Canalys has posted their Q4 2011 global smartphone research report and it appears that for the first time, ever, smartphones have outshipped PCs.
158.5 million smartphones were shipped during the quarter, for a total of 488 million on the year. The figure was a huge 63 percent jump from the 300 million shipped in 2010. PCs, on the other hand, only saw a 15 percent bump to 414.6 million units, including tablets like the iPad.
Says Canalys: “In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads. But pads have had negligible impact on smartphone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011. Smartphone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone.
In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition. The greater availability of smartphones at lower price points has helped tremendously, but there has been a driving trend of increasing consumer appetite for Internet browsing, content consumption and engaging with apps and services on mobile devices.”
Apple was the top smartphone and PC vendor during the quarter, selling 37 million iPhones, 15 million iPads and just over 5 million Macs. Altogether, the company shipped 93.1 million iPhones during the year, barely beating out Samsung who also finished strong and ended with 91.9 million smartphones shipped for the year.
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Result for: iphones
Cultofmac has reported today that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is pushing hard to get Wi-Fi syncing for the upcoming iPod revamp coming later this year.
The company has apparently been testing the tech for the last two years.
Jobs has made Wi-Fi syncing one of the top priorities for the media players, which are becoming less and less relevant as more people simply buy iPhones or iPads.
So far, Apple’s engineers have had issues with “reliability, signal strength, case design and battery life” when trying for Wi-Fi syncing.
The current method for syncing involves connecting to your PC via USB cable.
Using a carbon fiber design, which the new iPods are said to have, “the engineers have found many improvements” but it is still nowhere near perfect.
Result for: iphones
The next generation iPhones and iPads are rumored to have Apple’s new System on a Chip, which will feature the much more powerful dual core SGX543MP2 graphics chip. It is also said that the chip would enable four times the pixel count of previous iPad. The new iPad 2 Retina display would have a resolution of 2048 x 1536.
The more advanced SoC will also add support for HDMI as well as 1080p Full HD video playback. However, it is not yet certain in which iOS devices you will see these, if any. According to AppleInsider, there will be multi-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs in the SoC quite like in Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip.
It certainly does sound like the new iOS devices will have a ton more horsepower than the predecessors.
