Smartphone shipments grew by 15 per cent in first quarter of 2017

Together, all these top five brands contributed to almost 70 per cent of the total smartphone market. 

“India’s smartphone market is witnessing a focus shift in distribution strategy by major brands. Offline brands have now started focusing on online channels as well to gain extra market share while online only brands are moving fast into offline markets to widen their reach to the mass market, addressing consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities,” said Karn Chauhan, Research Analyst at Counterpoint Research.

Google’s India-born CEO Sundar Pichai has received a stock award of $198.7 million in 2016, almost double his 2015 stock award of $99.8 million. That brought his total compensation in 2016 to $199.7 million, almost twice the $100.6 million he earned in 2015. Pichai received a salary of $650,000 in 2016, slightly less than the $652,500 he earned in 2015. Pichai’s massive pay package came even as his two bosses and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, once again drew salaries of only one dollar for their roles as CEO and President, respectively, of parent company Alphabet. But Page and Brin are each worth more than $40 billion through their stock holdings.

US tech giant Apple is experimenting with wireless charging technologies that could see users charge their iPhones with a Wi-Fi router. Apple’s patent application for ‘Wireless Charging and Communications Systems With Dual-Frequency Patch Antennas’ is a method for transferring power to electronic devices over frequencies normally dedicated to data communications. The patch antennas may be used for wireless power transfer at microwave frequencies or other frequencies and may be used to support millimetre wave communications.