High Tech Lounge » Study

Gartner Research shows Mac sales at 24 percent in US, more than industry average

adina — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:33:36 +0000

A report recently published by Gartner Research says that US Mac sales in the second quarter have reached 24 percent, which means 1.7 million units. This is outpacing the average of the industry. Gartner analysis places the domestic market share of Apple at 9.8 percent, which is higher than the 8.8 percent estimated by IDC.

Both Gartner and IDC agree that Apple has now several hundred thousand units more than Acer, its nearest competitor, as the latter has been experienced only flat sales compared to the same period of last year. Although Apple’s tablet is not included in the sales numbers for PCs, the iPad is believed to have had negatively impacted on netbook shipments.

Soaring popularity of the iPad is considered by Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, to have temporarily cannibalized sales of mini-netbooks and consumer notebook sales as well to a certain degree. According to him, it is not clear at this moment if the process will continue to affect the media tablets’ current price point.

Hewlett Packard has kept its leading position in the United States with 4.6 million PCs sold, which is 14 percent more than in the same period of last year. The second spot is held by Dell, with 4.2 million PCs. Toshiba is the last of the top five PC makers.

Study confirms declining interest in Nokia versus Android and iPhone

adina — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:20:57 +0000

According to a YouGov new study, the demand of the customers for Nokia smartphones had shown a new minimum in the United Kingdom. The number of the customers expecting to get Nokia phones has dropped to half, i.e. 10 percent only in June versus 19 percent last year in December. While 46 percent of potential buyers were committed to acquire a Nokia phone in December 2009, their number has significantly dropped to 34 percent as of last month.

This shortfall is mainly due to greater interest in the United Kingdom shown to HTC and Apple over the same period. Fence-sitting for both companies has slightly moved with 28 and 56 percent respectively, with companies’ smartphones on the lists. However, when talking about definite sales, they shot up to 41 percent versus 32 percent in December. For instance, although HTC’s share was rather small, Android helped it getting ten percent of buyers.

The study did not intend to investigate actual buying habits, but reveals tendencies showing a serious drop in the European share of Nokia. The once secure Nokia is being abandoned in favor of the iPhone and Android. It seems that some frustration with Symbian, related to its age, difficulty and poor application selection, is generating the buyers giving up. Other phone makers like Sony Ericsson and Samsung have also seen diminished interest for their smartphones over the same period, as they also based some of their phones on Symbian.

Browsers vulnerability study by Cenzic

adina — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:53:51 +0000

A Cenzic study reveals that Mozilla’s Firefox is much more vulnerable to attacks from the web than any rival is. Out of 3,100 attacks monitored by the researchers, 44 percent were successful, while in the case of Internet Explorer, ranked third, only 15 percent would succeed. Another vulnerable browser is Apple’s Safari, notably closer to Firefox, with 35 percent successful attacks that could affect the platform. The Opera browser is significantly much safer, with only six percent of the attacks affecting the platform.

A great part of the attacks affecting the Apple’s Safari is due to the mobile Safari browser on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

SQL injections were the most common with 25 percent, followed by cross-site scripting with 17 percent, phishing at 14 percent and rogue web servers at 12 percent.

Open-source fans always claimed that Firefox should be more secure because many application authors have real difficulties in finding and solving bugs, while others are unaware of applications. Internet Explorer received criticism in the past for Active X-like tools that were often offering websites direct access to PCs. Since then, much vulnerability was solved through the browser or through patches in Windows.

Out of the total reported vulnerabilities, 78 percent affected web technologies, such as web servers, web browsers, applications, ActiveX and plug-ins, which reflects a significant increase from the beginning of this year.

Based on the vulnerabilities Cenzic found using its ClickToSecure managed service, leaks of information, XSS, authentication/authorization and session management flaws continue to be in the top. The majority of assessments Cenzic completed highlighted the continuing exposure and risk faced by organizations.