According to the latest metrics from Gartner — which measure sales of handsets to customers, not shipments into the channel — Samsung sold 86.6 million mobile phones in the first quarter, 25.9 percent more than it sold during the same period a year ago. That was enough to give it a 20.7 percent share of the market, and to seize the title of “world’s largest mobile handset vendor” from Nokia, which sold 83.2 million cellphones during the quarter, as its market share slipped to 19.8 percent from 25.1 percent a year ago.

Unfortunate news for Nokia, which had been the market’s leader since 1998, but inevitable given the company’s recent decline and, perhaps, its choice of Windows Phone as an OS for its newest handsets.

Because what’s driving Samsung’s growth is Android. According to Gartner’s sales data, Samsung was by far the largest Android smartphone vendor, claiming nearly 44 percent of Android-based smartphone sales. Interestingly, no other Android phone manufacturer captured more than 10 percent of the market.

So, if Samsung commandeered the handset market’s top spot in the first quarter, and Nokia its second, who claimed third? Apple, which sold enough iPhones to capture 7.9 percent of the total mobile phone market.

As for mobile OS market share, Android continues to rule the market — 56 percent of smartphones sold to end users globally in the first quarter of 2012 run the OS, far more than the 22.9 percent running Apple’s iOS.

Typically, transmitting data across this band has required large, power-hungry equipment. But now researchers in Japan have managed to do it with far less complex equipment, and in doing so, have broken the terahertz wireless-transmission speed record.

Using a device called a resonant tunneling diode, Tokyo University researchers were able to achieve a 3 gigabits-per-second data transmission over the terahertz band — double the speed of the previous record set back in November by chipmaker Rohm.

Truly an impressive speed, though, as is often the case with advanced technologies like these, it comes with a caveat. The connection over which the data is transmitted is only good over distances of about 30 feet. So it’s not really an outright replacement for Wi-Fi. That said, there are plenty of short-range applications for which it would be perfect — transmitting media among home entertainment devices, backing up a PC to a wireless hard drive, etc.

Not at all.

“We’re very happy with it,” Hesse said of Sprint’s deal with Apple, during the company’s annual shareholders meeting Tuesday. “Carrying the iPhone will be quite profitable.”

But not for a few years, at least.

By its own admission, Sprint won’t profit from the device until 2015. But according to Hesse, who was reelected to Sprint’s board during Tuesday’s proceedings, that initial heavy upfront investment in the iPhone is worthwhile because it will slow subscriber turnover and create a new segment of higher-value subscribers.

“We believe in the long term,” Hesse said. “And over time we will make more money on iPhone customers than we will on other customers.”

And there, it would seem, Hesse does have a point. Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones in its first quarter, with about 44 percent of them going to new customers. And those sales helped spike Sprint’s average revenue per user 6.9 percent, the largest year-over-year increase ever charted in that metric in the U.S.

On Tuesday, the company’s stock price closed at $11.09 — a price it has not seen since December of 2003. Another ugly decline for RIM, which has shed more than three-quarters of its value in the past year alone.

Evidently, the brief run-up in RIM’s stock price prior to the unveiling of the company’s long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system at BlackBerry World earlier this month has proved untenable. And the prospect of watching the first BB10 phones go head to head with the next iteration of Apple’s iPhone this fall has sent investors fleeing into the woods.

RIMM data by YCharts

As I write this, RIM’s market cap is hovering at just about $6 billion. Hard to believe that just five years ago that number was about $80 billion, and RIM was the most valuable company in Canada by stock market value.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review the Ninth Circuit’s rejection of the Mac clone maker’s claims that Apple violated antitrust law by refusing to license Mac OS X to third-party hardware manufacturers. In doing so, the court let stand an earlier ruling barring Psystar from peddling PCs with the Mac OS X operating system preinstalled, circumventing the technological measures Apple uses to prevent unauthorized copying of Mac OS X and assisting others in doing so.

Which means this is likely the last we’ll be hearing from Psystar, which was already bankrupt when it embarked on this little adventure, though the company’s legal counsel continues to put on a brave face.

“I’m sure that the Supreme Court will take a case on this important issue eventually,” K.A.D. Camara of Houston law firm Camara & Sibley, told CNET.

