With one in two in the United States now owning a smartphone (was 40 percent of mobile subscribers in 2011), app downloads are on the rise, too.
Compared to last year, the average smartphone consumer in the U.S. now has 41 apps on their home screen, a 28 percent increase from 32 apps in last year, according to a Nielsen study released this morning.
Here are the top five downloaded apps across the iOS and Android platforms...
So this is pretty big news: The Verge is reporting that it has learned that shipments of HTC's One X and Evo 4G LTE handsets have been indefinitely delayed at US Customs due to an import ban order handed down by the ITC last year.
The International Trade Commission ruled last December that HTC was infringing upon an Apple patent regarding the auto-hyperlinking of phone numbers and other data in text, resulting in a country-wide ban of HTC's products...
The search giant Google is reportedly looking to replicate Apple's Game Center with a native Android app of its own.
Despite the ongoing patent war waged between Apple and a bunch of Android backers over the look and feel of iOS software, Google is reportedly looking to simply copy Game Center.
The search firm needs own social gaming service so Android gamers have a central place to connect with each other, check out leaderboards, scores and challenge friends.
And if their other products are anything to go by, Google's thing is likely to feature deep integration with Google+, their another social thing...
We may still be a good five months away from Apple's expected iPhone 5/Next iPhone announcement, but Samsung has already shown its hand with the Galaxy S III.
Building on the already hugely popular Galaxy S II handset, the third generation of the Galaxy S line will feature some interesting software additions alongside a reasonable speed bump and rather large screen. All in, it's an impressive-looking update for a company that has already shown that it is more than capable of going toe-to-toe with Apple when it comes to kicking out huge sales numbers and satisfied customers.
But shy of taking the Roman numeral approach to naming conventions and calling the next iPhone the iPhone V, what will Apple do to take the fight to Samsung now that the Koreans have firmly placed their stake in the ground? What must Apple do in order to compete with a handset that has seen almost as much excitement and expectation as any Apple product? The truth is that it might not actually need to...
Of the 6.3 million smartphones Verizon sold last quarter, 3.2 million of them were iPhones. This means it sold more Apple-branded handsets than it did all other smartphones combined. So the carrier must really be pushing these things, right?
Well as it turns out, that doesn't seem to be the case. CNET's Chris Matyszczyk recently went to his local Verizon store to investigate a rumor that Big Red reps were actually purposely diverting iPhone sales. And judging by the account, they are...
A whopping 91 percent of tech moms want it for Mother’s Day instead of flowers, teachers deem it the future of education (though DoJ disagrees), it's used everywhere for work, has managed to break Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry - and yet it shows no sign of slowing down.
And even as rivals face downturn, folks are picking their iPads like there’s no tomorrow. This is the crux of latest market tablet survey by research firm IDG which pegged Apple's worldwide tablet share in Q1 2012 at 68 percent, up from 54.7-percent in the year-ago quarter.
Apple's growth largely came at the expense of Amazon’s Kindle Fire which plummeted from 16.8 percent share in Q4 2011 to just four percent share in Q1 2012. That's a staggering 12.8-percentage points market share loss in just one quarter. Another way to look at it: Amazon shipped only 700,000 Kindle Fire units in Q1 2012...
ComScore is out with a new report this week regarding US smartphone platform marketshare for the March quarter. And the highly-regarded marketing research firm provides an interesting look at the current smartphone landscape by OS.
Google, as you might have expected, is still in the lead with its Android operating system. Apple's iOS is in a [comparatively] close second, and RIM and Microsoft come in at a distant third and fourth. Keep reading for a full breakdown...
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...