Apple and Samsung are the only two smartphone manufacturers currently seeing any growth in the United States. The pair are slowly eating away at the market share held by their rivals, including LG, Motorola, Research in Motion, and HTC. In the three months leading up to November 2012, Samsung increased its market share from 25.7% to 26.9%, but Apple is catching up with the Cupertino company enjoying slightly more growth.
WhatsApp, the hugely popular cross-platform messaging system available to Android and iOS, saw out 2012 with an incredible bang. The company has announced that it processed a staggering 18 billion messages on New Year’s Eve alone, exceeding its previous record of 10 billion messages processed last August.
Samsung sells some of the best and most successful Android devices currently available. The Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II are undoubtedly two of the hottest Android handsets on the market, and they’ve both shifted millions upon millions of units. But despite that success, the Korean electronics giant is expected to try its luck with another mobile operating system in 2013.
It’s called Tizen, and Samsung’s been developing it alongside Intel. Samsung confirmed its plans to merge the open-source operating system with its own Bada OS back in October, and according to a new report, it will partner up with NTT DoCoMo to launch its first Tizen-powered smartphones in Korea in 2013.
Android’s market share continues to grow throughout the world, but one country where Google’s platform is having its biggest impact is in China. It’s now the largest single Android market in the world, with one third of all Android devices sold there during 2012. The iPhone, on the other hand, is struggling there.
On Tuesday, Chinese gadget maker Huawei confirmed it would be announcing the Ascend D2, a new Android-powered smartphone, at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January. But you don’t need to wait until then to see it, because the device has already been revealed in a number of leaked photographs, courtesy of the Chinese FCC.
