Research firm IDC has posted its quarterly report on the smartphone market which suggests that Windows Phone devices have finally overtaken BlackBerry smartphones in terms of shipments. This also means that devices running Microsoft’s OS take third spot in terms of smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013.  According to the report, Windows Phone devices accounted for 3.2 percent of total shipments while BlackBerry devices fell to 2.9 percent from 3.2 percent in the previous quarter.

It’s also worth noting that Nokia has expanded its Windows Phone portfolio to lower price points with devices like the Lumia 720, Lumia 620 and the Lumia 520. In fact, the Lumia 520 costs less than Rs 10,499, so it makes sense that the shipments are increasing. On the other hand, BlackBerry only launched its new BB10 based Z10 in January and its QWERTY Q10, which happens to be its bread in butter device has not launched in many parts of the world including India. Plus, its Q5 smartphone was only announced two days ago, and will not arrive before June. In fact, if anything can say that the growth in Windows Phone shipments is still slow.

Android and iOS seem to be in league of their own with 92.3 percent smartphone shipments being shared between both the platforms. Actually, it is Android, which is really running away with the market share. Yesterday, Google announced that there had been 900 million Android activations which was up from 500 million activations a year before. Additionally, 75 percent of the total smartphones shipped in Q1 were based on Android.

While, Apple managed 17.3 percent, it should also noted that it shipped 37.3 million iPhones in Q1 in the wake of the iPhone 5, and this was its best best quarter ever.

IDC posits that 162.1 million Android smartphones were shipped in Q1, an increase of 71.8 million units from 90.3 in 2012.

Android is on a roll, and if Windows Phone and BlackBerry want to make a fist of it, then both the operating systems need to eke out market share from Android. Windows Phone seems to be in the right direction, as devices like the Lumia 520, Lumia 620 and the Lumia 720  are selling quite well in emerging markets like India.

Apple was running a countdown with every download to mark the 50 billionth download on the App store, and today the App store has finally recorded 50 billion app.

As mentioned on its countdown marker, the company will give away awards including a $10,000 gift card to the user who has downloaded the 50 billionth app, and $500 gift cards to the next 50 app downloaders. It has only been four months since the company had announced to have got over 40 billion downloads.

The Cupertino giant was the initiator of the app market concept and took it to a whole new level. It was soon followed by Google whose Play Store is now giving head to head competition to the Apple’s App Store. Now, while Apple claims to reach half a billion mark, Google is not far behind in the picture as also announced yesterday to have over 48 billion app downloads on its application market Play Store.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 for many is considered to be a wildly different smartphone than the Apple iPhone 5 or for that matter any iPhone. But it appears that the patent war between Apple and Samsung will rage on even if Samsung devices have stopped looking like Apple’s. According to patent law expert Florian Muller, Apple has requested the US district court to allow it to add the Galaxy S4 to the list of products that are guilty of violating its patents.

According to the report, Apple has analyzed the Galaxy S4 and has concluded that it infringes its patent portfolio. Currently, Apple has 22 Samsung products in its claim and it will need to drop a product if it intends to add the Galaxy S4 to the list. Samsung too has 22 products on its list in a counter claim.

In the end, both the companies will need to narrow down their claims to 10 devices on each side and number of patents questioned to five.

Apple’s App Store is soon to touch the 50 billion download mark and marking this momentous occasion the Cupertino-based company has released a list of its ‘All-time Top 25’ free and paid apps for the iPhone and iPad.

The list not surprisingly has a majority of apps from the Games category that includes the likes of Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Draw Something among others. While apps like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram top the list in the other categories.

As we reported earlier, on eve of this milestone, Apple has posted a countdown and will award a $10,000 App Store Gift Card to the person who downloads the 50 billionth app. Apple will also give away a $500 App Store Gift Card each to the next 50 customers downloading apps following the lucky winner.

You can see the complete list of Top-25 apps in the table below.

Apple’s ex-employees seem to be quite in demand in the job market. After Facebook snapped up former Apple Maps’ executive Richard Williamson, a report on CNET now claims that chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has reportedly hired former Apple graphics chip designer Raja Koduri to join its engineering team.

