Apple

As Apple and Research In Motion have won a greater share in the Wi-Fi handset market over the past year, Nokia has lost share.

Though Nokia is still the leading vendor for dual-mode smartphones (Wi-Fi and cellular), its market share dropped to 35 percent in the second quarter, compared with 50 percent in the same period a year ago, according to a report released Monday from In-Stat.

The report "Wi-Fi in Mobile Phones: Dual Mode Becomes the In Thing" tracked the major Wi-Fi phone vendors, including Nokia, Apple, Research In Motion, HTC, and Samsung. Among those, Apple has enjoyed the greatest growth in market share, from 3 percent in the second quarter of 2008 to 20 percent in this year's second quarter.

Market share for both RIM and Samsung has also weakened the past few quarters, though less so than Nokia's. RIM's 15.7 percent chunk of the market for the second quarter of the year was down from its first-quarter high of 17.6 percent. Samsung's share has been relatively flat but usually dips a bit from the first to the second quarter, notes In-Stat.

In sheer unit volume, Nokia has done well the past few quarters, with 9.3 million Wi-Fi handsets shipped in the second quarter of the year compared with Apple's 5.2 million shipments. However, Nokia's shipments have dropped since the first quarter of 2008 when it saw 12 million units fly out the door. Over the same period, Apple, RIM, and HTC have seen their shipments grow.

As the No. 2 Wi-Fi handset vendor, Apple has also outsold third-place RIM in dual-mode phone shipments, says In-Stat. Though RIM still has a larger market presence, not all of its Blackberry devices include Wi-Fi. HTC and Samsung rounded out In-Stat's list as the fourth and fifth top Wi-Fi handset vendors, respectively.

(Credit: In-Stat)

The report also detailed the growth of the Wi-Fi smartphone market overall. The industry shipped 37 million handsets in 2007, and 103 million units in 2008. That rise is because of several factors, notes In-Stat, including greater functionality, lower prices, and carrier promotions. Initially targeted to the business market, smartphones are also now an entrenched hit with consumers, which In-Stat attributes to the success of the iPhone.

Wi-Fi handset shipments are expected to rise just 25 percent to 128.4 million units for 2009. That compares with a nearly 180 percent jump in 2008.

But In-Stat sees gains ahead. By 2010, the growth rate is likely to climb to 43 percent. Though that rate may not be sustainable, it should remain strong in the coming years. Wi-Fi will also become more prevalent in mobile phones. This year, 11.5 percent of handsets include Wi-Fi; by 2012, that figure will grow to 25 percent, predicts In-Stat.

To compile the report, In-Stat relied on its own data as well as interviews with Wi-Fi equipment vendors.

Correction 5/18: Gracenote was incorrectly listed as a partner of Shazam.

Earlier this week, a company called Tune Hunter accused music-finding service Shazam as well as a host of consumer electronics makers, wireless service operators, and digital music retailers of infringing on its patent on a music identification system.

Shazam is named along with Samsung, Apple, Amazon.com, Napster, Motorola, Gracenote, Verizon Wireless, LG Electronics, AT&T Mobility, and Pantech Wireless in a suit filed Tuesday over U.S. Patent No. 6,941,275, which was issued to Remi Swierczek/Tune Hunter in September 2005. The suit accuses Shazam's music discovery and identification service of violating the patent and the other companies of benefiting directly from Shazam's alleged infringement. Tune Hunter is asking for unspecified damages and an injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Texas that would prevent "further infringement" on Tune Hunter's patent.

Tune Hunter's patent covers "a music identification/purchasing system, specifically to a method for marking the time and the name of the radio station in portable device such as a key holder, watch, cellular phone, beeper or the like which will allow the user to learn via internet or regular telephone the name of the song, artist and/or music company by matching the stored data with broadcast archive."

Shazam is available on several different mobile devices. It is a popular iPhone application sold through Apple's App Store, which "listens" to songs and identifies them. Samsung is a partner with London-based Shazam on a mobile music store. Amazon.com is a retail partner of Shazam. Gracenote is a competitor.

Shazam was founded in 2002 in London and says by the end of the year its service will be available on 250 million devices.

Shazam, AT&T, Apple, and Gracenote each said they had no comment on the suit, and Samsung and Verizon had not yet heard about it.

Shazam is also available on many platforms not named in the lawsuit, including Research In Motion's BlackBerry, Facebook, and Android-based phones like T-Mobile's G1.

CNET News reporters Maggie Reardon and Greg Sandoval contributed to this story.

iPhone users in the United Kingdom heavily rely on their device for accessing e-mail and Web content, compared with owners of other smartphones in the country, according to a report released Thursday by market researcher ComScore.

During a three-month period concluding in January, ComScore found that 79.7 percent of U.K. iPhone users accessed news and other Web information with their iPhone. Contrast that to 48 percent for users of all smartphones.

And e-mail also has struck a chord, with 75.4 percent of iPhone users relying on the device for checking their in-boxes and sending messages, compared to 35.4 percent for users of all smartphones.

