Motorola shipped only 5.3 million smartphones and 200,000 tablets in the fourth quarter. In comparison, Apple shipped 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads in the same period.

Total device shipments were 10.5 million for the quarter, while for the year, the total was 42.5 million, including 18.7 million smartphones and 1 million tablets. Like other Android smartphone makers not named Samsung, Motorola continues to feel the pressure of a very crowded and competitive market.

As Om wrote earlier this month, the market is fracturing between two smartphone giants – Apple and Samsung — making it harder for any vendor without a distinguishing operating system to catch up. Nokia is hoping it can become just that challenger by embracing the upstart Windows Phone OS. Its Lumina Lumia Windows device sales were about 1 million for the fourth quarter, but the company has only begun to ramp its new smartphone line.

Despite a five-percent boost in device revenues, Motorola posted a loss of million, which the vendor attributed to reorganization and write-off costs in advance of its acquisition by Google. Whether Google plans to use its considerably resources to revive the ailing vendor or plans to simply reap its patent portfolio is still an open question. Regardless, Motorola said it expects the .5 billion deal to close early this year.

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It might not be making as much money as the competition in Cupertino, but that doesn’t mean Samsung isn’t raking in cash at an astonishing clip. We reported earnings estimates a few weeks ago, but now it’s official that the firm posted a 5.3 trillion won (.7 billion) operating profit in Q4 2011. That represents over a 2 trillion won (.8 billion) increase year over year. In all, it pulled in 47.3 trillion won ( billion) in sales, thanks in no small part to the over 300 million phones Sammy sold last year. While mobile accounted for roughly 40 percent of company sales and half of its operating profit (2.6 trillion won, or .3 billion), its semiconductor business did almost as well, raking in 2.3 trillion won ( billion) in profit over the same period. Samsung’s Display Panel business outperformed 2010 — buoyed by strong sales in LED televisions — as sales were up almost 20 percent, to 8.55 trillion won (.6 billion).

Samsung 2011 Q4 earnings official: billion in sales, .7 billion operating profit originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Crowdsourcing the inventory selection

Firstly, rather than populating its site with objects selected by a group of buyers operating autonomously based on their own taste, LuxeYard is taking cues from its users on what items to sell. LuxeYard members can post photos of the type of items they’d like to buy on social media platforms, and other members can vote up on products they would also like to buy. Essentially, the items for sale on site will be crowdsourced according to users’ wants.

LuxeYard screenshot (click to enlarge)

“We’re really establishing a pattern of listening,” LuxeYard COO Steve Beauregard said in a phone interview Monday. “We’re really trying to build a conversation around certain pieces, and that will help focus our buyers and attune them to our users’ tastes, rather than just buying something they think is interesting.”

Taking group buying one step further

Secondly, LuxeYard is employing truly flexible group buying. This is where members use their social networks to encourage their friends to buy the same product on LuxeYard they’re buying, thereby driving down the price of that item. For example: I could buy a chair on LuxeYard for 0, and then post about that chair on Facebook. If a certain number of other people end up buying the same chair, the final cost for everyone buying the chair could be driven down to 0.

A unique financial starting point

And another unique thing about LuxeYard is that it’s hitting the ground running from a financial perspective. The company has raised .5 million from private investors, but has technically already gone public by conducting a reverse merger into a publicly-held shell company. Details are still being ironed out, so there is no public float to LuxeYard’s stock, but it will begin trading under the ticker symbol “LXRD” at some point in the coming months. Access to public market investors will potentially give LuxeYard the monetary wherewithal to compete head-to-head in the flash sales and group buying space already filled with solid players such as Wayfair, One Kings Lane and others, not to mention more general e-commerce sites such as Amazon.

But how long can exclusivity last?

Now, LuxeYard also claims it will be more choosy about the items it selects to sell on the site. According to Beauregard, if a company’s products are already being sold on existing e-commerce sites or major chain stores, LuxeYard will not sell any of its products. That’s an honorable goal, but true exclusivity is not always an easy thing to maintain when you’re also balancing the demand from investors for constant growth. And being that LuxeYard is starting out as a public company with notoriously demanding Wall Street-style investors, that could be an even harder balance to strike. But overall, LuxeYard’s offering seems unique enough that the company has a good shot at success — even in the hyper competitive world of e-commerce.

