5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

Droid Does Domination

Android's stranglehold on the smartphone market shows no signs of slowing down. Google's operating system market share jumped from 56.9 percent to 74.4 percent year over year, according to a report released by Gartner. Principal research analyst Anshul Gupta said that Android's dominance is "unshakable."

On the other hand, Apple's market share continues to fall, dropping from 22.5 percent in the first quarter of 2012 to 18.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. BlackBerry was in third place with 3 percent share.

HP Revs Up Tablet/Notebook Offering

HP is doubling down on its latest batch of tablet-notebook hybrids. The company Wednesday unveiled two hybrid models that will be available this summer. The HP Split x2 will run on Windows 8 while the HP SlateBook x2 will run on Android. Both x2 models have detatchable displays that can be used as stand-alone tablets and can be re-attached to the keyboard to act as notebooks.

Jeff Davis, senior vice president of sales at D&H Distributing, said he sees hybrids becoming a dominant form factor.

"The smaller 7-inch tablet models have been very popular," he said. "And we're seeing a lot of the 10-inch tablets sales turn into convertible notebooks or hybrids."

Google Offering More Free Cloud Storage

MSPs cheered Google's decision this week to combine the 10-GB limit on free cloud storage for Gmail and the 5-GB limit for Drive and Google+ Photos into one 15-GB pool for all those applications. Google Apps customers also now have more flexibility, with a combined 30-GB pool of cloud storage instead of the prior 25-GB limit on Google Apps and 5-GB limit on Gmail.

"With this new combined storage space, you won't have to worry about how much you're storing and where," said Clay Bavor, director of product management at Google, in a blog post. "For example, maybe you're a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn't matter, because you can use your storage the way you want."

Cisco Reports Strong Growth

Cisco beat Wall Street expectations Wednesday by reporting its ninth consecutive quarter of record revenue. The company reported sales of $12.2 billion for the quarter, up 5.4 percent compared with the same quarter last year.

Cisco CEO John Chambers (pictured) cited steady growth in the U.S., which saw revenue grow 7 percent to $7.1 billion. The company also saw upticks in U.S. commercial revenue, enterprise revenue, solution provider revenue and public sector business.

"This balanced approach to growth is a positive signal for growth going forward," Chambers said.

Samsung Ships 6 Million Galaxy S4s In Less Than Three Weeks

Korean tech giant Samsung confirmed that its latest smartphone, the Galaxy S4, is on pace to break records set by previous generations of the Galaxy model. Samsung said it already has sold 6 million units and that it could break the 10 million mark by the end of May.

Samsung continued its overall domination of the smartphone market, increasing its market share to 30.8 percent in the first quarter, according to Gartner. This is a jump of more than 3 percent compared with 2012.