Apple’s smartphone share in China plummeted 32 percent year over year in Q2 to 8.6 million units, said an IDC report, while the top three vendors -- Huawei, Oppo and vivo – had gains of 15, 124 and 75 percent. The top three totaled 47 percent of the domestic market in Q2, compared with 43 percent in Q2 2015 and 45 percent Q2 2016 on “aggressive marketing” and brand-building efforts, said IDC. “The iPhone SE was not a hit in China, where consumers prefer larger screen-sized phones,” said IDC analyst Xiaohan Tay. Nearly 90 percent of phones shipped in China in Q2 had screen sizes 5 inches and above, Tay said. Apple fans are holding out for the next wave of larger iPhones in Q3 “which could likely give Apple a boost in China,” she said. Oppo and vivo thrived on the strength of their offline channels, where their shops and advertisements cover most of the third-to-fifth-tier cities, providing a convenient option for consumers to visit stores for after-sale service, said Tay. In the first- and second-tier cities, smartphone vendors continued to focus on sponsorships of key entertainment events to win consumers over, Tay said. Oppo and Huawei took different marketing routes in Q2, with Oppo promoting its camera selfie features and fast-charge technology with the tagline, “Charge for 5 minutes to be able to talk on the phone for 2 hours,” she said. Huawei focused on the P9, one of the top-selling products in the quarter, promoting its thinness and the quality of the camera’s Leica lens, IDC said. Oppo went the celebrity route, hiring brand ambassadors to launch its R9 series. “After vendors witnessed Oppo’s success with its R9, they also started riding on the trend of hiring celebrity endorsers to represent their brand and appeal more to the young crowd,” said Tay.

The Wireless Innovation Forum filed several documents at the FCC on its work on the 3.5 GHz shared band. The group said last week the first trial deployments of devices designed to operate in the spectrum are expected in the fall (see 1608120057). Among the documents is a road map by the forum’s Spectrum Sharing Committee Steering Group. The FCC charged the forum with getting industry to work together on sharing the band (see 1608010044). The filing was in docket 15-319.

Sprint cellular 911 service was "degraded" in Montgomery County, Maryland, said a release Tuesday from the county government, saying: "Sprint cellular service is affected throughout the area." Sprint hadn't given an estimated time for restoring service. A Sprint spokeswoman emailed: "Earlier this morning commercial power outages and a fire on L St. in DC caused some of our wireline services to be impacted in the DC Metro area which in turn has impacted 911 calls for some wireless customers. Specifically, some customers might receive a busy signal when calling 911. Customer safety and security is a top priority -- we’re working aggressively to resolve and service restoration is underway."

Kyocera added to its military-grade smartphone line a 4G model with a wide-view 13-megapixel 1080p action camera. The DuraForce Pro is targeted to business users and consumers, said a Kyocera news release. The phone is dust- and shockproof, and the camera can operate underwater up to 2 meters for 30 minutes, said the company. Additional features are a Qualcomm Snapdragon octa-core processor, 5-inch display and push-to-talk functionality. Connectivity for the Android phone includes Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.2, near-field communications, Miracast and USB 2.0, and the phone can be a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot for up to 10 devices, Kyocera said. AT&T will sell the phone but pricing hasn’t been announced.

Siri and Google Now voice controls launched as smartphone interfaces, but the smart home is where voice control will reach its full potential, said ABI Research in a Monday news release. Smart TVs, refrigerators and plugs are among the devices that will extend the reach of the smart home and bring simplicity to managing the smart home by voice, it said. ABI forecasts more than 120 million voice-enabled devices will ship annually by 2021, and voice control -- combining speech recognition with natural language processing -- is becoming the “key user interface” in the smart home. Amazon’s Alexa, leading the pack of voice engines, is creating “new competition" and demand for wireless speaker manufacturers and other vendors to include voice capabilities in their devices, said analyst Jonathan Collins. But scaling voice control capability brings complexity, Collins said. “Vendors will need to evaluate how and when to bring voice control into smart home devices in order to best tackle adding the service into wider smart home systems,” he said.

Canadian Pacific Railway agreed to pay a $1.2 million fine for operating more than 100 wireless radio facilities in the U.S. without prior FCC approval, the bureau said Monday. The railroad, which has some operations in the U.S., also didn’t get FCC authorizations for the transfer of control of 30 wireless radio licenses, the bureau said. The violations were disclosed to the FCC by the railway after a 2015 audit, the bureau said. Canadian Pacific also agreed to implement a three-year compliance plan to prevent future violations, said an FCC news release.

The spectrum noise floor and other interference issues dominated discussions at a recent International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART) meeting, said Keith Gremban, director of the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, Monday in an NTIA blog post. “One of the biggest themes to emerge from the discussions was the inevitable rise in the ‘noise floor’ -- the measure of the unwanted signals -- with so many more wireless devices in use,” Gremban wrote. “Another theme was the need for rapid and reliable investigation into the impact of the proliferation of devices attempting to operate simultaneously in the same or adjacent bands, from both a scientific and a policy perspective. Panelists discussed not only how to predict aggregate interference from many devices and protect against it, but also who bears responsibility for it when it occurs.” Discussions at the ISART session found broad agreement on the importance of collaborative action, he said. “Transparency, trust, honest brokers, and clear rules are prerequisites to real-time interference mitigation.”

The Rural Wireless Association and NTCA asked the FCC to slow or even pause the TV incentive auction while meetings by its members are in progress next month. RWA meets at CTIA's conference Sept. 7-9 and NTCA and RWA have annual meetings Sept. 26-28, the filing said. If the FCC doesn’t pause the auction during those dates it should hold only one round per day, the groups said. “The Associations’ members have limited personnel resources to dedicate to auction participation,” the groups said in a filing in docket 14-252. “Small staffs already manage a substantial workload, and auction participation over a lengthy and unpredictable time period will stretch limited personnel resources even further. In many cases, the leaders that attend industry events to conduct their companies’ business are the same individuals named as their companies’ authorized bidders in Auction 1002.” Auction 1002 is the FCC’s formal name for the forward part of the incentive auction.

Sixty percent of smartphone users with Pokemon Go were likely to enter a business offering Pokemon-branded discounts to players, said a survey by marketing communications company MGH collected through Survey Monkey Audience. Some 38 percent were likely to buy a Pokemon-themed product, and 60 percent viewed businesses hosting Pokemon promotions favorably, it said. Restaurants and bars topped the list of business categories offering Pokemon-themed products or discounts, followed by retail stores at 44 percent. Facebook (72 percent) and store signage (52 percent) were cited highest for communicating Pokemon-themed discounts. The online survey of 1,000 U.S. smartphone users ages 18-55 was done in July with a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent at the 95 percent confidence level, it said.

FirstNet plans a series of meetings in the central part of the U.S. starting in September to explain its environmental plan to the public, said a notice in Friday's Federal Register. The meetings, to present FirstNet’s draft programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for the Central region, are required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The meetings cover Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The first is Sept. 7 in Des Moines. Interested parties can also file comments by Oct. 11.