According to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone vendors shipped 157.8 million units in Q4 2011, and 37 million were from Apple—accounting for 23.5-percent market share in Q4 2011 quarter.

If Apple shipped 37 million then Samsung the next best shipped 36 million units with 22.8% market share.I knew Samsung would over take HTC which shipped 10.2 million units with a market share of 6.2%.However, while taking the top position in the market thanks to the iPhone 4S launch, Apple also set a new shipment volume record for the entire industry during the quarter.

The report citied the initial delay bringing the launch closer to the holiday season and the addition of new carriers as reasons for the device’s strong demand. Despite that, Samsung was still able to come out on top for FY 2011, edging Apple out by under a million units…

Samsung finished the year as 2011′s top smartphone vendor by market lead shipping 94 million units in FY 2011, compared to Apple’s 93.2 million. Those numbers gave Samsung 19.1 percent of the market for FY 2011 and Apple 19 percent. Samsung also posted the largest year-over-year increase of 275 percent, compared to Apple’s 128.4-percent.

If you see today’s trend then we see that Google’s Android 4.0 Galaxy Nexus and Apple’s iPhone 4S have been in the news but IDC’s Kevin Restivo said, “a growing number of sub-$250″ Android devices have allowed Android vendors to rapidly increase smartphone volumes. In total, smartphone shipments during 2011 were up 61.3 percent to 491.4 million units from just 304.7 million units the year before.

IDC

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Apple tops the list by shipments and market share for Q4 2011 is a post from: Tech Mania.Check out more of the latest news by Subscribing to feed

The Qualcomm-Motorola agreement was also discussed at the hearing, but only behind closed doors. That agreement may very well help Apple keep its more recent products, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, on sale in Germany despite Motorola’s legal attacks in Mannheim and Düsseldorf.

Motorola has demaned with Apple to give it 2.25% of all of its iPhone sales in exchange for licensing some of Motorola’s patents it claims Apple uses in the device. Depending on what iPhone model you’re looking at, that would mean that Apple would be handing over between $15 and $19 for every iPhone it sells to Moto. Multiply $15 over all the iPhones Apple sells and you’re looking at a pretty substantial chunk of cash.

Apple claims that Motorola’s demands are outside of the realm of fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.Apple also said that the rate which MMI is asking is too high and this would lead to others also coming up with similar rates in future which would effect Apple’s cost structure.Same thing is what Apple says about Samsung is doing.

Via Foss Patents 

Motorola Wants 2.5% of All iPhone Sales- Foss Patents is a post from: Tech Mania.Check out more of the latest news by Subscribing to feed

The S4-based device appeared on NenaMark2, a graphical benchmark, and was listed as featuring a 1024 x 600 pixel screen – a resolution typical for 7-inch tablets. The device was running on Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich with the Krait processor clocked at 1.5GHz.Nenamark2 on this slate which showed a score of 54.90 noticeably better than the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket(AT&T at 54.1) but with a lower resolution at 480 X 800 and Galaxy Note(32.8).Proving that is the fact that it beats the Mali-400 GPU, which is the second-best graphical performer after Apple’s PowerVR SGX543MP2 in the A5 chip.This may be  tiny winy less than upcoming Tegra 3.

Via PhoneArena and Nenamark2

First Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 benchmark score appears is a post from: Tech Mania.Check out more of the latest news by Subscribing to feed

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Notion Ink explains why it choose OMAP over Tegra for the Adam II is a post from: Tech Mania.Check out more of the latest news by Subscribing to feed

I was on the team that designed the graphics core, so I’m a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge,” he said. “What’s really striking is how badly Tegra 2 performs relative even to simple APs using licensed Imagination Technologies (TI and Apple) or ARM Mali (Samsung) graphics.

“To summarize, BCM2835 has a tile mode architecture – so it kills immediate-mode devices like Tegra on fill-rate – and we’ve chosen to configure it with a very large amount of shader performance, so it does very well on compute-intensive benchmarks, and should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content,” he added.

On the ARM front here is some update.We know that Windows 8 will be the first OS to run both on AMD and ARM chips.We saw in CES 2012, ARM devices were on display running Windows 8.0. However, back then Windows 8 wasn’t stable on ARM machines but now with a number of sources are claiming that Windows 8 is now stable on ARM devices and that this may warrant an earlier-than-expected release of ARM devices with Windows 8.

If this is true then, this may be a cause of worry for Intel. This is because the ARM machines, with nearly the same specs and Windows 8, will cost hundreds of dollars less than Intel machines with similar capabilities.So there is a chance that consumers might shift to ARM machines than use Intel machines. Intel hopes to make a major come-back with it’s Windows 8 ultra books. But ARM can somewhat puncture this come-back if ARM ultra books with similar specs are released with a much lower price range. This is all the more expected now because many sources are claiming that ARM may be able to launch side by side with Intel, although earlier we were told that ARM machines will be released later.Among the main ARM chip suppliers are Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Qualcomm. The sources reveal that two of these platforms have finally succeeded in running stable Windows 8 on ARM machines.

Upton also indicated that his team has talked with Microsoft about using Windows 8 on the device, but the upcoming OS will require an ARMv7 (Cortex) processor, and won’t run on the Raspberry Pi’s current ARM11 core. A future version might support the new Windows platform, as there seems to be a lot of interest in running Windows-based applications.

There have been claims that Microsoft Office, may not function well enough on ARM. But now it is being said that Office is working fine too.The greatest problem ARM faces is the lack of support for legacy apps. These apps run perfectly on Intel machines but ARM has not support for them. Although it is said that some of the main metro-style apps of Windows will be available on ARM machines, there is no encouraging word about third-party legacy apps.

High end enthusiasts prefer to overclock processors and try to get more juice of your machine.So good news for those keeping an eye on Raspberry Pi.Upton said that Raspberry Pi can be overclocked, although users won’t be able to push it more that 100 MHz above the current 700 MHz core clock speed. “The ARM is already fairly close to the edge at 700 MHz,” he said.

“Without overvolting the chip (which decreases lifetime), there’s not much more than 100 MHz of overclocking headroom on typical silicon. We do offer a clock speed tweak option in the boot configuration parameters, so if you get lucky and get a fast part you can exploit it.”

Raspberry Pi runs Linux which will play host to a wide range of programing environments. Already lined up for the credit card platform are Scratch, Logo and Kid’s Ruby for younger children and beginners, and tools like YoYo Games’ GameMaker. Raspberry Pi will also support fully-fledged professional tools like Python and C. Even XBMC runs “beautifully” on Raspberry Pi.

After years in development, the first production run of 10,000 units will be available for purchase within the next few weeks. The basic version will cost a mere $25, and the $35 version adds more memory and an Ethernet port.Check out XBMC running on Raspberry Pi after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Raspberry PI will supposedly perform twice the performance of the new iPhone 4S is a post from: Tech Mania.Check out more of the latest news by Subscribing to feed