The Apple iPhone Makes up For Two-Thirds of Verizon's 9.8 Million SmartPhone Sales in Q4

Apple's iPhone accounted for 6.2 million of the 9.8 million smartphones Verizon sold in the last quarter, powering record smartphone adoption numbers at the nation's largest carrier even as Verizon posted a big loss for the quarter.

The iPhone across all of its models sold nearly double the number of Android-based smartphones sold in the past quarter. Verizon's Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo revealed that approximately half of the iPhones Verizon sold in Q4 were 4G LTE, meaning that they were iPhone 5 units.

At 63 percent of total Verizon smartphone activations, the iPhone this quarter far outstripped its 47 percent average over the past five quarters. The figure for the fourth quarter was the highest since the third quarter of 2011.

The nation's largest carrier saw $30 billion in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2012, up 5.7 percent over the prior year. Of that, about $20 billion was wireless revenue. For the whole of 2012, Verizon saw $115.85 billion in revenue, up 4.5 percent year-over-year.

The largest negative item for Verizon was a pretax charge of $7.2 billion related largely to pension liabilities. The pension write-down, in combination with expenditures due to Hurricane Sandy, amounted to a total quarterly loss of $1.48 per share.

The carrier saw its total wireless subscriber base grow by five million customers over 2012, the highest growth Verizon has seen in four years. Retail postpaid connections were up 5.9 percent year-over-year. [AppleInsider]

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Big-Screen Smartphone Shipments to Surge This Year, Says iSuppli

IDG News Service - Shipments of smartphones with screens 5 inches or larger will more than double this year, as consumers are increasingly attracted to the large screen sizes offered by the phones, according to a prediction from IHS iSuppli.

The company said it expects shipments of such phones to reach just over 60 million units in 2013, up from 25 million units in 2012. The entire smartphone market is expected to be around 836 million handsets, which means the large-screen phones will make up about 7 percent of the market. In 2012, large-screen phones accounted for about 4 percent of all smartphones, said IHS iSuppli.

Demand for large-screen handsets is strongest in Asia, where customers find the screen size easier for Asian text input, said Vinita Jakhanwal, director of mobile and emerging display research at the company.

At last week's International CES in Las Vegas, two Chinese cellphone makers unveiled new phones with large screens. ZTE's Grand S has a 5-inch, full high-definition (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen, while Huawei's Ascend Mate has a 6.1-inch screen. That screen pushes further the boundary between phone and tablet and is the largest yet featured on a smartphone.

Of course, all screens are not created equal -- something Apple sought to underline when it began emphasizing the "retina" screens on its phones.

Apple's retina screens pack pixels closer together than many competing phones, resulting in a much sharper and crisper image, but that's also being challenged by the new wave of larger screens.

"Apple tried to differentiate their product and bring attention to the PPI (pixels per inch) that people had not cared about in the past," said Jakhanwal. "All the new phones are full HD and some are greater than 440 pixels per inch. The iPhone is 326ppi, so the new phones are definitely trying to use the buzz around pixel pitch that Apple created."

Enabling the growth in large-screen smartphones is expansion in production capacity of such screens at major display makers, like Sharp, LG Display and Japan Display, a company formed in late 2011 when Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi merged their small and medium-size display businesses.

Supply of 5-inch and larger screens is still a little tight, but new and more advanced production lines coming from these companies, and later from Chinese display makers, will help free up supply to meet the increasing demand, said Jakhanwal.

For display makers, the growing market is good news. The screens on such smartphones are often high-end products with high resolution that command a higher price and better profit margins than 3-inch and 4-inch class screens where competition is fierce, said Jakhanwal. [ComputerWorld]

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