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Samsung Passes Nokia As Biggest Handset Manufacturer
rtfa-troll writes "Tomi Ahonen reports that Samsung has become the largest manufacturer of smartphones (overtaking Apple) and of mobile phones (overtaking Nokia). During the first quarter of 2012 Samsung sold 93.5 million phones, with 44.5 million (48%) of those being smartphones. Apple would still lead on 'smart mobile devices' with 52 million sales including iPads, but not iPods. The last time the lead in mobile phone sales changed was in 14 years ago, in 1998, when Nokia overtook Ericsson. Ericsson never recovered and began leaving the mobile phone market three years later, creating Sony Ericsson, later Sony Mobile. It looks like the mobile phone market is going to be brutal, with Apple and Samsung crushing everybody else except possibly HTC, which is still rising, and Motorola (which has Google to look after it)."
thanks to the microshit idiot in charge, nokia will fail and microshit will pick up the remains for pennies on the dollar.
If only I could buy a new phone with Meego on it...
Just the beginning of the end. Nokia was doomed the moment Microsoft was whispered in the head office. Any company to work that closely with MS always gets burned.
Right now the mole is just tanking the company, making it cheaper for the inevitable buy out.
I'm dead serious about all of this. You'll mod me down now, but I'll be laughing when it happens 8-18 months from now.
Largest manufacturer of smartphones and mobile phones does not automatically mean that they are the best.
I don't own a Samsung device but I have to say: Well done! Well deserved!
Copying Apple was the best plan Samsung even devised. Not only is it a really cute move, but it has paid off in the market. The only problem is that Samsung makes about a nickel on each phone it sells.
Secondly.. Nokia is in a mess, but it isn't Stephen Elop (the CEO) who created it. He inherited the mess from the previous CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who basically doomed the company after borking the launch of the N900 and the Maemo platform. Elop sent out his now famous "burning platform" memo and chose to leap off the platform into Microsoft's lifeboat rather than the Android one. Why? Well, Nokia has much more influence over Windows than it would do with Android and has a chance of building a decent ecosystem.
Honestly though.. if Nokia made a decent Android handset, then I would probably go and buy it.
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I find the current state of the smarphone market less than appealing. I'm not interested in iPhone (too restrictive, dumbed down, etc), and not so much Android (you basically have marry Google to make good use of it). Symbian was great for its time, but with Nokia as the sole user and distributor, have been too slow with updates and appealing user interfaces. Even Belle (which I find more appealing overall than either iOS or Android) suffers from slow update cycles and bug fixes.
So I had great hopes for Maemo/Meego. Nokia's plan was to support Qt on both Symbian and Meego, thus providing a clean transition path for application developers. N9 was possibly the most awesome phone yet in terms of the OS. That is, until that Microsoft lackey Elop hijacked the company and turned it into a tool for one last-ditch marketing campaign for Microsoft and their even more hopeless Windows Phone OS (probably on the behest of his former boss, Ballmer).
Nokia abandoned anything they had which held promise. Sony (sans Ericsson), Motorola and also Samsung are now nothing more than generic run-of-the-mill Android pushers. Apple -- they are basically a one trick pony, and are not likely to become any less arrogant anytime soon.
My interest in smartphones is waning...
Lessee.... Nokia bets heavily on Windows 7, a few months later Samsung overtakes Nokia. Coincidence?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are better sources at BBC News or Bloomberg.
That 's it.
Every time I read something about Nokia I miss my beloved n900.
And I miss the GREAT Nokia6120 too.
All this means is that Foxconn is stamping "Samsung" more times on its phones than any other brand name.
Nokia is failing due to failures at the management level. Pessimists even rumour all the most competent developers to have already left the company since the Microsoft partnership. If the WP7 partnership was not an idiotic gamble unlikely to succeed to start with, how it has been implemented seems to have collapsed the card house for good. An enormous mistake was made when management thought that people would still buy Nokia's Symbian smartphones even as the company was loudly bannering it as a "platform on fire" that would be discontinued at first opportunity. A smoother transition would have been in place. For the techies, even more fatal mistake was not only to cancel the pioneering MeeGo/Maemo line, but to publish the final device in the line only in select markets despite even greater demand than all their "flagship" WP7 phones combined.
Nokia is currently making losses. It's only profitable unit is the one selling old "dumb phones", those famed "bricks" that would shatter concrete floors rather than take a hit. Dumphones are Nokia's core business, but it's a business that is becoming less and less profitable as East Asian competitors enter the market and are able to localize their phones, an important and big task easily ignored by US consumers. This is part of the reason why Nokia's share fell heavily this week and its credit rating was downgraded below investment grade. The losses from its other divisions have surpassed the profits from its dumbphone division, and dumbphone sales are further falling faster than anticipated.
Nokia seems to have never excelled in pioneering SW development. Although there are innovative and productive units, they are subject to irresponsible decision-making and unnecessary bureaucracy from mid-high management and other, non-cooperative units, which is part of the reason why Nokia was never able to come up with an iPhone of its own in time. The hiring of Elop was only result of the "panic reaction" when they realized (or got over to admitting to themselves?) that Google and Apple-based phones would marginalize them in a few years
What could still save Nokia is developing its dumbphone offering, and trying to compete with the East Asian manufacturers with more smartphone-like features. They are working on Meltemi, a Linux and Qt-based dumbphone platform. It's still highly classified and details are sparse. But an advanced $100 dumbphone with browser, GPS and 3rd party apps could well pose a fresh alternative to Google and Apple products in the minds of those consumers who don't want to invest in an overpriced phone-PDA.
As for WP7, it remains to be seen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It's still a young platform, and Nokia has gambled a lot on it. If that gamble fails, the company will have to come up with a serious plan to avert disaster, or face the fate of many other companies that invested in bad technologies.
Huawei should not be ignored. They're going to come onto the world market in a big way this year. For instance, I am truly looking forward to their new flagship coming later this year -- 1.5GHz, 1280x720 and 2500mAH without crazy Android customization that every big manufacturer seems to be in love with. Samsung may make nice displays but they focus more on a diaspora of handsets rather than making exceptional ones.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Walmart StraightTalk uses Samsung phones. Walmart was one of the the first to offer unlimited talk and text without a contract for a decent price. A direct result was the sale of a huge number of Samsung phones.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Puh-leez. Why should we care about who manufactures the biggest handsets?
Apple just needs to make the iPad into a phone and they will easily be the biggest handset manufacturer.
I won't be buying a Nokia product again.
Piss the wrong customer off and they'll rail on you for life, I will not only never buy your products, I will tell people never to buy your products. Nokia and Gigabyte will never, ever see a dollar from me again. Ever. Remember this companies, remember it.
>>And so does the next generation of Microsoft apps built to go with it (have you seen Visual Studio 2012??)
>What you see in VS11 is not "Metro" by any measure, though. Making everything flat and monochrome does not make it Metro.
Wait, what, they made the buttons in VS11 flat and greyscale? Anybody remember when they went from MS Word for Windows 1.1 to 2.0, and the buttons were 3D (i.e., had a shadow on the sides) and also were in color? That was supposed to be the new hotness.
It was theorized that depth made the buttons look like real buttons, thereby easing people's transition, and letting them know that it's a button. Also the color was supposed to increase the ability for people to figure out what in the world the button was supposed to represent (file, paper clip, doodad, whatever).
And now, in 2012, a M$ program manager who wants to make his mark is trying to say that flat and monochrome is supposed to be an advance?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The Galaxy II S is retarded large. Man purse large.