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Tag: iphone

  • iPhone Is Shattered In China: Apple Fails To Win The Chinese Market

    Apple’s strategy of aligning the iPhone to a single mobile operator seems to have failed in China, where Samsung has achieved impressive market share. According to Bloomberg, iPhone has a 7.5% share of smartphones sales in China, while Samsung has 24.3% market share.

    This percentage makes Apple the fifth smartphone seller in the country, while Samsung ranks first. Samsung has sold phones through the three largest mobile operators even since 2009: China Unicom (about 200 million subscribers), China Telecom (129 million subscribers) and China Mobile (655 million subscribers).

    Apple, on the other hand, has sold exclusively through China Unicom, but two weeks ago began to sell its iPhone through China Telecom as well, which should increase the company’s market share. But China Telecom, although huge considering the Western standards, is the smallest of the three Chinese mobile operators.

    The “Father” of mobile communications in China, China Mobile, expects to start selling Apple’s iPhone only after the Cupertino company will release the LTE version, expected by the Chinese company later this year. About 15 million “decoded” iPhones are already in use in China Mobile’s network, without the operator to sell one.

    The reason why the market share is so important is that the smartphones have become a marketing platform, on which developers are building applications running on different operating systems. As for Windows, if a platform reaches a dominant market share, developers tend to “gravitate” around it. Thus, a risk for Apple in China (and worldwide as well) is that Android could become the dominant platform for application development.

    The operating system developed by Google, which supports the smartphones produced by Samsung, is the market leader in China with a share of almost 50%, even though Apple has regained an important part in the previous quarter thanks to the sales of iPhone 4S.

    It is likely that Apple’s sales through China Telecom to help reduce the difference between the Cupertino company and Samsung in China, but until will sell the smartphone through China Mobile, Samsung will remain the leading smartphone manufacturer in China.

  • Apple iPhone, Partly Built By 13-Year-Olders for 70 Cents per Hour

    Not many people know that the popular iPhone and iPad are made in unbelievable working conditions. According to a report conducted by NPR, some of those working in production are 12, 13 or 14 years old.

    Foxconn, the factory where parts of Apple terminals are made, is located in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, with a population that exceeds New York – over 13 million people. Factory workers are more than 430,000.

    What surprised NPR reporters is that they met many children at the entrance. Apparently, Foxconn employers ignore age when hiring, even when they have less than 14 years old. The reporters  estimated that 5% of Chinese people working in manufacturing are minors. They suspect that Apple's U.S. representatives must know this or, if they don't, it's because they don't want to know being concerned about the price of production to remain as low as possible.

    According to NPR, at the Foxconn factory as well as other factories in Shenzhen, employees are working in halls with a capacity of 30,000 people. Work is done exclusively by hand, and the room is always quiet, because people are not allowed to speak. Workers are watched by cameras and have no right to create trade unions.

    On the move, reporters saw a former employee of Foxconn factory. He has broken his hand in a metal press, but has not been provided with medical care. Moreover, when he got back to work he did not have the same dexterity, so the man was fired. One reporter showed an iPad to the former employee and despite the fact that he worked for years in production the man had never seen such a device.

    NPR reporters claim that Foxconn employees earn about $250 per month. According to Reuters, their salary is $298 per month. Considering the fact that they are working over 15 hours a day, they are paid with less than 1 dollar per hour.

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  • iPhone 4S Could Be Banned in Europe

    iPhone 4S, Apple’s latest smartphone, could be banned in Europe along with all Apple devices that have GPRS connectivity and run iOS, following a lawsuit filed in Germany by Motorola.

    The number of lawsuits in which the company in Cupertino is involved grows with every passing day. After last week a court in Australia has unanimously decided to withdraw a preliminary decision prohibiting Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to be sold in Australia, Apple faces a new threat from Motorola.

    The company, acquired this year by Google, has won in Germany a preliminary injunction through which obtained prohibiting the sale of Apple devices that have the GPRS  technology, namely iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G, in Europe.

    The case represents a huge loss for Apple in the patents war that they are carrying with the Asian manufacturers of Android devices in several countries worldwide.

    “We will appeal the decision immediately. German consumers who want to buy an iPhone or an iPad for the holidays should not have troubles finding them,” said Apple representatives shortly after the decision.