Here’s one more screenshot of LuxeYard (click to enlarge):

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Moskowitz is mostly reiterating what he heard from Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppeheimer in a recent sit-down with them, during which they discussed the Kindle Fire’s role in relation to the iPad. Moskowitz came away with the clear impression that “Apple is not seeing much pressure from lower-priced tablets,” and that current Kindle Fire buyers “could gravitate to more feature-rich experiences” down the road based on their initial use of the cheaper Amazon device.

J.P. Morgan and Apple execs apparently aren’t all that concerned over Amazon’s new Android tablet, which is already projected to beat out the sales of all other tablets based on the Google mobile platform by the end of this quarter. And it’s true that the Kindle Fire could act as a sort of gateway drug, turning users on to the tablet experience but leaving them craving features missing from the Amazon device, like a full-fledged market of applications targeted to large-screen devices, a larger screen itself and cellular data access.

It’s an admittedly rosy outlook from a source with a vested interest in seeing this outcome come to pass, however. There’s another obvious possibility to contend with too: Users could find that the Kindle Fire provides everything they really need in a tablet experience (web browsing, media playback) for an acceptable price and look no further. Whether or not those users would’ve looked at iPads otherwise, or whether another, significant portion of Fire owners might not find themselves wanting more is another question.

I think Apple’s optimistic outlook should pan out, however, so long as one thing remains true: tablets continue to encroach upon and replace PCs as primary computing devices for general users. In that case, the Kindle Fire and the iPad likely will indeed enter into a mutually beneficial orbit, with the cheaper device drawing in first-time tablet users and the iPad acting as a sort of graduation gift for when they opt to use tablets as their main computers.

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As the legal drama between Apple and Samsung drags on around the world, US District Court Judge has rejected Apple’s request to block the sales of Galaxy devices. Reuters reports the ruling came out late Friday, with the judge deciding “It is not clear that an injunction on Samsung’s accused devices would prevent Apple from being irreparably harmed,”. This isn’t the first rejection for the folks from Cupertino either, after a request to speed up the trial was also denied back in July. The case itself will of course go on, but this means you’ll still be able to get your hands on those Galaxy Tabs, Galaxy S IIs, and the like in the meantime.

Apple’s request to block Samsung Galaxy tablet, phone sales in the US is denied originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A quick run-down of the specifications for those who missed the announcement:

• 4.65-inch 1280 x 720-pixel Super AMOLED HD with curved glass
• TI OMAP 4460 dual-core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz
• 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of internal storage
• 5 megapixel rear camera with 1080p video capture, 1.3 megapixel front facing camera
• LTE / HSPA mobile broadband
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, NFC support, barometer sensor

The Galaxy Nexus is the first handset to use a Samsung Super AMOLED display that’s 4.65-inches in size. With a computer-like resolution, the screen should be stunning. However, detailed analysis of the technology by FlatPanelsHD shows that the display uses sub-pixels, which means some pixels are shared. I’ll have to see the screen for myself, but I suspect only the most discriminating users will see any issues.

Some enthusiasts are also disappointed by Samsung’s choice of a 5 megapixel rear camera sensor. I agree that Samsung missed an opportunity here — at least for those who care mostly about megapixels — but as the iPhone 4 has shown for more than year, with the right image processing software and camera sensor, a 5 megapixel camera can shoot excellent pictures. We’ll get a better feel for the camera quality soon, as Verizon has announced it will carry an LTE version of the Galaxy Nexus before year end.

Hardware of course, is only part of the equation for any  mobile device. Along with the new phone, Google introduced Android 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich, which is the version that will run on the Galaxy Nexus. Everything you need to know about Android 4.0 is here, but a basic summary from what I saw during the introduction includes:

• A cleaner, more consistent user interface
• Roboto, a new system font
• Notifications in the lock screen
• Facial recognition for unlocking the phone
• Improved cut/copy/paste
• Voice recognition in near real-time for text input
• Updated core apps, i.e.; Gmail, Calendar, etc…
• Detailed data usage monitoring with customizable alerts
• Contacts are now People, with social network integration
• Android Beam: a method to share data wirelessly via NFC proximity

Android 4.0 looks far more like a finished product than Honeycomb, or Android 3.0 and it should unify Google-powered smartphones and tablets. Ultimately, that could help Android tablet sales, although some think they’re selling just fine.

