In a recent article over at The Wall Street Journal, Nokia’s challenges trying to make a dent in the iPhone 4S with the Lumia 900 are highlighted by some pretty grim numbers: Nokia makes more than $200 less on each Nokia Lumia 900 sold compared to Apple’s profit on an iPhone 4S.
Siri won’t just joke and tell you that the best smartphone around is the one you’re using Siri on. She’ll also be ironic and tell you the iPhone 4S is the least popular smartphone on Earth.
It’s one thing to listen to the number of iPhones sold during an Apple financials call and be impressed by the sheer volume and popularity of the iPhone. It’s also easy to miss the overall impact of those incredibly high numbers without some context.
Gartner’s latest mobile device data, however, offers an excellent point of context – just under 8% of all mobile phones sold worldwide last quarter were iPhones.
For a very brief moment in time, the Nokia 900 reigned supreme in the eyes of Siri. When asked what the best smartphone ever is, Siri replied back that the Nokia 900 4G was the best. Apple fixed that problem pretty quickly and made sure that Siri now replies that the iPhone 4S is lord of all smartphones. Now Nokia is pissed and says that Apple is conspiring against the truth, and if Siri’s opinions on smartphones can’t be trusted, what can? It’ll be anarchy.
When you build a robot or an artificially intelligent machine, there’s always going to be a fear that one day it will turn against you. That’s what Siri has done to Apple today, labeling one of the iPhone’s biggest rivals, the Nokia Lumia 900, the “best smartphone ever.”
Foxconn chief executive Terry Gou has confirmed that Apple will use some of its cash to help improve the labor conditions for more than 1 million workers in Foxconn’s Chinese factories, where devices like the iPhone, iPad, and iPod are assembled.
Apple’s effort to make the future iPhone smaller and thinner has caused it to focus once again on making SIM cards even smaller. The Cupertino company has designed a new “nano-SIM” that is even smaller than the micro-SIM that was introduced with the iPhone 4 back in 2010.
However, rival smartphone vendors like Nokia have publicly voiced their concerns over the new standard, calling it an attempt to devalue its rivals’ intellectual property. Apple has now amended its design slightly to quash some of those concerns, and ETSI is set to case its vote on the design this month.
In addition to promoting its unfinished BlackBerry 10 mobile OS at BlackBerry World in Florida, RIM also made an effort to hype the success of its current BlackBerry 7 OS in developing markets, including Nigeria and Indonesia.
It isn’t surprising to see RIM trying to prove that it’s still a competitor in the global marketplace by highlighting the platforms use in developing countries. During RIM’s latest financials call, the first one for its new CEO Thorsten Heins, the company acknowledged that markets in the developing world accounted for much of the company’s revenue.
According to the latest report from the International Data Corporation, Samsung has ousted both Apple and Nokia to aquire the top spot in both smartphone and total mobile phone shipments for the first quarter of 2012. This marks the first time since the inception of IDC’s Mobile Phone Tracker that Nokia did not lead the global market in total mobile phone shipments. That’s quite a testament to Samsung’s tremendous growth over the past year, which according to the IDC, was nearly triple in the smartphone category.
Despite his love for the iPhone and its iOS operating system, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak surprisingly feels that Windows Phone apps are “more beautiful” than their counterparts on Android and iOS, and jokes that Steve Jobs may have been reincarnated inside Microsoft.
Woz also revealed that he favours Windows Phone over Android, but that iOS is still his number one choice.
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