Somehow, I doubt that. Recall that Psystar was found to have violated Apple’s exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works by installing Mac OS X on its hackintoshes in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Image by Joy of Tech

The allegation, made earlier this month in a motion discovered by Network World, claims Samsung destroyed “vast quantities of relevant evidence in blatant disregard of its duty to preserve all such evidence.” Samsung, it seems, routinely purges emails from custodian computers and, according to Apple, has continued to do so despite its duty to preserve evidence to the case.

From Apple’s motion:

Samsung’s ad hoc, unmonitored email ‘preservation’ methods have resulted in the irretrievable loss of unknown volumes of relevant emails. … For example, Judge Grewal recently compelled the deposition of Won Pyo Hong, the head of Samsung’s Product Strategy Team, in part due to an email in which Dr.Hong ‘directly orders side-by-side comparisons of Apple and Samsung products for design presentations.’

Apple and the Court cannot possibly know how many more emails Dr. Hong sent or received that would have supported Apple’s claims that Samsung copied Apple products had they not been deleted.

Harsh allegations, and ones that Samsung has decried as baseless. That said, this isn’t the first time the company has been called out for meddling with a discovery order. Just last week it was sanctioned by a California judge for withholding evidence. This just two weeks after another sanction for another failure to provide internal documents on a timely basis. Apple, in its motion, notes other instances as well.

So, as I said: Messy, and getting messier by the day. Which doesn’t bode well for the companies’ upcoming court-ordered mediation talks on May 21 and 22.

(Image: Joy of Tech)

A 3-D view of San Francisco from C3 Technologies

Sources tell 9to5Mac that Apple will abandon Google’s mapping back-end in the next major iteration of iOS, replacing it with a brand-new mapping application powered by Apple technology. We’ve independently confirmed that this is indeed the case. Sources describe the new Maps app as a forthcoming tentpole feature of iOS that will, in the words of one, “blow your head off.” I’m not quite sure what that means, and the source in question declined to elaborate, but it’s likely a reference to the photorealistic 3-D mapping tech Apple acquired when it purchased C3 Technologies. C3 did use missile-targeting technology to develop its gorgeous 3-D models of major cities, so …

In any event, we’re almost certain to find out for sure at Apple’s WWDC conference, which runs June 11-15 in San Francisco. Sources say the current plan is to debut the new Maps app during the keynote. Caveat: Keynote plans often change, especially at Apple.

(Image courtesy of MacRumors)

While the rumored marriage of the two carriers would certainly result in a larger subscriber base, a more robust infrastructure and a nice combined swath of spectrum, there are other considerations that make the combination a bit dubious. And though chatter about a potential deal may have cheered some investors, it’s turning the stomachs of others.

To wit, Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett’s take on a T-Mobile/Metro PCS merger, which begins with an exclamation that pretty much says it all:

“Oh my, what an ugly baby.”

Moffet’s opinion is that combining two wireless weaklings just leaves you with a bigger weakling, particularly if they rely on different network technologies, as T-Mobile and MetroPCS do. T-Mobile’s network is GSM. MetroPCS’s is CDMA. In other words, a combination of the two is not a solution to either company’s problems, at least until they meet on LTE.

“Both [companies] are spectrum constrained — this wouldn’t change that — and they rely on fundamentally different technology platforms, making a combination a logistical nightmare,” Moffet says. “It will be years before either is sufficiently transitioned to LTE to make a combination truly sensible. To be sure, there would potentially be some overlapping retail stores in MetroPCS market, there would naturally be some selling, general and administrative expenses savings, and there are perhaps some savings in LTE network deployment in MetroPCS markets. But none of these benefits would provide truly compelling justification.”

And that really does seem to be the case. Though, to be fair, the combination would give T-Mobile more customers, which it could really use, after having lost more than a half-million contract customers in the first quarter.

Still, it’s far from an ideal tie-up. Said R.W. Baird’s William Power, in a note that echoes Moffet’s: “A T-Mobile/PCS merger smells like a mess to us, and seems to speak to the challenges facing the industry, exacerbated by the government rejection of the T/T-Mobile deal, which might have created spectrum opportunities for the other operators.”

