Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones last quarter, nearly doubling the amount of handsets it sold in the same three month period a year ago. But despite its record-breaking performance, the company still conceded its top smartphone vendor title to Samsung.
During the holiday quarter, Apple shipped 37.1 million handsets — the most out of any of the other smartphone manufacturers in the world. And it looked like it was set to do it again this time around, but the Korean handset-maker edged it out...
It's pretty common knowledge that the smartphone space currently belongs to Android and iOS. The two platforms make up more than 70% of the market, which at one time belonged to the likes of Microsoft and RIM.
But neither company saw the iPhone coming, and both failed to respond quickly. Now they're fighting for the crucial "third platform" spot. Microsoft with its Windows Phone OS, and RIM with its new BB10...
Thanks to his biography, Steve Jobs' feelings on Android are fairly well known. The late-CEO famously said, "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Considering that Apple is involved in a number of lawsuits around the globe with Android manufacturers, it's easy to see that Jobs' remarks weren't totally unfounded. But did Google actually steal anything?
With just one device family, Apple's iPhone has managed to outgrow Google's Android platform in Japan over the past three months, gaining market share, a survey note out today from research firm comScore indicated. While we've known for awhile that Japan's iOS-Android duopoly is a sign of things to come, the numbers are nonetheless eyebrow-raising.
Together, the two platforms accounted for a staggering 95.6 percent of all smartphones sold in Japan, where still just one in five own a smartphone.
Low smartphone penetration rate in Japan, compared to the one-in-two smartphone penetration rate in the U.S., actually bodes well for Apple. As more folks in Japan upgrade their dumb phones, they are likely to consider the iPhone 4/4S and especially a sixth-generation model that Piper Jaffray's resident Apple analyst Gene Munster deemed "the mother of all upgrades"...
Chitika, an ad network whose reach spans across more than 100,000 websites, is out with a new report this weekend regarding mobile platform usage. The firm has been tracking real-time activity on its network over the last 24 hours, and the results are pretty interesting.
Despite Android devices garnering close to 50% of the smartphone market, Chitika found that iOS seems to be the mobile OS of choice among its users. Here in the US, at least, devices running Apple's operating system accounted for nearly 70% of recent activity...
If you couldn't believe those hipsters who stopped using Instagram just because it sold out to Facebook for a staggering $1 billion, wait 'till you hear this.
Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president, apparently stopped using Instagram because the photo sharing service recently expanded to Android.
It's hardly a surprise, if you think of it. Schiller, a prominent figure in Apple's public presentations, has been a member of the company's executive leadership team since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.
Being in charge of worldwide marketing at Apple and an active Twitter user, Schiller would be foolish to continue supporting a hugely popular service that up until recently used to be an iOS exclusive...
Yesterday, Google's Larry Page sparked some controversy with some comments he made regarding Steve Jobs. In an interview with Businessweek, the CEO suggested that Jobs' disdain for Android was more for show than anything else.
But Walter Isaacson, author of the Apple founder's popular biography, tells a different story. Isaacson gave a lecture at the Royal Institution in the UK last night, and had no problem clearing the air about Jobs' feelings on Google's mobile OS...
Steve Jobs' distain for Google's mobile OS was well documented. There's a famous quote from the late CEO's biography that goes something like, "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
But according to Google's CEO Larry Page, a large part of Jobs' hatred for Android was merely for show. He believes that it was more of a way to rally his troops at Apple, rather than evidence of bad blood between the two companies...
Dolphin, a popular third-party Android browser, finally got ported to the iPhone last August. It's seen more than ten million total downloads on both platforms since. Featuring custom gestures, a clever user interface design, advanced features and many customizable options, it's the favorite non-Apple browser on my iPhone.
Developer MoboTap Inc. updated the iPhone version of Dolphin today with half a dozen nice-to-haves, including the all-new voice control capability dubbed Sonar. Just shake your device or tap the mic icon and tell Dolphin what to search for. Voice input works with any site that has search or text fields.
This lets you not only search for eBay items, but update your Facebook status, post a tweet and more - all just by using your voice. Sonar also lets you speak commands to bookmark your favorite website and control other features of the app.
The ailing BlackBerry maker Research In Motion today released the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion enterprise server software, first announced last November.
Among the features is built-in support for tablets and smartphones running Apple's iOS and Google's Android software.
This is the first time RIM comprehensively supported iOS mobile devices in a major corporate enterprise server software.
A new survey out of Nielsen today says nearly one in three of all smartphone users in the United States have an iPhone, or 32.1 percent. For comparison, 48 percent opted for an Android device, or nearly one in two. As for recent acquirers who got their smartphone within the last three months, 43 percent bought an iPhone versus 48 percent for Android.
Together, the two platforms pretty much own the entire US smartphone market. More important than this, in my opinion, is the overall U.S. smartphone penetration rate which approached the psychologically important 50 percent milestone during the month of February. How is smartphone penetration important?
Though Google does not profit directly by giving away Android software to phone vendors, they do take 30 percent cut on app sales, just like Apple. This is peanuts compared to Google's indirect, mobile advertising-based revenues. Understandably, of course, as Google's ad-based business model benefits from people using their many services on the go, such as maps and search.
The more people use Google on their handsets, the higher advertising revenues the company pulls. At Android's scale, it's easy to think that Google gets more revenue from Android phones and tablets than Apple's iPhones, iPads and iPod touches.
According to a newspaper article today, based on court documents, Android’s total revenue from the launch of handsets at the end of 2008 through to the end of 2011 was $543 million. Still, Google made four times as much revenue during the same period on iOS devices.