Samsung is king of mobile phones, while Apple owns a not-too shabby 7.9 percent of the global phone market. And Android remains the top operating system, with more than half the market.

Those are some of the findings of a report on the global mobile market in the first quarter of the year by Gartner.

Nokia Is Slipping

South Korea-based Samsung's sales to end users amounted to 20.7 percent of the worldwide total in the quarter, up from 16.1 percent in the same quarter last year, Gartner said. That growth comes at the expense of Nokia, the Finnish company that saw its share shrink from 25.1 percent to 19.8 percent.

California-based Apple received its accustomed dose of good news with a share that doubled from 3.9 percent to 7.8 quarter over quarter. Considering that Apple makes only a single smartphone (in varying generations and storage capacity), the news is impressive.

Research In Motion dropped from 3.0 percent to 2.4 percent. The Canadian BlackBerry maker lags behind China's ZTE, South Korea's LG and China's Huawei to take up seventh place.

Gartner's report follows one by Strategy Analytics based on vendor surveys that put Samsung at the top of the market with a 31 percent share, toppling Nokia's 14-year reign at the top spot.

Google's Android OS saw substantial growth year over year, from 36.4 percent to 56.1 percent, while Apple's iOS also grew from 16.9 percent to 22.9 percent, according to Gartner. Nokia's fading Symbian platform dropped significantly as the company switches to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, dropping from 27.7 percent to just 8.6 percent. Research In Motion's platforms fell from 13.0 percent to 6.9 percent.

Windows Phone also dropped, from 2.6 percent to 1.9 percent.

Overall, mobile phone sales reached 419.1 million units in the quarter, a decline of 2 percent, Gartner said, marking the first decline in sales...
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Intel just rolled out three new Xeon processor families with a range of target uses: the E5-4600 for boosted performance and flexibility, the E5-2400 for small- to mid-sized businesses, and the E3-1200 v2 with improved performance per watt, data security and graphics capabilities for entry workstation customers. Altogether, Intel introduced 28 processors.

As part of the announcement, Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of the Datacenter Infrastructure Group at Intel, said companies are increasingly dependent on IT to deliver innovative products and services to customers. Intel hopes to be the one to make IT look good.

But will Intel's move to drive Xeon innovations for small business and emerging scale workloads be met with enthusiasm among server makers? If OEM adoption is any signal, Intel could see new profits as both IBM and Dell deliver Xeon-based systems to market targeting these niche audiences.

The Ivy Bridge Disruption

We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his take on the latest news in the x86 data center revolution. He told us the overarching story has been a tale of industry standard upward mobility, pressing and pressuring traditional systems from below.

At the same time, he continued, displacement has been a constant theme in that narrative. Enter Intel's latest fab technology, widely known as Ivy Bridge. King said Ivy Bridge may look to some like just another chapter in an ongoing story but it could actually signal an entirely new era of industry-standard computing.

That, King said, is because not only did Intel's revolutionary new 3D Tri-Gate fabrication technology allow the company to become the first CPU vendor to deliver commercial 22-nanometer based products, the company also executed the process in good time, speeding its traditional "tick-tock" upgrade schedule and establishing a viable, believable roadmap for future tinier transistors.

Intel's...
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