Brilliantly rebranded with the memorable moniker ES9500 OLED TV, the 55-inch set features a display that Samsung claims produces deeper contrast and finer detail than typical OLED screens, along with voice and gesture control. Also on board: The company’s Smart DualView technology, which allows users to view two different programs on a TV’s screen simultaneously, with the help of 3-D glasses and couple of pairs of headphones.

Price? 10.8 million won, or about $9,500.

That’s close to double what you’d pay for one of the high-end 55-inch TVs currently on the market. Given that price point, Samsung is taking the ES9500’s ramp-up nice and slow. It plans to begin shipping it in the latter part of this year, with an eye toward producing about 55,000 units. And if all goes as planned, that number will hit five million by 2015.

Bowen Liu / Apple

At least that’s the word from Foxconn chief Terry Gou, who said as much during today’s groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s new Shanghai headquarters.

“We’ve discovered that [improving factory conditions] is not a cost. It is a competitive strength,” Gou told reporters today. “I believe Apple sees this as a competitive strength along with us, and so we will split the initial costs.”

Gou didn’t elaborate on the size of Apple’s financial commitment, or its terms. Nor did he explain if this investment is a new one, or simply part of the same deal that’s seen the two companies invite audits by the Fair Labor Association. But it’s clear that Apple is bolstering its efforts to improve labor conditions at factories where devices like the iPhone and iPad are built. And any forward movement there is welcome.

Apple declined comment on Gou’s remarks.

This according to University of California law professor Eugene Volokh, who argues — in a Google-commissioned report — that ranking and placement of the company’s search results merit the same free-speech protection as articles in a newspaper.

“Search engines select and sort the results in a way that is aimed at giving users what the search engine companies see as the most helpful and useful information,” Volokh writes. “In this respect, each search engine’s editorial judgment is much like many other familiar editorial judgments.” In support of this argument, he offers a few examples:

• Newspapers’ daily judgments about which wire-service stories to run, and where to feature them
• The judgment of sites such as DrudgeReport.com about which stories to link to, and in what order to list them

There are others, as well, but these two get to the heart of Volokh’s argument: Search results are, at their core, editorial judgments; ergo, if Google were to prioritize its own services over the services of its rivals in them, that’s an entirely legitimate exercise of its First Amendment rights.

In other words, search is speech. And rivals claiming that Google is abusing its market power by favoring its own content over others’, or dropping a site’s ranking or otherwise manipulating its search results (something Google maintains it does not do), may have no other recourse than to accept that those actions, whether they occurred or not, are shielded by the First Amendment.

“Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo Search exercise editorial judgment about what constitutes useful information and convey that information — which is to say, they speak — to their users. In this respect, they are analogous to newspapers and book publishers that convey a wide range of information from news stories and selected columns by outside contributors to stock listings, movie listings, bestseller lists, and restaurant guides,” Volokh concludes. “And all of these speakers are shielded by the First Amendment, which blocks the government from dictating what is presented by the speakers or the manner in which it is presented.”

I suppose, if you buy that Google is truly a speaker and not just a conduit for speech.

In any event, it’s an interesting argument, and one that will no doubt see further elaboration if the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launches an antitrust suit over complaints that Google has rigged its search results to the detriment of rivals like Yelp.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock)

To wit, the U.S. Department of Defense has approved RIM’s BlackBerry 7 devices for agency-wide use. Vetted by the U.S. Army and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930; BlackBerry Torch 9810; BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860; and the BlackBerry Curve 9360 have all been certified for use by U.S. Army and other Defense Department personnel.

Welcome news for DoD employees who’ve been stuck using an older, slower version of the OS, and great news for RIM, which has won a renewed vote of confidence from what must certainly be its single largest customer. According to the DoD’s fiscal 2013 budget, it currently has about 250,000 BlackBerrys in use (along with “5,000 Apple iOS pilot systems” and “3,000 Android pilot systems”). So having its BlackBerry 7 portfolio approved for use across the department is a lucrative win indeed — especially if it paves the way for deployment of BlackBerry 10 at some point in the future.

Encouraging news for Nokia, which was recently sued — stupidly — by an irate shareholder over disappointing Lumia sales. Indeed, it’s McCourt’s impression that demand for the Lumia in the States is still quite good.

