Huawei Surpasses Apple As the World's Second Largest Smartphone Brand (theverge.com) 115
According to analysis by consulting firm Counterpoint Research, China's leading smartphone marker, Huawei, surpassed Apple's global smartphone sales for the first time in June and July. The company is only behind Samsung in sales. The Verge reports: Figures haven't been released yet for August, though Counterpoint indicates sales for that month also look strong. However, it's worth noting that with Apple's new iPhone releases just around the corner, the iPhone maker is almost certain to get back on top in September. Researchers at Counterpoint also point out that Huawei has a weak presence in the South Asian, Indian, and North American markets, which "limits Huawei's potential to the near-to-mid-term to take a sustainable second place position behind Samsung." Its strongest market is China, and it's also popular in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Still, Apple doesn't have much to worry about; Counterpoint says the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus remain the world's best-selling smartphones, while Oppo's R11 and A57 claimed the third and fourth spots, respectively, followed by Samsung's Galaxy S8, Xiaomi's Redmi Note 4X, and Samsung's Galaxy S8 Plus. Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list.
nothing surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: nothing surprising (Score:2)
I have Huawei Maimang 5, a good but overpriced mid-range phone.
As I understand, the model has like 10 different names and minor modifications that are sold as different models
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It's because they have manufacturing capacity to sell phones specifically tailored for each niche and still remain profitable.
Re:nothing surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
" Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list. " only surprising if you are ignorant of the market. Huawei make a shit ton of different model phones.
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
Nokia didn't ignore smartphones (Score:5, Informative)
No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
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No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
Nokia just seemed to have this kind of carpet bombing approach to the range of phones they offered: "Fuck market resarch, let's just make dozens and dozens of models of phones and maybe one of them will be what the customer wants." Apple, Samsung, HTC et-al went the other way, designed targeted products and .... well where is Nokia now?
Nokia Production Line (Score:2)
At first, that line is reasonable. Instead of gambling on a flagship model, you do a diverse form of gambling.
And i guess it worked out, the massive amount of lineage forking in Nokia models is sorta amazing, and so is the ascetic.
But this isn't what is talked about, what is talked about, is how Nokia in a post iPhone world, made a bunch of terrible decisions, allowing Microsoft to eventually buy out the phone part, and then waste it, and nobody was the wiser.
Your post is not addressing the arguments of sj
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Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted
Nokia proved that being first mover isn't always an advantage. They released their first smartphone in 1996 with a massive 4MB of RAM (the minimum requirement for Windows 95, though in practice 8MB was a more realistic minimum and 16MB was recommended). They redesigned their kernel (EKA2) in 1998 to allow the UI and the baseband to run on the same ARM core, giving hard realtime and isolation guarantees to the baseband, which became irrelevant when small ARM cores became cheap (modern SoCs have a huge numb
Nokia software (Score:2)
Nokia proved that being first mover isn't always an advantage.
That was well understood loooong before Nokia but your point is quite correct.
Nokia never really was very good at certain types of software, specifically the user facing parts of it. I owned a series of Nokia phones for several years and the interfaces on their phones were poor for anything but the most basic of phone operations. They routinely build phones which technically had features like email or web browsers but they were so awkward to use as to be useless. It's what I call checkbox marketing - the
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I think the problem was that Nokia thought their customers were AT&T, Verizon
I suspect part of the reason for this is that Nokia's customers were and still are AT&T, Verizon, and so on. Even after they sold their handset business, they're still selling a lot of the back-end infrastructure (which has much higher margins and less annoying customers). The handsets, to them, were just part of a system that they were selling to a network operator, not a device owned by an individual.
At the end of the day that is what killed them along with some weapon's grade stupid management decisions relating to Microsoft
I'm still not convinced that the decision to go with Windows Phone was particularly bad. My partner
Nokia and Microsoft (Score:2)
I'm still not convinced that the decision to go with Windows Phone was particularly bad.
