Can anyone explain the advantage of the original graphic over a nicely captioned table of data?
Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK.
US Mobile phone market share by OS and maker
Android 51%
Samsung 17%
HTC 14%
Motorola 11%
Other 9%
iOS (Apple) 34%
Blackberry 9%
Windows Mobile 3%
HTC 2.9%
Palm 0.1%
Other 0.2%
Windows 7 1.3%
HTC 0.5%
Samsung 0.5%
Nokia 0.3%
Symbian 0.9%
WebOS 0.6%
Above needs a clearer indication that the OS percentages are totals, and then split by manufacturer. I might try a two entry table so you could get market share by manufacturer or by OS, but then quite a few are single OS manufacturers.
I find the rounding of the larger market shares to nearest percent a bit worrying given that Palm is being listed as a discrete total. The 'rounding error' on Apple's % could be bigger than HTC/Windows 7 for instance
In Europe, set theory is taught early on. In the US where it is not, the average person seems challenged to quickly visualize the relative significance of sets and subsets of numbers from a table.
In any case, I think the correctly drawn rectangular chart conveys the significance in a single holistic glance, while the table above requires quite a few "memory registers" for comparing the sets and their parts.
Alas, set theory and the Venn diagram approach has been off the UK syllabus for some time as well as in the US.
I take your point about the correctly drawn/direct proportion version of the graphic being more quickly assimilated. I just think that with such a 'dynamic range' of data (0.1% compared with 0.2% in one category compared with 17% vs 14% in another) any kind of graphic will require very high resolution to convey the overall picture. I suspect that may have been the reason for the non-proportionality in the original Nielsen graphic.
I agree, viewing the data in a table made it a lot clearer to me, thanks.
For instance, I never knew Palm Inc. made Windows Mobile devices. I had to DuckDuckGo it, I've never even seen anyone use one. And apparently Palm stopped building them in 2009 [1].
Also, it's shocking (to me) that Windows Mobile still has double the installed base as Windows Phone does — it's not like Windows Mobile was a great smartphone platform, given its Pocket Internet Explorer was comparable to IE5-6.
The 9% installed base for Blackberry doesn't surprise me, and I imagine that long after RIM doesn't make phones anymore, there will be users who are still tied to its services. I foresee it going the way of IBM.
Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK.
Above needs a clearer indication that the OS percentages are totals, and then split by manufacturer. I might try a two entry table so you could get market share by manufacturer or by OS, but then quite a few are single OS manufacturers.I find the rounding of the larger market shares to nearest percent a bit worrying given that Palm is being listed as a discrete total. The 'rounding error' on Apple's % could be bigger than HTC/Windows 7 for instance