On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
ComScore latest report on the Smartphone market shows that Motorola and Rim are still the leaders with Apple showing a steady rise. Both the Apple iPhone and the Android show a steady gain in market share. Moreover, there seems to be plenty of room for more big gains. ComScore said just 17% of mobile phone users had smartphones at the end of 2009, up from 11% at the end of 2008. Palm and Microsoft -- the latter with its Windows Mobile platform devices -- continued their slide, with Palm garnering 6.1% of the smartphone market and Microsoft, 18%. Nokia, which has some 40% of the global smartphone market, didn't make it into the top five U.S. providers. However, the European-based handset provider did capture 9.2% of the overall mobile phone market in the United States. "A total of 234 million people age 13 and older in the U.S. used mobile devices in December 2009," comScore said in releasing the results for the fourth quarter of 2009. "Device manufacturer Motorola w...