The unstoppable rise of smartphones and tablets will see 1.2 billion of the devices being bought worldwide next year, analyst Gartner is predicting. It also forecasts sales of 821 million of the smart devices this year — accounting for 70 percent of total devices sold in 2012. Tablet sales to businesses are also set to grow substantially, says the analyst. → Read More
Corning’s Gorilla Glass got famous for being the scratch-resistant front screen cover material on Apple’s iPhone. Then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs talked Corning CEO Wendell Weeks into producing production quantities of the stuff, the legend goes, and now, it’s been featured on over 1 billion devices worldwide, the company announced in its quarterly earnings release, but the news wasn’t all good. → Read More
Last week, we got a peek at HTC’s J Butterfly Japan-only Android phone, with a huge 1080p 5-inch display that manages a crazy 440ppi pixel density, and today, Android Central is claiming a new North American HTC flagship phone coming to Verizon will offer the same screen on our shores. The HTC DLX, as the report claims it’s called, appears to share both design and spec cues with the J Butterfly. → Read More
We are just getting into reporting season, where some (but not all) handset makers tell us how many handsets they’ve sold in the last three months, but Strategy Analytics has taken a punt to say that Q3 will be the quarter that we have hit a major milestone: there are now more than 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide — 1.038 billion, to be exact. It’s taken 16 years to pass 1 billion, but the… → Read More
It’s definitely on between Samsung and Apple, with the two are battling it out in consumer hearts, courts around the world, and in supply chain arrangements. But now, the company’s two flagship smartphones go head-to-head in that timeless venue, the blender. Watch the Samsung Galaxy S III face-off against the iPhone 5 in a competition that neither can truly win. → Read More
comScore today released its latest U.S. mobile market rankings, covering usage by 30,000 consumers over a three-month period ending August 2012 — that is, in the period just before the launch of Apple’s newest iPhone, and during the time when Samsung was slapped with a $1 billion+ fine over a patent suit brought against it by Apple. In that time, Samsung retained its position as the country’s… → Read More
According to a new report from research firm IHS, Apple’s iPhone 5 display lags behind the Samsung Galaxy S III’s on the important measure of color gamut, which creates a more vibrant, crisp image with better overall color saturation, but the difference in terms of how users perceive the margin could actually be negligible, and is unlikely to alter buying decisions. → Read More
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the WPP-owned market research group, today released its latest 12-week smartphone sales figures across the key markets in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere, and the figures show that Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is definitely making some progress, and in at least one case, in Italy, overtaking RIM as the fourth-largest smartphone OS in terms of actual sales. But it… → Read More
Editor’s note: Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He’s responsible for identifying investment opportunities in Internet-related companies in addition to working closely with companies across the firm’s portfolio. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Building and controlling a marketplace is hard. Marketplaces consist of two sides: supply (sellers) and demand… → Read More
Google’s Android smartphone OS is facing a lot of challengers in the low-cost smartphone segment, from Huawei, ZTE, Samsung and Nokia at the vendor end to Mozilla coming from its position in browser software. But for the short term it appears that there is little for Android to worry about from any single contender. Research out today from Strategy Analytics notes that one of these, Firefox OS… → Read More
Editor’s note: Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He’s responsible for identifying investment opportunities in Internet-related companies in addition to working closely with companies across the firm’s portfolio. You can follow him on Twitter here.
The global advertising market is big. Half a trillion dollars big in 2012. In the tech world we tend to think of the… → Read More
Nokia and Motorola had their day in the device spotlight yesterday, and today it is Amazon’s turn, with Apple’s next week. So in the middle of all of this, just to make sure we don’t forget about it, Samsung has released some numbers on sales of its newest smartphone, the Galaxy S III.
Samsung says it has sold over 20 million units of Galaxy S III in the first 100 days of launch: 6 million in… → Read More
We’ve seen a lot of images of an (alleged) iPhone coming soon with a bigger screen, and some numbers out from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the WPP-owned market analysts, underscore how a bigger iPhone may not be coming a moment too soon. In the last 12 weeks, it found that Android-based smartphones have continued to extend their lead over the rest of the pack, and the charge is being led by the big… → Read More
The latest figures out from IDC confirm that this is the year that China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest smartphone market, with its 25.5% share a significant lead over the U.S.’s 17.8%. The tipping point has been a long time coming: China is the world’s most-populated country, so it was only a matter of time before it would overtake the U.S. But the trend has been accelerated in the… → Read More
Gartner is the latest of the big analyst houses to release its numbers for smartphone and overall mobile sales in Q2. The picture it paints is one of a market that has, effectively, one winner at the moment: Android — and more specifically Samsung — with growth for Apple’s iPhone “paused” as users hold out for the next iPhone and ride out the tough economy.
