Gartner: Lenovo will overtake Samsung in China next year

Samsung managed to snag the top smartphone maker spot in China, but Gartner is predicting it will soon lose it to Lenovo. As of Q3, Samsung held 16.7% of the market while Lenovo was close behind with 14.8% (Canalys reports slightly different numbers – 14% for Samsung and 13% for Lenovo).
Lenovo’s growth hasn’t been slow – during the same period last year they held only 1.7% of the market. “The brand is positioned at the mid-to-lower end which will drive much of its future growth, and this is where global brands are less competitive,” says Gartner.
The analyst company believes that the established PC maker is the only brand that can capable of competing with global brands in the local Chinese market (though according to Canalys, the other three companies in the Top 5 smartphone maker list are Chinese). Apple had a 6.9% share in Q3.

Samsung to show an 8-core big.LITTLE chipset next year

Samsung is rumored to put a quad Cortex-A15 CPU inside the Galaxy S IV with the Exynos 5450 chipset, but EETimes is reporting that the Korean company has a more interesting chipset in the works - the first one to use ARM's big.LITTLE technology.
This tech pairs a number of powerful Cortex-A15 cores with the same number of low-power Cortex-A7 cores (similar to NVIDIA's fifth core in Tegra 3). The chipset seamlessly switches between the high and low power cores depending on the load (but it can't run all at the same time).
The chipset in particular will pack four A15s clocked at 1.8GHz and four A7s clocked at 1.2GHz. The A7s will reportedly match a quad-core Cortex-A8 CPU (not that such exist), while the four A15s should offer a big increase over the already powerful A15 duo that powers the Nexus 10. The chip will be built on a 28nm process and pack 2MB of cache.
We're sure that there will be plenty of rumors that this will be the chipset in the Galaxy S IV, but it's more likely to see it in a tablet first.

Exynos 5250 SoC goes into mass production in Q2, tablets get it first

During Samsung's earnings call, they took a minute to talk about the Exynos 5250 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) they announced last year. It's already sampling to manufacturers and it will go into mass production in Q2 this year.

The chipset packs two Cortex-A15 cores running at 2.0GHz, which reportedly have double the performance of their Cortext-A9 predecessors. We can't wait to see how Exynos 5250 stacks up against quad-core chipsets coming this year.

Details on the GPU are pretty scarce, all Samsung said when they announced the chipset was that it will quadruple the graphics performance of their current models (they are presumably talking about the successor of the Mali-400 GPU).

Samsung said that the Exynos 5250 will be used to power tablets first and eventually smartphones. They didn’t give an exact timeframe for the smartphones, but if there's any truth in the rumors of the Galaxy S III being delayed, maybe we'll see the chipset debut on the third generation flagship droid from Samsung.