(Credit: ComScore)

While U.S. smartphone users may assume that surfing the Web is the only reason for getting a smartphone in the first place, apparently, that is not the case in the United Kingdom.

"Over the past several quarters, the U.K. smartphone market has been dominated by the N95, which lacks a QWERTY keyboard. As a result, we see smartphone users favor using their device for music and photo messaging, two activities for which these Nokia devices are particularly well-suited, more than e-mail," Alistair Hill, a ComScore analyst, said in a statement.

Currently, iPhone users represent only 2 percent of the U.K.'s mobile-phone market, ComScore noted. The number of U.K. iPhones reached 1 million in February, according to figures from Spanish telecommunications carrier Telefonica Europe.

Apple's moving to secure enough flash memory chips for the launch of the iPhone 3G.

(Credit: Apple)

Samsung is warning its customers that NAND flash memory might be hard to come by for some time after Apple placed a large order, according to a report out of Taiwan.

Digitimes reported Wednesday that Apple recently placed an order of 50 million 8Gb flash chips that it plans to use for that iPhone thing you might have heard about, and therefore the rest of Samsung's customers will have to wait for their chips. Samsung is one of the companies that Apple contracted with to secure supply of flash memory back in 2005.

The order would translate into 50 million GBs worth of flash (8Gb, or gigabits, equals 1GB, or gigabyte). So, since Apple's planning on having 16GB and 8GB versions of the iPhone 3G, that's enough memory for 3 million 16GB versions, or 6 million 8GB versions, or (most likely) a more even distribution between the two capacities.

Apple apparently ordered 25 million 8Gb chips in June to get the ball rolling, and is now planning for the ramp of the iPhone 3G. The company has steadfastly maintained that it expects to sell 10 million iPhones this year, and it needs to sell about 7.7 million units in the second half of the year to make that goal.

Apple may have taken a look at the future of mobile chip development and decided to forge its own path.

Future successors to the iPhone 3G might use a chip completely designed by Apple.

(Credit: Apple)

The New York Times scored an interview with Apple CEO Steve Jobs following Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, and buried inside a rambling exchange about parallel processing and Mac OS X Snow Leopard was this little nugget about PA Semi, the chip company Apple acquired in April. "PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods," Jobs told the Times.

System-on-chips, or SOCs, are pretty much what they sound like: complete computer systems on a single chip, including the processor, memory, graphics, networking, and all the regulator chips needed to manage things like power consumption. ARM's licensees, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Nvidia build SOCs around ARM's processor cores for smartphones such as the iPhone, and Intel wants to head down this path with its Atom processor family.

It's well known that Apple has played an active role in the design of chips that go into its system for years, but the acquisition of Dan Dobberpuhl's PA Semi team means it will apparently play an even more active role in the future. Jobs has previously said that Apple acquired PA Semi for its talent and patents--not its products--but had not shared many details about its plans for that talent.

In an interview with Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang last week, we got to talking about mobile processors and the evolution of that market, and he insisted that Samsung, widely thought to be the processor supplier inside the iPhone, merely "fabbed" the chip. In his view, Apple was the chief designer of the ARM-based processor that's used to run the iPhone--and presumably the iPhone 3G unveiled Monday--with Samsung just providing the factory. The PA Semi engineers would allow Apple to draw up a complete design in-house and take it to a chip foundry without having to let any other mobile processor companies in on its plans, Huang said.

The companies that license ARM's instruction set are increasingly butting heads with Intel as the ARM community tries to move up from smartphones into more powerful mobile computers, and Intel tries to shoehorn its PC processing know-how into a mobile environment. There has been much speculation over the past year or so that Apple will one day add processors for mobile devices to the invoices orders it sends Intel every quarter for Mac processors, but the PA Semi acquisition apparently means Apple is prepared to go it alone.

If CNET News.com's readers are any indication, Microsoft's Windows Mobile has a better base of support than one might think, but all the winds are blowing toward Apple.

The results of our first annual (maybe) smartphone survey are in, and thanks to everyone who left comments here on One More Thing or over on Crave, and those who flooded my inbox with responses. Yes, I know we should have a survey tool, but we're working on other stuff right now that's more important. (You'll have to trust me on that one.)

Between the comments and the e-mails, we received 159 responses. I must note that this is not a scientific study; we're not going to be putting market research firms out of business anytime soon. But I thought it was time for a look at what some of our readers are using, and I was surprised at some of the results.

Windows Mobile-based smartphones were by far the choice of survey respondents. Of the 130 people who said they owned a smartphone, 42.3 percent said they were using a Windows Mobile-based smartphone. That category includes the carrier-branded models, mostly from HTC, as well as the Motorola Q and the Samsung BlackJack, the two most-popular "tier 1" brands cited in the responses using Windows Mobile.

"This past weekend I traded in my BlackBerry Pearl for the HTC Tilt on AT&T's service," said a Crave reader with the screen name Yieeman. "So far it has been great. I like the fact that it works more like a computer for the organization of e-mails and documents, but also has amazing call clarity."

