Android dominates smartphones in Q3 2012, Samsung widens its sales lead

Android continues expanding its dominance of the smartphone market, Samsung keeps on increasing its lead as the biggest smartphone maker and Nokia slips catastrophically in Q3 2012. That is a quick summary of what happened in the third quarter of 2012, according to the latest numbers by Gartner.

The analytics company concludes that while overall phone sales dropped slightly, smartphone sales are growing rapidly rising by 46.9% in Q3 2012.

Samsung cemented its position as the most prolific phone manufacturer selling nearly 98 million devices in the quarter.

Android remains the world’s most popular operating system in Q3 , iPhone 5 gives it heat in the States

Android has grown its share almost all over the globe and remains theworld’s most popular operating system, according to the latest report by UK-based analysts from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

The Kantar report focuses on the state of the mobile market in the United States, the UK and Europe as a whole in the third quarter of 2012.

So what are the numbers? Android leads in the United States, but with less. Its commanding 66.4% share has shrunken down to 57.5%, cannibalized by the growth of the iPhone which now has a 35.7% share. Interestingly, RIM has now become less popular than Windows Phone, but both have a very marginal sub-3% representation in the States.

Samsung sold twice as many smartphones as Apple in Q3, Nokia falls out of top five smartphone makers

Samsung sold 56.3 million smartphones in the third quarter of 2012, more than any other company and twice as many as its nearest competitor Apple, according to latest research by IDC. The two companies combined sold nearly a half of the total 179.7 million smartphones in the quarter.

As Samsung grew sales, though, the smartphone top 5 changed a lot and for the first time in years Nokia is not in it. The Finnish manufacturer, known for basically creating the smartphone, sold only 6.3 million smartphones.That is less than RIM, less than ZTE and less than HTC.

There are now over 1 billion smartphone users on the planet

In Q3 of 2012, a pretty significant milestone has been reached, according to a study by the research experts at Strategy Analytics. It is estimated that the total number of smartphone owners worldwide has surpassed the 1 billion mark for the first time ever since smartphones came to be back in 1996. In comparison, the figure stood at 0.7 billion at the end of Q3, 2011. That’s huge!

Think of it this way: one in seven people around the globe have some kind of a smartphone, be it an iPhone, an Android handset, a Symbian device, or any kind of phone worthy of being called smart. But what’s even more exciting is that the numbers are to go higher at an even more ridiculous pace, if the research is correct.

RIM CEO thinks the company has a “clear shot at being number 3”

Analysts and users may not totally agree, but at least the head of RIM has a positive outlook on what the future holds for the BlackBerry platform. In fact, Thorsten Heins believes that RIM can be successful enough to be number three in the market. Although, Heins sort of undercut his own optimism in the same statement. At the BlackBerry Jam Americas conference, Heins said:

We have a clear shot at being the number three platform on the market. We’re not just another open platform on the market, we are BlackBerry.

The statement was a good shot at bravado, but the problem is: What exactly does “we are BlackBerry” even mean anymore?

RIM licenses Microsoft’s exFAT file system to stuff extra-large files into BlackBerry devices

RIM has big ambitions for media on BlackBerry hardware — really big. Accordingly, it just reached a patent licensing deal with Microsoft that lets it use the exFAT file system on “certain BlackBerry devices.” We have a hunch that’s a reference to future BlackBerry 10 phones and tablets rather than retrofits of existing (and likely incapable) mobile gear. The move will let any devices that do recognize exFAT handle much larger files, such as long videos, in addition to streamlining transfers between computers and other gadgets. The conditions of the deal haven’t been given out, but we suspect RIM’s negotiations with Microsoft were on more voluntary terms than those faced by Android supporters.

The Mobile Device Privacy Act has been introduced in Congress

Rep. Markey’s assertion is that a handheld personal device does not equate to personal information being handled by third parties without permission. The intention of the legislation is to provide greater transparency regarding data an application may gather and transmit, with the user’s permission.

Lenovo reveals the waterproof A660 Android smartphone

Lenovo’s first waterproof device features an IP67 certification which translates to dust and water resistance of up to 1 meter for 30 minutes.

comScore: Android still dominates, iOS closing in

It seems that smartphones had another strong summer quarter Stateside, as the quarterly comScore report reflects a 7% increase in smartphone users for the 3 month period ending in July.
Google still dominates the smartphone platform with just over 52% of the market, up 1.4% over last quarter. Apple has also seen good growth, up two percent points to now cover just about a third of all smartphones in the US.

Chips reaching their limits as smartphones progress

The semi-conductor business, for all its progress, is a balancing act. The industry, from AMD to Xilinx, advances their product lines and specifications at a blinding speed, sometimes exceeding the spirit of “Moore’s Law” which basically states, that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years. Certainly in some cases, we have seen this technology advance at an exponential rate. This law applies in the context of miniaturization as well.