April means lots of new first-quarter market share numbers. And research firms are stepping over each other to show that Samsung is faring well vis-a-vis its nemesis Apple -- which isn't doing too badly itself.

ComScore said today that Samsung is the top handset supplier among the 30,000 mobile subscribers surveyed in the U.S., with a 26 percent share in the three-month period ending in March. (see chart below).

In that period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices, according to ComScore.

LG was No. 2 with 19.3 percent and Apple third with … Read more

Intel's second wave of Ivy Bridge chips for ultrabooks are due by early June, when Computex gets under way, an industry source told CNET.

In the first week of June, consumers can expect to see a new wave of ultrabooks based on Intel's just-announced Ivy Bridge processor, according to the source, who is familiar with the plans of Intel and PC makers.

That's the time frame in which Intel is expected to roll out power-efficient versions of Ivy Bridge. Last week, Intel announced only high-performance, quad-core versions of the processor that typically goes into larger laptops, like … Read more

Samsung's smartphone shipments soared over the same period last year, allowing it to easily grab the lion's share of the global market, while Nokia's share plummeted, a market researcher said Thursday. Another market researcher put Samsung No.1 in the overall cell phone market.

The South Korean electronics giant's share went from 12.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to a whopping 30.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Strategy Analytics (see chart below).

Apple's growth isn't too shabby either: it jumped from an 18.1 percent … Read more

Online retailer giant Amazon is quickly becoming a device heavyweight.

Amazon's Kindle Fire grabbed a 54.5 percent share in February, almost doubling its share in the past two months and "already establishing itself as the leading Android tablet by a wide margin," according to ComScore (see chart below).

ComScore said its methodology "measures unique devices accessing the Web during the time period noted, including home, enterprise and secondary devices across all age groups."

Samsung's Galaxy Tab was a distant runner-up with a 15.4 percent share in February, followed by the Motorola Xoom … Read more

The first phone based on Intel silicon keeps pace with rival devices using chips from longstanding mobile standard bearer ARM, a report said Wednesday.

"For Intel, answering the looming ARM threat is obviously hugely important for the future," said review site Anandtech.

"So how did Intel's first attempt fare? In short, reasonably well," the site's Brian Klug wrote.

For the first time, a commercial smartphone is packing Intel silicon, the Atom 'Medfield" Z2460. India-based Lava announced the Xolo X900 this week.

Benchmarks showed the X900 keeping up with market-leading Android phones like the … Read more

Electronics heavyweight Samsung will put quad-core silicon in its next Galaxy smartphone, upping the ante for mobile performance.

The Exynos 4 Quad integrates four processor cores and is built on the company's cutting-edge 32-nanometer manufacturing process. The chip will run at speeds above 1.4GHz, the company said in a statement today.

As a yardstick, the third-generation iPad uses older 45-nanometer Samsung manufacturing tech and its central processing unit is dual-core (though the graphics processing unit is quad-core). And most multi-core smartphones and tablets on the market today are dual-core.

Samsung's new chip -- targeted at both tablets … Read more

Apple's CEO Tim Cook may have just thrown down the gauntlet to the Windows camp about nothing less than the future of portable computing.

Cook dismissed the idea of a hybrid MacBook-iPad device, during the company's second-quarter earnings conference call this afternoon. "You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going be pleasing to the user," he said.

The toaster-refrigerator hyperbolic analogy aside, it just so happens that Intel has begun to push the Windows 8 laptop-tablet hybrid concept. And it has even built a demo unit to prove the … Read more

Supercomputer maker Cray will sell its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $140 million in cash, the two companies announced today.

Up to 74 Cray employees will join Intel, Cray said. The company currently employs approximately 800 people worldwide.

"By broadening our relationship with Intel, we are positioned to further penetrate the [high-performance computing] market," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, in a statement.

Ungaro continued, "This agreement also dramatically strengthens our balance sheet and increases our options for further growth, profitability and creating shareholder value."

Cray said it … Read more

You may not yet be familiar with Okta, an on-demand identity and access management service company founded by former Salesforce.com executives and backed by big-time venture investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate. But as cloud services continue to find their way into the enterprise, there is a good chance it will be noticed by companies that will have the need to support identity and access management across enterprise/cloud borders.

While this is an early market, the premise of Okta (and others such as Symplified) is that the next generation of IT infrastructure is being built … Read more