Lugging around all the charts and papers required by commercial pilots can be a pain – literally. Now comes word Apple’s iPad is taking a load off pilots of one airline, replacing 40-pound flight bags with a 1.5-pound tablet. By the end of May, 8,600 American Airlines pilots will swap the heavy bags of charts, maps and manuals for the iPad, easing one of the industry’s largest sources of injuries… Read More
The nation’s second-largest carrier, AT&T, on Wednesday upgraded its cell phone trade-in program at its brick-and-mortar retail stores. The new terms incentivize customers to trade-in their old smartphone for one of the latest models and receive a $100 credit on-the-spot, which can be immediately redeemed against any AT&T smartphone or accessory purchase.
If you have an old iPhone or an Android phone that is less than three years old, the $100 trade-in credit lets you purchase a brand new iPhone 5 for just $99. Or, you could settle with an iPhone 4S wit zero bucks in upfront payment. By comparison, the entry-level 16GB iPhone 4S/5 normally sets you back $99/$199 after a two-year contract… Read More
Some intriguing numbers were released Monday on how one research firm views the smartphone race between iOS and Android. According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Google’s Android averages a 64 percent unit share of the smartphone market across ten countries.
Apple leads in Japan while Android’s doing its best in Spain, where the mobile software owns an astounding 93 percent of the smartphone market.
In the U.S., the race is much tighter, with Android holding 49.3 percent and Apple owning 43.7 percent of the domestic market. But the rivals might be even closer as observers question how accurate Kantar is, given recent iPhone sales reports by U.S. carriers… Read More
Despite the massive marketing blitz, Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform has managed to regain but a fraction of market share lost to iOS and Android in years past. Figuring it could take a page from Samsung’s marketing handbook, Microsoft on Monday published on its YouTube channel a new Windows Phone commercial which takes a mandatory jab at Apple’s iPhone and its Siri digital personal assistant while also poking fun of Gorilla-sized Android devices from Samsung. The funny ad is aimed at boosting Microsoft’s and Nokia’s stagnant sales of Lumia handsets in the United States… Read More
Whenever I stumble upon a survey predicting that Apple’s iPhone will loose traction to not just Android, but Windows Phone as well, my blood starts to boil in my veins.
And just like clockwork, you can count on the likes of IDC and Gartner to come out of the woodwork every now and then with wild predictions of the iPhone’s demise by 2015, 2016 or 2017.
History has taught me to take such long-term predictions with a healthy dose of skepticism, even more so if data comes from big name firms whose crystal ball peering is based on “polls” that sample a few hundred random people, at best.
With that in mind, here’s a survey that paints a rather rosy future for the Apple smartphone. Noting that Android is actually losing one out of every six customers to other phone vendors, Yankee Group ran their spreadsheets and determined that Apple will surpass Android in U.S. market share by 2015, provided Apple brand loyalty numbers hold up in the coming years… Read More
For some time, the mobile phone industry has been shifting toward more powerful smartphones and away from basic mobile phones. Now comes word that smartphones outnumber feature phones for the first time. The line was crossed in the first quarter of 2013 with 216.1 million smartphones shipping, accounting for 51.6 percent of all handsets sold. Smartphone shipments grew 41.6 percent during the quarter, up from 152.7 million units shipped during the same period in 2012, one industry research firm announced Thursday… Read More
Apps (whether iOS or Android) are attracting huge audiences in the United States. Indeed, during a recent month apps attracted nearly the same number of people as used laptop and desktop to go online. What’s more, for a prime-time period during the week apps attract 52 million users, equivalent to the circulation of the top 200 weekend U.S. newspapers and three television shows, according to numbers released by a mobile analytics firm Thursday…
Let the post-mortem begin. It is a ritual on Wall Street: forecast Apple’s quarterly numbers, then afterwards dissect the data the iPad maker releases. And once more, the coverage conflates shipment with usage to determine the status of Apple or Android.
Although Apple Tuesday announced selling 19.5 million iPads during the first quarter of 2013 – an improvement from 11.8 million tablets sold during the same three-month period in 2012 – the focus Wednesday was on the iPad shedding market share to Android. But do unit sales trump actual usage? Read More
One day after Apple announced selling 19.5 million iPads during the second quarter, new numbers show the tablet dominated online traffic as late as last month. The device held the market in a stranglehold, controlling 81.9 percent of tablet web traffic in the US and Canada, according to an online advertising network. According to the Chitika Ad Network, the 1.4 percent increase is the first month-on-month advance in the iPad’s share of web traffic since December 2012…. Read More
You would think, given Android’s raw numerical advantage, that app developers would first build for the larger market. However, Apple’s iOS appears to offer companies other, more valuable qualities. Indeed, one need only look to last Friday, when Twitter unveiled its #music service – available initially only to iOS users. Another iOS exclusive, Twitter’s Vine, has yet to hit the Android platform.
Key to why companies are still developing apps first for iOS are findings that Apple’s mobile software is both used more often and the users are more loyal to the apps they download. What is Android’s response: change how such things are measured…. Read More
Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most interesting people for 2013 is packed with profiles of technology leaders. Apple design guru Jony Ive is among those listed, described as a Star Wars’ Obi-Wan leading a team of Jedi employees.
