Smartphone Sales Grew 74 Percent year on year says Gartner

Posted by Seth Planck

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If you thought smartphone sales had peaked, your were wrong – they, in fact, grew a whopping 74% year-on-year according to Gartner

Phew, just when you thought there was nothing left to speculate on, we find that Gartner has been at it again, giving us statistics to analyze, ponder and argue over as to their real world meanings. With more people in the world using mobile devices than those who have running water, you can imagine it’s big business. In big business, we see winners and losers and many industry insiders wait with either excitement or dread for these reports to hit the media. Gartner today reported that mobile device sales grew 16.5% compared to the second quarter last year. That’s 428.7 million units in the second quarter of 2011. Mobile devices in general are a mature market now and a 16.5% increase in a globally bad economy is certainly news for celebration if you happen to be a market winning mobile device manufacturer.

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Huawei Sonic U8650NFC sub $200 Android NFC phone coming soon

Posted by Seth Planck

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We have heard rumbles in the rumor mill for sometime that Huawei has been working on NFC phones. Today we get a first look at what the low cost smartphone manufacturer has in mind which comes in the form of the Huawei Sonic, otherwise lovingly known as the U8650NFC. The Huawei Sonic is not going to take any bleeding edge awards for the amount of technology they have managed to pack inside the Android Gingerbread NFC phone, but it may well get honored as being the lowest cost NFC-enabled smartphone. Details are sketchy at this time but here is what we have on the Huawei Sonic so far:

Huawei Sonic NFC phone specifications

Details are a little light on the ground at the moment but we do have a few specs to share about the Huawei Sonic NFC phone:

The NFC phone runs on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) with a custom UI. The Huawei Sonic also sports a 3.5 inch touch capacitive screen, however, we know nothing about resolution unknown at this point. As far as its shooter, the U8650NFC sports a 3.2 mega pixel rear camera with no flash, 256 MB of ram, and 512 MB of internal memory. It is unclear at the moment if the device takes external memory (we would imagine it would support MicroSD but this is unconfirmed). The Huawei is also said to have GPS capabilities.

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