"smartphones" articles

Yesterday’s much anticipated launch of Amazon’s first smartphone named “Fire,” lived up to its pre-launch hype in many ways. The event showcased a smartphone with an impressive array of features and technology. How well these features work in practice remains to be seen, but it is a bold attempt by Amazon to make its first smartphone hold its own against some stiff competition at the higher end of the smartphone market. While many of the features are not surprising, and, in...

Parks Associates research shows that 25% of U.S. smartphone users have a lifetime value to a mobile carrier of $5,000 or more, and Apple iPhone users in general have a higher value than Android users. Roughly one-third of iPhone users having a lifetime value of $5,000 or more versus just 22% of Android phone users. Parks Associates' new mobile consumer reseach also shows: More U.S. broadband households now have a smartphone than a desktop PC. Mobile phone...

In a recent article for TWICE , Tejas Mehta , research analyst at Parks Associates, discussed the growth of the mobile market, particularly in regards to consumers' connected lifestyles. He revealed that a Parks Associates 2014 survey of U.S. broadband households shows more households now have a smartphone than a desktop PC. Other highlights from the article include: Smartphone penetration is reaching saturation levels in the United States, and trends in other mature...

While the Android-based Nokia X smartphone stole the attention at MWC, everyone knows that for any Nokia smartphones to be successful, the phone maker needs to do more and fast in the app and content space. In a close-door meeting with industry analyst, Nokia’s two leaders, Bryan Biniak and Amit Patel detailed Nokia’s app ecosystem initiatives and answered our questions. I left the meeting with an overall feeling that these two Nokia leaders know where the gaps are between...

In conjunction with this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Parks Associates released new mobile industry research detailing the dynamic mobile data market from the perspective of the mobile operator. The research report, Optimization & Monetization Mobile Data Traffic , reveals that mobile network operator revenues are declining due to increased competition. "Since 2008, revenues from voice services for the top-four U.S. mobile network operators (MNOs) have...

PayPal is on offensive at all fronts. The three initiatives launched sequentially within 48 hours show a multi-facet effort from PayPal to conquer the mobile payment market. First, it announced on the eve of MWC a dedicated mobile payment app for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear II—the new smart watch. Then during the S5 event in the evening of 24 th , it announced it will be the payment solution partner to Samsung to power the Galaxy S5’s fingerprint-based NFC payment function. To round it up,...

Last week saw an interesting and very public war of words between the chief executives of two of mobile world’s well-known brands – Blackberry and T-Mobile.  The social media war ignited after T-Mobile’s email offer encouraging existing Blackberry customers to “upgrade” to iPhones.  This was quickly followed by an angry retort from John Chen, CEO of Blackberry in a blog post on Blackberry website and the strong backlash of loyal Blackberry customers on social...

Parks Associates data shows that the number of streaming music users has doubled in the last two years, while the number of paying subscribers has surged 166% over the same period of time. Due to popularity within the space, Sprint announced it will  be offering customers premium digital music services through their mobile devices. The first offering, streaming music service through the Harman Kardon® Onyx Studio™ wireless speaker system, will be available to U.S. customers...