The thread of Apple’s innovation runs through other profiles, including Samsung’s CEO, who is viewed by a former executive of the iPhone maker as carrying on the tradition of Steve Jobs… Read More
More details are trickling in on what to expect of Google’s upcoming unified messaging platform called Babel. Google’s internal documentation and code snippets discovered Wednesday indicate the Babel thing will support media transfers during chat sessions and group chatting ability. More importantly, the service will be available as a native app on both Apple’s iOS and Google’s own Android platform.
Of course, Babel is also going to be available on the web, as a Chrome web app and inside Gmail. The upcoming messaging platform should solve Google’s instant messaging conundrum that confuses users with nearly a doze different chat service that include Talk, Gmail, Google+ Hangout, Google Voice and Chat for Drive.
Even if way overdue, Babel will unify Google’s many messaging platforms into a single service. The Internet giant is likely to formally announce Babel at its upcoming Google I/O conference, which runs May 15-17 in San Francisco… Read More
Here’s an interesting tidbit we found this morning: Microsoft’s Surface tablets could actually be outselling Google’s latest Nexus 10. We understand every scuffle between Google and Apple is actually a proxy for the battle between Android and iOS, so the statement by blogger Benedict Evans caught our eyes. According to Evans, the Samsung-made Nexus 10 likely sold around 1.01 million of the Google tablets by the end of March.
This compares to the 1.5 million Surface tablets Microsoft has reportedly sold – not to mention the ten million iPad mini tablets purchased in just the last two months of the fourth quarter in fiscal 2012. While the latest Nexus tablet is no threat to the iPad, the calculations suggest something more important: strong distribution and a well-defined ecosystem can overcome big-name rivals… Read More
The shift to mobility has certainly hurt the ability to pick clear winners and losers. In the era of beige-box PCs, bean-counters could glance at market share data. But growth of smartphones and apps shattered such easy measurements The battle between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android is more of an optical illusion where the “winner” can triumph in terms of market share, but lose when it comes to revenue.
Still, people want clear winners and losers and Time magazine is just the latest to answer the call. According to the magazine’s website, the winner is – well, that really depends… Read More
A pair of reports issued yesterday really put the growth of mobile in perspective. Currently, the mobile landscape is dominated by two players – Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
While Apple is increasingly favored by companies big and small, Android has become the go-to vector for mobile malware, it seems.
Attacks involving mobile devices has risen dramatically in the space of just one year, skyrocketing to more than 36,000 instances in 2012, up from only 792 cases, according to a security research firm.
Meanwhile, large companies are adopting Apple devices at a faster clip than Android, according to another report… Read More
In another era, Apple and Samsung would be competing gasoline retailers, locked in a war to entice more automobiles to the pump. Update the picture to the 21st century, replace gas with smartphones and you have the modern-day equivalent of a price war playing out in India, according to a Wednesday report.
Android-based Samsung smartphones initially had the majority of the India market to itself. However, now Apple is shaking things up by offering discounts on its iPhone 4 – a move fueling the company’s challenge of rival Samsung.
The South Korean company has responded with discounts on its Galaxy family of products – on top of the current payment plan. Both companies are jockeying to control a market full of potential smartphone buyers… Read More
JellyLock is a jailbreak tweak that allows you to add an Android inspired Lock screen launcher to iOS. The tweak, developed by Max Katzmann, and only available via his beta repo, has proven to be quite popular amongst the jailbreak community — it’s been downloaded over 19,000 times already.
Like its inspiration, Android Jellybean, JellyLock features a lock icon that you can drag to the edge of a circle on your Lock screen to unlock your device. It also features the ability to fully customize the look of the launcher and add up to three custom apps that can be launched directly from the Lock screen. Take a look inside as we go showcase JellyLock in our in-depth video walkthrough… Read More
Are iOS games pressuring children into buying items, sometimes wracking up bills for unsuspecting parents? That’s the focus of a probe underway by the UK government, concerned that in-app purchases may unfairly target children. According to a BBC report, Office of Fair Trading (OFT) wants to hear from parents with the hope games developers will follow laws already on the books to protect children… Read More
Facebook Home just landed on select Android devices so the social networking giant figured it should do a video to highlight some of the features of its controversial new UI overlay. A first-look clip, included right past the break, has Facebook’s Product Director Adam Mosseri discussing Chat Heads, Cover Feed and nice gestures and animations which let you stay on top of what your Facebook friends have been up to, no matter what app you happen to be using at any given moment… Read More
Finally, a survey appears where BlackBerry is leading the big guys. On a twist of the usual polling of which device consumers want to buy, one research firm asked what smartphone would you not be caught dead using. The BlackBerry “crushed” the competition in the ‘don’t want’ department. In fact, 71.4 percent of consumers polled by Raymond James said no feature would get them to use a BlackBerry.
Basic math tells us this corresponds to nearly three out of each four respondents. Additionally, nearly twenty percent said you couldn’t give them an iPhone, or one out of each five. And, just over thirty percent replied they’d never touch a smartphone powered by Google’s Android, or approximately one out of each three… Read More
