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Samsung and HTC make up nearly 90 per cent of Android sales
By Rich Trenholm on 15 May 2012, 5:53pm
Nearly nine out of ten Android blowers sold in Britain are Samsung or HTC phones, according to the latest sales figures. Android accounts for half of smart phone sales, outpacing Apple — while BlackBerry stubbornly refuses to go quietly.
New data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech shows that phones running Google’s Android software still hold the number one position, with a 50.1 per cent share of the British smart phone market up from 44.6 per cent this time last year. Of those Android phones, Samsung and HTC are the dominant force: between them, they account for 86 per cent of sales in the last three months.
That’s partly thanks to the smash hit HTC One X, as well as the continued success of the Samsung Galaxy range — which will get another boost very soon with the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy S3.
The arrival of a big-name phone hasn’t done anything to reverse Sony’s ailing fortunes. Despite ditching Ericsson and launching the Sony Xperia S, the Japanese giant still slid to 10.4 per cent of the Android market.
Things are even bleaker for LG, down to less than 1 per cent of Android sales.
Meanwhile Windows Phones now has double the market share of Symbian, a drastic reversal from this time last year: Windows Phone is now at 3.3, up from a meagre 0.8 per cent, while Symbian has plummeted from 10.7 per cent to 1.6 per cent. So while Nokia’s cheaper Symbian phones are on the way out, the Finnish company’s Windows-powered Nokia Lumia range is on the up.
And BlackBerry? Whether it’s businesspeople or BBM-addicted yoofs, Britons are still buying BlackBerry. The market share has dropped but more than one in ten phones sold are BlackBerrys, in fact. That’s a far cry from a plummeting US market share.
Apple is stronger in the American market with 42 per cent, up a whopping 10 per cent on last year. In the US, Android has 47.6 per cent of the market, down from 54.2 per cent a year ago. Although Android’s growth is slower, it’s still selling more phones than last year because the total number of phones is increasing.
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
By Rich Trenholm on 15 May 2012, 5:53pm
Nearly nine out of ten Android blowers sold in Britain are Samsung or HTC phones, according to the latest sales figures. Android accounts for half of smart phone sales, outpacing Apple — while BlackBerry stubbornly refuses to go quietly.
New data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech shows that phones running Google’s Android software still hold the number one position, with a 50.1 per cent share of the British smart phone market up from 44.6 per cent this time last year. Of those Android phones, Samsung and HTC are the dominant force: between them, they account for 86 per cent of sales in the last three months.
That’s partly thanks to the smash hit HTC One X, as well as the continued success of the Samsung Galaxy range — which will get another boost very soon with the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy S3.
The arrival of a big-name phone hasn’t done anything to reverse Sony’s ailing fortunes. Despite ditching Ericsson and launching the Sony Xperia S, the Japanese giant still slid to 10.4 per cent of the Android market.
Things are even bleaker for LG, down to less than 1 per cent of Android sales.
Meanwhile Windows Phones now has double the market share of Symbian, a drastic reversal from this time last year: Windows Phone is now at 3.3, up from a meagre 0.8 per cent, while Symbian has plummeted from 10.7 per cent to 1.6 per cent. So while Nokia’s cheaper Symbian phones are on the way out, the Finnish company’s Windows-powered Nokia Lumia range is on the up.
And BlackBerry? Whether it’s businesspeople or BBM-addicted yoofs, Britons are still buying BlackBerry. The market share has dropped but more than one in ten phones sold are BlackBerrys, in fact. That’s a far cry from a plummeting US market share.
Apple is stronger in the American market with 42 per cent, up a whopping 10 per cent on last year. In the US, Android has 47.6 per cent of the market, down from 54.2 per cent a year ago. Although Android’s growth is slower, it’s still selling more phones than last year because the total number of phones is increasing.
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HTC Desire C confirmed, budget Beats and Ice Cream Sandwich
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
HTC Desire C confirmed, budget Beats and Ice Cream Sandwich
By Rich Trenholm on 15 May 2012, 12:58pm
Remember the HTC Desire C leaked yesterday? It’s just been made official, and it’ll put Ice Cream Sandwich in your pocket for £170.
The 3.5-inch Desire C runs the latest Android 4.0 software, known as Ice Cream Sandwich — which is kind of a big deal, especially at this price.
It also packs Beats Audio, boosting the quality of sound from your music, movies and games, and coming with a pair of signature Beats headphones.
