Kantar: WP gains market share in US, BlackBerry falters

According to Kantar WorldPanel in the three months ending April 2013 Windows Phone powered 5.6% of the smartphones sold in the US market, while Android remained in the lead. The Google platform had a share of over 51.7%, while its closest rival iOS is controlling 41.4% of the market.

Compared to the same period of last year, iOS is the biggest winner, gaining 2.3 percent points, while Windows Phone climbed 1.8 percentage points. Android's modest 1.4 percentage point growth made it only the third fastest growing platform in the US. That's still better than BlackBerry, though, which was pushed into a corner losing 4.6 percentage points of its market share and powering under 1% of the smartphones sold in the three months period.

Unsurprisingly, Kantar attributes the raise in Windows Phone interest mostly to Nokia's Lumia lineup.

In carrier news, Verizon remains the largest carrier in the country with 36.3% of the market (a rise of 1.8 percentage points), followed by AT&T with 26.3 (up 0.3 percentage points YoY).

Android Jelly Bean 4.2.1 coming to the A116 Canvas HD

The Micromax A116 Canvas HD has just seen its first major update released, which adds several cool new features and delivers a fix for the low GPS lock issue.

The Android 4.2.1 update will not be released over-the-air, unfortunately, although it does include OTA update support, so future OS updates from Micromax should be easier to install.

As far as what's included in the update, you get quick toggles in the notification area, along with offline voice typing, and panorama shot capabilities for the 8MP shooter. There's also the usual slew of minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

If you're looking to get the latest Android update on your Micromax Canvas HD, you'll have to contact the company's service center network.

HTC's COO Matthew Costello joins the revolving door of departing execs

One of HTC's top execs, Chief Operating Officer Matthew Costello, will depart after three years on the job, according to a report from Bloomberg. He'll join recent departees like Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik and others in leaving the company, which has seen unprecedented turnover of late due to its falling fortunes. Ironically, the latest departure comes in the wake of very good news for HTC, which just reported $970 million in May revenue -- nearly double what it took in last month and just shy of May 2012 figures. That can likely be chalked up to sales of the One, which is now being churned out at full speed (and soon in a stock Android version) but whether the fortunes of HTC's star handset can halt the brain-drain remains to be seen.

Razer puts 14-inch Blade up for pre-order

Razer teased us when it unveiled the 14-inch Blade last week: a rare blend of portability with gaming performance, and we couldn't even put money down? Well, we can at least do that now. The smaller of the two Blades is now up for pre-order, with prices ranging from $1,800 to $2,300 depending on the SSD capacity. Whatever the storage level, players are getting the same 14-inch 1,600 x 900 display, quad-core 2.2GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and GeForce GTX 765Mgraphics. Any fresh orders should ship within two to three weeks, which fits just inside of Razer's promised launch schedule -- and just ahead of our summer vacations.