Koduri, who served as AMD’s chief technology officer, left the company in 2009 to join Apple which was in the process of ramping up its own chip manufacturing business. After working for about four years, Koduri left the Cupertino-based company last month and since then, according to CNET, AMD has been trying to persuade Koduri to return to the California-based company.

As part of AMD’s engineering team, Koduri is expected to have an important role in the chipmaker’s graphics team, though his exact designation is currently not known. A formal announcement is expected sometime this week.

Motorola engineer Marty Cooper placed the first cellular call on April 3, 1973, marking the beginning of a revolution that would change the world forever. The device is question was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x that weighed 2.5 pounds, and was super ungainly by modern standards. We take a look at some of the most groundbreaking cellphones that have touched our lives in the last 40 years.

Motorola DynaTAC 8000x

The prototype that Marty Cooper used to make the first call weighed 2.5 pounds, and was 9-inches long and 5-inches deep. It offered just 30 minutes of talktime and took 10 hours to recharge. The first mass production model of the same phone hit markets ten years later in 1983 and an entire line of DynaTAC cellphones were made by Motorola till 1994.

Nokia Mobira Cityman 900

Motorola was not the only innovator in this space as Nokia joined the party in 1987 with the Mobira Cityman 900. It had a 1,000-mAh battery and offered a talk time of only 50 minutes. It was also pretty big, but at the time was one of the world’s first compact cellphones as it weighed ‘just’ 760 grams. The phone was made famous by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev as used the device to make a call to Moscow in October 1987 from Helsinki, Finland.

Nokia 1011

There is a reason Nokia’s name will be remain synonymous with the cellphone industry forever. It pushed mobile technology further than anyone else in the 90’s. The Nokia 1011 was the first cellular phone that ran on a GSM network. It used the 900MHz band and could even receive a SMS.

Nokia 2110

The 2110 was the model that really propelled Nokia to the stratospheric heights it managed to cling on to till the late 2000’s. It was also the first phone to feature the now iconic Nokia ringtone. It could list 10 dialed numbers, missed calls and received calls and could also send and receive SMSs. It was also known for its ungainly antenna.

Nokia 9000 Communicator

The word smartphone did not exist back in 1996, but if there was something close to a smartphone back then, it was the Nokia 9000 Communicator. It was actually the first phone to drive home the thought that a phone could be a computer. It was large, ungainly and was powered by an Intel i386 CPU clocked at 24MHz and ran GEOS 3.0. The Communicator remained an integral part of Nokia’s lineup till the last one which was the E90.

Nokia 7650

The Nokia 7650 marked the arrival of the smartphone in 2002. It was not only the first Nokia phone with a built-in camera, but was also the first device to be powered by the Symbian S60 platform, that powered the bulk of Nokia’s smartphone portfolio for almost a decade.

Sony Ericsson P800

The P800 was the very definition of a superphone. It had a large resistive touch-screen and was powered by the Symbian UIQ OS. While the initial design work was done at Ericsson, the final product was released only after Sony and Ericsson combined their business. It was the very definition of the PDA phone. Back then, touchscreens were a rarity, unlike today, but it was more than a phone as essentially it was computer and it even supported Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick Duos.

Nokia 3310

Launched in 2000, the 3310 and its various variants have become a part of Nokia history. Nokia has built its reputation because of such phones. It was considered to be indestructible phone and Nokia sold over 126 million units of the 3310 till its retirement. It was also one of the first phones to feature the popular Nokia game Snake II.

O2 XDA II

Built by HTC before it launched smartphones under its own brand name, the XDA II was a smartphone offered in the UK on the O2 network. It was one of the first smartphones to be powered by Windows Mobile 2003. It was also one the rare few smartphones to boast a touch-screen and it also combined a mobile Microsoft Office experience.

Nokia 1100

200 million Nokia 1100s have been sold since its inception in 2003. It is the best selling cellphone in the world to date, and frankly it was perhaps the first feature phone that Nokia made in an age of smartphones that attained this amount of success.

Palm Treo 600

The Palm Treo 600 was a mobility icon. Outside of the Nokia communicator and the BlackBerry it was one of the first devices to offer a lavish QWERTY keyboard and was truly a smartphone that delivered competent email capabilities.

