Smartphones 55 percent of global mobile phone sales in third-quarter

By Harro Ten Wolde

FRANKFURT Thu Nov 14, 2013 5:55am EST

Syrian refugees look at photos of their missing and believed to have drowned compatriots on a smartphone, at the Hal Far open centre for migrants in Hal Far, outside Valletta, October 22, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Darrin Zammit Lupi

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Smartphone sales accounted for 55 percent of global mobile sales in the third quarter as customers in China and Latin America swapped their old phones for the higher end of the range gadgets, research firm Gartner said on Thursday.

Worldwide smartphone sales rose nearly 46 percent from last year to 250.2 million units, it said, while overall mobile phone sales were up less than 6 percent at 455.6 million.

"Sales of feature phones (normal handsets) continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP of affordable smartphones," said Gartner analyst Anshul Gupta.

He said he expected smartphone sales of just below 1 billion devices for 2013.

Samsung kept the top spot in the smartphone segment, with a 32.1 percent market share, selling 80.36 million smartphones, up from 55 million in the same quarter last year, helped by its Note 3 large display smartphone.

Apple sold 23.2 percent more smartphones at 30.33 million, but its market share dropped to 12.1 percent from 14.3 percent.

Sales of Apple's new iPhone 5S and its low-cost iPhone 5C model had a modest impact on sales as both phones went on sale in September, the last month of the quarter.

Lenovo took the third spot with a 5.1 percent market share in the smartphone segment, just ahead of LG Electronics and Huawei, with market shares of 4.8 percent and 4.7 percent respectively.

All the companies are in especially fierce competition in the Chinese market, where customers are still replacing their old models with smartphones.

Of the smartphones sold, 81.9 percent were running on Google's mobile platform Android, while 12.1 percent used Apple's iOS and 3.6 percent were on Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Gartner said.

Blackberry saw its user base drop to 1.8 percent from 5.2 percent from the third quarter last year, it added.

(Reporting by Harro ten Wolde; Editing by Gareth Jones)

View the original article here

Posted

às 23:48

More Information

Report: Advertisers Could Track You Via a Smartphone's Accelerometer

Careful how you handle your phone: researchers have been testing out new surveillance techniques, and they think that you could easily be tracked around the web using your phone's accelerometer.

That might sound a little cooky, but according to the SFGate security researcher Hristo Bojinov has discovered that it's possible to distinguish between individual devices simply analyzing the data that accelerometers—devices which measure the physical motion of your phone—provide to webpages. Interestingly, that's a result of imperfections in the way that accelerometers actually work.

No accelerometer works perfectly, so they all provide (unique) outputs even when at rest. According to Bojinov that's enough to track a smartphone around the web. All a site need do is use a small piece of code that grabs your smartphone's accelerometer data. In fact, Bojinov has even implemented that on a Stanford website where you can view your own mobile's accelerometer footprint.

It's unclear whether or not this technique has been used by websites and advertisers, but Bojinov claims he'd be surprised if someone somewhere wasn't already exploring the possibility. Add to that that motion-detection is becoming ever more sensitive—think of the iPhone 5S's M7 chip, for instance—and the chances are that this could be an increasingly likely avenue of snooping. The research will be formally published in the next month or two, but in the the meantime it will be interesting to see if anyone is using the technique already. [SFGate via Slashgear via Verge]

View the original article here

Posted

às 19:10

More Information