Inside the Desire C’s metal frame there’s a 5-megapixel camera. Your photos, and movies and music, can be stored online in cloud storage service Dropbox, as you get 25GB of free online space when you buy the phone.
For more on Ice Cream Sandwich, check out our ten reasons why Ice Cream Sandwich beats Gingerbread.
Despite being an affordable phone, there’s a version with NFC available too, looking forward to when NFC will let you pay for stuff by waving your phone at a special till in shops, bars and restaurants. Paying for things isn’t the only use of NFC though — here’s how to use NFC tags with your Android mobile phone.
The Desire C is available around the world in red, white and black, but we’ll only get the white and black versions.
T-Mobile was quickest off the mark to give us the £170 price, and is offering the phone for free on a two-year contract at £15.50 per month. It’ll also hit the shelves at Vodafone, Orange, Virgin Media, Three, O2, Phones4U, The Carphone Warehouse, and Tesco Mobile.
Do you like the look of the Desire C? Does it have the chops to run Ice Cream Sandwich? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
By Rich Trenholm on 15 May 2012, 12:58pm
Remember the HTC Desire C leaked yesterday? It’s just been made official, and it’ll put Ice Cream Sandwich in your pocket for £170.
The 3.5-inch Desire C runs the latest Android 4.0 software, known as Ice Cream Sandwich — which is kind of a big deal, especially at this price.
It also packs Beats Audio, boosting the quality of sound from your music, movies and games, and coming with a pair of signature Beats headphones.
Inside the Desire C’s metal frame there’s a 5-megapixel camera. Your photos, and movies and music, can be stored online in cloud storage service Dropbox, as you get 25GB of free online space when you buy the phone.
For more on Ice Cream Sandwich, check out our ten reasons why Ice Cream Sandwich beats Gingerbread.
Despite being an affordable phone, there’s a version with NFC available too, looking forward to when NFC will let you pay for stuff by waving your phone at a special till in shops, bars and restaurants. Paying for things isn’t the only use of NFC though — here’s how to use NFC tags with your Android mobile phone.
The Desire C is available around the world in red, white and black, but we’ll only get the white and black versions.
T-Mobile was quickest off the mark to give us the £170 price, and is offering the phone for free on a two-year contract at £15.50 per month. It’ll also hit the shelves at Vodafone, Orange, Virgin Media, Three, O2, Phones4U, The Carphone Warehouse, and Tesco Mobile.
Do you like the look of the Desire C? Does it have the chops to run Ice Cream Sandwich? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
LG Optimus 4X HD coming to the UK soon
By Andrew Hoyle on 15 May 2012, 11:13am
Read hands-on test
The LG Optimus 4X HD will soon be arriving in UK stores, bringing with it a 4.7-inch screen, quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and a bunch of software extras.
We first saw the 4X back in February for Barcelona’s for Mobile World Congress but since then it seems to have disappeared off the radar. It’s reared its face again today though as LG has confirmed that it will be hitting our shelves very soon. It’s going to be launching “in Western Europe” in June although exactly when it’s going to be in good old Blighty hasn’t been confirmed yet.
The 4X HD was one of my favourite phones from MWC, packing a 4.7-inch screen with a 720p resolution that was both bright and vivid — as you’d expect from a company that’s famous for its TVs. It’s running on a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chip that I’ve found to be extremely competent on tablets like the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 for not only general processing tasks but also for handling 3D games too.
The Tegra 3 also makes use of a fifth core that it can switch to when in standby mode, thereby preserving power by not using all four main cores at once. We didn’t find this produced particularly impressive results on the HTC One X, but LG’s Eco software might be able to squeeze some extra juice out of it by letting you throttle the power output of the processor when you’re doing less demanding tasks.
The phone also comes with a bunch of media software that apparently gives you finer control over your video watching and Quick Memo that lets you write a note whilst you’re in any app or game.
There’s no word on pricing yet for the new phone but it’s likely that the various networks will be announcing their plans nearer to the launch so stay tuned for more info.
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
By Andrew Hoyle on 15 May 2012, 11:13am
Read hands-on test
The LG Optimus 4X HD will soon be arriving in UK stores, bringing with it a 4.7-inch screen, quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and a bunch of software extras.