BlackBerry 6280

BlackBerry with its smartphones defined what a professional phone should be. The 6280 back in 2003 was one of the first full QWERTY smartphones and it was essentially an emailing tool. The rock solid industrial design, QWERTY keyboard and solid encrypted email capabilities found in the 6280 was the bedrock on which BlackBerry built its business on.

Motorola Razr

Before the Razr, phones never looked beautiful. They were all rectangular, blocky and just a functional object than a style statement. The Razr changed all that. It was the thinnest phone when it hit the street in 2004, made of aircraft grade aluminum and chemically etched keypad. Over the years, Motorola sold more than 130 million Razr’s worldwide in a span of four years.

Nokia N95

With the N-series Nokia pushed the limits of photography, music and entertainment. Before the N95, Nokia had sold the N91, N93, N70, but it was the N95 that arrived at the fag end of 2006, that was the real game changer. It packed in a 5-megapixel camera, a dual-slider design, and some advanced communication capabilities. It was a winner and for the longest time was considered to be one of the best camera phones.

Apple iPhone

The iPhone changed it all. It brought a brand new multi-touch interface to the table which was wildly superior to anything that was offered in a mobile phone in 2007. Yes, Apple shortchanged the user on features as core features like MMS were missing, but it was the first smartphone that actually was made for a world connected to the Internet. It had Google Maps baked in and had a Safari browser that could display proper full websites and could handle email in rich text. Smartphones were never the same after the iPhone.

HTC Dream

In 2008, the HTC Dream became the first commercially available Android powered smartphone. It flaunted a slider QWERTY design and this marked the beginning of what only can be described as world domination. While phone itself was not a great seller, but over the last five years Android has become the most ubiquitous smartphone platform in the world.

Google Nexus One

The Google Nexus One market the entry of Google as a smartphone retailer. Essentially it was the HTC Desire, and it shipped with Android 2.1 Eclair and was perhaps the first Android smartphone that was seen in the same breadth as the iPhone.

Samsung Galaxy S

If Android is the dominant force in the smartphone market then it owes a lot of its success to Samsung’s Galaxy range of smartphones. The Galaxy S was the first one and it combined a powerful hummingbird processor with a 4-inch AMOLED display. Evolutions of these technologies have been seen its successors which have propelled Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone vendor.

Nokia N8

With its massive 12-megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss optics and masterful aluminum chassis, Nokia hoped the N8 would be the touchscreen phone that would revive the company. While it failed in doing so, it became a paragon for mobile photography, something which Nokia is still known for.

Nokia PureView 808

The PureView 808 will be remembered for many things. It is not only the last Nokia smartphone to be powered by Symbian, but it ushered in a new era of mobile photography with its unique 41-megapixel PureView camera. The technology was so fresh that Nokia to date has been unable to bring it to its more modern Windows Phone powered smartphones. Hopefully, this will happen in 2013.

Photographs: Wikipedia

Apple is slowly taking the Indian market seriously as it realizes just how big a market this country is. It is not surprising then that Apple has been selling its devices at attractive EMIs and also launching devices like Apple TV in India. Now according to a report on ET, the Cupertino-based company plans to scale up its presence in the country by tripling the number of its exclusive stores to around 200 by 2015.

According to the report, these plans were discussed when Hugeues Asseman, Apple’s vice-president (sales) for Europe, Middle-East, India, and Africa visited Mumbai last month. Currently Apple sells its products through exclusive stores called Apple Premium Resellers that are owned and managed by 17 franchisees. These franchises have been asked to ramp up their operations across the country and increase the number of stores from the present 65 stores in the country. Apple also plans to expand its presence in multi-brand stores like Croma and the Mobile Store.

But even with these stores in India, what is evidently missing are the iconic Apple Stores and this might be mostly because of our government’s policies. Apple has nevertheless asked its franchises to redesign their stores to look more like the Apple Stores seen in the US. The cost of refitting and redesigning each store is expected to be more than Rs 1 crore, which the company is reportedly planning to reimburse the franchisee owners over a year.

It is good to see Apple so seriously reworking its marketing strategy for India and we are hoping that the day isn’t too far when the Cupertino-based company will launch a device in our country on the same day as the US or Europe.

