IRISH APPLE fans finally got their hands on the company’s latest mobile phone yesterday, two weeks after it first went on sale elsewhere.
The queues outside Irish stores were not exactly on a par with the thousands who thronged stores in the US, Britain and France, but there was healthy demand for the iPhone 4S, which includes Apple’s new digital assistant Siri.
The voice-recognition software allows users to send text messages and e-mails, conduct web searches and create reminders.
Three’s store on Dublins Grafton Street opened at midnight with the mobile network reporting a decent turnout for those who could not wait to pick up the 4S.
Other phone stores opened at 8am, particularly around Dublin city and other urban centres, with O2 reporting steady demand throughout the day.
The new phone sold more than 4 million units in its first weekend when it went on sale on October 14th.
This time around, the company does not seem to have been dogged by stock shortages that held back sales of previous versions of the popular device.
Apple sold fewer phones in the third quarter of the year, missing analyst expectations for the first time in years, as customers held off buying iPhones until the October launch of the latest model.
Samsung, which makes handsets based on rival system Android, overtook Apple as the worlds top smartphone maker in the July-September period with a 44 per cent jump in shipments, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. The company, which sold 27.8 million units in the three-month period, has forecast strong sales in the current quarter.
Apple’s iPhone sales shrank by 16 per cent to 17.1 million units in the third quarter. Samsung had 23.8 per cent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, nine points higher than Apple. Samsung’s flagship Galaxy line of products is powered by Googles Android software.
Profits from the South Korean firm’s telecoms division have more than doubled from a year ago to a record won 2.5 trillion (€1.6 billion) and account for 60 per cent of Samsung’s total profit, offsetting a plunge in earnings from its bread-and-butter memory chips.
The technology firm reported a won 4.25 trillion operating profit for the July-September quarter, broadly in line with its earlier estimate of won 4.2 trillion. That was down from won 4.9 trillion a year ago but up from won 3.8 trillion in the preceding quarter. – (Additional reporting from Reuters)