“Our conversations with store reps indicated no signs of Lumia demand ‘falling off a cliff’ following the reasonably strong launch week,” McCourt says. “Clearly, at $99 and with very noticeable retail store support from AT&T reps, the Lumia launch in the U.S. was built for volume.”

Certainly, Nokia sounds pleased with the device’s performance in the U.S. In an interview with PC Magazine earlier this week, the company’s U.S. president, Chris Weber, reiterated earlier claims that Nokia is selling Lumias as fast as it can make them.

“Demand has been outstripping supply for the first couple of weeks, and we’ve been working hard to rectify that,” Weber said. “The demand for cyan [phones] is significantly outpacing supply.”

Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case abroad. When Nokia last reported earnings, CEO Stephen Elop said that establishing momentum for the Lumia in Europe has been “challenging.” And according to Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu, that remains true today.

“Consumer interest in Nokia’s flagship peaked at very low levels and is now evaporating in European markets,” Ferragu said in a Wednesday note to clients. “The US remains for now an exception.”

From 16.8 percent to about 4 percent worldwide market share in a single quarter. That is a swift and ugly decline. What’s causing it?

Kindle Fire demand could be dropping off as customers postpone their purchases in anticipation of a new version of the device. Or it could be declining because the Fire was a really well-executed holiday play whose novelty has since worn off.

Or it could be that the iPad 2, which Apple continues to sell alongside the new iPad at a lower price, is winning over some of the same consumers that Amazon has been targeting with the Fire.

Or, because the number of units shipped isn’t the same as units sold, the dropoff in shipments in the Fire’s latest quarter could primarily be the result of a large inventory buildup in the product’s first months on the market.

At $399, the iPad 2 is still twice the price of the Fire. But it’s also $100 cheaper than the new iPad, and comes accompanied by the same vast app and content ecosystem, iCloud, Facetime and other slick features. And that may be discount enough to command the attention of budget-conscious consumers. Indeed, during Apple’s last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the iPad 2′s new lower price point was unlocking demand among price-sensitive customers.

If that’s the case, perhaps it’s unlocking demand among potential Kindle Fire buyers as well. It’s worth noting that during the same period, IDC claims that while the Fire’s share of the market fell to 4 percent from nearly 17 percent, the iPad’s share rose to 68 percent from 54.7 percent.

Could there be a correlation there?

Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes thinks there might be.

“The lower priced iPad 2 has seemed to offset some of the original threat of the lower priced Fire,” he says. “Many consumers seem willing to pay $399 for a feature packed tablet with a strong and developed ecosystem rather than $199 for a relatively underpowered tablet.”

Certainly plausible. Anecdotally, I know a few folks who had planned to buy the Fire, only to balk later and cough up the extra money for an iPad 2. Perhaps there are lots more of them out there. Your thoughts?

On May 18, Kentucky’s Bluegrass Cellular, California’s Golden State Cellular, and Kansas’ Nex-Tech Wireless will add the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S to their portfolios. And all three will sell the devices at a $50 discount to the prices charged by AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.

With the addition of Bluegrass, Golden State and Nex-Tech, Apple is now selling the iPhone on 12 carriers across the United States. Clearly, the company is executing on the plan for carrier expansion Tim Cook outlined last year to Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi and has no intention of ceding any smartphone market share to rivals.

Dutifully following judge’s orders, Apple on Monday said it will narrow its claims against Samsung, essentially cutting them in half. Meanwhile, Samsung agreed to pull from its case five of the 12 patents it has asserted against Apple.

By cutting their claims down like this, the companies hope to retain a proposed July 30 trial date.

The moves significantly reduce the scope of the case. For example, by paring its claims from 75 to 15, Samsung has reduced its total claims by 80 percent. Which should make the case much more manageable for judge and jury both. This time around, anyway. Because while Apple is dropping some of its claims against Samsung, it doesn’t want to do so “with prejudice.” In other words, it wants to reserve the right to assert those claims at a later bench trial, or roll them into a new lawsuit.