Worldwide, there were 419 million… → Read More
We have seen reports from Strategy Analytics, IDC and Canalys detailing how many smartphones that handset makers shipped in the last quarter (the takeaway: Android is still on top, with Samsung the chief benefactor); today, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, WPP’s market analytics business, has released its rolling monthly update on how that translates into on-the-ground sales in some of the biggest… → Read More
One more analyst house, Canalys, has released its numbers on global smartphone sales in Q2, and unlike Strategy Analytics and IDC, it has focused on sales by platforms rather than OEMs. In that light, Google’s Android was the clear, all-out winner: in a market that saw 158 million smartphone shipments worldwide, Android accounted for 68% of them, with its 108 million units an increase of 110% over… → Read More
ComScore today released its latest quarterly figures on the state of the mobile market in the U.S. based on active users, and while the exact numbers are different, the basic picture is the same as the one that Strategy Analytics painted earlier in the week around smartphone sales: Apple’s iOS continues to see the strongest gains and Android has remained in the lead but with its lead reduced… → Read More
Have we reached a state of “peak Android” in the same way that the energy industry can reach “peak oil”? This is an idea being floated today by Strategy Analytics. Last week the firm noted that Android partner Samsung was the world’s leading smartphone seller last quarter, taking just over 50% of the market. Today, it’s broken out what’s happening in the key U.S. market: Android sales actually… → Read More
Now that all the big handset makers have put in their quarterly sales figures, Strategy Analytics has done the number crunching for an overall picture of what happened in the mobile market. The upshot: just as many predicted, mobile as a whole — facing wider economic slowdown and “shifting consumer tastes” – remained largely flat, growing by just 1%. But smartphones, still at a less mature… → Read More
Microsoft continues to make a big push with the Windows Phone platform, but figures out today from Strategy Analytics indicate that it’s still barely moving the needle against the Android/iOS juggernaut. In 2012, Microsoft’s Windows Phone will account for only 4.1 percent of the 123 million smartphones that will be sold in the U.S. in the year. That’s a rise, but of less than one percentage point… → Read More
According to the latest data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of the adult cellphone owners in the U.S. now use their phones while watching TV. The main reason they do so isn’t to talk about a program they are watching on Twitter, though. Instead, the majority of cell owners (38%) used their phones to keep themselves occupied during commercials or breaks. Quite a… → Read More
Revenues from mobile ads are only a small fraction of the overall digital advertising pie — and an even smaller slice of overall advertising revenues, but some research out today from the Interactive Advertising Bureau underscore why that may well change in the future: ads that appear on touchscreen devices like tablets and smarphones are showing some of the highest levels of engagement of all… → Read More
We know that Apple has been making a killing from the iPhone, with the device reigning as the single-most popular smartphone in a number of markets — despite Android-based handsets collectively having a bigger lead. Now, with the fifth anniversary of the iPhone fast approaching — it’s June 29 — Strategy Analytics has calculated just how big that killing is: Apple has shipped 250 million iPhones… → Read More
Feature phones are not the future. Of course that verges on tautology; of course everyone will have a smartphone, until everyone has something smaller and better and even more integrated into the fabric of our lives, like Google Glasses or cybernetic jawbone/retinal implants or whatever Charles Stross dreams up next. But when, exactly?
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life wandering around and … → Read More
New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech — a market research division of WPP — show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18.
Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of… → Read More
Do you regularly use your cell phone to coordinate meetings, solve an unexpected problem, decide which restaurant to eat at, look up the score of a sporting event, check traffic, call help in an emergency situation or find information to help settle an argument? These activities make you a “just-in-time” cell user according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. → Read More
The mobile industry will reel in more than $1.5 trillion in revenues in 2012, with 28 percent of that, $400 billion, attributable to mobile data, according to new research out from analyst Chetan Sharma.
He notes that within the revenues expected for mobile data, non-messaging revenues led by apps, mobile web browsing and streaming media have finally overtaken those of traditional messaging… → Read More
New numbers out from Nielsen today point to just how close the U.S. is to having more smartphone than feature phone users: analysts say 49.7 percent of cell phone users currently own a smartphone, a big leap on the 36 percent who owned smartphones only a year ago.
What’s increasingly clear in that growth is that, at least in the U.S., no other platform is proving to be a contender against… → Read More
Android has become the most popular platform in smartphone sales, and that domination is slowly but surely making itself felt in other aspects of the mobile experience — just as Google would have wanted it to be.
Some figures out from the number-crunchers at StatCounter have found that Android’s native browser has finally overtaken Opera to become the world’s most popular mobile web browser. → Read More
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