Apple, Smartphone | featured news

This is a guest post by Caribou Honig, a partner with QED Investors in Alexandria, Va. In a prior post on the topic of mobile payments, I made the case that the mobile wallet will become the foundation of a new, disruptive "payment Operating System."

Soaring sales of smartphones lifted Samsung Electronics's profit to a record and apparently pushed the South Korean company past Nokia as the world's biggest cellphone seller—and perhaps past Apple as No. 1 in smartphones.

When Verizon Wireless started selling the iPhone, AT&T sounded a defiant note, saying that its customers would remain loyal. A year later, it's clear that the Verizon iPhone has crimped AT&T's stride. Verizon had little problem attracting new customers before it started selling the iPhone. In fact, it was the only wireless carrier that managed to keep up with AT&T's iPhone-fueled growth.

Few products have been launched with such a blizzard of publicity as Apple Inc.'s iPhone... The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant... Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won't make a long-term mark on the industry.

Microsoft, struggling to dent the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone market, is aggressively courting app developers for its Windows Phone.

Ever find yourself frustrated with how smoothly Siri seems to work for the folks in Apple’s commercials but not for you? A New York man has filed a class-action suit against Apple, saying that the company has been “misleading and deceptive” about what the iPhone 4S virtual assistant can do.

Taiwan's HTC, the world's No. 5 smartphone maker, launched a new range of smartphone models on Sunday, hoping the fresh designs will help it to recover some of the lost market share. The new smartphones are crucial for HTC in a cut-throat market place -- dominated by Samsung Electronics and Apple Inc -- as lack of new, outstanding models has sent its sales sinking over the last months.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

Apple's iPhone was a hot seller in the company's first fiscal quarter of 2012, but that's nothing compared to what one analyst predicts we could see in just a couple of years' time. Morgan Stanley thinks Apple's efforts in China could pay big dividends by 2013.

Angry customers and gangs of scalpers threw eggs at Apple Inc.'s Beijing store Friday after the iPhone 4S launch there was canceled due to concerns over the crowd's size. Apple reacted to the outburst by postponing iPhone 4S sales in its mainland China stores to protect customers and employees. The phone still will be sold online and through its local carrier.