A research report from Strategy Analytics this past week suggests that Android tablets now hold more than a quarter of the tablet market and are quickly eating into Apple’s iPad sales. Upon closer inspection of the analysis, there are several discrepancies and interpretations that simply don’t make sense to me. I outlined some data points that indicate Android tablets still aren’t selling well.

Perhaps with Android 4.0 in combination with quad-core chips, we’ll see an uptick in Android tablets next year.

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I have no doubt that when Apple introduces the next iPhone model, AT&T will still continue to sell millions of the device. Surprisingly, even though the iPhone is on many networks around the world and available on Verizon since February, AT&T appears to have sold 17.1 percent of all iPhones last quarter. Apple reported sales of 20.34 million iPhones and just days later AT&T claimed 3.6 million iPhone activations in the same time period. That’s a big number in relation to all iPhones sold.

As strong as those numbers are, there’s still money being left on the table, because no matter how good the software keyboard is on the iPhone, there are consumers that simply won’t consider it due to the lack of a hardware keyboard. I’ve heard this complaint time and again in various conversations and it comes more from women in my experience. It turns out that women with long fingernails — again, based on my conversations — can’t easily use a capacitive touchscreen keyboard. That’s just one example of many I hear; talk to a long-time BlackBerry user and you’re likely to hear a similar aversion to touchscreen keyboards.

So while the Samsung Galaxy S II is no iPhone when it comes to software or ecosystem, it may drive sales on AT&T’s network for those seeking the touchscreen smartphone experience but with the addition of a hardware keypad. The Galaxy S II is certainly powerful enough to please with Samsung’s 1.2 GHz dual-core processor; early benchmarks from the overseas model show it to run rings around most other smartphones. A Super AMOLED Plus display brings vibrant colors that draw the eye. And even with a peppy processor, early reviews show the phone capable of lasting a full day on a single charge. It’s no wonder the Galaxy S II is the company’s fastest selling smartphone with 3 million sales in 55 days.

Hardware keyboard aside, potential customers will still focus on iOS vs Android as a major part of their purchase decision. But if these folks consider the two platforms to be “close enough” to parity, a keyboard could help Samsung move more Galaxy S II smartphones on AT&T. And given AT&T’s importance to iPhone sales, that helps Samsung as it battles Apple to become the new smartphone king.

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It’s been about 18 months since Walmart bought Vudu, but as demand for physical media declines, the big box retailer is finally marrying the online video service with its website. By doing so, it’s hoping to introduce its customers to a new way of watching movies and getting them to spend money on digital copies instead of buying the DVD.

Steve Nave, SVP and general manager of Walmart.com, said the decision to buy Vudu was made as the retailer realized that there was a rapid shift in consumer behavior from purchasing physical media to streaming content online. The acquisition was made to help better position Walmart and its web property as this shift occurred.

The result of that purchase can now be seen at Walmart.com. Users shopping online for DVDs and Blu-ray discs on the site will now also have the option of buying or renting digital copies of titles that are available as part of the Vudu streaming library. Once purchased, those movies can then be accessed either through the Walmart website, Vudu.com or on any of the 300-plus connected devices that the Vudu streaming service is available on.

The move to add the service to Walmart.com comes just a few months after Vudu introduced its own browser-based streaming option. But it’s not just the Vudu service on a Walmart URL: The integration keeps the same look and feel of the retailer’s website, while introducing a wide new range of streaming content. Existing Walmart.com customers will be able to link their accounts with the Vudu service and seamlessly purchase movie titles without having to switch logins or change sites.

Now for the bad news: For those that want to stream videos in HD, they’ll have to watch the movie on one of Vudu’s supported devices. The Walmart.com site, along with Vudu.com, only stream videos in standard definition. While many purists will only want the highest quality video, for many Walmart shoppers new to streaming movies online, that might not be a big deal.

Adding the Vudu service to its website also comes as the retailer is experimenting with new ways to get its users to try out the service. That includes the introduction of new digital movie cards that users can purchase from Walmart stores and use to redeem streaming movies later. The company has also been working with Hollywood studios to enable customers to buy a physical copy of a DVD and be able to stream it from Vudu on supported devices.

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