China is proving to be a harder market to crack than Apple anticipated.
The iPhone-maker has dropped to fifth place in its second most important market, marking yet another setback for Apple in China.
It looks like a dual-lens camera will be the most exciting upgrade for the iPhone 7 Plus this year, but you might be able to get one a month early from Samsung.
According to one report, the South Korean company is expected to deliver one inside the Galaxy Note 7 edge, which is due to make its debut in mid-August.
Apple’s affordable 4-inch iPhone SE is causing a major headache for Chinese makers of low-cost Android phones.
Supply chain manufacturers in Taiwan and China are reportedly becoming more conservative about building up inventories of smartphone components from companies including Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo as the iPhone SE squeezes the competition.
Huawei took to the stage at CES this morning to show off a bunch of stuff that looked really familiar — although the stage wasn’t free of some killer features.
The world’s number three smartphone brand is ready to take on Apple and Samsung, and it brought its own versions of the big three devices on stage to show off what they can do. And they can do quite a lot, it seems, but not all of it has us wanting to defect from our iPhones.
Here’s what Huawei brought to the party.
Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has had a couple of good months as it aims to shed its image as a manufacturer of cheap devices. It released a new and now popular premium phone in September, surpassed rival Xiaomi in sales in their home market and, like Apple, had a glowing Q3 earnings report.
And with Apple boasting of rapid growth in China, Huawei answers the challenge by hiring Apple’s former creative director, Abigail Brody, to be the company’s chief user experience designer.
Apple may have been the first to put Force Touch technology in a smartwatch, but Huawei has beaten the Cupertino company to putting it inside a phone.
At the IFA trade show in Berlin today, Huawei used the Force Touch display in its new Mate S smartphone to weigh an orange, a week before the technology is expected to make its way to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.
Google will finally launch Android Pay, its brand new mobile payments service, alongside a refreshed Nexus 5 from LG in October, a new report claims. The Apple Pay competitor will take advantage of Android M’s native support for fingerprint scanners.
Android-powered video game consoles like the Ouya haven’t exactly been a huge success, but Chinese electronics maker Huawei is hoping to change that with Tron, a device that looks remarkably similar to Apple’s new Mac Pro — albeit a lot smaller. It’s powered by a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor and 2GB of RAM, and it’s expected to cost less than $150.
Samsung has overtaken Apple and Nokia to become the global leader in mobile web traffic, according to the latest figures from web analytics company StatCounter. It’s the first time the South Korean company has taken the lead in Internet usage, but Apple isn’t far behind.
Android rules the worldwide smartphone market when it comes to market share, and its dominance in China could have a lot to do with that. At the end of the first quarter of 2013, Google’s platform claimed a whopping 51.4% share of all smartphones owned in China.
Android doesn’t look like it’s about to lose any of its market share to competing platforms any time soon. During the first quarter of 2013, Google’s platform powered a whipping 59.9% of all smart mobile devices sold as total shipments hit 308.7 million units.
Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, was installed on just 19.3% of devices — despite the success of its iPhones and iPads.
While smartphone have really taken off since Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007, believe it or not, traditional feature phones have remained the biggest sellers worldwide. That was until the first quarter of 2013, when smartphones out-shipped feature phones for the first time ever.
Of the 418.6 million cellphones sold during the first three months of the year, 51.6% of them were smartphones, according to new figures from IDC.
Cult of Android will soon be on its way to Barcelona for this year’s Mobile World Congress — which kicks off Sunday, February 24 — where we’re expecting a whole host of announcements regarding new smartphones, tablets, apps, and accessories. More than 65,000 people will attend the event, and they’re all there for one thing: to see what’s on the horizon in the world of mobile for 2013.
We’re expecting new devices from Samsung, LG, ZTE, Huawei, Nokia, Asus, and more — and you can follow all of our coverage from here. In the meantime, here’s what you can look forward to.
Apple could launch its $330 “iPhone mini” as early as this summer to boost the company’s smartphone sales in China, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty. It’s expected the low-cost device could provide Apple with an additional 20% of the smartphone market, adding to the 10% it has already claimed with the iPhone 5. And with smartphone prices now beginning to stabilize in China, now would be an ideal time for such a device.
Mobile World Congress is undoubtebly one of the premiere places to see smartphones, but how about 3,500 smartphones fashioned to metal rods to create a 19-foot tall mythical winged horse? Well, that’s exactly what you’ll find guarding this year’s MWC thanks to Huawei and London’s Machine Shop.