We first saw the 4X back in February for Barcelona’s for Mobile World Congress but since then it seems to have disappeared off the radar. It’s reared its face again today though as LG has confirmed that it will be hitting our shelves very soon. It’s going to be launching “in Western Europe” in June although exactly when it’s going to be in good old Blighty hasn’t been confirmed yet.
The 4X HD was one of my favourite phones from MWC, packing a 4.7-inch screen with a 720p resolution that was both bright and vivid — as you’d expect from a company that’s famous for its TVs. It’s running on a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chip that I’ve found to be extremely competent on tablets like the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 for not only general processing tasks but also for handling 3D games too.
The Tegra 3 also makes use of a fifth core that it can switch to when in standby mode, thereby preserving power by not using all four main cores at once. We didn’t find this produced particularly impressive results on the HTC One X, but LG’s Eco software might be able to squeeze some extra juice out of it by letting you throttle the power output of the processor when you’re doing less demanding tasks.
The phone also comes with a bunch of media software that apparently gives you finer control over your video watching and Quick Memo that lets you write a note whilst you’re in any app or game.
There’s no word on pricing yet for the new phone but it’s likely that the various networks will be announcing their plans nearer to the launch so stay tuned for more info.
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
Talk to the hand with a phone in a 3D-printed glove
By Rich Trenholm on 14 May 2012, 1:47pm
Mobile phones: they’re pretty handy, right? But holding one does mean your hand is tied up — unless you don Glove One, a glove with a phone in it. Best of all, you can make it yourself.
Glove One is an art project by Milwaukee-based designer Bryan Cera. The numbers are on the fingers, so you dial and chat away by holding up thumb and little finger in the universal symbol for “call me”.
It’s made out of jointed bits of plastic, and here’s the really clever part: you can print the plastic joints with a 3D printer to build your own gloved phone, making you look like Michael Jackson dialling out.
3D printing involves a machine like the Makerbot Thing-O-Matic building up layers of plastic to a set design to create your piece of kit. Press play on our video to see the Thing-O-Matic in action.
According to its designer, the five-fingered phone is “the literalization of Sherry Turkle’s notion of technology as a ‘phantom limb’, in how we augment ourselves through an ambivalent reliance on it, as well as a celebration of the freedom we seek in our devices… While we enjoy the fantasies they offer, we rethink the technologies we construct and reflect on how they construct us.” Quite.
I’d like to see a smart phone version with a screen in the palm for web browsing and watching HD movies. And how about pairing it with Nokia’s magnetic tattoo that vibrates when you get a call to turn your body into a bionic blower?
Until then we’ll stick with our Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X — at least until bionic eyeballs and Google brain implants come along.
Would you wear a glove with a phone in it, or are mobiles fine the way they are? Smell the glove in the comments or on our Facebook page.
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
By Rich Trenholm on 14 May 2012, 1:47pm
Mobile phones: they’re pretty handy, right? But holding one does mean your hand is tied up — unless you don Glove One, a glove with a phone in it. Best of all, you can make it yourself.
Glove One is an art project by Milwaukee-based designer Bryan Cera. The numbers are on the fingers, so you dial and chat away by holding up thumb and little finger in the universal symbol for “call me”.
It’s made out of jointed bits of plastic, and here’s the really clever part: you can print the plastic joints with a 3D printer to build your own gloved phone, making you look like Michael Jackson dialling out.
3D printing involves a machine like the Makerbot Thing-O-Matic building up layers of plastic to a set design to create your piece of kit. Press play on our video to see the Thing-O-Matic in action.
According to its designer, the five-fingered phone is “the literalization of Sherry Turkle’s notion of technology as a ‘phantom limb’, in how we augment ourselves through an ambivalent reliance on it, as well as a celebration of the freedom we seek in our devices… While we enjoy the fantasies they offer, we rethink the technologies we construct and reflect on how they construct us.” Quite.
I’d like to see a smart phone version with a screen in the palm for web browsing and watching HD movies. And how about pairing it with Nokia’s magnetic tattoo that vibrates when you get a call to turn your body into a bionic blower?
Until then we’ll stick with our Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X — at least until bionic eyeballs and Google brain implants come along.
Would you wear a glove with a phone in it, or are mobiles fine the way they are? Smell the glove in the comments or on our Facebook page.
You might like these…
O2 Travel £2 data deal in time for new Euro roaming rules
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Samsung Galaxy S3 best prices compared
Android on 600 phones and tablets in less than four years
Samsung is destroying evidence in patent trials, Apple claims
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Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All rights reserved.
