Not the Android and iOS numbers: Steady but unspectacular growth for Android and gradual but not catastrophic drops for Apple are pretty much in line with expectations.
But the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are dramatic changes from the same quarter a year ago. Windows Phone looks to be finally taking off, with 52 percent growth in December, January, and February of this year compared to the same three months in 2012. And BlackBerry is falling of a sales cliff, with an 81 percent plunge in sales.

The big kahuna, of course, is Android.

Google’s Android now owns more than half of U.S. smartphone sales, with 51.2 percent market share. That’s up from 45.4 percent in the quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS is holding fairly steady at number two, with 43.5 percent, down slightly from last year’s 47 percent.
What’s interesting about the Windows numbers, even though they are on a much smaller installed base, is that Windows Phone is currently the fastest-growing mobile phone platform. At 4.1 percent of mobile operating system market share, Microsoft still has a very long ways to go, and growth rates could start to slow as it piles up share. But the numbers have to be encouraging for Redmond as it is finally gaining traction in a market that it once appeared to have completely lost.

And the international numbers contain pockets of even more good news, such as Italy, where Windows Phone now makes up 13.1 percent of new phone sales.
Apple’s mobile offerings are strongest with the two largest U.S. carriers, AT&T and Verizon. Both sell a majority of iOS smartphones, with AT&T selling 68.4 percent iOS versus 20.8 percent Android, and Verizon selling 55.1 percent iOS versus 43.4 percent Android.
Meanwhile, Samsung is continuing to expand its Android leadership, taking away market share
from competitors LG and HTC:

“Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Samsung smartphone, 19 percent had previously owned a Samsung feature phone, 15 percent owned a HTC smartphone, 14 percent owned an LG feature phone, 10 percent owned a Samsung smartphone, and 9 percent owned a BlackBerry,” said Kantar Worldpanel analyst Mary-Ann Parlato. “It’s apparent that Samsung is successful at capturing users from across the competitor set and not just gaining from their own loyalists.”

Kantar Worldpanel is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel in the world, and conducts more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone to determine what consumers are buying and using.

That 350,000 is the same as the number of total iOS apps reported by Apple as of January 2011, just a year after the launch of the iPad. At the time, Apple had only 60,000 iPad apps, which means iPad-specific titles have seen a 483 percent increase in the intervening years.

Apple also revealed that it has App Stores in 155 countries, covering 90 percent of the total iOS user population, and that it has so far paid out more than $9 billion to developers. That’s a $1 billion increase from the total it reported it had paid out to developers as of mid-February.

Apple now pays out $1 billion per quarter to devs, Oppenheimer said at the close of the call, and $4.5 billion or half of the grand total has been paid out during the past four quarters alone.

But when it comes to mobile, Amazon’s ambitions are anything but limited to ecommerce.

Recent reports from BI Intelligence detail Amazon’s mobile ambitions, analyzing everything from the potential impact of a rumored Amazon smartphone to Amazon’s ability to become a huge player in mobile advertising.

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Here’s a brief overview of Amazon’s mobile ambitions:

Tablet Sales: Amazon’s Kindle tablets and Android tablets had a big third quarter last year. Kindle shipments, including e-readers, jumped 104% in the quarter, likely helped by the early September launch of the new Kindle Fire tablet line and the fact that the 7-inch version began shipping that month. It’s tablets priced very competitively. With the release of the Nexus and the iPad mini, the competition has never been hotter.

Software sales: The Amazon Appstore has been a huge success on the Kindle Fire. Developers make almost as much revenue per active user as they do on iOS. Google Play has many more users, but it does not generate substantially more revenue in the U.S. than the Amazon Appstore. Apple executives reportedly worry that Amazon’s controlled, iTunes-like approach makes it more competitive than other app stores, including one operated by Google. Given strong early results, Amazon shouldn’t have a hard time convincing developers to bring their apps to an Amazon phone.

Media sales: The Kindle Fire is best understood as an interactive catalog which drives sales of all sorts of Amazon products. The Kindle ecosystem includes ebooks (Kindle app), music (Amazon MP3), movies and TV shows (Amazon Prime), and apps. Almost 50 million Americans visited an Amazon site on their smartphones in July. Over 86 million U.S. smartphone owners accessed a retailers’ app or mobile site, meaning 47% went to an Amazon property. The next largest smartphone draw was eBay, which had 33 million visitors with a reach of 31%.

Smartphone Sales: Amazon continues to push forward with the makings of a smartphone platform. The potential platform has been widely rumored but not yet confirmed. The beginnings of a platform strategy are coming together: a recent purchase of 3D mapping startup UpNext, last year’s acquisition of voice recognition software creator Yap, and the launch of a prepaid wireless service in Japan. However, big questions remain about its ability to build out and manage a software platform and design the hardware to deliver it.

