Phone maker and OS market shares: Samsung rises, Nokia slips

Those who keep score, Samsung recently overtook Nokia as the top mobile vendor in the world. Analysts from IDC and comScore have published their own studies that bring detailed info on the standings of phone makers and also mobile OS market shares.

IDC notes that the mobile market shrunk 1.5% compared to last year's first quarter. That's a loss for feature phones though - the smartphone market in Q1 of 2012 is up 42.5% year over year, beating IDC's expectations (but lower than the growth in Q4 2011).

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Tizen OS hits version 1.0, SDK gets updated

Tizen, the open source mobile operating system on which Samsung and Intel are working on, is finally out of beta and into version 1.0. In addition, the team behind Tizen has added a bug tracker and a wiki page for the community.

Developers will be happy to know that the SDK has seen lots of updates such as a new browser-based simulator, which supports the Tizen APIs and an improved emulator for Windows and Linux.

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Motorola Mobility releases first quarter financial results

Motorola Mobility just announced its first quarter financial results for 2012 and things aren't looking so well.

The total revenue in this period was of $3.1 billion (out of which $2.2 billion were from mobile devices) but the company faced a net operating loss of $85 million, $24 million more than same quarter last year. Motorola managed to ship 8.9 million mobil

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RIM BlackBerry 10 prototype fails to wow investors

Research In Motion Ltd (RIM.TO) gave developers a glimpse at its next-generation BlackBerry 10 smartphone on Tuesday and a set of software tools to create flashy apps to run on its new operating system, but investors were unimpressed and RIM's shares tumbled

At RIM's annual BlackBerry World conference in Orlando, new CEO Thorsten Heins took center stage to unveil a prototype of the devices RIM expects to launch later this year. The BlackBerry 10 devices will navigate with fewer keystrokes than the legacy smartphones, relying on swipe gestures and word suggestions.

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BlackBerry 10 developer alpha unit goes official

RIM is hosting its annual BlackBerry World event between May 1-3. Today, on the first day of the event, RIM presented the official developer alpha device for the QNX-based BlackBerry 10 platform.

We expect the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone to look much like the developer's unit.

 
An official and a live photo of the dev unit

Engadget managed to snap some hands-on pictures of the device. Unfortunately there are no actual pictures of the new BlackBerry 10 platform, since the thingy ran on PlayBook OS 2.0.

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Huawei-made Prism is heading to T-Mobile US on May 6

T-Mobile is preparing to launch an entry-level droid called Prism. It’s manufactured by Huawei and will launch on May 6.

The Prism packs a 600MHz processor, a 3.5-inch HVGA display, a 3 megapixel snapper and a microSD card slot with a 2GB pre-installed card. The phone is Wi-Fi-enabled and will support 3G with HSDPA.

  
T-Mobile Prism leaked documents

The rumored launch price for the Prism is $50 on a T-Mobile contract.

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LG has no future plans for Windows Phone devices

LG is dropping from the Windows Phone race and has no plans to release any gadgets of that kind. The decision is not final, of course, and LG will continue its partnership with Microsoft.

As you can imagine, LG’s U-turn is based on the really weak sales and most probably the threat from the Microsoft/Nokia team.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer has a scheduled visit in Korea in May to explore partnership opportunities. LG is most probably on the list too, so we’ll have to see what happens then. Keep in mind though, that Samsung will surely be pushing WP8 running devices later this year, which will be an additional threat for everyone else.

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Is this the first legit Samsung Galaxy S3 press shot?

So far Samsung has been keeping its next flagship under wraps quite successfully. We've only seen blurry shots of the externals and supposedly, those are not even the final designs.

Props to Samsung for their success so far, but could this be the first serious leak of the handset?

What we have on our hands today is an image that looks a lot like what the Samsung Galaxy S3 is supposed to look like, judging by some ofthe more substantial leaks from the past.

Now this photo didn't come with any extra info on the handset, but the leaked specifications for the device so far detail a 4.6 or 4.8-inch SuperAMOLED screen of 720p resolution, Samsung's latest quad-core Exynos chipset, and an 8 or 12 megapixel camera to go with those. There should also be an extra beefier battery to make the phone last a bit longer.

Now as usual, take this thing with a pinch of salt. But our guess is leaks won't get any better than this before the official announcement. Even if it's some user-land fan art, we still appreciate the effort and it's a job nicely done.

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