Highlighting the huge disparity between the iPhone and the rest of the mobile market, the average selling price of Apple's smartphone lineup is now 2.7 times that of devices running Android.
During the last 12 days of Q3 2014, Apple "experienced a huge jump in sales share across almost all major markets thanks to the launch of the iPhone 6," reported Dominic Sunnebo of Kantar Worldpanel, enabling iOS to reach or exceed 40 percent market share in Australia, U.S., UK and Japan.
Microsoft on Friday released a short ad bashing lack of enhancing Siri when it released the latest iPhone 6 models, expectedly touting Windows Phone-based Cortana virtual assistant technology.
Actress Jen Taylor, who voiced the the Cortana AI character in Halo games as well as providing the voice of Microsoft's identically named Siri-like assistant for Windows Mobile, actually uses an iPhone.
A new television spot from Microsoft's Windows Phone division again puts Siri on the iPhone 5s up against Cortana on an HTC One M8, though the video slants more toward a hardware comparison than Microsoft's previous Siri-focued efforts.
The two-horse race for smartphone operating system share continues to obliterate competitors, as Apple's iOS and Google's Android were the only two platforms to see growth in the second quarter of 2014, the latest data from IDC claims.
In a new ad released on Monday, Microsoft highlights the apparent inadequacies of Apple's Siri virtual assistant, which is pitted unfavorably in a head-to-head feature test with "Cortana," its Windows 8.1 analog.
When recent reports suggested Apple was considering bringing iTunes to Android to help boost flagging music sales, skeptics scoffed at the thought of the iPhone maker supporting a competing platform. But with its $3 billion purchase of Beats, Apple has now revealed it plans to keep the Beats Music subscription apps alive not only on Google's Android, but also Microsoft's Windows Phone.
Chitika Insights web traffic report for April assigned Apple's iPhone a 53.1 percent majority of all smartphone web traffic, while all Android devices combined amounted to just 44.5 percent.
Enterprise mobile services vendor Good Technology reported that companies continue to prefer Apple's mobile platform, with iPhone and iPad share of business devices holding steady in dominating device share despite significant growth in the segment, and in particular, custom app development standardizing on iOS.
With Apple's Passbook quickly becoming the de facto way for developers to create digital tickets, store cards and passes, Microsoft capitalized on ways to strip the data from .pkpass files and recompile them on handsets running Windows Phone 8.1.
Just days after officially announcing Cortana, a Siri-like personal digital assistant for Windows Phone, Microsoft has revealed a substantial and wide-ranging artificial intelligence program it hopes will leapfrog similar offerings from Apple and Google.
Software behemoth Microsoft on Wednesday showed off the latest update to its Windows Phone mobile operating system, refining several areas and officially unveiling Cortana, Microsoft's answer to Apple's Siri.
Ever since Google's Android began to first gain mainstream support among smartphone makers in late 2009, Android platform enthusiasts have predicted that it would win out over proprietary mobile platforms, particularly Apple's iOS. The obvious parallel they like to draw is the rise of Microsoft's Windows in the mid 1990s at the expense of Apple's Macintosh. But that's wrong, here's why.
In an effort to bolster its struggling Windows platforms, Microsoft is said to be "seriously considering" allowing Android applications to run in both the traditional Windows environment, as well as on the Windows Phone mobile platform.
Enterprise mobile services vendor Good Technology reported that Apple's iPad accounted for more than 91 percent of enterprise tablet deployments, while iPhone represented 54 percent of smartphones activated by the more than 2,000 companies using its services in the fourth quarter, giving iOS an overall 73 percent share of mobile devices in the enterprise.
Following in the footsteps of Siri and Google Now, Microsoft looks to be on track to release its own personal digital assistant — dubbed Cortana — later this spring.
Microsoft plans to continue to blur the lines between its traditional Windows PC platform, its Windows Phone mobile platform, and its Xbox One game console operating system with a forthcoming update codenamed "Threshold," according to a new report.
Good Technology is "stealthily stealing BlackBerry's enterprise clients with a simple pitch" that offers companies a secure path to accommodate Bring Your Own Device policies, a movement that has ushered Apple into corporate markets.
IDC reported 251.1 million smartphone shipments for Q3, reflecting 40 percent year over year market growth but an implosion in Average Selling Prices, at least outside of Apple's iPhone sales.
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Neil Hughes
Daniel Eran Dilger
AppleInsider Staff
Sam Oliver
Shane Cole