The decision was fine. How they executed it was profoundly idiotic. They announced that they were switching to Microsoft in February 2011 but didn't have an actually product with Microsoft's system until November 2011. Basically they told everyone they were killing off their current offerings nearly a year before they had the replacement ready to ship. That's just weapon's grade stupid especially given how little traction Microsoft had managed to achieve against Apple and Google.
If they'd gone with Android, they'd have been stuck in a race-to-the-bottom in a market with razor-thin margins were Google is the only company that makes serious money.
Google doesn't make seri
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Nokia was dying long before the iPhone. They stayed with the candy bar phone with a 1" LCD monochrome screen when Motorola went to color screen flip phones. Poof went the market share.
Nokia and the smartphone (Score:2)
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It *did* work great for them back in the dumb-phone and feature-phone era.
Management just completely fucked up everything afterwards regarding smartphones :
- They dragged the aging symbian platfrom way too much. ("But hey, it has always worked until now, so it's a safe bet !") (~yeah sure. And maybe Palm should have stuck to PalmOS even longer~)
- They let go the R&D departement which was until that point striving to make nice smartphone/tablet OS (the Meamo/Meego line with N700, N800, N900, and the firs
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Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It *did* work great for them back in the dumb-phone and feature-phone era.
Management just completely fucked up everything afterwards regarding smartphones : - They dragged the aging symbian platfrom way too much. ("But hey, it has always worked until now, so it's a safe bet !") (~yeah sure. And maybe Palm should have stuck to PalmOS even longer~) - They let go the R&D departement which was until that point striving to make nice smartphone/tablet OS (the Meamo/Meego line with N700, N800, N900, and the first large scale public N9, etc.) and would have actually helped Nokia become relevant in the smartphone era. ("But hey, it's burning money, let's leave the burning ship for shareholder's sake !") (on the other hand that team manage to escape the burning ship on a small jolla (pun intended by them) to survive and put an interesting OS on the marked) - They decided to ged in bet with Microsoft. ("But in the business world you're never wrong to go to Microsoft !" (Or was it IBM ?~) )
End result : "we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost"
They kept doing stupid shit that would sound "a safe bet" to an MBA, but didn't make any sense. (And the biggest part of these decision was taken by microsoft shills such as Elop)
I always figured that scrapping the Meamo/Meego line and hiring a Microsoft executive was what really finished them off.
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Apple vs Huawei (Score:3)
" Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list. " only surprising if you are ignorant of the market. Huawei make a shit ton of different model phones
Yup, my reflexion too.
It's easier for Apple to be top selling phone - even if they sell in much smaller volume - when they basically only sell one single phone in 2 variations.
Huawei might sell a much bigger total volume, but divided by hundreds of models, none of the phone will individually beat any of the top 10 sellers.
Same situation with operating system regarding iOS vs Android:
back then's Apple smartphone were the top seller, but Android was (and is still today) the most popular OS even if no phone wi
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Support (Score:2)
I've heard anecdotally online and from friends that Huawei's support is sub-Samsung. Meaning you'll get a few security patches, and maybe an OTA point release upgrade for Android, but that's about it.
Could be wrong, but usually support is the first thing to be cut to make a tablet or phone cheaply.
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Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Or purchase an iPhone at all, when there are so many better options.
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Because there aren't any other options if you want a proper phone.
Have you actually tried both, to understand what you are talking about?
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Completely missed the point, clearly didn't read the article
I remember back in the day when we had decent trolls who would actually read the article and then incisively cut down posts made here. Had you done so yourself, you'd have been aware that the article said...
However, it’s worth noting that with Apple’s new iPhone releases just around the corner, the iPhone maker is almost certain to get back on top in September.
...which is exactly what the OP was talking about.
