According to research firm Gartner, although Microsoft shipped 2 million Windows Phone units during Q4 of 2010, it sold 1.6 million units during Q1 of 2011.”Windows Phone saw only modest sales that reached 1.6 million units in the first quarter of 2011,” wrote Gartner. “Devices launched at the end of 2010 failed to grow in consumer preference and CSPs continued to focus on Android.” Gartner is, however, predicting big things for Microsoft’s smartphone operating system. By 2015, the analyti...

Operating systems are big business. But just how big you ask? According to research firm Gartner, sales of server and desktop operating systems totalled nearly $30.4 billion in 2010 alone. “As the global economy recovered, worldwide operating system (OS) revenue totaled $30.4 billion in 2010, a 7.8 percent increase from 2009,” explains Gartner. “Among client OSs, Mac OS was the fastest-growing subsegment in 2010 as the unit shipments of Mac desktop/laptop devices saw strong sales, although f...

Analytics company Flurry has published an interesting study involving Android, iOS, and the U.S. video game market. Following up on a report from 2009, the company notes that the two mobile operating systems accounted for 8% of all U.S. video game sales in 2010 when calculated by revenue. What’s even more interesting is where both Android and iOS are taking their share from: portable gaming players. Console software revenues grew by 5% from 2009 to 2010 — 71% to 75% respectively — with portable ga...

Market analytics firm International Data Corporation (IDC) is predicting a big boom for semiconductor manufactures in 2011. Citing strong tablet and eReader-based semiconductor revenues — $3.3 billion in 2010 alone — IDC is predicting an additional 120% growth rate in 2011. “Media Tablets and eReaders are two devices that share components but whose bills of materials (BOM) are optimized for very different functions,” writes IDC. “The 2010 average Tablet semiconductor BOM was nearly one a...

Market research firm IMS Research on Tuesday said the growing market for tablets and eReaders will continue to have a significant impact on portable PC sales this year. The report shows that the 2010 holiday season capped off a massive fourth quarter for tablets and eReaders. eReader shipments in the quarter were up 90% over the third quarter and 116% year-over-year to 5.1 million units, with Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK the biggest winners. Led by Apple’s iPad, tablet shipm...

According to new data issued by wireless market intelligence firm Berg Insight on Thursday, the global smartphone market grew by nearly three-quarters in 2010. Global smartphone shipments hit 295 million units for the year, a 74% increase over 2009 totals. The firm anticipates that shipments will hit a staggering 1.2 billion units in 2015, at which time there will be an estimated 2.8 billion smartphone users scattered across the globe. Berg sees the bulk of the growth coming from mid and low-end smartphone sa...

Concord Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed on Saturday that Apple shipped a total of 1.1 million MacBook Air units over the course of the refreshed laptop’s first quarter of availability. Though the firm’s figure is most certainly not confirmed by Apple, Ming-Chi cites channel checks in Asia in revealing shipment numbers, which would make the new MacBook Air one of the fastest-selling Mac computers in Apple’s history. Ming-Chi notes that sales have likely begun to slow in the first qua...

The fourth quarter of 2010 — the busy holiday quarter — was not all that fruitful for the U.S.’s forth largest wireless provider. In an earnings call today, T-Mobile posted a nearly flat revenue number — $4.69 billion in Q4 2010 versus $4.71 billion in Q3 of 2010, and $4.65 billion in Q4 of 2009 — and less than stellar customer retention numbers. T-Mo saw net losses of 318,000 customers in Q4, along with a churn rate rising from 3.4% in Q3 to 3.6%. One bright spot on the company&...

No platform in recent history has grown as fast as Google’s Android OS, and now Google has created a quick video to help us visualize the Android phenomenon. The sequence was first shown ahead of former CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote at Mobile World Congress, and this week Google finally posted it to its Android Developers YouTube account. The video gives us a visual representation of all Android device activations from October 2008, when the platform launched, through the end of December 2010. It al...

IHS, new owner of research firm iSuppli, has issued its full-year data on app stores in 2010. According to the company’s report, Apple’s market share decreased significantly last year while its revenue more than doubled. The app store pioneer pulled in $1.78 billion in global app sales during 2010, up 132% from the $769 million its App Store earned in 2009. Not surprisingly, its market share dropped from 93% in 2009 to 83% during the period. RIM’s BlackBerryApp World grew 360% year-over-year...

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I inform you that U.S. wireless provider Sprint, for the first time in thirteen quarters, has reported gains in post-paid subscribers. Ending its long drought, the Now Network added a total of 1.1 million new subs; 58,000 of which were post-paid. Sprint also reported a drop in churn during its earnings call, down to 1.86 in Q4 from 2.11 in Q3. It isn’t all good news, however. The company still posted a $929 million loss on revenues of $8.3 billion in...

If you’re a hardware manufacturer trying to figure out where to delegate R&D funds, you might want to pay attention to this. According to an article on ReadWriteWeb, smartphones outsold personal computers in the fourth quarter of 2010, marking the first time such an event has occurred. Analytics firm IDC provides the data, and indicates that smartphone OEMs sold 100.9 million units worldwide — an 87.2% jump year-over-year — while PC OEMs sold 92.1 million units worldwide — a 5.5% ...

Lead by the impressive sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, the Android platform is finally starting to gain momentum in the emerging consumer tablet market. Analytics firm Strategy Analytics reports that Android owned 22% of the global tablet market in the fourth quarter of 2010. The iPad’s share of the market dropped from 96% to 75% in the fourth quarter last year, according to the report. Apple shipped 7.3 million iPads last quarter, up 74% from the third quarter, while 2.1 million Android tablets we...

Canalys today becomes the first major firm to report a changing of the guard we all knew was coming. According to the industry watcher’s fourth-quarter 2010 data, Google’s Android platform outsold Nokia’s Symbian OS to become the best-selling smartphone platform in the world. Canalys’ figures show 32.9 million Android-powered smartphones having been shipped last quarter, while Symbian device shipments slid in at 31 million units. In terms of market share, Android reeled in 32.9% of the...