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Android vs. iPhone: Is Google the smartphone leader? Is Apple?

Android vs. iPhone: Is Google the smartphone leader? Is Apple?

Is Google the smartphone leader? Is Apple? How about BlackBerry maker Research In Motion? According to a report this week from industry researcher Nielsen, they all are!

Nielsen tallied the number of U.S. consumers who are using smartphones under contract on wireless networks. By that measure, Google’s Android operating system leads with 29 percent of the market. Android phones, though, are made by a variety of manufacturers, including HTC, Motorola Mobility and Samsung.

Apple and Research In Motion are the dominant smartphone makers, both with a 27 percent market share. However, the iPhone and the BlackBerry are tied for second as the most popular smartphone operating systems.

“Most Admired”: Speaking of Apple, it was the undisputed leader on Fortune magazine’s yearly list of “World’s Most Admired Companies” released this week.

“The company’s blistering pace of new product releases” — including Wednesday’s iPad 2 announcement and last month’s Verizon iPhone launch — “has continued to set the bar high for tech companies across the board,” Fortune noted on its website.

Google was No. 2. The Mountain View Internet juggernaut “maintains its reign as the king of search,” the magazine noted. It’s “also spreading through more and more devices with its free, open-source operating systems.” Google was No. 2 last year and No. 4 in 2009.

The Fortune list is based on a survey of businesspeople. The other Silicon Valley companies on the Top 50 are: Cisco Systems (28); Netflix (40); eBay (45); and Oracle (48).

Mobile search: Speaking of Google, it has a dominant 97 percent share of spending on mobile search advertising, leaving the alliance of Sunnyvale Internet powerhouse Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing with just 3 percent of the market, according to research by Sunnyvale-based Efficient Frontier and Macquarie Securities.

The research is based on Efficient Frontier’s data on mobile ad spending — and not the share of smartphone and tablet searches that take place on Google, Yahoo or Bing. (The share of searches on Yahoo and Bing is almost certainly higher than 3 percent, the researchers said.)

Efficient Frontier CEO David Karnstedt said the $750 million purchase last year of mobile ad company AdMob “really puts Google ahead of the game.”

For each 1 percent shift in U.S. search traffic from desktops to mobile devices, Google gains $50 million in ad revenue, while the Yahoo-Bing alliance loses $20 million in revenue, although this excludes revenue from incremental searches, the researchers said. “In terms of market share, Google right now completely dominates the market,” said Sid Shah, director of business analytics for Efficient Frontier.

Juniper Networks’ surge: The Sunnyvale network equipment maker’s stock has climbed in recent weeks to make it one of the 10 most valuable Silicon Valley tech companies. (This is another list, by the way, on which Apple is No. 1 and Google is No. 2.)

After the company’s analyst meeting Thursday in San Francisco, Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White noted that Juniper “is taking aim” at San Jose industry behemoth Cisco Systems and other industry rivals. “We believe Juniper is likely to be disruptive to incumbent networking players of all sizes in the coming years,” White wrote in an e-mail Friday.

In the past year, Juniper stock has traded as low as $22.25 a share — and as high as $44.98. The shares closed Friday at $44.11, giving Juniper a market value of $23.6 billion — more than such well-known Silicon Valley names as Yahoo, Applied Materials and Adobe Systems.

[Thanks: http://www.mercurynews.com]

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