Frankly, I'm disappointed. As you just demonstrated, the quality of the trolls on Slashdot has diminished significantly in recent years. We deserve better than you. But, to answer your question, the fact that you're all we've got could indeed be taken as
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Not everyone cares about the latest version (Score:3)
Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
Millions of people (including Apple customers) don't actually give a shit about having the latest and greatest. My father has an iPhone and it's a fine choice for him but he's never been on the latest version. He's always 1-2 editions behind whatever the latest is and he's fine with that. There are millions of people just like him. For someone like me or presumably you, you are correct - I would not buy a new iPhone three weeks before a new version is released because there is a reasonable chance I migh
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Some don't care (Score:2)
Waiting makes even more sense if you're not buying the latest.
True but people often don't care that much and need a phone right now. If you aren't concerned about whatever is in the next one and you need a phone today then you are probably going to buy a phone today even if you could save a little by waiting. I'm not saying it's the most sensible course of action but a lot of people simply aren't that concerned with their smartphone.
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Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
You have that backwards. Apple enjoys a 1 quarter spike in sales on the month of a new phone. Their sales are very much flat for the rest of the year with the month before a new product announcement being only marginally lower than the preceding months. Huawei overtaking Apple in June and July means they are also quite likely to beat apple January, February, March, April .... etc
In some cases it's not even lower. Depending on the leaks and interest driven for the new phone. E.g. The quarter before the iPhon
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Apple enjoys a 1 quarter spike in sales on the month of a new phone. Their sales are very much flat for the rest of the year with the month before a new product announcement being only marginally lower than the preceding month.
Except that's not historically true. [statista.com] The month before has always been marginally higher. Also since Apple does not break down sales by month, how can you quantify that there is a spike in the "month of a new phone"?
There's a reason why Apple typically announces new phones in the fall: holiday sales. Q1 for Apple will always be tend to be higher than any other quarter as it ends the holiday season.
Who are they? (Score:2)
Re:Who are they? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who are you? Huawei?
It is pronounced (roughly) Wah way [wikipedia.org]. There is no "who" sound.
It is a good name in Chinese, since the "hua" hanzi is shorthand for "China" and the "wei" hanzi can mean "action" or "achievement". So it means "Chinese action" or "Chinese achievement".
Re:What I'm REALLY looking for is (Score:4, Insightful)
There are enough people just in my circle who prefer the 4" iPhone SE over the larger iPhone models... I'd expect someone on the Android side of things will eventually go after that market as well. I'm kind of surprised Samsung hasn't done it.
I had the 5.5" 6 Plus for a couple years, but like you said - the size was a bit much. I eventually replaced it with the 4.7" version, which I like because I can one-hand my phone again now.
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I've been using the Alcatel One Touch Idol 3 for a couple of years. Very nice phone, and at an excellent price. I like the 4.7", but others in the family prefer the 5.5" version. The 5.5 does have slightly better specs (cpu and/or memory), so it's a little faster. The 5.5" is just to big for me.
The latest is the Idol 5S, which seems to only come in a 5.2" form factor, and it's a bit pricier. Still a nice phone for the money, and I'm sold on Alcatel's quality.
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The biggest problem for Android by far is that many manufacturers including Samsung and Huawei are compelled to fill their phones with crapware and replace the perfectly functional default launchers, diallers etc. with their own crappier equivalents. In some cases they even double up the normal apps with t
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They have the Samsung A series in Europe (I just borrowed one while I was in France). I liked it, but it's not available in the US. You can buy the international version for around $250 but it won't work on all US frequencies.
Re:Apple still #1... (Score:4, Informative)
God knows how though, samsung's phones are expensive to buy and cheaply built compared to Apple's. Maybe labor costs are a factor...
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Maybe labor costs are a factor...
iPhones are made in China, while Samsung has shifted most of their production to Vietnam. So they should win on labor costs.
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[...] planned obsolescence [...] apple is still number 1 in all those things.
Google stopped providing Android updates, on the Nexus 5 two years after it was released, and security updates another year later. I bought mine a year after it was announced, giving me two years of security updates before Google gave me the finger.
Meanwhile, my daughter's iPhone 5S (bought used for about a hundred loonies) is still receiving updates, even though it was released a month earlier than Google's Nexus 5.
