TrendForce is predicting that total worldwide smartphone sales will fall by around five percent in the first quarter of this year. If so, this will be the first fall in two years.
It doesn’t mean demand for smartphones is actually dropping, but rather than the upward trend has slowed to the point that the seasonal effect – people buying smartphones as holiday gifts – is now bigger than the overall growth rate.
Samsung and Apple of course maintain their lead, though Sony saw significant growth in its home territory of Japan, and LG’s share grew 57 percent year-on-year to a 4.2 percent market share thanks largely to sales of the Nexus handsets it makes for Google.
Following the continued growth of smartphones in the US and increasing competition between Samsung and Apple, the two companies saw combined growth between 2012 and 2013 amounting to 68% of the US smartphone market. That’s according to data provided by The NPD Group which reports overall smartphone growth increased from 52% to 60% in Q4 of 2012 and 2013, respectively. NPD reports Samsung rose from 22% to 26% in Q4 2012 to 2013 among US smartphone users. Expand Expanding Close
A company that makes smartphone-controlled door locks for hotels has announced its first home door lock system, going by the rather cringeworthy name Okidokeys.
Once fitted, you’ll be able to unlock your front door from your Android handset via Bluetooth. The locks are also compatible with RFID chips, allowing you to open them with a keycard or wristband in case your phone battery goes flat. As you’d expect from a hi-tech lock, you can also manage access and accounts online … Expand Expanding Close
By all accounts the Consumer Electronics Show kicking off in the next 10 days is looking to be fairly tame. While its true there could be dozens of surprises in store, the hype thus far has been pretty timid and I don’t see many of my colleagues expecting a wild ride as has been the case in years past. That’s not to say CES won’t be filled with exciting announcements of new products by hundreds of companies all converging on Las Vegas for one week in early January.
Amazon’s upcoming smartphone that may or may not truly exist is now set to launch in the first half of 2014 according to Digitimes. The world’s most prolific source of insider information with a track record that hits around 50/50 says Primax Electronics has “obtained orders from Amazon for compact camera modules for use in smartphones to be launched in first-half 2014.”
When I wrote for Fortune in 2010 that inexpensive hardware would allow Android to ‘take over the world’, the concept of smartphones that were priced only slightly above feature phones was just starting to take hold. Fast forward three years and Android has by some accounts cleared 80% of the world smartphone market. The low end of that Android spectrum, with the exception of a few mediocre handsets (LG’s Optimus line comes to mind), has been, frankly, a mess.
Today there is a truly great, inexpensive Android phone that costs less than $200 unsubsidized, and it is made by Google’s Motorola division. I’ve tested the Moto G for the past week and a half and I love it. It could easily replace any high end handset on a day to day basis in terms of speed and functionality. The one caveat being the camera is mediocre, but still functional.
I’ll rundown the specs, but the important thing to consider is the price and positioning of Google (and believe me, this is a Google phone, not an old Motorola one).
The $179/$199 8GB/16GB Motorola G comes with a 4.5-inch 720P display, which isn’t the best by any means, but it also isn’t far from the best out there. I’ve argued for awhile that you can’t hardly make out the difference between 720P and 1080P on a display without some very close inspection. Even those with sub 20/20 vision don’t notice much day to day.
The G has a quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor which falls along the same lines: Not the best, but not far from it. It is a little heavier than what I’d now expect from a 4.5-inch display phone, but that heft is largely because of the all day 2,070 mAh battery.
This thing looks and behaves like a flagship Nexus phone…from last year – all the way down to the hardly-touched Android 4.3 interface. Motorola has promised some form of 4.4 Kitkat by the end of next month. With the veracity that they’ve been updating their Moto X handsets, I have little doubt that it will get done.
But what does this all mean? Why this phone at this price? Why now? Expand Expanding Close
Surprise, surprise as a new Canaccord Genuity study shows the Galaxy S 4 as the most popular Android device at the nations four largest carriers. Unfortunately for Samsung, the nations largest carriers actually show the iPhone 5s as the top selling smartphone overall.
Korean site ET News reports that Samsung has cut its smartphone sales target for 2014 from 360M handsets to 330M. The company’s original goal would have represented 25 percent year-on-year growth, now reduced to just 14 percent.
The company is blaming saturation at the top end of the market, with many existing owners of flagship handsets having reduced their upgrade cycle from annual to bi-annual.
Samsung as a whole isn’t hurting – it recently announced record revenues and profits – but the bulk of those earnings came from lower-end handsets and its chip manufacturing business. The ET News piece says that Samsung also plans to move into a whole bunch of new areas, including cloud computing and hi-tech materials … Expand Expanding Close
A story out of Korean publication Asia Today is indicating some bad news for fans of LG’s G2 flagship smartphone. According to the publication, sales of the device are falling well below expectations with just 2.3 million units sold in the four months post launch. LG had projected 3 million units for the third quarter alone and have only hit 600,000 units in their home country of Korea.
