[HD2 General] vangrieg:
Look, that report is ultimate crap. I'm not an IT professional, I'm a management consultant, a modeling and forecasting expert. I admit I haven't myself studied the phone market on the job but I can see how this Gartner report was made. It's based on assumptions that are dubious at best. You could as well use a crystal ball.

That $4.61 bln is sales revenue, not profit. I don't have the revenue from Android headsets, but it's a rather marginal amount with some numbers.

If I go to a local phone retailer or the HTC online store here what do I see? Discounts and promos for Android phones, free software, free carkits, stuff like that. I don't see this even for the rather mediocre Diamond. Now, I wouldn't blame the OS for this - the hardware and design may not be good enough to make these phones a huge success the OS may deserve in the mass market. But here's the problem: nobody really knows where Android will go. Maybe it'll surpass everything else like Gartner says. Maybe not. Maybe it'll die out like a fad. Nobody knows that, neither I nor you nor the Gartner folks. For manufacturers it's a bet, and they approach it as such. True, it would probably make sense to make a device with Leo class hardware and Android if one wanted to see how good the OS would be in terms of sales. But HTC is having real challenges - they need to improve the situation with declining average phone prices and improving profitability. If it works, it's OK to do some experimenting. I still don't see why they need to migrate to a new OS in their flagship product though. There's just no urge and no sane commercial reason.

Actually, I don't care either way, I don't have an intrinsic preference for WM, I just prefer it as a user compared to Android and iPhone because of a combination of factors.

Well, I know full well that IE on WM is barely usable for surfing, and decent builds of Opera Mobile appeared not too long ago so I'm not surprised to see low internet usage from WM.

In addition to that, I would expect WM user base to use the internet less frequently in general. Why? Because iPhone is positioned as an internet device to a large extent, and Android is a geek toy, so their users will always be much more active surfers. If I take a look around me (this is not scientfic in any way, of course), I see WM in meetings and used by my colleagues with like 90% share of all smartphones (I happen to live in a country where use of Blackberries is limited pretty much to employees of US companies). Now, I can bet money that I'm one of two or three people who use their phone for browsing.

And finally, browser statistics is very unreliable. As an owner of a web site I know how difficult it is to find a service that detects Opera Mobile properly. Most sites and browser detection scripts confuse it with the desktop version.

This is not to say that browsing is unimportant or that better browsing capabilities aren't a threat to WM. This is also not to say that WM's future is nothing but bright and Android will disappear. I'm simply saying that at this stage there's no compelling business for a fairly large smartphone manufacturer to bet all their money on a new OS. What you are saying about WM not being a platform for market share as opposed to Android is so far a theory that has to be proven. WM, on the other hand, is the platform for sustainable cash flows for HTC. MS has a chance to change the playing field if they do it right. They were lazy and inactive for too long, but WM is far from being dead. Whether they will manage to use what they have and improve things we'll see.

EDIT: the moderator comment came when I was typing this, so my apologies. I'm done discussing Android here. :)