    In the light of recent events, the Motorola Mobility purchase by Google, recorded this summer, seems a natural one. Market specialists have speculated even since those times that Google has paid $12.5 billion for the U.S. company only for its patent portfolio in the telecom area, and only in order to defend Android, the mobile platform that develops, by the trials filed by Apple against several manufacturers.

    Legal conflict between Apple and Android manufacturers has a long history, most of the lawsuits being filed by the U.S. company against the South Koreans from Samsung.

    Apple accuses them of copying the design and functionality of the iPhone and iPad smartphones and tablets of the Galaxy series models. In response, Samsung accuses Apple of violating several patents in the telecommunications area.

    Currently, between Apple and Samsung are opened 23 lawsuits in countries like France, Japan, Germany, South Korea and the United States.

  • Smartphones – Present and Future

    More than 200,000 units of iPhone 4S, the world’s leading smartphone, have been sold following its release into the market in the past week, and sales worldwide are still picking up. Just what is it about smartphones today that make them the hottest item in the global shopping list?

    Market analysts this week indicated that the success of the leading smartphones available today may be attributed to the specialized niche for the product created by Apple when the company launched its first iPhone model in 2007. The researchers pointed out that smartphones were not an invention of Apple; the device has been in the market for a couple of years before the 2007 iPhone launch.

    However, the iPhone defined the smartphones once and for all: hands down, it became the most dramatic universal device ever invented as the human race left the old and entered the new millennium.

    So many things can be said about this gadget and still leave so many things unsaid. The most recent studies showed that the smartphone is so common, in fact, so universal that it became as vital as breathing and as handy as a handkerchief.

    The growth of the smartphone market is due to the astonishing uniqueness of the device. Unlike any telephone ever invented, it has an entirely new name which describes its singular position as THE as a communications device of the day.

    There are currently scores of smartphone models from the four biggest cellular phone manufacturers worldwide, excluding knockoffs and imitations (of questionable quality and origin) from Asia. While the cell phone and the smartphone are essentially both hand-held wireless telephones to allow one to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world so easily and so inexpensively, smartphones occupy their own unassailable niche. Smart-phones are basically hand-held, pocket computers with features and capabilities far and away more superior to their older cellular phone cousins.

    The future of the smartphone remains awesomely bright, as technologies it thrust into the spotlight are further perfected such as its multi-touch screen that dispensed with the keyboard and its walk-around computer feature that makes smart-phones so updatable.

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  • iPhone Did Not Conquer Yet the Hearts of the Rich

    iPhone is leading the smartphone market in terms of sales, but smartphone users can also be divided by income: a study conducted by prospermobile.com, shows that the brand of mobile phones most used by the rich is BlackBerry. The study was conducted in June 2011 by interviewing 25,000 respondents.

    According to the study, the BlackBerry is the most used smartphone among users with incomes over $ 150,000 per year. 11.3% of the richest Americans own a BlackBerry, while only 10.9% of them have an iPhone and only 7.2% have an Android smartphone.

    Moreover, the ranking is also the same for users which have income ranging between 100,000 and 149,000 dollars per year. 21.2% of them are using BlackBerry, 19.1% of them use Apple’s iPhone and only 15.8% use a smartphone running on Android OS.

    Interestingly, iPhone starts to lead the ranking of the most commonly used smartphones among users with an annual income between $ 75,000 and $ 99,000. 20% of them use Apple's terminal, while the BlackBerry smartphone is used by only 18.7% of users in this group.

    Android handsets, which are not so popular among wealthy users, seem to be the preferred choice of those with incomes ranging between 35,000 and 49,000 dollars a year.

    The study also shows that BlackBerry users are generally professionals, businessmen or managers and they are not active users of online applications or multimedia content. Only 59.5% of them are downloading applications, while the percentage among iPhone users is up to 85.

    Anyway, this study gets public even before the launch of the iPhone 5, which, according to the latest rumors, will be held in Cupertino, not in San Francisco as happened with the previous generations if iPhones and iPads. The launch will be live on internet, on the Apple’s official website, on Tuesday, October 4.

