smartphone

Apple wins limited ruling in important Android patent suit

Not the knockout blow Steve Jobs sought; Google has until April to find a workaround

Apple (AAPL) has won a partial victory in an intellectual property case that Steve Jobs had famously vowed to fight to his "last dying breath."

The U.S. International Trade commission ruled Monday that the software in some of HTC's Android smartphones violated one provision of an Apple patent and that those phones would no longer be allowed into the MORE

Nielsen: U.S. teens exchange 7 text messages per waking hour

Teenage females lead the way, averaging 3,952 messages per month. (Males: 2,815.)

Although teenage females (does anyone still call them girls?) lead the way in texting, teenage males consume more data. Analyzing the monthly cell phone bills of roughly 65,000 mobile subscribers, Nielsen discovered that males age 13-17 took in 382 MB per month while their female counterparts used 266 MB.

Overall, mobile data usage among teens of both sexes was up 256% over last year MORE

Nielsen: iPhone & Android own the U.S. smartphone market

Apple is the top manufacturer (28.6% share), Android the top operating system (44.2%)

Nielsen (NLSN), which is fighting hard to be for mobile media what it was for television, pulled out all the stops in its State of the Media report for the third quarter of 2011.

Drawing on monthly surveys of 25,000 Americans (300,000 per year), it found, among other things:

44% now carry smartphones. Ownership is highest among 25-34 year olds (64%) and MORE

Nielsen: iPhone & Android own 71% of U.S. smartphone market

83% of the apps downloaded in the past month were for a Google or Apple phone

The U.S. smartphone market is starting to look like a two-horse race, judging from data scheduled to be released Wednesday by a Nielsen general manager at AppNation III in San Francisco. Among the new findings:

44% of all U.S. mobile subscribers now own a smartphone
56% of the mobile phones purchased in the past three months were MORE

The amazin' elastic iPhone 3GS

Who gets hurt most by Apple's entry into the $250-$400 mobile phone market?

In a 36-page report to clients issued Monday, a Credit Suisse team led by Kulbinder Garcha took a close look at the iPhone's price elasticity -- Econ 101 jargon for the question: "If I lower the price of my widget, how many more will I sell?"

Garcha et al.'s focus is the iPhone 3GS, which Apple (AAPL) last month began MORE

Android's malware problem is growing exponentially

Reports of trojans, spyware and other malicious programs are up 472% since July

Several warnings have been issued over the past year about the growing problem of malware on Google (GOOG) Android smartphones (see here, here and here), but none as dire or as sharply worded as the report issued Wednesday by Juniper Network's Global Threat Center.

Not only did Juniper's annual threat report see a 400% increase in Android malware between 2009 and the MORE

Apple's smartphone share dropped to 15% in weak Q3

But Gartner expects it to bounce back in Q4 after "strongest ever" orders for iPhone 4S

The slowdown in iPhone sales in advance of the October release of iPhone 4S is reflected in the report on mobile phone shipments for the third quarter of 2011 issued Tuesday by Gartner, Inc.

Apple (AAPL) shipped 17 million iPhones in the quarter -- up 21% year over year but down nearly 3 million units from the MORE

Nielsen: Android's U.S. share steady at 43%, iPhone at 28%

But adoption varies greatly by age. Most Americans under 44 already carry a smartphone

In the rapidly growing U.S. smartphone market, Google's (GOOG) Android and Apple's (AAPL) iPhone seem to have reached a steady state.

According to the third quarter Nielsen survey of the market, issued Thursday, 43% of Americans now own smartphones, up 5 percentage points in the past six months. Within that 43%, according to Nielsen, Android has 43% of the MORE

Smartphone shipments tripled since '08. Dumb phones are flat

The latest graphic from Asmyco shows an ocean of opportunity

Horace Dediu summarized three years of mobile phone data Monday in another striking color-coded chart. This view of the market offers three key take-home messages:

Most of the growth in mobile phone shipments has been in smartphones, which have tripled in the past three years (from 40 million to about 120 million) while non-smartphones barely increased (from 258 million to 272 million).
Most MORE

Samsung overtakes Apple in smartphones, trails in profits

Even with 40% fewer unit sales, the iPhone generated 3 times more profit

Apple's (AAPL) reign as the world's No. 1 maker of smartphones, it turns out, was like the life of a grasshopper: It overtook Nokia (NOK) in June and was overtaken by Samsung in September.

Strategy Analytics reported Friday that Samsung either shipped or sold (accounts differ) 27.8 million smartphones last quarter, easily outpacing the 17.07 million iPhones that Apple sold in MORE