Apple’s Maps may have bombed after its release back in September but that hasn’t stopped the Cupertino-based company from slowly making improvements to the app in its quest to make it as good as Google’s. Now according to a report on WSJ, Apple has acquired a startup company called WiFiSLAM that develops ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals.

The Silicon Valley-based startup that was co-founded by a former Google software engineering intern, Joseph Huang, basically develops apps which let smartphones locate themselves indoors using ambient Wi-Fi signals that already exist in buildings. WiFiSLAM has been for quite some time now marketing the technology to app developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps.

According to the report, the deal is believed to be around $20 million and by acquiring WiFiSLAM, Apple has made its intentions clear on how serious it is about taking the crown of the best Maps app on iOS back from Google. Google Maps which was launched on iOS back in December already offers indoor mapping in airports, shopping centers, sports stadiums, and other locations.

Previously, Apple CEO Tim Cook had also announced the exit of its iOS chief Scott Forstall in the wake of the iOS 6 Maps fiasco and ever since then the company has been rigorously improving its solution.

According to a PrecisionMatch report on ‘Mobile Handset Market Insights’ for India for the period of December 2012 – February 2013, Micromax has emerged as the second most researched handset brands beating biggies like Nokia and Apple.

The data shows consumers in India are gaining interest in Micromax phones and it was the second most researched handset brand after Samsung in February 2013. While Samsung recorded the most search queries online with 31 percent of total researches registered, Micromax got 17 percent of the researches followed by Nokia with 16 percent of traction. These were followed by Sony, HTC, Apple and Blackberry.

As far as devices go, Micromax’s A110 Canvas 2 fetched the maximum traction in January and stood second in the most researched phone in February, trailing Samsung Galaxy S III by merely 0.32 percent. While Apple iPhone 5 stood fourth in the list, Samsung got seven of its models placed in the top ten.

One of the findings on the purchasing behavior of the consumers suggest that they prefer to buy either high-end devices priced upwards of Rs 20,000 or opt for low-end phones costing below Rs 15,000. In fact, January registered maximum traction for the devices falling in the Rs 5,000 – Rs 10,000 category.

The data was derived by aggregating and analyzing audience data for 5.3 million unique users who displayed strong purchase intent by either researching, comparing or reviewing handset brands across sites.

“Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device.” These were the words of Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s CTO in a blog post defending Flash after Apple decided to banish it from its iOS devices. Today Adobe announced that Lynch has quit the company to join Apple. Lynch is said to join Apple as its VP of Technology and would report to Bob Mansfield, the SVP of Technologies who has a wide role at Apple, where he is also overseeing future technologies.

Lynch of late had been spearheading Adobe’s cloud efforts in the form of Adobe Creative Cloud, which intends to take the company away from box sales and offer its suite of tools as SaaS. Apple, which also realized the importance of cloud services launched its iCloud service in 2011 but it has not been the most intuitive services that one expects from the Cupertino, California-based company.

Though iCloud comes under the mandate of Eddy Cue, the SVP for Internet Software and Services, it would be naive to think Lynch won’t have any role to play despite him reporting to Mansfield and not Cue.

Vyclone, the start-up behind popular cloud based social video editing apps for iOS and Android has revealed that it is launching a web-based browser centric video editor. The company has partnered with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and while the service works just perfectly with any browser IE will have the extra benefit of pinch-to-zoom gestures.

Built for touch, the new experience builds upon the strengths of the mobile apps and its totally HTML5 based.

While the idea behind the mobile apps was to allow fast stitching together of content from multiple users who are present at the same location, the web-app allows for more manual control and allows people who were also not present at the locale of the shoot to edit the content.

Vyclone claims that since launch last year it has helped created tens and thousands of multi-angle movies and this new variant of the app could induce even more users.

Ever since the launch of the iPad, it has dominated the tablet space. Even the entry of Android in 2011 with Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the iPad dominated and for the past year it has forced Google to go back to the drawing board with the interface of Android on tablets. With Jelly Bean and lowered price points Google has steadily been making inroads and now IDC claims that finally Android tablets will overtake the iPad and the iPad mini in market share this year.

