Apple’s big China weekend: how big?
All mobile phonemakers know just how important China is to their fortunes. With around a billion mobile phone customers, and many poised to upgrade to smartphones, the industry is at a crucial point.
So Apple followers and investors should be cheered by the company’s announcement on Monday that it sold over 2m units of its new iPhone 5 in China, just three days after the December 14 launch. Game over? Not quite. Continue reading »
HTC: Apple settlement – good news or temporary reprieve?
When the biggest beast in the jungle decides not to fight you any more, your survival chances go up a lot. That’s the message from HTC shares on Monday.
After the company and Apple announced a global settlement that includes the dismissal of all current lawsuits and a ten-year license agreement, shares in the Taiwanese phonemaker leapt up 6.86 per cent – its daily limit. But is this the turning point for HTC, which saw profits fall 80 per cent in the third quarter? Continue reading »
Google: don’t let 1,000 Androids bloom
It’s been the season of high-profile phone launches. Except, sadly, for Acer and Alibaba. Their planned launch of a co-branded phone for Chinese consumers got cancelled at the last minute when Google objected to the version of Android on the phone.
What the last-minute cancellation – and some continued sniping between the companies – shows is how tricky it is to manage China’s booming mobile market. That’s true, apparently, even for Google, whose Android platform dominates in a big way. Continue reading »
BlackBerry’s lead in Indonesian market: the Apple / Android threat
Although it is losing sales in the developed world to Apple’s iPhone and Google Android smartphones produced by Samsung and Sony, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion has been able to console itself with its market leading position in Indonesia.
But that could be coming under threat, according to new figures from market research group IDC, which show that Android has overtaken BlackBerry as the most popular operating system in this country of 240m people. Continue reading »
India: Android outpacing iPhone
As Apple wades through patent battles and criticism over working conditions in other parts of Asia, it faces a different kind of resistance in India: a consistently low customer base.
Rival Android-based phones and BlackBerrys overshadow Apple’s flat 2.4 per cent market share as they continue to be increasingly popular with the country’s youth and business markets. Continue reading »
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Stefan Wagstyl
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