RIM

Nielsen: Android share of U.S. smartphone market hits 43%

Of those purchased in last 3 months, 56% were Androids. iPhone holds steady at 28%. 

The results of a Nielsen survey conducted in August and released Monday reinforced several ongoing trends:

The smartphone pie is getting bigger. While 43% of all mobile subscribers in the U.S. had a smartphone as of August, according to Nielsen, 58% of those who bought a new mobile phone in the last 3 months chose a smartphone over a feature MORE

The iPad has this Christmas nearly to itself, says Gartner

Expected to account for 73.4% of a market that has grown more than 260% since 2010

Gartner Inc. is a lot better at telling you what's already happened than predicting what's about to.

Witness Thursday's report on worldwide tablet sales in which it describes Apple (AAPL) as having a "free run" in the tablet market this coming holiday season, accounting for nearly three quarters of the 63.6 million units sold before the MORE

IDC: iPad gained market share in Q2, Android tablets lost

The worldwide tablet market grew 303.8% year over year, and it's mostly Apple's

Since IDC launched its Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker in January, its coverage of the tablet market has been, shall we say, spotty.

Its tracking report for the first quarter of 2011 didn't arrive until July, causing serious confusion among some high-profile tech writers who mistook it for a second-quarter report (see What slowdown in tablet sales?).

IDC's MORE

Samsung's Android vs. Apple's iPhone

The sharp rise of one of Apple's frenemies triggers a fierce debate about what it means

Some of the most intelligent conversations on the Internet these days are to be found in the comment stream of Horace Dediu's Asymco blog. Not only does Dediu produce striking charts and graphs from his analysis of the mobile phone market, but he carefully moderates the subsequent discussion, pruning repetitive comments and chasing out the MORE

Whose ox Apple has gored

When you look at the market caps of its competitors, the picture is pretty clear

UBS's Maynard Um posted two interesting charts in a note to clients Monday.

The first compares the growth in Apple's value since 2007 with its chief competitors in the PC and handset businesses.

Apple's (AAPL) market capitalization (calculated by multiplying its share price by the number of shares outstanding) now stands at $327 billion, making it the world's MORE

The 3 most undervalued tech stocks: Google, Apple, IBM

By the same "PEG" measure, the 3 most overvalued are Amazon, Cisco and Netflix

Here's a simple exercise suggested by one of my readers.

Take a stock you're interested in and calculate its price/earnings to growth ratio, better known as its PEG ratio. The formula looks like this:

According to Peter Lynch, who popularized the measure, the P/E ratio of any company that's fairly priced will equal its growth rate. In other words, MORE

Asymco: Apple could buy the mobile phone industry

It could, in theory, acquire every cellphone vendor except Samsung with cash alone

Asymco's Horace Dediu has been tracking Apple's (AAPL) growing liquid assets and the shrinking valuations of its mobile competitors, and he estimates that they soon will cross.

Apple's third fiscal quarter closes next week, and when it does, Dediu is pretty sure that Apple will have amassed more than $70 billion in cash, cash equivalents, short-term marketable securities and MORE

Nielsen: Android's lead over iOS may have stopped growing

Google's OS is still more popular than Apple's, but no more than it was in March

Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Research in Motion (RIMM) have reached something like a three-way stalemate in the battle for dominance of the U.S. smartphone market, according to Nielsen survey results scheduled for release Tuesday.

Smartphones are increasingly popular -- they now represent 37% of all U.S. mobile phones -- and smartphones running Google's Android operating MORE

Gartner: iPhone Q1 sales were "remarkable," considering

Despite higher prices, sales to end users worldwide more than doubled

Gartner issued its "mobile devices" report for the first quarter of 2011, two weeks after rival IDC's.

Here's what Gartner had to say about Apple (AAPL):

Apple sold 16.9 million units to end users worldwide, more than doubling its sales of iPhones year-on-year. This market-beating growth came from all regions: the iPhone is now available in 90 countries from 186 CSPs [communications MORE

The iPhone in Q1: 5% of unit sales, 55% of global profits

Visualizing Apple's share of the worldwide mobile phone market in the first quarter of 2011

On Monday, we reproduced a pair of charts from Asymco's Horace Dediu showing how Apple (AAPL) overtook Nokia (NOK) in less than four years to become the world's No. 1 maker of mobile phones -- smart or otherwise -- in terms of revenue. See here.

In the charts at right, which Dediu posted Tuesday, he takes two MORE