India Passes Japan To Become Third Largest Global Smartphone Market, After China & U.S.

India pushed past Japan to become the third largest global smartphone market in Q1, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics. The analyst notes it’s the first time ever that India has moved up into third place. The top two worldwide markets for smartphones remain China and the U.S.

Smartphone makers including Apple, Samsung and local Indian mobile maker Micromax (an Android OEM), are driving higher volumes in the country thanks to improved distribution networks, according to the analyst.

Strategy Analytics said India is growing four times faster than the global average,with 163% year on year growth across India in Q1, compared to worldwide smartphone volumes expanding 39%. It noted that India’s market is rising quicker than China (86% YoY), Japan (24% YoY), the US (19% YoY) — and “almost all other major countries”.

The rise of India as a smartphone powerhouse is not surprising — given its huge population, including a growing, wealthier middle class, and rising interest in owning consumer electronics — coupled with parallel smartphone saturation in developed markets such as Japan and Europe. Saturation in those mature markets means companies like Apple and Samsung have been shifting more attention to emerging markets to try to ensure they maintain their own growth.

Figures put out by analyst IDC yesterday suggest the mature Western European smartphone market shrank more than expected in Q1, with total shipments dropping 4.2% year on year to 43.6 million units. This European slowdown is having the biggest impact on Apple’s marketshare, with IDC noting that iOS continues to lose ground in the region, declining to 20% in Q1, down from 25% in the year ago quarter.

Although it’s losing share in Europe, Apple has been gaining in India. Back in March IDC noted Cupertino had jumped to second place for revenue share in India, taking a 15.6% share in Q4 last year, after getting smaller local retailers distributing its iPhones. Apple has also been offering amortized payment plans to help spread the upfront cost of buying its devices — to widen access to what remain premium priced products vs the Android-powered competition.

Although Samsung and Apple are among the “key brands” driving growth in India, Strategy Analytics said it’s domestic players rather than foreign firms which are growing fastest. It name checks Micromax, Karbonn and Spice (all Android OEMs) as three examples of homegrown mobile makers with a growth rate of between 200% and 500% on an annual basis.

The local market also has what it describes as an “extra long tail of Indian microvendors” — such as Lemon Mobile — that it says is surging at 1000%+ YoY. “They are almost all using Android software, which captured 89% share of the entire market in the quarter,” the analyst added.

He Likes His Horror Personal And Global Stephen King’s ‘Under The Dome,’ Adapted for a TV Series

LOVELL, Maine — Rosie’s General Store serves breakfast all day, and it’s the type of place where residents of this town of 1,140 will stop in to buy lottery tickets, a loaf of bread or the special jumbo lobster roll. It’s also the inspiration for the Sweetbriar Rose, a diner in Stephen King’s 2009 opus about a small town cut off from the outside world by a mysterious and impenetrable dome.

A television adaptation of that novel, “Under the Dome,” will have its premiere on Monday night on CBS, which was why Mr. King found himself talking one day recently with the real-life Rose about the TV version of her character, one of nearly 70 in his 1,074-page doorstop of a novel. “I told you I want to be taller and thinner,” Rose McKenzie told Mr. King heartily as he ate blueberry pancakes with maple syrup.

“And through the power of narration, you are,” he assured her.

After nearly 100 television and film adaptations of his novels and short stories, Mr. King is used to the Hollywood version of his characters ending up younger and more glamorous than their often-haggard literary counterparts. It’s one of those things he doesn’t try to fight. He has developed a rule about collaborating on adaptations of his work: “Usually my attitude is go all the way in or all the way out, but don’t be a noodge,” Mr. King said.

But he’s being something of a noodge about “Under the Dome.” After reading the script for a coming episode, Mr. King was concerned that in it, Jim Rennie Jr., the degenerate son of the town’s alpha male, says that he scraped his hand while cutting wood with an ax. “I said, ‘Ax and hand, really?’ ” Mr. King said. “I had them change it to hatchet.” A hatchet’s blade is closer to the user’s hand, he explained.

Rather than turn the series over entirely to the producers, as he has with other adaptations to varying degrees of success, Mr. King has stayed involved, and it seems fitting. “Under the Dome” encapsulates the arc of his writing career: Started before he became a published novelist, the book was released 37 years later, when he was so renowned that the e-book version contributed to a price war.

The television series won’t have much effect one way or the other on Mr. King’s reputation as a master storyteller. CBS, by comparison, has more at stake with “Under the Dome,” as it risks shaking up the reliable models for summer television and online streaming.

Not only is it unusual for a broadcast network to introduce a dramatic series in late June, but CBS has broken with network tradition by selling the exclusive digital rights to Amazon. Under the deal struck with the online retailer, Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to stream episodes of “Under the Dome” just four days after they are broadcast on CBS. The deal is the first of its kind for a broadcast network and a Web streaming service and will be a closely watched test.

Beyond reading the scripts, Mr. King has visited the set and occasionally offers advice. He mostly leaves casting, character arcs, plot development and story lines to the executive producers, who include the comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan and Neal Baer, a longtime writer on “Law & Order: SVU” and “E.R.”

The television adaptation inevitably ups the visual ante. In the book, a woodchuck is split in half (“blood squirted and pumped; guts tumbled into the dirt”) as the giant dome violently descends on the fictional town of Chester’s Mill, Me.; in the TV version, a cow is severed through computer-generated effects. The Iraq war veteran and short-order cook who assumes the hero’s role in the book disposes of a dead body in the first episode, hinting at a potential murder plot, not found in the novel, that could muddy his image.

After Mr. King downed Ms. McKenzie’s pancakes and a side of sausage, we headed to Bridgton, a nearby town that inspired the fictional Chester’s Mill. In a gray T-shirt, jeans and black sneakers, he is tall but slight at 65, as if the strong breeze that passed through the quiet town square could knock him over. The weather on this late spring day felt oddly like the sunny fall one he describes as the backdrop of “Dome Day,” which is how residents of Chester’s Mill refer to the day the dome arrived. As he drove, it was hard not to get the feeling that an alien structure could descend at any moment.