US mobile entertainment company Myxer is an interesting case in point.
It certainly has reach, having delivered over one billion ringtones, wallpapers, videos, apps and games to 33 million unique users. Whether this counts as a well balanced, representative group is less clear however.
Nevertheless, its most recent BoomBox report [PDF link] highlights what it calls BlackBerry's quiet but continued dominance of the off-portal downloads market.
BlackBerry no raspberry
In terms of mobile visits, RIM devices accounted for a massive 63 percent of Myxer's activity in March 2010, up from 58 percent year-on-year.
The number of Myxer registered users with Android devices rose from 7 to 17 percent year-on-year, while Windows Mobile dropped from 21 to 10 percent in the same time frame.
Ignoring iPhone, this chimes with data from comScore which gave RIM 42 percent of the North America smartphone market by install base during February 2010. Apple had 25 percent, Microsoft 15 percent and Google 9 percent.
Equally, of the 22 million smartphone downloads Myxer hosted in March, 72 percent of these came from BlackBerries.
The Curve 8330 was the most active handset in the US, accounting for 22 percent of all March downloads.
Of course, these breakdowns are skewed as iPhone users are much more likely to get their content via the App Store, rather than thirdparty portals such as Myxer. Hence, the reason, iPhone barely figures in Myxer's data.
Indeed, there is an argument that the domination of Blackberry devices in the market is partly due to the less than easy access provided by the official BlackBerry App World store.
Also interesting to note is the gender breakdown in terms of BlackBerry handsets, all of which are used by more women than men, although the split is less pronounced when it comes to newer devices such as the touchscreen Storm.
[source: Myxer]
