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Premium Android Hits the Wall: the Q2 2015 Smartphone Scorecard

September 3, 2015

Charles Arthur, whose column appears in The Guardian, crafts an insightful quarterly smartphone scorecard. Below is the latest installment, published on his site, The Overspill. It’s an eye-opening read, and below I’ve pulled out my favorite sentences.

Premium Android and the piranhas

“Premium” Android is getting torn apart, piranha-style. Cheaper phones from Chinese companies such as Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus, and Oppo are taking away their high-end Chinese business. Slowdowns in developing countries (notably south America) are killing sales there.

And in the west, there isn’t the same appetite for continued upgrades that there was; people are upgraded out. […]

The peculiar thing is that Samsung is throwing everything it has at the premium end. You can now choose (depending on location) from the following:

  • Galaxy S6
  • Galaxy S6 Edge
  • Galaxy S6 Edge Plus
  • Galaxy Note 5

and that’s just this year’s models. […]

The iPhone, meanwhile, pulls people in and generally keeps them there too. […]

The point of no return?

I don’t think the crash in premium Android sales is a one-off. The competition from low- and mid-priced devices is fierce now, and yet these companies don’t seem to be putting any clear blue water between them; they’re not offering anything better than they did a year ago. […]

More than ever, the smartphone business is turning into one where only two companies make money from handsets – and increasingly, only one gets the top-end business. For the rest, they need something new to come along that they can get into and make some profit.

Spot on.

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Filed Under: Android, Apple, Samsung, Smartphones

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