Hello from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona! Smart Chimps has been stomping through the show halls talking to a plethora of companies and attending launch events, focusing on the exciting and innovative content and technologies that are making us as consumers and business users want to never leave home without our mobile devices.
Starting with Samsung’s launch of the new Galaxy S6 and S6 edge on Sunday evening, while the devices include various tweaks that improve on their predecessors, the best thing for Smart Chimps was the battery charge capability. For the first time, Samsung has created a built in battery for both versions of the S6 because it has cracked the problem of slow charge; on a 10 minute charge you can have four hours of everyday use, and to get to 100% charge it takes less than 50% of the time that an iPhone 6 takes.
Samsung also launched a new mobile payment service, Samsung Pay, which will boost mobile payments as it will be usable at all retailers accepting debit and credit cards as well as NFC. Samsung Pay uses both NFC and a new proprietary technology called Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) to make mobile payments more accessible to merchants and consumers than ever before.
On mobile payments, Visa Europe has partnered with fastacash to enable a new social networking payment feature for member banks to extend to their customers. This new social feature makes it easy for users of Visa Direct, formerly known as Visa Personal Payments, to send peer-to-peer payments via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and LinkedIn.
Apple had a great last quarter for 2014; Gartner said Samsung lost the number one smartphone sales spot to Apple in the global market in the fourth quarter 2014, a position that Samsung had held since 2011. The manufacturer’s unit sales of smartphones in the fourth quarter of last year dropped to 73,032, 19.9% of global marketshare. However, over the course of the entire year Samsung still dominated Apple, even though that share has dropped from its 2013 figures.
Finally, an additional one billion people will become mobile subscribers over the next five years, according to a new GSMA report that forecasts that the number of unique mobile subscribers will increase from 3.6 billion at the end of 2014 to 4.6 billion by 2020, increasing by 4% over this period. By 2020, almost 60% of the global population will subscribe to mobile services, up from half of the population at the end of 2014. That’s a lot of people!
OK, back to the show for Smart Chimps!
Your chief chimp,
Heather McLean
