Starting Friday, customers who switch to Sprint will get “the nation’s best price for Unlimited,” including HD-quality streaming video and 10 GB of mobile hot spot use per month, Sprint said. “At $22.50 per line for four lines, that’s 50 percent less than Verizon’s newly announced plan,” said a Thursday news release. “Customers save even more compared to AT&T’s current unlimited plans, which require a DirecTV or U-verse contract.” Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said “our unmatched spectrum position gives us a clear competitive advantage in a high-capacity unlimited world.” Claure also commented in a tweet: “So this Fri, it’s bye @Verizon & @ATT, hello @Sprint #Unlimited HD!” A new Verizon unlimited plan took effect Monday (see 1702130041).

Nearly half of mobile phone users worldwide still use their devices only to make voice calls or send SMS text messages, said research by GSMA Intelligence, based on 2016 data from 56 global markets, the association said. South Korea, Qatar and the U.S. scored the highest on mobile engagement, according to the survey. Traditional SMS is still used more frequently than IP messaging in a number of mature markets, including France and the U.S., and millennials aren't necessarily more engaged mobile users than other age groups. “There are some markets, such as Myanmar, where smartphone ownership is relatively high but user engagement is low, due to digital illiteracy and a lack of locally relevant content,” the survey found. “There are several African countries with high mobile user engagement in financial services; for instance, in Kenya and Tanzania, around four in every five adult mobile phone owners use their phones for mobile money services.”

Global sales of smartphones to end users totaled 432 million units in Q4, up 7 percent over the year-ago quarter, Gartner said in a Wednesday report. Q4 saw Apple leapfrog past Samsung to secure the No. 1 global smartphone vendor position, Gartner said. It was the second straight quarter in which Samsung “has delivered falling quarterly smartphone sales," the researcher said. Samsung's smartphone sales declined 8 percent in Q4 and its share dropped by 2.9 percentage points year on year, it said.

Facebook added immediate sound to News Feed videos, reformatted how they appear on mobile devices and is releasing a video app for TV, the company said in a Tuesday blog post. "Videos in News Feed have previously played silently -- you tap on a video to hear sound. As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on," wrote Engineering Manager Alex Li and Product Manager Dana Sittler. As users scroll through videos the sound fades in and out, but they can also disable the sound in their settings, they said. The staffers also said a larger format for vertical videos that "look better" is now available for mobile devices. They added that videos can also be minimized -- providing a "picture-in-picture view" that can be dragged to any corner of the screen -- as users scroll through the News Feed. Li and Sittler said a Facebook video app for TV will be available on the app stores for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV for now. Last year, users could stream Facebook videos on their TV. With the new app, they "can watch videos shared by friends or Pages you follow, top live videos from around the world, and recommended videos based on your interests," the employees wrote.

The Organizational Partners of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) said it released a new 5G logo for use on such products. “Implementers wishing to declare conformity to the 3GPP specifications may mark their equipment and documentation with the 5G logo,” 3GPP said in a release. “The Partners have registered the logo as a trademark for the benefit of the Membership.”

Proposed National Highway Traffic Safety Administration guidelines on distracted driving typify the type of pending regulations that a Jan. 20 White House memo called on agencies to halt to afford the incoming Trump administration an opportunity to review them. So said CTA President Gary Shapiro in a letter Monday to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Mark Sandy, Office of Management and Budget acting director. CTA thinks the proposed guidelines “raise substantial questions of law and policy,” and therefore “merit a careful review” by DOT and OMB, as the White House memo prescribed, Shapiro said. “While NHTSA maintains that the proposed guidelines would be voluntary and nonbinding, in practice they could have a sweeping effect on the multibillion dollar market for mobile devices and apps.” In the letter, Shapiro repeated what he told the Senate Commerce Committee Feb. 1 when he testified that “by issuing guidelines on how smartphones, tablets and even wearable fitness devices function when near a driver, NHTSA has exceeded its authority and invited uncertainty and litigation” (see 1702010036).

Global Q4 smartphone sales reached 391 million units, up 6 percent year on year, GfK reported Wednesday. Western Europe was the only region to see negative growth with unit sales down 4 percent year on year to 38.6 million and dollar sales off by a percentage point to $16.2 billion. North American unit sales rose 3 percent to 58 million and dollar sales advanced 5 percent to $22.9 billion, it said. Following a dip in Q3 last year, North America experienced a turnaround in demand in Q4, driving by operator promotions and flagship device launches during the holiday season, said the research company. It forecasts that tough competition among North American carriers will drive marginal growth in smartphone demand of 1 percent year on year to 193.4 million units in 2017. Central and Eastern Europe had the steepest rise in the quarter, at 16 percent, posting unit sales of 24.2 million, for $5.6 billion in revenue. China led all smartphone sales with 118.9 million, up 12 percent, grossing $36.9 billion, it said. Smartphone demand is expected to remain stable even in saturated markets this year, said analyst Arndt Polifke, citing their relevance in developed markets for innovations such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, smart home functionality, mobile payments and mobile health. Polifke said that developing regions such as the Middle East/Africa and emerging Asia “have yet to mature and as such still have significant potential for growth, leading to a solid growth outlook for smartphone demand in 2017."

FCC real-time text rules will take effect Feb. 22, the commission said in a Tuesday public notice. Comments on the related Further NPRM are due the same day, with replies due March 24, the FCC said. The commission approved 5-0 an order Dec. 15 on a common standard for the transition from text technology to real-time text (see 1612150048).

Social media and video streaming drove T-Mobile wireless data traffic at NRG Stadium in Houston on Super Bowl Sunday, Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said in a Monday blog post. Social media apps drove one-third of data usage, with users sending 3,000 social posts per minute, the CTO said. And 36 percent of traffic was video streaming from YouTube and Netflix, he said. Data traffic spiked 15 percent immediately after the game-winning touchdown by the New England Patriots, Ray said. Total data traffic at the game beat last year’s total before halftime, he said.

Apple rode the success of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus to retake the top global smartphone share from Samsung in Q4, IDC reported Wednesday. Vendors shipped a total of 428.5 million smartphones in the holiday quarter, a 6.9 percent increase from 2015's Q4, it said. For the full year, vendors shipped 1.47 billion smartphones, the highest year of shipments on record, yet up only 2.3 percent from 2015, it said. "This was a year that brought us the first down year for iPhone, yet Apple closed out the holiday quarter by surpassing Samsung for the top spot in the smartphone industry.” Apple shipped 78.3 million iPhones in Q4, a 4.7 percent increase from Q4 a year earlier, IDC said. Samsung’s global smartphone shipments declined 5.2 percent in Q4 to 77.5 million, it said: Apple took an 18.3 percent global share of the smartphone market to Samsung’s 18.1 percent. In Q4 a year earlier, Samsung controlled 20.4 percent of the smartphone market to Apple’s 18.7 percent, it said.