At TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing today, 8 Securities showed off a financial dashboard for trading that’s different than anything that I’ve seen. Simple to use, social and very fast. Take a look.
This is a great post from the understatement. Check out the chart below on the fragmentation of OS’s on Android devices:
This chart represents the manufacturers support of the latest OS for each smartphone device. And it doesn’t look pretty for Android devices.
So why don’t Android devices get updated?
According to Michael Degusta, “Obviously a big part of the problem is that Android has to go from Google to the phone manufacturers to the carriers to the devices, whereas iOS just goes from Apple directly to devices.”
“In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.”
This is what many Microsoft groupies have been waiting for. Can the Microsoft/Nokia alliance pull MSFT out of the past in the smartphone business? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Steven Overman, who heads up Nokia’s marketing strategy, said during the keynote that Nokia needs to drive demand for the product by making these consumers lust for for the Lumia devices. I’m not sure what’s to lust for, does it seem that revolutionary?
The problem I see with this is the number of apps. Compared to the 600,000 iOS apps and the 500,000 apps in the Android Market, the “thousands” of apps in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace are nearly negligible. Since apps are the main selling point for smartphones, that’s a big problem.
But according to John Biggs via Techcrunch, he writes:
By breaking with MeeGo and Symbian, Nokia has ensured that IT departments will look at Nokia phones seriously again. Windows Phone may not seem popular, but rest assured that once Windows 8 hits it will be an important part of the Microsoft ecosystem. As fanboyish as we are here, I well understand the impact of Windows on the tech landscape and once Windows 8 and Windows Phone merge, Nokia’s profile will improve immensely.
We’ll see, MSFT is way behind in this game.
The the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor claims “A few years from now, most every single person at Facebook who works there is going to be working on mobile almost exclusively.”
Should CTO’s take note. I think yes.
It seems that VC’s are also telling portfolio companies to focus on mobile first, web second.
Here’s more evidence of the mobile/social revolution.
comScore estimates that nearly one-third of all U.S. mobile users are now accessing social media services, and that close to 40 million Americans are doing so on an almost daily basis.
Mary Meeker made some interesting points at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday in San Francisco. One to note is outlined in the graph below.
Take a look at the acceleration of the iPad versus the iPhone and iPod, shown in shipments per quarter. Apple currently controls 74% of all tablets sold in the United States, said Tim Cook at a recent Apple Keynote.
I find this hard to believe, but facts are facts. I like my iPad, but it doesn’t seem as useful as a smartphone. My iPhone is always with me, my iPad isn’t. And I can’t replace my desktop with an iPad, I’ve tried. But maybe that’s because of what I do for a living.
Now, checkout this slide on Android acceleration.
When you compare Android and iPhone shipments, the acceleration of the Android platform dwarfs the iPhone.
Here’s her complete presentation.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo yesterday at a Web 2.0 dinner stated that “the recent iOS 5 Twitter integration has notably increased signups 3x”.
This means that many of the companies that have popular iPhone apps have already implemented the iOS 5 Twitter features.
That’s what I thought at first. But after further investigation, I realized that most of these additional signups are probably coming from users simply configuring the Twitter settings that are now baked right into iOS 5. From the Settings app you can easily setup your Twitter account.
Additionally, from a developers point of view, Twitter’s single sign-on feature alleviates a lot of issues. Twitter integration is now a piece of cake. Check out this blog article on how simple it is to integrate Twitter into an app under iOS 5. This makes the older solutions look like a nightmare, using OAuth or packages like MGTwitterEngine.
I think the most impressive figure noted in this article is the fact that 25 million Apple devices are now running iOS 5.
This means 21 million people have gone through the painful task of attaching their device to a PC to update the OS.
I wonder if, like me, they were hoping for Siri as part of the upgrade.
Xyologic, a startup that searches and indexes through App Store data, recently published some interesting data regarding the App space.
According to Xyologic projections, by August 2012 there will be an equal number of apps available for the Android as there are for the iPhone, at roughly 680,000 apps available for both platforms.
Also, according to Xyologic, the total app downloads for Android will surpass the iPhone sometime in May 2013, at roughly 84 billion.
All of this makes a lot of sense with Apple’s 3 devices competing against Androids many manufacturers and many devices.
I wonder if Apple’s free iPhone 3GS will make any impact on these numbers.
I was all excited last night when I downloaded iOS 5.0 for my iPhone 4. I was really wired to use the new Siri technology, but to my dismay apparently Siri is not available for the iPhone 4, only the 4S.
I guess it makes sense for Apple to leave out this feature for “legacy” phones. Here’s a thread from the Apple support community on the topic. It makes me want to upgrade when before last night I was perfectly happy with my iPhone 4.
If your phone is jailbroken, there’s good news on the way. The popular iPhone hacker known as iH8sn0w and John Heaton (@Gojohnnyboi) have started to work on porting the Siri feature on iPhone 4.
Some are also saying that Siri won’t work on the iPhone 4 because it really needs the dual-core A5 chip.
