Smartphone Application Downloads Forecast

ABI Research has recently published a forecast for smartphone application downloads world wide for 2009 - 2015, and which can bee seen in the chart below:

While iPhone apps are still going to be the leading source of downloads, for the year of 2010, Android is expected to have over 800 millions application downloaded, a major increase compared to 2009. Beside iPhone and Android, Blackberry and Symbian are also catching up on sales. What all this means, at least for me, is that it is a great time to be a mobile developer :)

Android and Symbian on Netbooks

Corresponding to a report by In-Stat, HP is pushing Android into Netbooks. From the Information Alert:

"This solution bypasses the huge memory, storage, and graphics requirements associated with Windows and lowers hardware cost, as well as the software cost. It also addresses the changes in the market. Over the past decade, we've seen two megatrends in electronics – mobility and the Internet. As content and applications migrate to the Internet, these trends will change to mobile Internet and Internet ubiquity. Adopting Android or another open source OS with a custom UI and good browser technology addresses these changes in many specific applications and usage models."

I do agree with the article, and I believe that Android will have a bigger impact on non-smartphone devices (such as Netbooks) than it will have on smartphones.

Symbian is not behind on all this. According to this article, the S60 5th Edition runs on a "off the shelf Intel Atom based motherboard", which means directly on the x86 hardware. The difference is that Symbian runs on x86, while Android runs on ARM.