mashable.com - It's not looking good for Microsoft.
The company's Windows Phone platform only had a 1.7% market share in the third quarter of 2015, a steep drop from the 3% market share in the same period last year, according to new data from research company Gartner.
While that's far from negligible - 5.9 million Windows Phone units were shipped in the quarter - there are several reasons why this is bad news for Microsoft. The Windows Phone platform's fall is actually accelerating; it lost 0.8% market share in the last quarter alone. Microsoft also said it sold 5.8 million Lumia phones in the third quarter, meaning other manufacturers have all but given up on the platform.
Furthermore, Gartner does not foresee major growth for Microsoft's platform, despite the impending launch of Windows 10 Mobile. Gartner does not foresee major growth for Microsoft's platform, despite the impending launch of Windows 10 Mobile.
"Despite the announcement of Windows 10, we expect Windows smartphone market share will continue to be a small portion of the overall smartphone OS market as consumers remain attracted by competing ecosystems," Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.
In addition to the Windows 10 launch in December, Microsoft has one more trick up its sleeve: two attractive new flagships, the Lumia 950 and 950 XL, which launch Nov. 20. We'll have to wait and see whether those manage to turn the tide for the company's mobile division.
The news is much better for other mobile platforms. Android did well, jumping from 254.4 million units to 298.8 million units shipped year-over-year, firmly clutching the first place with an astonishing 84.7% market share. Apple's iOS is second with 46.1 million units and 13.1% market share, while BlackBerry's OS is now barely a blip on the radar with less than a million units shipped and 0.3% market share.
As far as manufacturers go, Samsung is still firmly in the No. 1 spot. However, despite increasing the number of units sold year-over-year - 83.6 million versus 72.9 million - the company actually dropped from 23.9% to 23.7% market share. Apple did better, shipping 46 million units versus 38.2 million in the third quarter of last year, and moved from 12.5% to 13.1% market share.
China's Huawei is in the No. 3 spot, grabbing a 7.7% share of the market, followed by Lenovo and Xiaomi, both holding a 4.9% market share.

channelpartnersonline.com - A recent study says the market for mobile enterprise business applications will increase by $22.5 billion over the next five years.
The market for mobile business apps is set to spike.
The market will reach $40.5 billion this year and $63 billion by 2020, according to research released by Strategy Analytics.
The study's author, Gina Luk, says the mobile workforce continues to increase and demand new mobile-oriented strategies. Many of the organizations surveyed had already started using at least one mobile application.
"There is tremendous pressure on businesses to make workers more productive," she said in a news release. "Throughout 2015 companies rolled out new mobile, social, cloud and big-data analytics-based business applications to help deal with changing customer, employee, and partner expectations."
Those apps range from text messaging to conferencing to payroll to customer relationship management. Business-process applications were the second most used, according to the study. The dominant app type among mobile workers was SMS, which decreased in revenue along with MMS this year. The study said over-the-top (OTT) instant messaging services are taking a chunk out of SMS and MMS.
Additionally, corporate IT departments have shifted their job from "control to enablement." And the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture is gaining traction.
"Consumer demand for ubiquitous communications and OTT IM are higher than ever and are also having an impact with BYOD growth," the study said.
Channel Partners recently highlighted some of the most popular business apps, including those for CRM, collaboration, conferencing and finance.

pcworld.com - Google is making life easier for anyone who needs to use Maps in areas with spotty data connections. On Tuesday, the company added new functionality to offline maps including turn-by-turn directions, the ability to search for a destination, and place data. To use the new offline features, you first have to manually download a specific section of the map.
Google's new offline functionality is rolling out right now to Android and is coming soon to iOS. Google first announced the new offline features in May during Google I/O.
There are two ways to use the new feature to save map data for either a city, county, or country to your device. First, you can just search for the area, tap the banner at the bottom of the screen to bring up the place panel. Then just hit the download icon, confirm you want to download, name the offline area, and you'll have offline access to that area of Google Maps.
The second way to add an offline area is to tap the "hamburger" menu on the left side of the screen, select Offline Areas, and tap on the + button.
After you download specific areas, Google Maps will move into offline mode automatically when you hit a patch with spotty service-or none at all. Once the connectivity gets better, Maps will flip back to online mode.
Although offline Google Maps now offers deep functionality, the one major thing you won't be able to do is see live traffic updates.
We haven't had a chance to try out the new feature yet so we can't comment on how much storage a map area will take up. Google says that by default it will only download Map data when on a Wi-Fi connection.
The impact on you at home: Google Maps has had basic offline functionality for nearly five years. The original feature automatically cached areas of Google Maps that you frequently visited. All you could do, however, was use Google Maps as a digital stand-in for its paper counterpart-voice-guided directions and other features were not available. This latest upgrade brings offline Google Maps almost as close as possible to the connected version. One notable missing piece is the ability to view public transit information something Google said in May that it wanted to bring to Maps in offline mode.

