IDC

News

• iPhone, Android account for 82% of smartphones shipped

  Android and iPhone smartphones together made up 82% of all such devices shipped to retailers in the first quarter of 2012, IDC said Thursday.

• Tech guns for hire: 5 places to find skilled IT contractors

  Even for organizations with a stellar full-time IT staff, situations often arise where temporary outside help is needed. A big Web project might demand a few extra programmers to meet a tough deadline, for example, or a rollout of tools to support a sales force bent on capturing a broader market may require expertise not available in-house.

• Android in enterprises 'severely limited' by weak management support from Google

  Adoption of Android tablets and smartphones in large businesses has been "severely limited" because of the complexities of managing the various Android models and versions, market research firm Gartner said in an evaluation of 20 mobile device management (MDM) software vendors released Friday.

• Android, Samsung top smartphone sales, topping Apple's iPhone

  Android smartphones made up 56% of the global smartphones sold to end users in the first quarter of 2012, giving them a far higher share than the 22.9% held by Apple's runner-up iPhone, Gartner said Wednesday.

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  Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 on sale Sunday for $400

  Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 is set to go on sale at retailers nationwide Sunday for $399.99, furthering the variety of tablet sizes from the vendor.

• IDC: Explosive growth expected for Hadoop, MapReduce-related revenues

  The market for software related to the Hadoop and MapReduce programming frameworks for large-scale data analysis will jump from $US77 million in 2011 to $US812.8 million in 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 60.2 per cent, according to a new report released by analyst firm IDC.

• Tablets Will Be Preferred Devices by 2016

  Tablets will become most users' main computing devices within the next four years, Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett has predicted.

• Will Yahoo CEO's misstep kill company momentum?

  All the momentum and vision that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has been building for the struggling company may have been thrown off course.

• Analysis: Does the iPad cannibalize Apple's laptops?

  Is Apple cutting the MacBook's throat with the iPad?

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  Analysis: BYOD could hurt Windows Phone growth

  Some of the researchers behind last year's high expectations for Microsoft's Windows Phone mobile operating system are beginning to dial back their predictions, citing the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend as a roadblock in some markets.

• Asus, fifth and rising in tablet market

  Asus has won critical praise for its early tablets, including the quad-core Transformer Prime TF201 that was released last year and the new quad-core Transformer Pad TF300T that will be available in some U.S. retail stores next week.

• Windows sales defy predictions, grow 4%

  Stronger-than-expected sales of Windows helped Microsoft post a 6% increase in revenue for the first quarter of 2012, the company said yesterday.

• Skepticism mounts over Windows RT's enterprise role

  Omissions from the feature set of Windows RT are making analysts increasingly skeptical that enterprises will gravitate toward tablets running the new forked version of Windows.

• Windows RT, formerly WOA, to have Office apps included

  Windows 8 on ARM, now dubbed Windows RT by Microsoft, will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote applications, according to a chart included in a blog by Microsoft posted yesterday.

• Are IBM, Cisco and Oracle IT platforms really comparable?

  IBM's new PureSystems integrated data center offering is drawing comparisons to Cisco's UCS and other convergence platforms from leading IT vendors.