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.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

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...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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