China smartphone shipments to rise

HONG KONG: China’s smartphone shipments are expected to rise sharply to 460 million by 2017 and will make up nearly all mobile phone sales, research firm IDC said, as increasingly wealthy consumers opt for morefeature-filled phones. China has more than one billion mobile phone subscribers, with many switching from low-end feature phones to smartphones in the past few years as prices become more affordable with some smartphones selling for less than 1,000 yuan (USD 160) a piece. Handset vendors, such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Apple Inc, ZTE Corp, Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and others, shipped a total of 213 

million smartphones in 2012, more than double 2011 figures, according to IDC. No rankings of top smartphone vendors in China were immediately available from IDC analysts. Smartphones made up almost 58.8 cent of total handsets shipped in China in 2012, with the figure expected to rise to 78.4 per cent in 2013 and 90.1 per cent in 2017, IDC said. 

Microsoft fined 561 million pounds

WASHINGTON: Microsoft has been fined 561 million pounds by the European commission for failing to give users a choice of web browser as they logged into Windows computers in Europe between May 2011 and July 2012 — breaking a binding commitment it had made in 2009. The error arose when Microsoft’s own programmers forgot to include a single line of code that would have automatically triggered the ‘browser choice’ programme on versions of Windows 7 called Service Pack 1 (SP1). A source close to Microsoft explained: “It was a single line in the code that triggered the browser choice programme.” It 

estimated that 15 million users had no alternatives to Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Opera and other browsers. Microsoft could have been fined as much as 10 per cent of its fiscal 2012 revenues equivalent to 5.9 billion pounds. It said it took ‘full responsibility’ for the technical error that caused the problem and that it had apologised for it.