“Obviously, Apple is not willing and should not be required to waive any right to a jury trial on claims and defenses that arise from Samsung’s continued assertion of patents that Samsung contends are essential to practice the UMTS telecommunication standard, including Apple’s Twenty-Fifth through Twenty-Ninth Counterclaims in Reply,” the company wrote in its filing.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Both are important hires for RIM, which has been without a CMO since 2011, and without a COO since Thorsten Heins became the company’s new CEO in January. They join the company at a difficult juncture, as it scrambles to launch its new BlackBerry 10 OS this fall, and again go head to head with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, operating systems that have bled RIM of market share with hardware that resonates with consumers and far more well-established application ecosystems.

There, lawmakers are calling for a stronger response to Google’s collection of personal data from the Wi-Fi routers of unsuspecting households. And the rhetoric of condemnation for the company’s actions is ramping up.

To wit, European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding’s recent comments to Der Spiegel, decrying Google as an “Orwellschem Überwachungsapparat.”

That’s German for “Orwellian surveillance apparatus.”

Which is a pointed and nasty criticism of Google’s practices, particularly coming from an EU justice commissioner. Evidently, Reding was not at all happy to discover that Google’s harvesting of sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company had long maintained. Said Reding, “My impression is that Google has trampled European data protection legislation.”

Google’s Street View debacle is still being reviewed by regulators in Germany and France.

“The court is well aware that it is being played as a pawn in a global industry-wide business negotiation,” Robart lamented after reserving judgment on the motions of Microsoft and Motorola for a later date. “The conduct of both Motorola and Microsoft has been driven by an attempt to secure commercial advantage, and to an outsider looking in, it has been arbitrary, it has been arrogant and frankly it appears to be based on hubris.”

Which, if you’ve been following these cases, is a reasonably accurate assessment. Using litigation to squeeze exorbitant licensing fees out of a rival for intellectual property is becoming par for the course in negotiations like those between Microsoft and Motorola, and as Robart points out, not only is that a drag, it’s often a waste of everyone else’s time.

According to Proview attorney Xie Xianghui, mediation talks between the two companies are progressing, albeit slowly. “We feel that the attitude of Apple has changed,” Xie told China’s government newswire. “Although they expressed that they were willing to negotiate, they have never taken any action before. But now, they are having conversations with us, and we have begun to consult on the case.”

And, evidently, Apple is looking to close the complaint. Xie says the company has already proposed a sum to end the litigation, though it’s not high enough for Proview. “Right now, there is still a big gap between the two sides on the settlement amount,” he said.

Which isn’t at all surprising. Apple has maintained throughout this battle that it legally owns the iPad mark across Asia, and that Proview is doing nothing more than squeezing it for additional money to use the trademark in China — despite the fact that it has already purchased those rights.

“We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told AllThingsD earlier this year. “Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple in China, and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter.”

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• Proview’s New PR Attack: Apple Cheated Us Out of the iPad Trademark
• Proview Loses Bid to Ban iPad in Shanghai
• Surprise — Proview’s Ready to Talk Settlement With Apple
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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120507/apple-proview-talking-settlement-in-ipad-trademark-spat/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120507/warren-buffett-on-apple-google-do-not-want/ http://allthingsd.com/20120507/warren-buffett-on-apple-google-do-not-want/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 11:11:42 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=204213 Warren Buffett wouldn’t bet against Apple and Google, but he won’t invest in them, either.

Speaking at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting over the weekend, the legendary investor said he had no interest in buying shares of either Apple or Google because he views them as risky investments.

“I would not be at all surprised to see them be worth a lot more money 10 years from now, but I would not buy either one of them,” Buffett said of the two companies. “I sure as hell wouldn’t short them, either.”

Why is Buffett reluctant to buy into two such tech juggernauts — particularly Apple, which some analysts are betting will become the world’s first trillion-dollar company? It’s not like he hasn’t invested in tech before. Berkshire Hathaway did plow $10.7 billion into IBM last November.

He thinks Apple and Google are too risky of an investment, and he doesn’t know enough about either company to see them as “inevitable” winners. “We couldn’t predict what would happen to Apple 10 years ago, and we can’t predict what will happen to it 10 years from now,” Buffett said.

Fair enough. But really, isn’t that just another way of saying “we missed them”?

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