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  • Apple Strikes Again: Galaxy Tab 7.7 Out From IFA

    The war Apple takes against Samsung is reaching a new milestone: the tablet Galaxy Tab 7.7, presented last week at IFA 2011, has been removed from Samsung’s stand after a court order, the reason being violation of patents owned by Apple.

    The Court in Dusseldorf, the same that has also decided to ban Galaxy Tab 10.1, was the decision-maker in this case.

    Apple has legally obtained an order according to which Samsung is prohibited from marketing and promoting this product.

    James Chung, a spokesman for Samsung Seoul declined to comment on the court decision, but said that Samsung will respect the legal order, despite the fact that it is severely limiting the consumer. Furthermore, the company will defend itself in court.

    Samsung and Apple have been in disputes over time, because Apple claims that the Galaxy products from Samsung are copying their iPad and iPhone. Just a month ago, the court from Dusseldorf has temporarily banned Samsung to promote their Galaxy Tab 10.1 in 26 out of the 27 EU member states. The first trial in this series took place in April, in the United States.

    The legal order received late last week comes with losses of over half the units, according to Strategy Analytics. In the first quarter, Samsung had a market share of 16%, well below the iPhone's 69%.

    Galaxy Tab 7.7 has been released last week in Berlin. The first tablet in the world with Super AMOLED screen resolution of 1280X800 has a thickness of 7.89 mm, weighs 335 grams and comes equipped with a 1.4 GHz dual-core processor and 1GB RAM. The tablet is running Android 3.2 Honeycomb and has WiFi, HSPA + 21 Mbps and 2 cameras of 2 and 3 megapixels, respectively.

    Samsung had no details about the price of the tablet and when it will arrive in stores.

    Further reading:

  • Apple Took Two Thirds of Available Mobile Phone Profits in Q2

    iPhone is a huge success for Apple. Besides the fact that is making almost half of the company’s revenues, iPhone collects two-thirds of total profits of the smartphone manufacturers.

    This figure was provided by the consulting company Asymco, founded and led by Horace Dediu. He gathered data from financial statements of the main protagonists that are competing on market for our money for phones.

    Asymco says that Apple has 66.3% of the pie, followed by Samsung with 15%, Research in Motion (RIM) is gathering with its BlackBerrys 11% and HTC has other 7.4%. Moreover, four major global manufacturers – Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG – have losses in the last quarter.

    According to Strategy Analytics, Apple now holds the crown of smartphone shipments, with 18.5% of market, followed by Samsung with 17.5% and Nokia with 15.2%.

    Samsung, the main threat, is using three platforms

    Unlike its analysts, who give Samsung with 19.2 million smartphones sold, Dediu estimates the giant at 19.9 million units shipped. Apple has already announced officially that they have 20.3 million terminals. The problem is that Samsung is producing phones that are running on three platforms, Android, Windows Phone 7 and its Bada OS. Rumors say the company refrain from publishing the breakdown and the number of phones, not only because of patent problems they had with Apple and Microsoft, but just because Android deliveries were under Nokia sales, 16.7 million Symbian phones.

    HTC will surpass Blackberry and Nokia

    Asymco analysts also write that the era of slightly increase of the smartphone producers already ended and that is very clear that Symbian and BlackBerry OS have become a burden to their developers and users are not buying any, since the decreases are not cyclic. Nokia already jumped in the Microsoft boat, but RIM is trying a transition to QNX, the operating system on the PlayBook tablet. Also, the hot competition could strongly hit smaller companies such as Motorola and Sony Ericsson. In addition, with iPhone nano entering the fight for the low-cost and medium segment of smartphones would be almost equivalent to a disaster for the small producers of Android or LG, who cannot make profit even so. And that's exactly what Apple is going to do.

    Also, at this rate, HTC will surpass RIM over the next three months in terms of units sold, after giving 12.1 million units in the last quarter (+142%), while RIM has sold 13,2 million BlackBerry phones (+18%).

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  • Apple Ready to Launch the Production of the New iPhone

    Apple is close to launch the next generation of iPhones in an attempt to stay on top of their rivals from Samsung, says WSJ.

    The company has ordered some important components for a new iPhone in order to launch the next generation in late September, according to several people close to the matter. Sources say that the new iPhone is expected to be much like the current iPhone 4, but thinner and lighter, plus an 8-megapixel camera.