AT&T has launched a new initiative called Mobile Share Value Plans that is designed to save customers money on their monthly AT&T mobile phone service bills. The following changes are specifically for the Mobile Share program, which allows devices to work under the same AT&T account and share data, talk, and text plans. Similar to T-Mobile’s “un-carrier” approach, the new AT&T plans separate the cost of the device hardware completely from the monthly service charges:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I recognize that when it comes to smartphone buying, I’m stuck in a crossroads about my next device. Yes, it’s true that my position as a tech blogger affords me the opportunity to try the latest and greatest, often at the same time. However, with a 10 month old my primary methodology for selecting a smartphone lately comes down to camera, camera and camera.
The video may be slightly cringeworthy (hot girls are always turned on by geek tech, right?), but the concept is certainly an exciting one: a foldable display which allows a pocketable smartphone to unfold or unroll into a tablet … Expand Expanding Close
There’s no question that with every new smartphone release, we look at the camera, the display and ultimately, the battery. As the Nexus 5 begins making its way to the masses, some new software and performance enhancements will offer a slight boost in battery life.
As GigaOM points out, the inclusion of Qualcomm’s new “envelope tracking technology” will make the Nexus 5 a more battery friendly, power-efficient smartphone. Qualcomm’s envelope tracker, dubbed the QFE1100 was first introduced to the world with the Galaxy Note 3, highlighting the Nexus 5 as the second smartphone to include the tech. Expand Expanding Close
Samsung could see itself getting priority access to new glass technologies after taking a 7.4 percent stake in Gorilla Glass maker Corning and simultaneously signing a 10-year supply agreement.
The net effect of a complex series of share swaps and cash investments, allied to a long-term procurement commitment from Samsung, is a $2B deal that will enable Corning to boost its R&D investment, accelerating the pace of development of new types of display.
With closer cooperation between the two companies, Samsung may prove well positioned to gain access to those new technologies ahead of the rest of the market … Expand Expanding Close
The Galaxy Round, which Samsung touted as the world’s first smartphone with a curved display, turns out to be just an extended production run of a prototype device – according to a source cited by SamMobile.
Samsung is looking to produce only limited quantities of the device, even in South Korea. It’s apparently a prototype device to test curved OLED displays, similar to devices like the SCH-W850 and the Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE (SHV-E120S), which were also produced in limited quantities in order to test AMOLED and HD AMOLED displays, respectively.
But while this particular device is unlikely to go on sale in the U.S., now that Samsung has proved the technology is practical, we can be fairly sure that company has other curved display phones and tablets in the pipeline. LG also appears to have a curved smartphone on the way, in the form of the G Flex.
We don’t get many details from the report, but it does claim that the device is already in mass production and could debut as early as this month.
It’s worth pointing out that we still don’t have any real official details on either of these curved devices from Samsung or LG, but we’re guessing the first generation of flexible display smartphones will likely sport a rather rigid casing that will make the product appear curved, opposed to actually being flexible in one’s hand.
Five days after arriving on AT&T, Motorola announced today that its new Moto X flagship smartphone is now available to purchase directly through its Moto Maker website. Previously customers were forced to purchase the device through AT&T and enter a code on the Moto Maker site to start the customization process. Starting today, Motorola will allow AT&T customers to purchase the device directly through the Moto Maker site for $199 (16GB) or $299 (32GB) on contract, and it’s also making the device available without a contract for $579 (16GB) or $629 (32GB). While Motorola originally planned to ship devices ordered through Moto Maker in 4 days, the site is currently quoting a shipping time of 8 days.
The Moto Maker tool is the standout feature of the Moto X, allowing users to choose from over 2000 customization options for back, front and accent colors, unique wallpapers, and engraving. Unfortunately, we found out earlier this month that engraving won’t be available initially due to some manufacturing issues.
Verizon announced that Moto X would arrive in black and white on August 29, but the Moto Maker customization tool remains and exclusive to AT&T. Other major US carriers are expected to start carrying the Moto X by early September. Expand Expanding Close
Smartphone makers these days seem to be in the habit of drip-feeding leaks about new products so steadily that there’s almost nothing we expect to surprise us by the time a model actually launches.
About the only thing we didn’t yet know about Sony’s new handset codenamed the Honami was the official name. We knew it was an Xperia model, but both Z1 and i1 had been suggested as model names. From the “3..2..what comes next?” tweet on the Sony Xperia Twitter account, we’re going with Z1 …
We may all be eagerly awaiting affordable 4k displays for our computers and TVs, but things are starting to get just a little silly in the race for ever higher resolutions in small-screen devices. LG has just announced a 5.5-inch screen with a 2560×1440 resolution, giving it a pixel density of 538ppi.
