applications to run on Nokia Windows Phones, allowing developers to easily leverage the ecosystem’s global reach.

»  Microsoft will continue to invest in the development of Windows Phone and cloud services so customers can do more with their phone, across their work and personal lives.

»  Nokia’s content and application store will be integrated with Microsoft Marketplace for a more compelling consumer experience.

Here is the video where Stephen Elop announces Microsoft partnership. Nokia & Microsoft partnership

Elop and Ballmer didn’t give any more details of the partnership so we don’t know what’s going to happen to Microsoft’s other partnerships for devices, such as HTC, Dell, and Samsung; or what’s going to happen to Symbian and MeeGo. We don’t know the answers to our questions yet, but we know one thing for a fact. As all the eyes are on the Nokia right now, if the company doesn’t get it right, this could send the company into freefall. We believe for Nokia, this is going to be tough; so let’s await the future and see!

While consumers’ expectations of smartphones are rising everyday, the mobile industry hasn’t educated consumers about the limitations of mobile devices and this has led to idealistic expectations of mobile phones and mobile ads. A part of their unrealistic expectations is that smartphones can do just about anything and everything for them.

Before the Smartphone’s boom, most cell phone owners were satisfied with only clear voice calls, fast texting, and simple games. But times have changed and consumers have great expectations from their mobile devices; they want the best smartphones at the lowest possible prices. They demand more features, better performance, the coolest apps, and indirectly the best mobile ads.

The competition in mobile OS market is intense and bloody! Everywhere you go, you see Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Symbian devotees trying to make their friends switch or upgrade; marketers and advertisers are adding mobile to their strategy; manufacturers and app developers fight for increased market presence; wireless carriers try their best to attract more customers, and basically everyone in the mobile industry is fighting for more profit, higher market share, or stronger presence.

As a result of this hype, today more than ever before, mobile advertising is up swinging. Mobile advertising campaigns have become the key to making money with mobile marketing. This means that the opportunities for making money are endless, but the question is how can you turn mobile ad campaigns into successful mobile marketing that puts money in your pocket?

How to best turn mobile ads to dollars?

Cell phone adoption rates, especially smartphone adoption rate are rising everyday, so is the importance of mobile advertising; therefore, marketers should keep in mind the necessary qualities in creating successful mobile ads.

Marketers should also bring into consideration that many consumers are still less than thrilled about ads on this very personal device. In order to increase the usefulness of the channel, mobile marketers must cater the features and formats of their mobile ads to their consumer’s preferences. Meaning that they should understand not only do consumers expect mobile ads to inform, but also they expect the mobile ad to provide relevant information tailored to their preferences.

According to a survey from Yahoo! and Nielsen Company, being informative was the most important quality of mobile ads for a wide variety of products and services. Relevancy was a relatively close second in most categories. Respondents cared relatively little about the graphical and multimedia elements of the ads. This contrasts with research on iPad advertising, which has shown that tablet users pay more attention to the look and feel of the ads and care more about the colors.

According to the InsightExpress “Digital Consumer Portrait” published in 2010, the heaviest mobile users generally did not find mobile banners annoying, while full-page ads were seen less favorably.

Based on the research that has been done on mobile ad campaigns and our expertise in this arena, we recommend marketers to focus on relevant information for their mobile ad. A smartphone user’s satisfaction of mobile ads will only improve if the mobile industry releases flawless, informative, relevant mobile ads that truly offer excellent value and choice for the user.

As mobile ads are getting millions of clicks and eyeballs, it’s important to create an ad that meets users expectation. Time on a mobile ad with a brand is a great deal for a retailer; it is a very intimate experience exploring a brand on such a personal device; isn’t it?

There’s a teaser out today for Motorola‘s Tablet, Motorola Everest, to be released and announced at CES 2011.  The ad promotes the tablet as the latest and best tablet in the history of Tablets, claims the iPad is just a big iPhone and the Galaxy Tab as just running Android phone OS.

The device apparently runs Android (3.0/2.4) Honeycomb and was demoed by Google’s Andy Rubin at D:Dive into Mobile at San Francisco last week.  Be sure to check out the interview with Andy or view the portion of the interview with the demo below:

With the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) now passed, we saw yet another wave of new app store announcements.  Following in the footsteps of Apple, these app stores provide developers relatively easily to build and distribute apps while also giving them an opportunity to monetize on them.  To the end-user they are giving them an endless list of of applications and things to do on their devices.

It ‘s great to see that with this wave of app-stores the focus was not just smartphones but much wider.  One which caught our attention was an announcement from Samsung:

Samsung introduced Samsung Apps as the platform to download and use apps across all Samsung devices such as HDTVs, phones, blu-ray devices, cameras, printers etc.   So imagine using some of the apps that you’ve come to love on your iPhone directly on your HDTV while watching TV!

Although the concept of an internet-connected TV (or any of the above devices) is not new at all, empowering developers to build and distribute to these broad range of devices is truly innovative and I am sure we will see many interesting applications that will captivate end-users.

This is particularly interesting to us at Plastic as we will be able to help our clients expand their applications beyond mobile devices and truly everywhere the consumer is!

Check out the presentation at CES by Samsung:

Want to read more on Samsung Apps? Check these out:
Gizmodo Coverage
Engadget Coverage