    One source claims that the new iPhone will run on Qualcomm chips. iPhone 4 uses chips from a former division of the German company Infineon Technologies AG, which is now owned by Intel. Apple officials declined to comment on the data.

    The rumors on the appearance of the new iPhone version, the product that brought the most revenues for Apple, have increased after the company chose not to reveal a new model of smartphone at the CNDC held in early June, as they did in the past.

    Apple said at that time that the new version of iOS 5 will be available in this fall. This has fueled the speculations that the latest generation of iPhones will be introduced at the same time. A well- informed person said the American company initially planned the launch this summer, but the device was not finished on time.

    iPhone businesses have generated almost half of company’s revenues of 24.7 billion dollars in the quarter ended on March 26. The rivalry between Apple and Samsung has intensified in recent years, both companies being directly involved in a legal battle, both Samsung and Apple being accused of violating intellectual property.

    Tuesday, Apple filed a complaint against Samsung at the Commission on International Trade in the United States by trying to stop the importation of Samsung smartphones and tablets after the Koreans have asked the Commission to de-market certain models of iPhone and iPad in the United States.

    Wall Street projections for the new iPhone are relatively conservative because the analysts are not expecting the device to have major improvements and design changes to convince the current iPhone owners to buy the new version.

  • iPhone in a Smaller and Cheaper Version for Emerging Markets

    A few days ago have appeared a number of new rumors about iPhone 5, according to which the terminal will come equipped with iPad's processor, will have an 8-megapixel camera and will have a radically changed design, as "teardrop".

    The sources close to Bloomberg are disclosing some information that we won’t even dare to hope: Apple is preparing a smaller and cheaper version of iPhone, based on the iPhone 4’s hardware. The device aims the under-development countries, areas that until now have been dominated by Nokia’s handsets.

    The same sources are saying that Apple will soon release a new iPad, which uses an improved version of the “Retina Display” technology, which currently features the iPhone 4. The tablet will have a higher resolution and will include a touch layer to respond more quickly to commands.

    And as the sixth generation of iPhone is becoming more and more interesting for the Apple fans and the speculation have already started to flow, the enthusiasts claim that the iPhone 5 will hit the market in the spring 2012. The phone is expected to come equipped with major hardware updates, with a magnitude as great as the fourth generation had.

    The experts in this field believe that Apple should really embrace a more aggressive launch cycle to cope with strong competition coming from the growing army of Android smartphones.

    It is estimated that by the end of 2011, Apple will hold 18.5 percent points of the market share, while Google will have twice, 38.9 percent points. These are some bad news for Apple, which obtains more than half of revenue from the sales of iPhones.

    Meanwhile, new information on the final design for the iPhone 5 were used to create a portrait that we can form an opinion about how the future iPhone should look like.

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  • Apple Prepares the Next iPhone for September

    Apple prepares for September the launch of a new iPhone 5 which will have a more powerful processor and an advanced video camera, said two sources close to the situation.

    The phone will be equipped with the A5 processor of the iPad 2, and an 8-megapixel camera, compared to the 5-megapixel on the iPhone 4, said the sources, adding that Apple is also testing a new version of the iPad tablet, which boasts a higher resolution screen.

    Apple representatives declined to comment on this information.

    A faster chip will allow faster processing of data and will strengthen iPhone’s market position in relation with the smartphones launched by rival companies such as Samsung and HTC using Google’s Android platform.

    The new Apple phone will run the iOS 5, recently introduced by the company at a WWDC conference. The system has improved messaging features and photo-sharing and can run on all Apple mobile gadgets. By the end of last year, the iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch were using slightly different versions of the iOS.

    The company has delayed the introduction of the fifth iPhone to coincide with the launch of the iOS 5, said the sources.

    The iPhone is Apple's best selling product, generating half of the revenues in the last quarter.

    Market research firm, IDC, estimates that the smartphone market will reach one billion units sold by the end of 2015. The IDC also predicts that Apple will have a market share of 18.2% this year compared to 38.9% for Android phones.

    Apple is close to completing a cheaper and smaller version of the iPhone for consumers in emerging countries, the sources added. This gadget would use chips and screens close to the current seen on iPhone 4.

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