Q3 enterprise adoption: iPhone slips, Android gains, iPad owns the tablet space
Along with Apple's quarterly results earlier this week, there's another report hitting today that covers a growing segment of the mobile device market: Good Technology's roundup of device activation statistics, compiled from the company's range of Fortune 500 clients that use Good's service to provide secure email and calendaring to handsets and tablets. (See previous results here.) The results this time around: interesting but not that surprising. You can see the full PDF report here.
iPhone and iOS activations continue to lead the field, with iPhones representing 61% of all smartphone activations on Good's platform and iOS devices generally covering 70% of activations (a drop from the 78% share in the previous quarter). Android smartphones, however, picked up some ground on the iPhone over the quarter, showing improvement month over month. Android phones finished the quarter with about 39% of smartphone activations, passing iPad activations again (28.3% vs. 26.3% of the total) after the iPad overtook Android last quarter.
Good's assessment of the iPhone/Android shift is largely in line with Apple's spin: customers put off iPhone 4 purchases in anticipation of a new iPhone release in the fall, which is exactly what we got. Good SVP John Herrema did get a look at preliminary data for the iPhone 4S launch weekend, and given the observed 25% bump in activations over the quarterly average for the iPhone 4, he's confident about an iPhone surge: "Looking forward to Q4, 2011, we expect... the iPhone 4S to be the catalyst for an Apple rally."
When it comes to the iPad versus the larger universe of tablet devices, the story remains that there is no "tablet market" -- the iPad is the only game in town as far as big companies are concerned. The report summary puts it thusly: "To say iOS tablets dominated adoption in the enterprise is to understate the case.... Android tablet activations within Good's customer base remain in the realm of a rounding error compared to what we're seeing with iPad and iPad 2." iOS tablets made up more than 96% of all tablet activations in the quarter.
As always, it's important to note that Good's data does not cover RIM's Blackberry devices, as they are supported by RIM's proprietary server infrastructure; Windows 7 phones and tablets are also not tracked by the company.
