Apple has now sold 40m iPads – we estimate 4 to 5m in the UK – and goes into the Christmas season with no credible competitors beyond Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which is so far only available in the USA

Android phones are selling in huge numbers at half the price or less of the iPhone, but would-be iPad competitors are the same price or higher. With the continued absence of a meaningful content ecosystem for Android tablets it is hard to see consumers buying them in substantial numbers

Competing Android tablets have sold around a tenth as many units as the iPad, but others have sold far less: RIM’s PlayBook has been a major disappointment, forcing RIM to write off $485m of inventory

Zoopla and The Digital Property Group, DMGT’s property portfolio which includes Findaproperty, Primelocation and Globrix, announced a merger on 14 October 2011. Under the terms of the proposed merger, DMGT would receive a 55% interest in the merged entity

A merged Zoopla and DPG will compete more effectively with market leader Rightmove, in a property market scaled down by one-third in terms of the number of transactions

We think the merger will give advertisers a better choice and constrain Rightmove’s pricing power, which has seen hefty fee increases on members, most recently in 2010, in 2011 and most recently again in November 2011

Apple is now a $108bn company, with annual revenue up 66% from a year ago and 40% gross margins. September quarter iPhone sales dipped to 17m ahead of a new product launch, but Apple still sold 72m in the last 12m, compared to 40m in the 12m to September 2010

Apple has now sold 40m iPads for $20.3bn revenue, and 11m in the last quarter. All other competing devices have sold perhaps 4m. We expect Apple’s dominance to continue through 2012 and potentially beyond

Google’s Android sold even more smartphones than Apple, activating 150m in the last 12m and 55m in the September quarter. Yet in October Apple sold 4m of the new iPhone 4S in just three days, bringing in around $2.6bn: Google’s annual run-rate mobile revenue is now $2.5bn

National newspaper circulation continued its inexorable decline in September, with daily circulation down 7% year-on-year, although we estimate retail sales value decline was marginal

Sunday popular and mid-market newspaper circulation fell 4% month-on-month, as News of the World buyers continue to drop out of the market; we estimate around a third of ex-readers have not migrated to another title

Publishers are responding to circulation decline in a variety of ways, from churning out bulks to maintain scale, to increasing cover prices, axing international editions and developing their subscriber base

The Guardian has finally launched its iPad app: of the UK’s paid daily newspapers all but the Mirror and Independent now have iPad apps. All of these require payment and all but the FT use Apple’s iTunes billing

Apple has moved to smooth out the buying and reading process with the new Newsstand feature for iPad and iPhone, which adds better discoverability and automatic downloads to the existing subscription offer. This also makes it harder for readers to move to other platforms

There are now 3-4m iPads in the UK: this is more than the 2m people who buy a broadsheet everyday, but it is not clear how many can be converted. Moreover, iPad editions bring in annual revenue per reader of £100-125 where a print reader averages £435: a scale problem remains

In the context of his Inquiry, Lord Leveson invited Claire Enders, as “one of the UK’s foremost media business analysts”, to kick off the seminar series on the 6 October with a synoptic presentation on “Competitive pressures on the press”. The Inquiry is interested in understanding the market economics of the mainstream media, including the impact of technology

This presentation brings together our existing work on the newspaper and consumer magazines industry, with an emphasis on the former, highlighting the challenges to the print media of the internet

A video transcript of Claire’s presentation and the debate on the session’s subject of “Competitive pressures on the press and the pressures on journalism”, may be accessed on the site of the Leveson inquiry, at www.levesoninquiry.org.uk

Amazon has taken the ereader to $79 and the tablet to $200. The Amazon Fire is everything that Android tablets are not: a coherent high-quality user experience rather than a box of components. It will sell well, while new sub-$100 Kindles will reinforce Amazon’s dominance of ebooks

Amazon began as a bookshop, but just 30% of Q2 North American sales were physical media of any kind. The Fire is part of a broader strategy – to embed Amazon in online buying of everything from shoes to nappies to iPads and TVs. The Kindle Fire is a shop window on every coffee table

Media companies should not expect Amazon to be a more congenial partner than Apple. Amazon’s long-term stake in the health of the books or magazine industries is limited: the Kindle is a new way to reach readers and viewers, but not a saviour

Apple will release the iPhone 4S later this month, with substantially upgraded internals but the same design. Despite disappointment at the lack of something with a ‘5’ on the box, this is a solid update that maintains Apple’s competitive positioning

The most significant omission was a lower-priced iPhone. Apple sells the 3GS and now the 4 at lower prices, but lacks a dedicated device to address the sub $300 (SIM-free) market where most future growth will come from. We think this is only a matter of time

Apple’s new ‘Siri’ voice assistant looks very impressive as a USP. If it works, and spreads, it will join apps as a structural problem for Google, drawing people away from web search

Advancing its free-to-air TV project, France’s Canal+ is to buy Bolloré TV’s national channels for €465 million to gain (scarce) licences for FTA terrestrial broadcast

Canal+ plans to leverage its library of original programming to attract upscale audiences, neglected by commercial rivals

However, the Vivendi investment case of a 9% return on capital is built on incompatible assumptions about profit margins and market share – to grow the latter in a mature market, a channel needs to sacrifice the former

In this report we outline the current state and likely development of the war between mobile platforms. We discuss installed bases and activity levels, the key issues facing Apple and Android, including Android fragmentation and Google's acquisition of Motorola, and go on to look at the tablet market and the outlook for RIM, Nokia and Windows Phone.