How well did your favorite smartphone brand grow in 2017?
Here are some interesting insights form IHS Markit, a renowned market research firm, that recently published its findings on the leading global smartphone brands of 2017.
Gold and Silver go to…
Samsung was the leading Smartphone brand of 2017 by shipped unit volume. Its dominance is unchallenged with a total market share of 22% or 316.2 million. Samsung shipments grew 2% last year.
Apple is a distant second at 15% or 215.8 million units — this despite an amazing fourth quarter, where the iPhone X was the bestselling smartphone. Apple, however, flatlined this year with zero growth rate.
A Chinese brand takes Bronze
Huawei in third is creeping up on Apple with an 11% market share or 153.1 million shipped units, a plus of 10% compared to the previous year, but ran into speed bumps breaking into the US market. The company only sold around 200,000 units in the fourth quarter of 2017, despite the promising showing of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro in other parts of the globe.
In January, AT&T pulled out from negotiations, days before a partnership was scheduled to be announced at CES 2018. In addition, a proposed bill seeking to ban Huawei from doing business in the US might further hurt the company’s chances of securing all important carrier partnerships for its flagship devices.
Better together
Sister companies OPPO and Vivo took fourth and fifth, respectively. Both companies posted double-digit year-on-year growth rates, 23% and 18%, respectively. Together, both brands shipped 212.8 million units, enough to get dangerously close to Apple and well ahead of Huawei. Both brands opened flagship stores in China allowing them to boost brand recognition and drive home an image of value for money.
The growth winners are
But when it comes to growth numbers, the clear winners are Xiaomi at sixth and Motorola at ninth. The two brands saw growth rates well beyond any other brand, both enjoying a 58% year-over-year growth.
Motorola now controls 3% of the market while Lenovo, as the owner of the Motorola Mobility name, reached only a 1% market share. This is a clear validation of Lenovo’s go-to-market strategy to focus on the beloved Motorola brand. In 2018, expect Lenovo to continue to shift away from Lenovo-branded smartphones in favor of Motorola-branded handsets.
What about the other South Korean player?
While LG maintained almost the same unit volume as in 2016 with a growth of just 1%, they climbed up one spot to number seven due to the weak performance of ZTE. LG is struggling to get market recognition for its high-end devices, and with a limited marketing budget compared to other brands, this might not change in the foreseeable future.
And the losers
ZTE and Gionee are the biggest losers of 2017. ZTE declined by 20%, dropping to the eighth spot. Ginoee also declined by 14%.
The overall market
The global smartphone market grew only slightly by 3% equaling a total unit volume of 1.44 billion shipped phones compared to 1.4 billion in 2016. The fourth quarter of 2017 saw a decline of 4.5%, ringing in trouble ahead and laying the foundation for more changes to come in 2018.
Computers
AMD expands Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series lineup
Scalable, efficient AI compute for industrial, edge solutions
AMD has recently announced the expansion of its AMD Ryzen AI Embedded P100 Series processor lineup.
This enables scalable and power-efficient AI compute tailor-built for industrial and AI edge systems. Scenarios include factory automation, physical AI in mobile robotics, and other AI-driven edge applications.
With eight to 12 high-performance Zen 5 cores, AMD ROCm support, and up to 80 total system TOPS, the new x86 embedded APUs deliver up to:
- 2x more CPU core counts
- 8x higher GPU compute
- 36% higher system TOPS
This way, developers and system designers get an expanded and scalable portfolio of power-efficient edge computing solutions. These processors support real-time AI from vision to control and reasoning, as well as offer advanced graphics capabilities.
On a single chip, clients get up to 80 TOPS physical AI acceleration, AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics for real-time visualization, and an NPU based on the AMD XDNA 2 architecture.
Moreover, the processors can withstand industrial temperature ranges (-40° C to 105° C) and can support continuous 24/7 operations for up to 10-year life cycles. That’s along with low-latency and power-efficient AI inference.
Real-life applications include intelligent factories, autonomous robots, and medical imaging devices. For instance, the processors can deliver CPU performance required for real-time inspection and process optimization.
For mobile robots, meanwhile, processors can manage navigation, motion, control, and route planning while the GPU processes multi-camera feeds for spatial awareness.
Furthermore, for 3D health imaging, the processors can enable the powering of 3D imaging for ultrasounds, endoscopes, tissue classification, and tumor detection at the edge. This is done with models like U-Net, nnU-Net, and MONAI.
The processors then accelerate image-to-report workflows with MedSigLIP and support clinical reasoning and Q&A with Med-PaLM 2.
Gaming
Valve is embroiled in a lawsuit with New York over loot boxes
Valve has been embroiled in an odd war as of late. A few weeks ago, the New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the gaming company for allegedly encouraging children to gamble through loot boxes primarily found in Counter-Strike 2. Today, Valve is fighting back by declaring how little its loot boxes have to do with gambling.
For years, governments have had a problem with loot boxes. To them, the mechanic makes it too easy for gamers to fall into a gambling addiction. In essence, loot boxes are earnable packs that contain a single or a number of random items that the player can use for their game. Most of the time, these items are purely cosmetic and don’t give a gameplay advantage.
Like Blizzard before it, Valve is also defending its loot boxes as non-essential to how players engage with their games. “There is no disadvantage to a player not spending money,” their statement reads.
Additionally, Valve says that their loot boxes are no different from Pokémon cards and Labubu blind boxes. As such, the company is also defending their users’ right to transfer obtained items to other users, as with two players trading cards or Pop Mart figurines.
Now, these items have monetary value in the market. In the same way, a rare Counter-Strike 2 skin can fetch thousands of dollars. However, Valve says that they are already proactive in shutting down accounts made only to gamble and avoiding pro-gambling businesses.
Valve is capping off its statement by saying that the NYAG is forcing the company to collect more information from its users, especially those using VPNs to prevent being located in New York. The company says that it will continue to protect user data, despite the demand.
What is an Xbox? For the past year and a half, Microsoft will tell you that anything can be an Xbox. Now, with Project Helix on the horizon, Xbox wants to bring the idea of playing anywhere to the next level. Microsoft will start rolling out its new Xbox Mode to PCs in April.
Since the very first device out in the market, handheld consoles have changed how people play games. Naturally, a lot can already be said about the portability and the convenience of its hardware. But the software needs a special shoutout, too.
Though they are essentially PCs at heart, these consoles are built explicitly for gaming. Fiddling around with Windows isn’t ideal. Instead, they have special software that can collate all of a user’s games into one hub.
The new Xbox Mode, adapted from the ROG Xbox Ally X’s Xbox Full Screen Experience, will do just that but on an actual PC. As announced via an official blog post, Xbox will release the new mode to Windows 11 devices in April, starting with select markets. Like the software used in handheld consoles, Xbox Mode should include all the available games from the Game Pass, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.
Right now, the feature will likely go up against Steam’s Big Picture Mode, which does the same thing but only for Steam titles. However, it should also transition neatly to Project Helix. Xbox is now ramping up the development of its next-generation console codenamed Project Helix. The upcoming machine will be a high-end PC and a gaming console rolled into one, making it perfect for Xbox Mode.
SEE ALSO: Project Helix is Xbox’s next console, and it plays PC games
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