Apple sold 74.8 million iPhones during the fourth quarter of 2014 to achieve its best quarter ever and give it a 20.4 percent share of worldwide smartphone sales, Gartner reported. Over the same period, Samsung's share of the smartphone market, on sales of 73 million units, plummeted to 19.9 percent from 29.5 percent. Samsung's return to the smartphone throne in the first quarter came despite its IT and mobile business recording a 57 percent year-over-year drop in operating profits during its first quarter. Samsung doesn't disclose its smartphone sales figures, but analysts had estimated Samsung shipped 82 million smartphones for the period, down from the 89 million a year earlier, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Strategy Analytics' keeper of the lost cities iphone case results do not include sales of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, which hit the market earlier this month, Samsung has predicted record sales for Galaxy S6 devices and says it's selling the phones faster than it came make them, Strategy Analytics' research showed that the smartphone game is still solidly a two-horse race, The Lenovo-Motorola tieup, which was finalized in October, registered a distant third with a 5.4 percent share of the market on shipments of 18.8 million units, Close behind Lenovo was Huawei, with 5 percent market share on 17.3 million units shipped..

Commenting on Best Buy's decision to embrace Apple Pay, MCX said Monday that Best Buy remained a partner in the consortium and a CurrentC supporter. A Best Buy spokesman confirmed Tuesday that the chain was still a member of the MCX consortium. MCX said Davidson's departure was unrelated to Best Buy's decision. "Today's news has nothing to do with yesterday's news," MCX spokeswoman Kristin Parran Faulder told CNET. Mobile payments are expected to explode in popularity by next year, growing to $27.5 billion in US transactions from last year's $3.5 billion, according to market research firm eMarketer. The number of mobile-payment users in the US is expected to hit 36.2 million next year, more than twice the number using digital wallets in 2014, the researcher said.

Many other companies have tried to tackle mobile payments in the past, with services that include Google Wallet, Softcard and PayPal, but it's been hard to convince merchants and consumers to sign on, Apple gave the sector a jump-start in September with the launch of Apple Pay , which allows consumers to make credit card purchases with an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus , Less than 72 hours after its debut, 1 million credit cards had been used on the keeper of the lost cities iphone case service, Not long after Apple Pay's launch, the payments system ran into resistance from a group of MCX merchants, with some members of the consortium deciding to disable consumers' ability to use Apple Pay in anticipation of the launch of MCX's alternative payments service, MCX denied encouraging the Rite Aid and CVS drugstore chains to block Apple Pay by disabling NFC terminals..

Aside from Apple, MCX faces stiff competition from other companies that offer similar mobile payments services. Samsung offers its new Samsung Pay feature on the new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge and has unveiled a mobile-payments service called Android Pay. PayPal, the digital payments unit being spun off from eBay later this year, plans to acquire Paydiant, a startup that helps companies such as Subway and Capitol One build mobile-payments options. CurrentC, which is expected to launch widely this year, relies on QR codes rather than fingerprint identification, potentially making the system less convenient than Apple Pay. It also lacks support for NFC and the tap-and-pay feature found on Apple Pay and Google Wallet, which also uses the same technology.