With 19.2 percent of the responses, the BlackBerry was the second most popular device among readers when the data was sorted by operating system. Apple's iPhone came in third, with 17.7 percent. Palm and Symbian tied for fourth place with 10 percent each.

Most of News.com's readers come from the United States (Thursday, 70.7 percent of our readers were in the U.S.), and most of the Windows Mobile phones claimed by respondents were carrier-branded models, with the AT&T/Cingular 8525 and 8515 popping up the most often. Symbian is by far the leading smartphone operating system provider in the world, but its phones are generally harder to find in the U.S., where RIM dominates the smartphone market.

Sorted by manufacturer, RIM and the HTC models were tied, with 19.2 percent of the survey respondents. I counted most of the carrier branded models as HTC models, in the cases where the carrier-branded model was a carbon copy of the HTC-branded model. Most people referred to their HTC designs with the carrier brand, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint.

Apple was just behind RIM and HTC, sorted by manufacturer, with 17.7 percent of the survey responses. Apple was followed by Motorola, Palm, and Samsung, in that order, each with around 10 percent of the responses. Surprisingly, Nokia, the worldwide leader in smartphone shipments, was used by only 4.6 percent of respondents. Sony Ericsson was used by 5.4 percent.

And it's clear that while Apple's iPhone isn't the smartphone of choice just yet among survey respondents, it hasn't escaped their notice. When asked which smartphone might be their next model, survey respondents cited the iPhone most often by far.

Of the 159 total responses, 66 people said they would consider an iPhone as their next (or first) smartphone. That was three times as many mentions as the second most desired smartphone, the BlackBerry.

"If I were in the market for a phone today, especially in light of the coming apps and integration with Exchange servers, I would likely get an iPhone," Ryan Hendley said over e-mail. "My current phone, Samsung Sync, does not integrate well with my MacBook calendar and contacts. In fact, it doesn't sync at all."

All those Windows Mobile users appear to be considering a switch, as HTC's models were cited by 10 respondents, but no other major manufacturer, including Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, or Palm, received more than 5 mentions. Several people cited multiple phones on their potential wish lists, so I just counted everything that was mentioned.

Most of the people looking at the iPhone were waiting for either a 3G version or a version that worked with their carrier, citing a desire to avoid AT&T. They were also intrigued by the business features slated to roll out in June, which gives them the option of using their iPhone at work.

The statistics were interesting, but I had also asked people to share the reasons they bought a smartphone in the first place, and whether they liked their current model. Most people did in fact like their current phone. The Windows Mobile users probably grumbled the most about their devices, but still, more than half of them were happy with their experience.

Most people bought their smartphones because they wanted to access e-mail, Web browsing, and telephone calls on a single device, as might be expected. I had thought going in to this survey that most respondents would mostly be using their phones for business, but an overwhelming number of people said they used their devices both for business and pleasure.

The BlackBerry users might have obtained their phone to check their corporate e-mail, but that doesn't mean they don't check sports scores in between meetings, or plot directions to the campground on the weekend. This will be the next big source of growth for smartphones, devices that can balance multimedia consumer desires with business needs. People aren't going to want to carry multiple devices for fun and work: that's why they got a smartphone in the first place.

So, again, thanks to all who participated. Stay tuned for the big CTIA Wireless conference at the beginning of April, which should bring new smartphones, new operating system news, and tons of coverage from both News.com and our colleagues at CNET Reviews.

Apple's long shadow over the flash-memory market might help it avoid serious problems in the wake of Samsung's production outage.

The second half of the year was already shaping up to be tight, as flash-memory companies switch over to new manufacturing technologies. But, of all things, a power outage in South Korea Friday could really make things difficult for companies that are depending on flash memory chips from Samsung this holiday season.

Analysts estimated that 15 percent of Samsung's output in the third quarter could have been lost because of the power outage. Not only will Samsung have to stop production for a couple of days, but some flash-memory chips that were in the manufacturing process could be ruined by failing to go through all the steps. Chipmaking and baking have more in common than you might think, and if the power goes out in the kitchen for several hours, that pie is not necessarily going to recover.

Apple will probably get all the flash it needs for its iPod Shuffles, despite Samsung's problems.

(Credit: Apple)

But Apple, unlike the rest of the industry, might have an easier time this fall getting all the flash-memory chips it needs for iPods and the iPhone.

Apple won't directly comment on its relationship with Samsung or other flash-memory vendors, but it's thought that Apple gets favorable supply terms because of its heft in the music player market. DRAMeXchange, a Taiwan analyst firm, estimated that Apple consumes 25 percent of the world's supply of NAND flash memory, and Samsung supplies about 44 percent of the world's NAND flash.

The outage might delay Apple's plans for future flash-based devices, such as a new iPhone, a new touch-screen iPod or a flash-based ultraportable notebook. If Samsung is able to get back up and running by Saturday, its stated goal, then the disruption shouldn't be too bad as other suppliers step in to fill the void, iSuppli said in a research note Friday. But an extended outage could hurt everyone.