reseller.co.nz - Growth in the mobile enterprise business software market looks set to continue at a rapid pace, with the market topping $US40.5 billion in 2015, on course to smash the $US63 billion mark by 2020.
Strategy Analytics findings cite increasing influence of mobile, social business, cloud, Big Data and analytics as the contributing factors, as the onus turns to enterprise to ensure workers become more productive.
According to Gina Luk, Senior Analyst of Mobile Workforce Strategies, the increase in the mobile workforce Is radically changing the way the business serves and interacts with its customers.
"There is tremendous pressure on businesses to make workers more productive," Luk says.
"Throughout 2015 companies rolled out new mobile, social, cloud and Big Data analytics-based business applications to help deal with changing customer, employee, and partner expectations."
As the corporate workforce becomes increasingly mobile, Luk claims the IT department's role has "unquestionably transitioned" from a control to an enablement function.
"Both of these issues create a lot of opportunity and the need for new software and processes," she adds.
Key findings claim that organisations mobility deployments are increasingly sophisticated, with many having already deployed at least one mobile application in the organisation.
"SMS is still one of the key dominant forms of mobile enterprise applications," says Luk, adding that SMS and MMS revenue declined further during 2014 as data-enabled business mobile phone users continued to turn to 'free and feature rich' over-the-top (OTT) IM services.
"Enterprises are more receptive to employees bringing their own personal devices into the work environment and synching them with the enterprise back-end applications and work processes," Luk adds.
"Consumer demand for ubiquitous communications and OTT IM are higher than ever and are also having an impact with BYOD growth."

macrumors.com - Google today updated its Google Maps app to version 4.12, adding spoken traffic alerts in navigation mode as well as the ability to easily add new or missing businesses from the app's sidebar.
Spoken traffic alerts will tell users about traffic congestion and incidents on a user's route. Additionally, users will get traffic descriptions summarizing traffic conditions before they set off on their journey. The feature is similar to Google-owned Waze's notifications, which also verbally points out traffic congestion, incidents and the location of police in the area.

prnewswire.co.uk - Mobile, Social business, Cloud, and Big Data/Analytics Saw Increased Influence and Impact on Mobile Business Apps Adoption
BOSTON, Nov. 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- 2014 saw continued growth in the mobile enterprise business software market. According to Gina Luk, Senior Analyst of Mobile Workforce Strategies, and author of The State of the Mobile Enterprise Business Application Market, the increase in the mobile workforce is radically changing the way the business serves and interacts with its customers. "There is tremendous pressure on businesses to make workers more productive," Luk said, noting, "throughout 2015 companies rolled out new Mobile, Social, Cloud and Bid Data Analytics-based business applications to help deal with changing customer, employee, and partner expectations." As the corporate workforce becomes increasingly mobile, the IT department's role has unquestionably transitioned from a control to an enablement function. "Both of these issues create a lot of opportunity and the need for new software and processes," she added.
Other key highlights from the Strategy Report:
- Organizations mobility deployments are increasingly sophisticated, many have already deployed at least one mobile application in the organization.
- SMS is still one of the key dominant forms of mobile enterprise applications, however operator SMS and MMS revenue declined further during 2014 as data-enabled business mobile phone users continued to turn to 'free and feature rich' over-the-top (OTT) IM services.
- Enterprises are more receptive to employees bringing their own personal devices into the work environment and synching them with the enterprise back-end applications and work processes. Consumer demand for ubiquitous communications and OTT IM are higher than ever and are also having an impact with BYOD growth.
- Business process applications such as sales force automation (SFA), field force automation (FFA) and other customer relationship management (CRM) applications (marketing/analytics, contact center, industry specific apps) have the second highest use overall among mobile workers; while supply chain management, procurement, production and operations, and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications (human resources, accounting, and payroll) have the lowest use overall among mobile workers.
The mobile enterprise business application market Strategy Analytics cover consists of collaboration/productivity (text messaging, image messaging, email & calendaring, productivity/content authoring, instant messaging/presence, and conferencing), and business process (CRM and ERP) applications.