It’s an impressive technological achievement, but the question we have to ask is: why? Once you get much beyond 300ppi, pixels essentially become invisible at any sane viewing distance. 538ppi is over-kill. Of course, one could ask ‘Why not?’, but there’s a simple answer in mobile devices: both the display itself, and the beefier graphics processor needed to drive it, consume power. Pointless resolution equals pointless reduction in battery-life.
The sad thing is that non-tech-savvy consumers will likely lap it up. Bigger numbers are better, right? It’s the same phenomenon we’ve seen with cameraphones, with manufacturers boasting higher and higher megapixel numbers when any photographer will tell you that cramming masses of pixels into a tiny sensor actually results in worse image quality, especially in terms of low-light performance. It’s why DSLRs have much larger sensors than smartphones.
There’s only one reason you might want ultra-high resolution in a phone: the ability to push the display to a large-screen device.
As an aside, LG refers to the 2560×1440 resolution as ‘Quad HD’. It would be more accurately described as ‘Quad 720p HD’ as it’s the same number of pixels as four 1280×720 displays.
In the circles most of us hang out, it might seem incredible that featurephones – aka dumb phones – were still outselling smartphones until recently, but that was indeed the case right up to the first quarter of this year. The latest Gartner figures show that smartphones finally broke ahead in Q2, achieving 51.8 percent of worldwide phone sales.
Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe exhibited the highest smartphone growth rates of 74.1 percent, 55.7 percent and 31.6 percent respectively, as smartphone sales grew in all regions …
There was good news for both Samsung and Google in the figures … Expand Expanding Close
New images that have made their way to Chinese-language forum Digi-Wo (via XperiaBlog) show what could be an upcoming Sony smartphone to be unveiled during IFA next month in Berlin. All of the big smartphone makers will be showing off their latest devices during the IFA trade show next month– including Samsung— so it’s not much of a surprise that Sony too will be hosting a press event on September 4th during the press days leading up to the show. Some are speculating that this could very well be our first official glimpse at the Xperia i1, codenamed “Honami”, that’s expected to arrive with a 5-inch display, 20-megapixel rear camera, and Snapdragon 800 processor as one of Sony’s new flagship devices. There’s not much to go on yet, but we’ll be in Berlin next month to bring you all the official details live from the Sony event.
A new report claims Sony plans to launch an attachment for smartphones that will include a camera lens with built-in sensor, battery, and memory, and connect to a smartphone over NFC or WiFi. The report comes from SonyAlphaRumors, which claims this rumor comes from its top sources (opposed to some of the other stories it often posts from anonymous tipsters and less reliable sources).
There aren’t a ton of details about exactly how the lens would work in terms of integrating with a smartphone, but we’d imagine it would come with a companion app to drive the experience. The report claims it will pack in the same 20.2 MP sensor and Carl Zeiss lens as its $750 DSC-RX100M II digital camera, indicating its price tag might be on the high-end compared to similar camera lens attachments. Another version with a “smaller sensor and larger zoom” is also reportedly in the works.
The site notes that “You can mount it on the smartphone but also use it separately,” which we assume means it will act as a wireless viewfinder of sorts. Expand Expanding Close
Choosing a phone is pretty simple if you’re the kind of person who wants the latest & greatest handset and has the budget to pay for it. Even if you’re not sure what platform you want, you’re essentially choosing between a handful of flagship products and are currently likely to walk away with an iPhone 5, Samsung S4 or HTC One.
There isn’t too much head-scratching at the bottom end of the market either: buyers there don’t care about the handset, and take whatever freebie their carrier pushes at them.
But the mid-market is where life gets complicated. You care enough about your handset to want something decent, both in specs and design, but you don’t want to take out a mortgage to buy it. It’s this market that is going to get incredibly colorful this fall … Expand Expanding Close
Mother’s Day is right around the corner and AT&T is celebrating moms with a fun, shareable video e-card for a special edition of the popular “It’s Not Complicated” campaign. In a new rendition of the commercial that will air Friday through Sunday, mediator Beck Bennett strays from his usual, “what’s better, bigger or smaller?” and instead asks, “who gives the best hugs?” to a unanimous response – mom does! The video e-card can be personalized, offering consumers a simple Mother’s Day themed e-card video, with Beck and the kids, to share with mom via social media (Twitter, Facebook, email). Make your own personalized version of the “It’s Not Complicated, Moms are the Best” video e-card atATTMothersDay.com.
You know the rules: To enter, simply follow @9to5Google and retweet this post telling us why your mom would love an HTC First Facebook phone.
