Apple vs. Samsung and the reality of the Android ecosystem

A winter ago, I postulated that thanks to Samsung’s ability to build and source mobile components — from memory to processors to screens — the company would be able to become one of the leaders in the smartphone ecosystem. The battle, in fact, would be between Samsung and Apple, something that we have reported multiple times over the past year or so. Lately that battle is actually between the iPhone and the Galaxy brands.

Last week my colleague Erica Ogg wrote that Samsung sold an estimated 87.6 million to 94.6 million smartphones in 2011 (though it made a lot less money than Apple, which sold about 58 million iPhones during the first nine months of 2011).

Of course, people didn’t believe me when I pointed out that HTC was about to hit the skids — it eventually did — and that Motorola is going to become an albatross around Google’s neck. It will — and the missing profit targets are only a start.

“A Googorola vertically-integrated smartphone line could counterbalance Samsung’s influence,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple employee and more recently an investor in technology companies. I don’t buy his argument. How is it that the company that was perpetually in trouble starts doing well because someone else bought it?

It may not seem obvious today, but in a few years, as the rest of the world moves away from feature phones to touch-enabled, Internet-connected phones, we will see Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese companies, go head-to-head with Samsung. And they are so dominant in Africa and parts of Asia that we are going to see them become major players in the low-to-medium end of the market.

via Apple vs. Samsung and the reality of the Android ecosystem — Tech News and Analysis.