The report claims that every one of every two tablets sold are smaller than 8-inches and these tablets are also cheaper. Consumers have started to realise the benefits of the smaller form-factor. Shipments of these low-cost tablets will reach 190.9 million units. Additionally, the tablet market will growth 11 percent annually till 2016 and shipments are expected to reach 350 million units by 2017.

In 2013, the Android tablet market share will peak at 48.8 percent and the market share of iOS powered tablets will slide to 46 percent in 2013 from 51 percent in 2012.

Things are not looking good for Microsoft according to the report as Windows 8 will only grow to 7.8 percent by 2017 and Windows RT will stay planted below 3 percent in the forecast period.

Photographs: Eshaan Shetty

A few hours ago we reported that Google might finally add Google Now in the Chrome web browser on Windows and Chrome OS, but it now appears it is also planning a version for iOS. Engadget is reporting that it found a promotional video of Google Now on YouTube which now has been pulled.

Luckily, Engadget was prudent enough to capture a copy of the video which it has now embedded in its own player. By the looks of it, the promotional video looks quite real as the voice actress is the same as the one in the original Google Now video for Android.

For those who don’t know, Google Now is a service that ties all user data and collates and provides contextual updates to the user on the basis of his/her’s likes or dislikes, habits, location and schedules.

The video suggests that users will be able to launch Google Now from a simple swipe up from the bottom of the screen on iOS from within the ‘Search’ app. While the video actually does not show an iPhone or an iPad, so it is plausible that this could be a fake but other than that the signs are that Google might be cooking an Google Now app for iOS, considering the video was also swiftly pulled.

Google has always been a cross-platform company and has never really restricted any features to its platform Android. Last October, Google updated its ‘Search’ app with voice recognition that is now considered to be vastly superior to Apple’s Siri on the iPhone and the iPad. Then in December it launched its Google Maps app with turn-by-turn navigation which has turned out to be vastly popular.

Google has been waging a proxy war of sorts with Apple on iOS, by providing alternative solutions to core iOS features. The addition of Google Now to the platform could be another pawn in Google’s gambit.

Some of the apps Google offers on iOS include the Chrome web browser, Google Maps, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive amongst others.

An image of an early iPhone prototype has surfaced on the web courtesy Ars Technica which suggests that Apple contemplated building a large ‘Phablet’ like device before the original iPhone was announced in 2007. This also means that Apple was dabbling with this idea way before Samsung released its industry leaking Note series of products that basically define ‘the Phablet’ category.

The image of the device was sourced through an ex-Apple employee who remained anonymous fearing retribution from the company. The device in question was 7-inches tall, 5-inches wide and 2-inches thick which is certainly, quite large by modern standards but back then (early 2000’s) it was quite an achievement.

The image suggests it had USB ports, Ethernet ports and even a serial port. It even used an ARM chip that was quite similar to the one Apple ended up using in the original iPhone and was running a version of OS X.

The moment Apple announced iCloud and its iTunes Match service last year, it was a given that it would end up venturing in a music streaming service of its own. The service, which has been dubbed iRadio by journalists, is now reportedly delayed, as licensing negotiations with big music labels have not gone according to plan reports the New York Times.

Apple was reportedly planning to launch the service early this year but this service is not likely to be released before summer that too is conditional because Apple will need to have a deal in place.

The Cupertino based technology giant reportedly wants to pre-install an app on its devices that will be supported by iAds which will deliver a free stream of music according to the users preferences similar to Pandora which is also the second most downloaded app on the App store.

Apple’s negotiations have been moving slowly with Sony/ATV, which controls the entire EMI publishing catalogue.

According to The New York Post, Apple has proposed in an initial offer 6 cents per 100 songs streamed. But this offer is half of what Pandora pays. According to this report, industry insiders believe that Apple should be paying 21 cents per 100 songs, which is still less than 35 cents per 100 songs that Spotify pays.

While Apple seeks to drive down the prices of these streaming services, labels like Sony earlier in the year introduced a 25 percent hike in its publishing royalties with Pandora.

Originally, according to the New York Post, Apple’s Eddy Cue has hoped to ship the service with the iPhone 5, but that never happened. In its current form Apple hopes that this service will not only launch in the US but also the UK, Germany and France and other countries as well.