Author: Lucy

The closing of the gap between the Microsoft operating system and iOS and Android has surprised many.

The most recent technology news report has been released based on the research conducted by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, which has indicated that Windows is continuing to make promising gains within the smartphone market.

The operating system still represents only a small percentage of smartphone sales, but it is growing.

Even though the Windows smartphone market share in terms of sales was only 5.6 percent during this year’s first quarter – according to the Kantar findings – this still represented an important growth of 1.9 percent over the market when compared to the same time in 2012. This is a sizeable increase in a market where the dominant players have a very firm hold on their territory.

The technology news still shows that almost half of all smartphones sales are of Android devices.

This latest technology news statement showed that 49.3 percent of all smartphone sales are devices run on the Android operating system. This makes it, by far, the leader in the market. At the same time, though, that operating system saw only a small growth in the first quarter of 2013 when compared with the first quarter of 2012. Furthermore, its current rate of growth has dropped when compared to the three months that ended at the close of February. It fell by 1.9 percent.

iOS is continuing to hold its second place position, as per this technology news. It still has 43.7 percent of the smartphone sales. That said, the sale of devices based on this operating system have also dropped, as they were down throughout the entire length of the first quarter of the year.

According to Mary-Ann Parlato, a Kantar analyst, “As iOS and Android continue to battle it out for top selling smartphone OS, we have seen Windows steadily grow over the past year and is now at its highest sales share figure so far.” She went on to add to her technology news statement by saying that it appears that Windows is growing in strength through its appeal to first time smartphone buyers.

At the moment, in terms of merchants and consumers, the company may be considered the leader.

PayPal, already a leader in the online transaction industry, is starting to be considered to be the frontrunner in mobile payments, as well, as it boasts the largest estimated number of merchants and consumers within a “digital wallet” sphere.

Furthermore, the company is aiming to expand this possible lead with the addition of new partnerships.

PayPal has just announced that it is partnering with Discover and NCR in order to further boost its mobile payments offerings. The eBay owned company has been a leader in online purchases for fifteen years, but were able to process more than $14 billion in transactions over tablets and smartphones last year.

The PayPal Here mobile payments service has allowed the company to define itself in this channel.

The success that PayPal has had over mobile payments has been considerable enough that they feel that they are starting to chip into the transaction processing sector, which has long been held by major credit card companies. This has also allowed consumers to start to be able to pay for their purchases in a seamless way, using their cards, but without having to actually carry the plastic.

The PayPal Here mobile payments card reader is also rapidly becoming popular among small businesses. This is because it allows those companies to use any smartphone or table to have a small card reader plugged into its audio jack without the need for large POS equipment or its associated rental or purchase fees.

Now that the Discover partnership has been added to PayPal’s growing set of deals, it will mean that the company will be expanding to 2 million more brand name locations by the end of this year.

That said, one of the mobile payments company’s primary goals is to eliminate the need for a card reader altogether so that the app can be used on consumer smartphones in order to replace the plastic cards. Though this service is available at a few thousand stores already, the extra two million will exponentially grow this opportunity.