This coming Friday marks the fifth anniversary of Apple's iPhone, the device that turned the mobile industry upside down. Today, the iPhone is bigger than most companies on the planet and no, I'm not exaggerating. The phone rakes in an astounding $25 billion of revenue per quarter for a run rate of a staggering $100 billion a year...
Different stats and market research all point to the same conclusion: that the mobile market is being reduced to a two-horse race between iOS and Android (or Apple and Samsung, specifically) as once great incumbents such as RIM and Nokia get pushed aside, their market shares seriously declining.
In fact, it's fairly safe to say that on the fifth anniversary of iPhone, both RIM and Nokia are fighting for survival, quite possibly their lifecycle coming to an end. Meanwhile, only four companies are turning profit in the increasingly crowded smartphone space...
It's not a typo: I really meant Nokia, not RIM. Look, the writing's on the wall. In the first quarter of 2012, only Apple and Samsung reaped benefits of the 41 percent year-over-year growth in the smartphone biz.
Together, the two frenemies accounted for 55 percent of global smartphone shipments in Q1 and an astounding 90 percent of the profits.
Apple shipped 35 million iPhones in Q1 while Samsung recorded 43 million global shipments. None of this is surprising. What's stunning is how sharp Nokia's decline is. Of all companies, beleaguered RIM, whose Q1 shipments dipped 20 percent, may soon surpass Nokia...
An interesting change in tablet web traffic in June, as observed by ad network Chitika which sampled hundreds of millions of ad impressions across mobile apps that incorporate its solution. While they're by no means an accurate representative of the market, the numbers still outline market trend changes.
Apple's iPad dropped a bit in June, but the biggest change comes in Barnes & Noble's Nook passing Amazon's Kindle Fire. Of all non-iPad tablets, Samsung's Galaxy Tab remains the most widely-used device...
So mere four days before the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs' favorite analytics company posts some peculiar numbers making Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt look ridiculous.
Though Android continues to lead the pack in terms of shipments, the iOS train just keeps on chugging along in terms of loyalty and profitability.
Seven out of ten mobile apps in the first five months of this year were built for Apple's platform, where developers on average earn four times more revenue...
TUAW points to a newly-published ChangeWave survey today regarding the wish lists of potential tablet buyers. And surprise, surprise, the iPad is still miles ahead of the competition in terms of consumer demand.
According to ChangeWave's data, collected from a poll of almost 3,000 American consumers, a staggering 73% of people who plan to buy a tablet in the next 90 days will be getting an iPad...
According to a new research note out today, compared to its launch-week usage share, the new iPad is now being more widely used in the United States than the original iPad, launched in April 2010.
That's good news for Apple's post-PC strategy, one that will hopefully put to rest concerns that the Retina display, faster GPU and better cameras won't entice would-be buyers enough to take the plunge.
Quite the contrary, the iPad 3 is picking up considerable steam even if much of its growth in the United States comes from owners of the original iPad and iPad 2 upgrading to the third-generation model...
Looks like Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he proclaimed Apple a mobile devices company at the original iPad unveiling in January 2010. Fast-forward to today and the tablet market is still by and large dominated by the iPad.
According to latest research data by NPD, Apple shipped 17.2 million tablets and notebooks - collectively referred to as 'mobile PCs' - for a cool 22.5 percent share of the entire market. For comparison, second-ranked Hewlett-Packard managed to move just 8.9 million mobile PC units, capturing a 11.6 percent market share.
Just two years ago, it would have been unheard-of for Apple to beat first-tier PC vendors at their own game. But this is 2012 and Apple is riding high on strong momentum that its tablet continues to enjoy in markets the world over...
TheNextWeb points to Millard Brown's 2012 Brandz Top 100 report — an annual study that calculates the brand value of the most popular companies in the world by combining their financial valuations with consumer loyalty and appeal.
As you've probably already guessed by now, Apple came in first place with a brand value of $183 billion. This was enough to finish ahead of IBM, Google, McDonalds and Microsoft, who finished in 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place respectively...
Even though the Android platform sits on top of several major smartphone categories — marketshare, hardware specs, etc. — there's one list that it can't seem to climb: customer satisfaction. That particular stat belongs to iOS.
The iPhone has taken home more than 6 J.D. Power Satisfaction awards, and countless other smaller surveys. And it just added another notch to its belt, coming in first in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report...
Research firm Gartner is out this morning with its first-quarter phone sales survey. The results show that Apple and Samsung together now represent 49.3 percent of all smartphones sold globally, up from 29.3 percent in the first quarter of 2011, while other vendors continue to experience a decline.
China has now become Apple's second-largest market for smartphones, after the United States and rival Samsung pretty much leads all, having overtaken both Apple and Nokia in smartphone and cell phone shipments, respectively...
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...