latest
Despite all of the criticism OnePlus is receiving for its update policy, its latest phones, and the OnePlus Watch, the company seems to be in a great state. It just reported one of the strongest quarters in Europe ever, with a 388% growth in sales and 286% in revenue compared to Q1 2020, with the UK being in the top three of the best performing markets.
The worldwide smartphone market hasn't just slowed, it's been in decline for the last year or so. Whatever you attribute that to — rising prices, longer-lasting devices, fewer necessary improvements — many major OEMs including Samsung and Apple have seen sales weaken. In comparison, though, Huawei continues to see explosive growth, especially in China.
Google, following through on its promise that the material design spec is a "living document," has updated its design guidelines and suggestions again, this time adding more guidance on motion design, along with new sections for growth & communications and expanding panels.
AT&T has a problem on its hands. It's big, but is it big enough? If you're a CEO of a major corporation the answer to that question is always "no." However, the carrier has difficulty expanding on the home front. An overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens have phones with one carrier or another, so there's very little wiggle room to grab new customers. And gaining in market share when you (and all your competitors!) are dead set on locking people into two-year contracts is very difficult. In short, growth isn't much of an option outside acquisitions, and those haven't gone so well.
I miss you, HTC. My Evo was the first phone I ever truly loved, and between 2007 and 2010, as a company you did remarkably well for yourself. Then the Thunderbolt happened, and then Beats got involved and... Well, let's just say it hasn't been a great couple years. So, when I hear that your CEO, Peter Chou, is planning some bold new changes for 2013, I'm hopeful. Skeptical, but hopeful.
As if the news out of Google couldn't get any hotter today, the company decided to just casually announce that it has over 500 million users with Google+ accounts, 235 million of whom are active "across Google" which means anything from +1ing things in various Google products to "connecting with friends in Search"...whatever that means. The most important stat, though, is 135 million users are active in the stream. That means, if we can assume past definitions are still true, those users either visit plus.google.com or use the mobile app to view content.
It's amazing what a new look can do for a platform, isn't it? Back in January, we reported that CyanogenMod, the most popular third-party Android ROM, reached one million unique installs. Now, a little more than four months later, that number has doubled, according to CM's stat tracker. This is huge.
The latest unaudited results from HTC for Q4 2011 indicate that total revenues reached NT$ 101 billion (US$ 3.34 billion), a 2.49% drop as compared to the same period in 2010. In stark contrast, Samsung just had a record breaking quarter with profits reaching 5.2 trillion won (US$4.5 billion), almost double the figures of Q4 2010. Samsung's results for Q4 2011 breaks its previous record profit period of 5.0 trillion won (US$ 4.3 billion) from Q2 2010 and is an increase of 22% from Q3 2011. According to an analyst Samsung shipped an estimated 35 million smartphones in the previous quarter alone, but this is likely to include Samsung's low-end bada operated devices.
Android has grown at an amazing pace in the past year, and so has our reader base. With that in mind, we have a simple question for our readers: how long have you been an Android owner? Were you one of the 'Droid front-runners, or did you join the game a bit later? Sound off in the poll below, and feel free to share some details in the comments below.
In case you thought Android's extremely fast-paced growth was being exaggerated, comScore's latest report on mobile market share might just convince you otherwise: From December 2010 to March 2011, Android not only kept its first place position among mobile platforms in the US, but it shot up 6 percentage points - far greater than all other platforms.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky has run the numbers on tablets and lined them up for comparison against a bevy of other figures. Surprisingly, there are 5.113 billion mobile subscribers in the world (out of 6.898bn global population), but only 394 million smartphone and tablet users.
Finally, some empirical evidence that illustrates what we've known for some time now: Android is growing like gangbusters. In fact, 28% of smartphones sold in Q1 2010 were Android, compared to 21% for iOS. RIM still holds the top spot with 36%, but that's a drop of roughly 12% in the past year - while iOS has fallen approximately 10% itself. In the same period, Android increased over 20%.