Hasta La Gadget!

Fresh reports on the state of the cellphone market during Q2 2013 have blown through the barn door, and industry analysts are flaunting some fairly impressive figures. Smartphones have outsold their less-intelligent brethren for the second quarter in a row, and Strategy Analytics says shipments hit a record-breaking 237.9 million. According to IDC, Samsung managed to ship a total of 72.4 million smartphones during Q2 — a 43.9% boost year-over-year — with help of the Galaxy S 4 and price cuts to the GS3. To put that in perspective, that’s more than double the 31.2 million iPhones Apple managed to ship, and Strategy Analytics claims this marks a three-year low in Cook and Co.’s marketshare. While LG and ZTE each occupy third and fifth place, respectively, Lenovo pushed Huawei out of the number four slot by sending out 11.3 million handsets. If you’re craving for more stats, hit the break for a trio of press releases.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Samsung

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Source: IDC, ABI Research

Q1 2013 marks the first time that smartphones made up the majority of cellphones shipped across the world, according to numbers from industry analyst IDC. 216 million handsets with computer-like functionality left factories compared to 419 million total, making up a solid 51.6 percent of the pie. Another trend spotted by the pollster was the emergence of Chinese phone makers, particularly ZTE and Huawei, who’ve notably displaced Blackberry and Nokia in the top five for smartphones sold.

Meanwhile, Samsung improved its lead over Apple in smartphone shipments over last quarter, jumping from 29 percent to a 32.7 percent share in Q1, while Apple slid from 21.8 percent to 17.3 percent. Sony dropped out of the top 5 in that category, while LG surged to 3rd place at 10.3 million units shipped, with Huawei and ZTE rounding out the top 5. Meanwhile, Samsung and Nokia continued to dominate overall cellphone shipments with a 27.5 and 14.8 percent share of the overall market, respectively. However, Nokia itself isn’t too optimistic about the feature phone portion of those sales continuing, as it mentioned in its last financial statement. And the fact that people are happy to surf the web on their phones? As we’ve seen, that doesn’t bode too well for the computer industry.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Researchers at IDC have had their ears to the ground keeping tabs on shipments for specific types of devices, and now they’ve painted a bigger picture of the hardware battlefield in 2012. “Smart connected devices” — a category which includes desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones — saw a total of 367.7 million units shipped in Q4 2012, up 28.3 percent from the year before. In total, over 1.2 billion units were shipped last year, marking a 29.1 percent upswing from 2011. Naturally, tablets and smartphones drove the boost by carving out roughly 60 percent of the year’s combined marketshare, while PCs and notebook shipments sank by 4.1 and 3.4 percent, respectively.

While Samsung and Apple each claimed crowns in specific gadget divisions, Sammy came out on top with smart connected devices in 2012 as a whole (and in Q4) thanks to a 20.8 percent marketshare, beating Cupertino by 2.6 percent. Lenovo finished in third place with a 6.5 percent slice, while HP and Dell trailed behind with 4.8 and 3.2 percent, respectively. IDC notes that Cook. and Co. could have come in a more distant second, but the debut of the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini pulled it out of a slump from earlier in the year.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Mobile, Apple, Samsung

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Source: IDC

Samsung is looking to move around 20 percent more mobile phones in 2013 than it did in 2012, according to a new report from The Korea Times. The Korean electronics firm wants to ship 510 million phones in the New Year, which exceeds the 420 million it projected for 2012. The 2013 increase adds anticipated holiday sales to its existing 288 million total devices sold through September. Around 76 percent, or 390 million, of that 510 million will be smartphones, according to a key Samsung supplier speaking to the Korea Times.

These figures are very optimistic compared to earlier projections from Gartner, which pegged Samsung at around 300 million smartphone sales next year at the upper limit. Samsung has since shown itself as a very strong competitor in the latter half of the year, thanks to devices like the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2, which have helped the smartphone maker become the top global cellphone brand in 2012, finally overtaking Nokia to win that honor, according to iHS iSuppli projections.

While Samsung execs see a possible slowdown overall for smartphone demand, the company will offer Windows 8 devices and smartphones shipping with TIZEN – a joint project with Intel — in addition to its existing stable of Android-based handsets. It also claims in the report to be considering “better pricing” in developing markets to drive growth, and provide LTE-capable handsets at lower costs in more established markets like North America.

Put in perspective, Apple’s iPhone sales for 2012 totaled just over 125 million, so Samsung’s plan would see it outselling its strongest smartphone market rival by a considerable amount and outpacing its other Android handset maker rivals by even more of a gap. Given how strong the Korean electronics maker has come on in both the Android OEM race and overall smartphone market, that’s not too surprising or unrealistic an expectation for 2013.

Apple releases sales numbers, but none of the major Android manufacturers do, so market share comparisons–especially of the tablet market–are hard to do. Which is why it was interesting when Asus executive David Chang let this goodie slip to the Wall Street Journal:

“At the beginning, [Nexus 7 shipments] was, for instance, 500K units a month, then maybe 600, 700K. This latest month, it was close to 1 million.”

Wow! One million Nexus 7 tablets sold in a month–that’s a lot, but nothing compared to Apple’s 100 million iPads sold. From Chang’s context, it’s difficult to know whether this figure refers to tablets shipped or whether it refers to tablets sold. Shipping counts are often used to inflate and conflate sales numbers: Asus may have shipped a million tablets, but 900,000 could be languishing on shelves. Still, that’s an impressive number, and probably makes the Nexus 7 the most widely adopted Android tablet–except for the Kindle Fire, which, of course, we have no idea how many have sold either.

Google’s spokesperson said the company hasn’t released official sales figures.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google’s Nexus 7 tablet reportedly selling nearly 1 million units every month, Chromium OS Nexus 7 port,