Tablets such as the Nexus 7 had the spotlight last week, but this week was more about Android smartphones. At this point, most of the new handsets — with a few exceptions of the lower end models — are finally launching with Android 4.0, Google’s platform that was announced in October of 2011. The improved platform combined with the latest hardware innovations are continuing to propel Android handset sales forward.
The top seller this year may already be Samsung’s Galaxy S III, which only launched in late May. This week, Samsung announced 10 million sales of its flagship phone and that surely helped the company’s overall handset sales figure. Samsung hit record profits — $ 4.5 billion — in the second quarter of 2012 and according to IDC estimates, sold 50.2 million handsets during that time period.
Putting those figures in perspective: Samsung’s total mobile phone sales for the quarter were nearly double that of Apple, which announced 26 million handset sales in April, May and June. And 20 percent of Samsung’s phone sales were comprised of the Galaxy S III. Another interesting statistic? Samsung sells 190,000 Galaxy S IIIs per day on average. We know that Google is now activating one million Android devices per day, meaning that the Galaxy S III is a sizeable chunk of those activations.
Of course, there’s room for other smartphones in the market too; this week one new phone was announced, while another was leaked. Sprint announced a 4G LTE update to the original Motorola Photon Q, coming in the near future. At 960 x 540 resolution, the 4.3-inch screen won’t have the most dense pixel count, but nearly all other components are appealing: A 1.5 GHz dual-core processor;, Android 4.0.4; 8 megapixel camera; five-row keyboard; and world phone capabilities with support for CDMA, EVDO, GSM and LTE.
Sprint hasn’t yet announced pricing and availability details, but the phone is real. The same can’t be said of the HTC One X+, which is rumored to be a handset coming to T-Mobile. The carrier opted to pass on the original HTC One X in favor of the smaller One S, which is a solid smartphone. But like all other One devices in the U.S., it doesn’t have the quad-core Tegra 3 processor, which has no integrated LTE support.
According to leaked information found by TMoNews, the HTC Era 42 is a One X with a Tegra 3 processor, possibly clocked at 1.7 GHz. Given that T-Mobile is the last of the big four U.S. carriers to migrate to an LTE network, it makes sense that a Tegra 3 version of the HTC One X could be coming. It would provide HTC a better chance to compete against Samsung’s Galaxy S III juggernaut.
