Samsung Gave Apple Stiff Competition in the US in 2015: Report

Apple's dominance in the United States may not last so long. Rival Samsung and other Android smartphone OEMs are slowly growing their presence in the country. The gap between the market capture of Apple and Samsung isn't that wide any more, as per market research numbers for 2015.

Parks Associates, a research and consulting firm, reports that Appledominates the market share in the United States with 40 percent capture in 2015. The company right below it, however, isn't so far away. According to the firm's numbers, Samsung accounted for 31 percent of the market in 2015. It adds that a third of iPhone users own a model that's more than two years old, compared to 30 percent of Samsung users.

To put the number into perspective, as per comScore's data from August 2015, Apple had a 44.1 percent share of the US market, and Samsung had 27.4 percent market share. This does hint a decline in iPhone's popularity in the United States.

Other Android smartphone manufacturers are growing as well, it appears. LG has 10 percent control of the market whileMotorola and HTC and other Android OEMs share about 5 percent of the pie. Though, Samsung and Apple alone assume 70 percent control of the market, and that should worry other players.

"Apple remains the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the U.S., but Samsung is catching up," said Harry Wang, Director, Health & Mobile Product Research, Parks Associates. "Apple controls 40 percent of the smartphone market, while Samsung has 31 percent and LG is the next closest rival with 10 percent."

The numbers may worry Apple, which is already struggling to keep pace with its past records. The company reported recently that it expects a decline in the iPhone sales number in the coming months. It will be interesting to see how the reported iPhone 5se, the 4-inch smartphone changes the dynamics of Apple's current situation.

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Flexible Camera Developed That Can Be Wrapped Around Objects

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) Leaked in Press Images

The anticipated successor to the popular Samsung Galaxy J1, tipped to be called the Galaxy J1 (2016), has once again been leaked in images on the Web. While in the previous leaks we have seen the unannounced smartphone in its Black colour variant, the new leaked image shows the handset in two additional colour variants. The image tweeted by @evleaks on Monday shows the Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) smartphone in Gold and White colour variants. The design of the handset also fall in line with the models leaked in images previously. It is worth mentioning that the screen bezel seen in the image stay black in all the three colour variants. The smartphone is seen featuring a physical home button, along with a multi-window, and a back capacitive button on either side. At the back, the smartphone sports a camera at the centre with a LED flash and a speaker on either sides. Samsung is yet to announce the smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016)leaked in images last month as well...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog