Between Q4 ’09 and Q1 ’10, Android and iPhone’s share of the smartphone market grew by 2% each. At the same time, smartphone leader Blackberry lost 2% share to fall to 35% of all smartphones while Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS also lost 2% to fall to 19%.

Based on a quick analysis of the apps people are buying on the devices, it's pretty simple: The iPhone and iPod touch are for games. The iPad is for a lot more. And people are spending a lot more (per app) on iPad apps than iPhone apps.

I believe that failure can teach us as much as success. So I asked other software entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure in the hope that we might save others from making the same mistakes. To my surprise I got excellent 12 responses, which I include below along with one of my own. It is a small sample and biased by self selection, but I think it contains a lot of useful insights. It is an unashamedly a long post, as I didn’t want to lose any of these insights by editing it down.

I have to say that I love how your current ebooks are formatted. Both the font and illustrations are clear, and big enough to read - even on the smallest settings. I also appreciate the fact that the books are DRM free and are re-posted when corrections/changes are made to them. Thank you, and keep up the good work!

One of our free titles was the #1 download on Amazon for the entire month of February. The subsequent sales of books 2 and 3 in the series increased by a rate of 20 to 1. For this series, digital sales are approaching 20% of the total product sales distribution and growing. With the visibility of the digital sales on Amazon, we have seen a substantial increase in print sales to the brick and mortar book chains. In this one instance, digital is driving print sales.

The other decision they made on marketing was with price -- despite calls to the contrary, they decided to stick with the $2.99 price on the iPhone. That proved to be very "polarizing" -- almost all of their App Store reviews mentioned the price, both positively ("this is totally worth the money") or negatively ("How dare you charge this much"). They believed that while they would have sold more copies at 99 cents, the $2.99 price gave them a different type of customer, and as they showed with the chart below, they got a different type of reviewer. Free apps, they said, tend to attract a lot more negative reviews in general, while people who pay for paid apps tend to take a little more "ownership" in the game they support.

Technology predictions can come back to haunt you, but this one I’m sure about: The fate of non-HTML formats has been sealed by HTML5 and the iPad. People are finally noticing what was staring them in the face all along—HTML is great for expressing words. The web is mostly about expressing words, and HTML works well for it. The same holds true for electronic books.

I love Tools of Change in Publishing because it is, most of the time, a very appealing balance between theoretical, creative thinking and direct, practical application. Because the audience is part publishing, part programmer, part geek and part executive, presenters need to be able to not only bring in the noise of their new idea, creative concept or new methodology, but also bring in the funk of real, practical application and potential (if not actual) results of that creative idea. It’s a full-brain conference - by which I mean that both left and right brain perspectives are represented and explored.