Samsung denies organising the 'Wake Up' demonstration outside an Australian Apple Store.
Yesterday evening there was big news reported around the interwebs that Samsung had staged a 'Wake up' promo aimed at what the company describes as iOS sheep, who simply buy Apple products because they want to be part of the 'cool crowd'.
Today, however, Samsung has expressly denied having an involvement with this event. The specially labelled buses, the people with their signs and matching attire were all the work of someone else.... hmmmmmm.
I can't believe for a second a company wouldn't take credit if they had pulled this publicity stunt, and the suggestion it was Samsung yesterday seemed to fit in with their iSheep and their you don't need to wait in lines campaigns of the past. So perhaps someone is lying through their teeth or perhaps this is a human rights group trying to argue that Apple needs to take better care of it's production workers in China. Either way there is more to come out of this story and always you'll be the first to know!
So who is the world's biggest smartphone seller?
That is a question you would think 'profession business analysts' would be able to answer. But, apparently not! It seems that there is a bit of disagreement within the industry as to who is actually the dominant force.
Apple come straight o0ut and announced it had sold 35 million iPhones in Q1, whereas Sammy where a bit quiet in their earns call. The only information they would offer was that they sold 93.5million phones of both the feature and smart varieties.
One firm called IHS suggested Samsung had shipped 32million smartphones but there was a rather large disagreement because 44.5million smartphones was the guestimate from Strategic Analysts. That difference is rather huge. Strategic Analysts cited the success of the Galaxy Note, S2 and the Galaxy Y for the huge growth in Samsung sales. So noone really knows.
Either way we do now officially Samsung is the world's biggest mobile phone seller after stripping Nokia of that title this quarter as Nokia suffered another torrid season.
The Kindle Fire makes up 50% of the Android Tablet sales!!!
U.S. Market Share of Android Tablets by Unique Devices Dec-2011, Jan-2012, Feb-2012 Total U.S. Source: comScore Device Essentials* | |||
% Share of Android Tablets | |||
Dec-11 | Jan-12 | Feb-12 | |
Amazon Kindle Fire | 29.4% | 41.8% | 54.4% |
Samsung Galaxy Tab Family | 23.8% | 19.1% | 15.4% |
Motorola Xoom | 11.8% | 9.0% | 7.0% |
Asus Transformer | 6.4% | 6.2% | 6.3% |
Toshiba AT100 | 7.1% | 7.0% | 5.7% |
Acer Picasso | 6.0% | 5.2% | 4.3% |
Acer Iconia | 2.8% | 2.6% | 2.1% |
Dell Streak | 2.2% | 1.7% | 1.3% |
Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 | 0.7% | 0.9% | 1.2% |
Sony Tablet S | 0.9% | 0.8% | 0.7% |
Other | 8.9% | 5.6% | 1.6% |
Android tablets; every company makes 15 different versions and they still can't compete with the iPad. Or so goes the normal story. But, with tablets becoming ever more popular which Android tablet rules the roost?
The answer to that is the Kindle Fire made by Amazon! with a whopping 54% marketshare amongst Android tablets. And that ladies and gentlemen is the reason why Google are planning a 7" Nexus Tablet! Although, if we work on the technicalities the Kindle Fire runs a forked version of Android and doesn't include any of Google's core Android apps because Amazon has it's own answer to Google Play, The Amazon App Store.
So there we have it, to do well in the Android tablet world, you need one reasonably priced product that is well supported with updates... Really Android manufacturers how hard can it be?
In other news:
- Sony have started offering a $50 mail in rebate and a free cradle if you pick up their Tablet S which is now complete with ICS.
- Apple request approval for an off-campus restaurant for their workers, so they can eat without worrying about giving all the companies plans away.
- Sharp posted a $1.4billion loss this last quarter and blamed it's refocusing as a mobile LCD screen producer instead of TV production as the main reason for such abysmal results.