milestones

Korean news agency, Yonhap News, reported on Wednesday (via Boy Genius Report) that Samsung shipped five million units of its top-of-the-line Galaxy S II smartphone, a successor to the wildly successful Galaxy S phone. Samsung achieved the milestone in 85 days, which means an average sales rate of nearly 60,000 units a day. The previous milestone had Samsung sell three million units in 55 days, amounting to some 55,000 units a day, so sales of the latest smartphone from the Galaxy S series are steadily accelerating. The device reached the milestone 40 days earlier than its predecessor, the Galaxy S, which shipped five million units in 125 days, and is the top-selling phones in ten European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Samsung is the world’s second-largest mobile phone maker, but it could soon overtake Apple and become #1. The company launched the Galaxy S II in South Korea on April 29 and the device went on to grab a surprising 56 percent smartphone market share in the country as of last month. The handset later rolled out in Japan and some European countries and is due to hit the US shores next month. Meamwhile, Engadget uncovered an FCC filing revealing CDMA and WiMAX radios for the US version of the handset. Paired with a recent leak of AT&T’s flagship slider phone purported to be the Galaxy S II, Samsung could be looking to bring its handset to AT&T’s 3G GSM network, Verizon Wireless’s 3G CDMA network and Sprint’s WiMAX.

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This little factoid came an hour ago straight from the Android chief Andy Rubin, who tweeted:

There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it’s growing at 4.4% w/w.

Compare that to some 210,000 daily activations for Apple stemming from the 19 million iPhones they sold in the last quarter. Google’s data point is a notable improvement over the 400,000 daily activations Google’s mobile chief Rubin reported last month at the Google I/O conference. Where are 100,000 additional devices being activated each day? Maybe China? Mobile handset base there grew to 910 million in May, a 1.08 percent and 14.35 percent sequential and annual increase, respectively. Many Android phones in China sell for less than $150, vendors like Arima Communications are promising sub-$100 handsets this summer and then there are really cheap Android knock-offs from white-label vendors.

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