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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.
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.
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.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
If only I could buy a new phone with Meego on it...
In some countries, you can, such as Australia, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, etc. But not in the US, UK, Japan, or Germany (the Germans apparently are buying them from Switzerland). The Nokia N9 runs on Meego "Harmattan", which is actually intermediate between Maemo and Meego. It's deliberately withheld from the larger markets, because it causes some embarrassment to the Lumia series of WinPhones.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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...
And, despite the lack of marketing, way more N9s have been sold than Lumias. It's a realy pity because Harmattan's swipe interface is lightyears ahead of anything Android has to offer.
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Sundar Pichai is the asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the closing down of the Atlanta engineering office. Great work!
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.
>And, despite the lack of marketing, way more N9s have been sold than Lumias.
Citation needed.
You can say that again. The first Samsung product I bought (and the only one I still like) was my first LCD computer monitor. Everything else our family bought since then, two DVD players, a DVD recorder, a CRT TV, a LCD TV, and a Galaxy smart phone either died before their time, or wasn't fully functional from the factory. The CRT TV was supposed to do clear-QAM reception, but it doesn't due to a Samsung known glitch. The DVD recorder also fails to successfully record on a disc 95% of the time due to a Samsung known glitch that they decided not to recall. The Galaxy feels cheesy in the hand, asks me if I want to mount the flash memory or use the Samsung sync suite every time I plug in the charger, and takes a long time to get a GPS lock, and it is always about 30 meters due west of the actual location.
It still surprises me that HTC fell from grace. I loved my G1, my brother's Nexus One, and my 3G Slide, and G2. They feel substantial, are still reasonable dimensions, and actually work, especially the G1, 3G and G2 on Cyanogen which came much faster than the Galaxy version.The One series looks super nice. But I really want smaller screens and a physical keyboard.
Harmattan's swipe interface is lightyears ahead of anything Android has to offer.
Checked out some videos. Looks very similar to BB10 swipe interface. Unfortunately whoever gets most third party app support will win in the end.
Bow before me, for I am root.
The same old fairy tale bullshit. Except that people would've complained about lack of apps and developer support. No Angry Birds, no Netflix, no nothing. Except for a few hundred geeks on Slashdot, nobody would've bought it since people would prefer Android for the apps. Remember OpenMoko?
The best available numbers are on the site linked to Who Wants Numbers? Lumia on T-Mobile? Lumia 800 vs Lumia 710? How Many Nokia N9?
Nokia could just publish the activation numbers as Google and Apple do, but instead they seem to only publish the number of phones sent off to operators and even that they do rarely. I wonder why?
That 's it.
Every time I read something about Nokia I miss my beloved n900.
And I miss the GREAT Nokia6120 too.
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
Those also seem to be the worst available numbers, since it's from the disreputable anti Nokia troll pulling numbers out of his ass.
For example, lets look at Statcounter Data for mobile OSes in Finland.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-FI-monthly-201201-201203
(click on the legend for other OSes to make them disappear from the graph).
You see that it's a straight up increase for the Lumia since launch in Feb and taking about 5% share in less than 3 months of launch and still uptrending, with the N9 pretty stagnant at 2%.
This space for rent.
Actually even *building* the N9 was marketing. Marketing isn't just about the ads you see on TV or buses, it's what products even get out the chute.
If you're making crap no one wants, FIRE YOUR MARKETING DEPARTMENT.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
This is just some bullshit made-up stats pulled from someone's asshole. It doesn't become true through being perpetuated on internet messageboards.
This information brought to you from an N9 owner.
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.
Doesn't nokia also sell big iron for telco backends and other non-phone related goods? Did they spin that part of the business off? Do they make razor thin margins on that line of business?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
>Yeah, and if you look behind [statcounter.com] a bit, you'll see that Meego took 5% in less than three months of launch as well.
I am sorry, I looked at that graph in the link but it's nowhere close to 5%. Please get your eyes checked.
This space for rent.
I've got a HTC Sensation (actually, two of them, one for my wife), and I'm pretty happy with it. It isn't perfect by any means; it has some glitches here and there, but overall it works great. The hardware, as you say, feels substantial, and most things work pretty well on it. Plugging in the charger just charges it; if I plug it into a USB port on a computer it asks if I want to charge only, or mount as USB drive, which is very handy. The GPS is accurate, the compass and gyro are amazing; the way they all work together on Google Sky View is simply phenomenal: I can hold the phone up to the sky and it'll show me what every star or planet is, in realtime, no matter how the phone is oriented. And unlike Apple crap, if the 8GB of flash inside isn't enough for me, it takes seconds to open it up and replace the SD card with a bigger one.
My main complaints are 1) it seems to reboot now and then, and 2) the stock Android (Gingerbread) dialer and contact manager kinda sucks, but for #2 I replaced it with Touchpad Dialer which works great.
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.
Sundar Pichai is the asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the closing down of the Atlanta engineering office. Great work!
lol what is that?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's outselling Nokia's WP7 offerings. I bought a N9 a week ago. Consciously and at full price (500+ euros). I could have bought ANYTHING at that price but I bought the N9. It is the most beautiful and elegant piece of hardware out there, running an OS that does everything I want, extremely well. Messaging is integrated, EVERYTHING from sms to msn is handled the same way. Making phonecalls through mobile carrier, SIP and Skype is equally well handled. Will it have new software a year or two down the line? Nope, but I don't care. I own an amazing phone and one that is now part of mobile phone history. The last truly great Nokia Smartphone, on a long line of amazing Nokia products.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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.
I am willing to bet a great deal of money that you have NEVER used an N9. Saying it's sluggish can only ever come from someone who's only seen the specs, rather than use the phone. Your other vague comments "it's incomplete in many places" are equally useless.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I think everyone can judge the validity of your analysis, as well as your sanity by your saying that Nokia's last sale in "your market" happened 5-6 years ago. I mean, hell, E71 STILL sells and it still is a damn awesome phone!
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Mod parent up, +1 Insightful, then -1 Bummer
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.