Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iOS platform showed big market share gains in the first quarter of 2012 as Symbian and BlackBerry shipments plummeted. Market research firm IDC on Thursday published its global smartphone market share report for the first quarter of this year, and Google’s Android was far and away the biggest winner in terms of year-on-year shipment gains. (more…)

Nokia continues to struggle as the once dominant cell phone maker continues to lose share in both the smartphone and broader mobile market. The Finnish vendor’s Lumia handsets have yet to take off and Nokia’s stock has tumbled 90% over the past five years. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop may look toward his former employer, Microsoft, to step in and help the troubled handset maker, Reuters suggests. The company’s partnership with the software giant is seen as a last chance to turn its business arou...

Adding insult to injury is never a concern for the litigious among us, and one man has filed a class action suit against Nokia in New York because its comeback, thus far, has been anything but. Complaint Robert Chmielinski, represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, alleges that Nokia’s shift to the Windows Phone platform has not halted its sliding position in the global smartphone market, as the company promised it would. Nokia reported last month that it lost a staggering $1.7 billion in the ...

After posting the most profitable quarter in technology company history to close 2011 — and the second most profitable quarter among all companies, ever — Apple came back again in the first calendar quarter of 2012 and managed another monster quarter. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant earned $11.6 billion on $39.2 billion in sales during the second fiscal quarter of 2012, and its iPhone was responsible for an estimated 80% of all smartphone profits during the quarter. According to Apple wa...

The global smartphone market grew by 42.5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2012, as the worldwide mobile phone market declined 1.5%. According to market research firm IDC, vendors shipped a total of 398.4 million mobile phones in the first quarter compared to 404.3 million units in the same quarter last year. Samsung ousted longtime leader Nokia to become the world’s largest mobile phone vendor, and it topped Apple to become the world’s largest smartphone vendor. The South Korea-based vendorÂ...

Samsung reported a blow-out first quarter on Friday as strong mobile phone sales helped the consumer electronics giant increase profits by 82% to a record 5.05 trillion won. The numbers were undoubtedly impressive as they stood, but market research firm Strategy Analytics helps us paint a broader picture of just how dominant Samsung’s mobile business was in the first quarter. On the smartphone side, Strategy Analytics estimates that Samsung sold a staggering 44.5 million smartphones into channels last q...

Amazon’s Kindle Fire has seen rapid adoption among tablet buyers since its release last November. The device had an explosive debut quarter, giving it a 14% share of the tablet market. According to the latest numbers from comScore, the Kindle Fire has almost doubled its share of the U.S. Android tablet market over the past two months from 29.4% in December to 54.4% in February. In other words, more tablets running Amazon’s version of Android were sold in the U.S. than tablets running Google’...

According to a recent report from Forrester Research, Apple’s iPad tablet PC will continue to lead the tablet market through 2016 despite increased competition. The Cupertino-based company’s iPad is expected to account for 53% of the global tablet market in 2016, at which time emerging markets may account for nearly 40% of all tablet sales, The Financial Post reported on Monday. Over the next five years, the global tablet market is estimated to increase to 375 million devices, up from 56 million s...

Apple’s upcoming entry into the high-definition television space is set to blow the high end of the TV market wide open while current market players continue their struggles to compete on price. Market research firm KAE along with online polling company Toluna recently conducted a survey and determined that 25% of consumers in the United States would purchase a physical Apple television set if the Cupertino-based company launches one. Beyond early consumer interest, however, current TV industry player...

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...

Microsoft and its partners have seemingly set some very lofty goals for Windows 8. Citing multiple anonymous sources at various unnamed Taiwan-based original device manufacturers, DigiTimes on Wednesday reported that Windows and Intel want top-tier vendor partners to launch an all-out assault on Apple’s iPad. The iPad’s share of the tablet market currently sits at 70% according to the report, but Microsoft and Intel want to push that figure down to 50% by the middle of next year. If earlier repor...

Apple released its third-generation iPad on March 16th and I purchased mine one day later on the 17th. There were no lines at my local Best Buy when I went to buy the new model. In fact, there were still more than 100 new iPads in stock when I picked up my iPad more than 36 hours after it was released. The store was eerily quiet. It felt nothing like an Apple launch. (more…)

Google’s Android platform was the most popular mobile operating system in the world’s largest market for mobile phones last year. The platform’s market share grew nearly 35%, capturing 68.4% of the mobile market in China, Reuters reported on Tuesday citing research from Analysys International. Chinese Android manufacturers ZTE and Huawei helped propel the platform to new heights by offering low-cost devices via local wireless carriers. Google’s success came at the expense of Nokia, who...

Apple released its third-generation iPad just over three weeks ago, and the company managed to sell more than 3 million units in less than four days of availability. The sleek slate has since launched in a number of additional markets and according to ad network Chitika’s real-time iPad tracker, it took Apple’s new iPad just three weeks to account for 10% of all iPad traffic across its network. The new iPad’s share of iPad traffic peaked at 16.2% on the morning of April 8th, and the full-da...