Mobile ads: Amazon has the potential to be a huge force in mobile apps development and advertising. Data is the lifeblood of online advertising and Amazon has a unique data trove. It’s not just data on what people like to buy, but data on what recommendations work in getting people to buy things.

No matter how much mobile applications talk to one another and sync information back and forth, our devices are still essentially distinct from one another, tied together by cloud services that transfer the information to services and then back and forth between each other. But they’re still ultimately separate, and that means a lot of missed opportunity.

What I’d love to see, and what some are already exploring with projects like the Inferno cross-platform operating system, is a way for all these devices to pool not only the information and media we store on them, but also their resources and raw computing power.

Don’t get me wrong; I love that my iPad operates as a completely standalone computer, as opposed to something that needs to be continually tethered to a central tower, like some of the earliest interactive tablet screens. But the fact that I’m now carrying a fairly powerful computer in my pocket in the form of my iPhone, and that both it and my iPad can’t pool their cumulative resources when necessary to accomplish tasks better and faster is starting to seem like an unnecessary failing.

It’s much more likely that we’ll see more and more processing duties handed off to server farms with the growth of cloud services, especially since there’s greater financial incentive to make that happen in terms of being able to charge for the bandwidth needed to make it happen. But when your television, appliances, phone, router, tablet, notebooks and PCs all have powerful processors on board and plenty of computing power, much of which they aren’t even using most of the time, it seems absurd that we have turn to a remote facility miles away to handle our computing demands.

Every tech company today talks about the age of cross-platform computing, where it doesn’t matter what kind of device you use, you get access to the same content. Facebook’s recent News Feed redesign is all about unifying the experience; Microsoft made a big bet on a shared UI with Windows 8 and Windows Phone; Google is moving in that direction with ChromeOS and Android; and Apple is continually adding more features pioneered on iOS back into OS X and tightening the links between the two with services like iCloud.

Now, however, the time has come for someone to take the next step, and bring our devices together in ways that maximize the truly amazing potential they have as a collective, which dwarfs even the impressive things they can now all do on their own.

It was on 3 April 1973 that Motorola employee Martin Cooper made a call in New York on a Motorola DynaTAC – dubbed a “brick” due to its size and weight – which was widely regarded globally as the first public mobile phone call.

The device was 9 inches tall, comprised 30 circuit boards, had a talk-time of 35 minutes, and took 10 hours to recharge.

Four decades on, a worldwide telecoms industry with annual revenues of £800bn has grown rapidly based on wide choice, falling prices and an array of technologies, resulting in the average mobile being used to take photos, play music and games, send emails, download maps, watch video clips, all as well as talking and texting.

Mike Short, an expert from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said Cooper’s phone call is the first public call people recognise as being a cellular mobile call.

He said the 10 years following that first call were “very much developmental”, with research being carried out in laboratories before services were launched in 1981 in the US.

“Since its first use 40 years ago, the mobile phone has completely changed our lives. The first decade was a research or a ‘demonstrator’ phase, rapidly followed by analogue networks deployed over 10 years from the early 1980s largely based on carphones and used in business in the developed world.

“This soon led to the digital decade mainly between 1993 and 2003 when consumerisation and globalisation of mobile really took off.

“This led to a further data adoption phase with the arrival of 3G and during 2003 to 2013 access to the internet and the wider use of smartphones became a reality,” he said.

The two most significant developments in mobile phone technology have been the widespread availability of devices and their ability to access the internet, Short said.

“In the early days of mobile, consumerisation was not considered. It was made for men in suits in business, whereas consumerisation followed much later.

“And then access to the internet followed much later again. The first smartphones weren’t until about five years ago. So the pace of change has actually sped up over the 40 years, particularly in the past 15 to 18 years,” he said.

Short expects mobile technology to continue to evolve and said people can expect even more developments in future.

“More changes are expected. The early days of mobile were all about voice, whereas today it’s much more about data.

“And the point about data is that we can carry voice calls over the data channel, but in future we’ll move towards fuller data services such as video – much more video to video calling, much more screens on the wall in your home, maybe more video television downloaded, catchup TV, that sort of thing.

“So there’s a lot more innovation to come, particularly in the data and video worlds,” he said.

Mobile phone users will have noticed these changes in the last few years, as phones have become more affordable and sit lightly in the palm of their hand – but innovators are working to enhance these aspects of modern devices further.

Short said: “The cost has already fallen a long way. What tends to happen is you get more functionality per pound spent.

“That would include more memory, that would include more features, that would include more capability to access the internet at higher speeds.

“The weight has dropped dramatically already, but we’re seeing, probably this year, the first watch-based phones.”

With improvements and changes implemented so frequently, Dr Short said it is hard to know what exactly to expect in the next 40 years, but it is safe to assume millions more people in the world will have access to mobile phones.

“It’s very difficult to predict 40 years’ time because the pace of innovation is speeding up. I would say that we’ll all be mobile, globally, everyone will be mobile.