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All our Apple widgets get their update notifications about the same time (within 24 hours, faster if you tell it to check). My Nexus 6 seems to get OTA updates about 2-3 MONTHS after I see a press release about it.
Earlier this years there was a mandatory down-rev from 7.1.1 to 7.0. Now 7.1.1 is back, but after 3 weeks since the press release I still have no update, even when I manually tell it to check, and I don't expect it to show up for many more weeks.
I had very sour Android experiences from Sony and
Not surprised; they make good products. (Score:4, Interesting)
I finally managed to wean my wife and kids off iPhones, which were ruining me with each upgrade cycle / theft / breakage.
Android has finally gotten "good enough" to be a viable iPhone competitor, and the Huawei phones are great at less than half the price.
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When a $600 phone is broken or stolen, it's (depending on your income) a very bad day or a disaster. When a $200 phone is broken or stolen, you can loose it again 4 more times before you get to the same $1200.
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Furthermore, a 200$ phone is also less likely to be stolen. Actually, anything else than an iPhone is less likely to be stolen.
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I use an exponential pricing model. Each time my kids lose or break a phone, I spend half as much on the new one. The next time my daughter loses hers, she's getting a $30 flip-phone.
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My daughter has a $10 candy bar phone :)
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"finally good enough"???? uh-huh...
Android has been far superior to iPhone in every single way since... well, always. it's not How do you claim something is "finally good enough" to beat something that it's been better than from day 1? Apple has never caught up to Android on features, usability, performance, or price since they first launched. And so far, I've seen no indication that they ever will.
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Even back when it was going to be nothing more than a Blackberry clone? Okay, Fandroid.
World's Largest Smartphone Brand (Score:3)
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We get these articles every year (Score:2)
Compare like for like across the sales cycle. As the summary says, look again in about October'ish or whenever the new phones from Apple are available for purchase. That is - if you actually care about such things as which global position your phone manufact
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Considering Apple has a positively miniscule overall share of the smartphone market compared to Android, it seems rather silly to try to cling to "oh but they'll beat that one other brand one month every year!"
I know you're desperate to claim that your team is winning, but let's face it, Apple's sup-par, over-priced, garbage just doesn't dominate the market the way you seem to think it does.
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Can't it be rooted and reflashed?
yes but still... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Selling lots of units is "easy" (Score:3)
It's "easy" (for lack of a better word) to sell lots of units if you don't give a shit about making a profit. The tough bit is to make a lot of profit while still selling a lot of units. So far only Apple and Samsung seem to have figured out that trick in the smartphone era.
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The estimated cost to build an iPhone 7 was broken out when it was still new and a bleeding edge phone cost Apple about $225 to build including parts and labor.
FTFY. We don't know a lot about what it costs a company to manufacture a smartphone especially for a company like Apple that has components that no one else has.
Being based out of China makes it even cheaper. If you think all these manufacturers aren't making a profit, you're crazy.
That isn't the claim. The claim is that only Samsung and Apple has figured a way to makes lots of profit while selling lots of phones. That claim isn't new [9to5mac.com] or original to the OP.
Phones are only loss-leaders for the carriers.
Many manufacturers would probably disagree with you on that point. Like all manufacturers, they have to build certain number of product on the premise that they are sold la
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From what I hear, Huawei earns a reasonable profit from its phones but bleeds money elsewhere.
One magic ad slogan from Number 1 (Score:2)
I think I can help Huawei move past Samsung into first place. All they need is a friendly, catchy slogan...something that will really speak to people. How about...
Huawei: at least you know our back door is for more than batteries.
Seasonal iPhone Sales Drop-Off (Score:2)
Let's see how Huawei (the name just trips-off the tongue!) fares against Apple in about a month, after the new iPhone models are debuted...
https://www.apple.com/apple-ev... [apple.com]
The timing of this Slashdot "News" article is quite well orchestrated. Just like the FUD Article regarding Apple's alleged "Production Issues" also seen today on Slashdot.