Not long ago, HTC posted six consecutive months of record revenue thanks to strong demand for its Android-powered smartphones. The company’s record run came to a screeching halt in October last year with the release of Apple’s iPhone 4S. HTC’s fourth quarter earnings fell, missing Wall Street’s expectations, and the rough patch continued in the first quarter of 2012. To compound matters, the latest study conducted by ad network Chitika shows that the troubled handset maker’s us...

Spotify is the darling of tech blogs, but the overwhelming media hype leading up to the service’s U.S. launch has seemingly not carried over to end users. According to a recent report from the New York Post, paid subscriber growth in the U.S. has failed to meet expectations thus far. Spotify launched stateside roughly nine months ago and the service amassed 250,000 paid subscribers in its first three months. According to the Post, Spotify is now home to 3 million users in the U.S., but only 600,000 are ...

Andy Rubin on Monday announced that the Google’s Android partners are currently activating an average of 850,000 each each. The activation rate continues to increase rapidly, and it is now up a whopping 250% year-over-year. In December it was reported that 700,000 devices were activated each day. Google also announced that the Android Market is now home to 450,000 apps, a mere 50,000 shy of Apple’s iOS App Store, and more than 1 billion downloads are being served each month to over 300 million And...

The growth of global LCD TV shipments is expected to fall in 2012, according to market research firm GfK. The company believes that in 2012, growth will come from emerging markets as demand from the U.S. and Europe will subside. Global TV shipments grew 12% in 2011, and that rate is expected to slow to an estimated 7% growth rate this year. In total, GfK expects vendors to ship 225 million LCD TVs worldwide in 2012, Digitimes reports. Samsung, the world’s largest TV vendor by shipment volume, has vowe...

Global tablet sales reached 67 million units in 2011 and are expected to grow 38.8% annually to 248.6 million by the end of 2015, according to a new market report from Transparency Market Research. Led by Apple’s iPad, tablet sales increased 275.5% in 2011 from 17.8 million units sold in 2010. Smartphone sales in 2011 hit 468.9 million units, a 66.7% increase over 2010 sales of 282 million units, and sales are expected to reach 1.05 billion in 2015 with Asia accounting for 39.5% of the market. Smartpho...

Phone maker ZTE recently said that it sees the United States and China as the two largest markets for smartphone sales growth. “The United States and China will be key engines driving our smartphone sales,” ZTE’s head of handset strategy Lv Qianhao, told Reuters in a recent interview, noting that the company expects its worldwide smartphone shipments to double in 2012 and to increase by 30% to 40% annually through 2015. ZTE mostly sells Android-powered smartphones but said it plans to launc...

LTE networks in the United States are expanding at a remarkable pace — after less than a year, the U.S. is already the global 4G LTE leader by subscription volume — and global LTE growth is expected to remain strong in the coming years. Market research and intelligence firm ABI Research last week said that it estimates worldwide LTE connections will reach nearly 80 million by the end of 2013. “We are expecting to see more LTE networks lighting up in the next year or two, but operators are now taking...

One in five smartphones sold in the United States during the second quarter was 4G LTE-enabled according to The NPD Group, and the market for LTE handsets is set to continue its rapid ascent according to a new report. Market research firm In-Stat on Wednesday suggested sales of handsets with embedded 4G LTE will surpass 154 million units in 2015. We’ve seen even more bullish projections — ABI Research said last week that annual LTE smartphone sales would reach 245 million devices in 2016 — but the c...

Tablet vendors shipped 18.7 million units during the third quarter of this year, DigiTimes said on Tuesday. Third-quarter shipments were up 27.5% over the second quarter, but the increase was less than the 60.9% jump in shipments between the first and second quarters of this year. The slower growth was attributed to a weaker global economy, and the entire industry suffered. Apple is estimated to have shipped 13 million units in the September quarter, fewer than DigiTimes’s prediction that Apple would sh...

Smart TVs will see significant growth next year according to Topology Research Institute, which expects current shipments to double to 52.85 million units. The research company said just over 7 million Smart TVs were shipped in 2010, and that figure is likely to increase to 25.18 million units in 2011. Smart TVs are defined as television sets that are capable of accessing the Internet, can be used to download and install applications, surf the web and more. Topology Research Institute believes there will be t...

Global shipments of PCs grew slightly but less than analysts had predicted during the third quarter of 2011, Gartner said recently, citing preliminary findings of a new research report. 91.8 million PCs were shipped during the quarter, a 3.2% jumped from the same quarter of last year. The figures are lower than Gartner’s original estimate, which suggested PC vendors would ship 5.1% more units during the quarter. Gartner said the lower sales can be attributed to a weak Western European PC market. Read on...

Shipments of consumer media tablets like the Apple iPad are expected to approach 250 million units in 2017, a report from In-Stat suggests. While analysts at In-Stat see tablet adoption growing rapidly over the next six years, even a number as large as 250 million is conservative when considering the estimates other firms have recently reported. IHS iSuppli, for example, increased its estimates earlier this week, suggesting tablet shipments will surpass 275 million units in 2015. In-Stat still sees tablet hav...

HTC on Friday reported record sales for the fourth consecutive month, though the Taiwan-based smartphone vendor’s growth did slow significantly in July. Following revenues of NT$38.7 in April, NT$40.6 billion in May and NT$45 billion in June, HTC pulled in NT$45.11 billion ($1.56 billion) last month to set a company record yet again. Continued strong demand for HTC’s Android smartphones drove revenue up 83% over July 2010, but HTC’s momentum slowed as it grew less than 1% over June. HTC is ...

Mobile data connections are poised grow 11% in 2011, driving global mobile data revenue to $314.7 billion. Market research firm Gartner on Thursday said mobile data connections will reach 5.6 billion this year compared to 5 billion in 2010, driving global revenue from mobile data up 22.5% from the $257 billion earned last year. “Mobile data traffic will increase significantly as more people will have access to mobile data networks, there is a migration toward smartphones and an increase in sales of medi...