Nielsen’s announcement on August 2nd that (1) it estimated that smartphones had grabbed 25% of the US wireless market (if that includes prepaid, then about 70M subscribers); and (2) that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of new activations over the past 6 months was well-covered. Given that Android has been adopted by 5 US carriers (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular, collectively representing over 90% of the market) and a multitude of handset makers, it was only a matter of time. That said, the announcement represented a tipping point of sorts. Nielsen’s chart on this is below.

As if to corroborate this, that same week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that on a global basis, 200K Android handsets are being adopted daily, or 6M per month, or 18M per quarter.

When I bought the second Android available handset available in the US (HTC’s MyTouch 3G, from T-Mobile) back last fall so I could keep up with the joneses, finding an Android OS handset to play with beforehand was a bit of a challenge. (Thank you, Seamus.) Not so any more.

The icing on this particular cake came in the form of a call with my father, who casually dropped that he’d picked up a Samsung Galaxy from AT&T. The Galaxy falls in the “superphone” category, i.e., 1 GHz processor and up. Yes, that’s my Dad, rocking the Galaxy superphone running Android 2.1. That is a tipping point. He was migrating from Windows Mobile, also somewhat symbolic in itself. AT&T was apparently of little help during the data porting process, and I have to imagine that this issue will only grow going forward.

Quick post on a solar powered phone from Sharp, available through KDDI AU and Softbank Mobile in Japan, meaning there are both CDMA and UMTS versions. (Coverage by Wireless Watch Japan of a review by Nikkei Tech-On.)

I got to see this phone (not use it, though) during a trip to Japan last month. I do wonder how much time a cellphone (at least one in urban Tokyo) spends directly in sunlight, unless you place it near a window. Nonetheless, snazzy; feel-good; takes advantage of Sharp’s capability to integrate components from its business units; and likely apt for overseas markets.

President Obama’s love for his Blackberry – which model is it, anyway? – has been well-documented, and has inspired coverage of its in-kind marketing impact ($50M, according to the NYT), and a weekly column in the Economist on subjects the new President must face. Unlike President Bush, who forswore email during his two terms, President Obama has vowed to hold onto his, which, apparently will now be possible thanks to an encryption upgrade (link via AlleyInsider).

Congressmen and staff were early Blackberry adopters. I remember the tremendous freakout by staff, members and lobbyists alike during successive outages in Washington in 2005.

The immediacy of short-form, real-time messages will be a boon for researchers down the road, at such time that correspondence is made available. This also begs the question, do Presidents use emoticons?