Metrics house hails Apple DOMINANCE of X-Mas phone 'n' slab sales Apple was by far the most popular brand of phones and tablets this Christmas, according to market researchers. A report from mobile app and ad analytics firm Flurry found that more than half of all phones and tablets activated worldwide from December 19 through December 25 were made by the Cupertino giant. Apple's 51.3 per …
As someone who bought a tablet (nVidia's, if you must know) and hasn't bothered to activate it, I wonder how many are like me? WiFi is so ubiquitous, even where I am, there's no reason to pay for a plan. Even where it isn't, I can just turn my phone into an access point.
I'm not sure that activations tell the whole story.
That's a good question. I THINK it means activating a cell plan, but am not certain.
I'm sure it does affect the apple family as well (I did the same thing with my iPad 2 this replaced), but is the ratio the same? How what is the ratios for unactivated tablets? I don't know, but without actually looking at this, these numbers are hard to trust.
You laugh, but revolution it was nevertheless. Did you own a smartphone before the iPhone came out? I did. It was a Palm Tréo. And let me tell you, the iPhone UI was heads and shoulders above everything that existed at the time, and it took four years for the competition to catch up after that headstart.
Since you talk of short memories, let me remind you that hardly anybody owned a phone that could surf the web at the time, business types aside. If you had told people that seven years from now, more than half of the surfing would be done by cell phones, they wouldn't have believed you.
And I've owned android phones for the part three years.
Well,
I had the HTC Wizard (200) as the O2 XDA mini S
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard
in 2005.
We had one each. interface pretty good, if resistive. could use grafitti or handwriting too.
Also interfaced really well to the Windows media player and had an e-reader and proper internet browsing and mail clients.
I think we forget what a great influence HTC have been on the smartphone market.At one time, HTC Desire/Sense WAS the face of (Android) smartphones!
Incidentally, a lot of people at the time did not 'get' why we had palm pilot or windows mobile 'pocket computers' and now everyone has one - what a difference 10 years makes!
(I had the handspring cellphone 'backpack' before that, which enabled palm o/s to go online too!)
I had the HTC too. It was a POS. There was much to like hidden in there, but every diamond was buried in the brown stuff. The volume of brown stuff was made about 10 times worse by O2's skin, which slowed an already slow device to a crawl. Seriously someone in O2 marketing must have employed a bedroom programmer who went on to wholly and completely destroy the device. I cannot convey to anyone how bad the O2 skin performance was. That O2 supplied it was unconscionable. Running vanilla Windows mobile greatly improved things, but still performance was bad. The browser was so bad as to be virtually unusable. The iPhone, which I also bought when it came out, was way, way, ahead in terms of experience. It was never about the features, always the experience.
I used to call the HTC the Soap-on-a-Rope because when the mini USB cable was plugged in (or whatever cable it had - I think it was mini USB), it had exactly the dimensions of a Soap on a Rope.
I owned a Palm Treo too and am still waiting for a calendar app as good as the one on the Treo. Mind you I just had a play with the last Palm I owned, a Centro with Palm OS, and I realised how simple the UI was and how easy it was to run with a single hand. No obscure graphics to try to remember what app lay underneath, neatly classified pages of apps, a real keyboard that I could use without looking and know when the key was pressed. All terrible stuff when now you can push around little pictures and watch magnificent "transitions" before your very eyes. Shiny, all very shiny.
I had a Handspring w/VoiceStream [pre T-Moblie] module. It was excellent I guess I was part of the Hardly Anybody. The iPhone UI wasn't any better than that. The handwriting recognition was amazing.
Exchanging buisness cards using close range IR worked great. I wish Apple had bought out the source code and used many of the features.
Next door had an iPad but they've given up on it. Actually citing the GUI control and lack of entertainment. They've gone back to an Acer Windows laptop and are playing more-or-less standard games.
Another of my relatives (older generation) was recently bought an iPad to keep her in touch on e-mail. It's confusing the heck out of her because of the way that it automatically files stuff, in particular different locations for the pictures that she takes with the iPad and pictures that are sent by e-mail and detached.
The fact remains that when someone comes up with a better user interface that isn't so damn confusing, then Apple's reign will be over. But lets face it, with the complexity of many of the systems we have these days, no one is going to achieve that in short order.
Apple is riding high on their "reputation" for ease of use, etc. but, fact of the matter is, I see growing numbers of shiny new iPads being discarded because people who aren't computer minded, just can't get on with them.
Still doesn't change Apple laughing all the way to the tax-haven, though.
"Another of my relatives (older generation) was recently bought an iPad to keep her in touch on e-mail. It's confusing the heck out of her because of the way that it automatically files stuff, in particular different locations for the pictures that she takes with the iPad and pictures that are sent by e-mail and detached."
I just saved a pic from an email and it appeared in my photo gallery alongside all the other photos. That seems quite logical to me.
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Don't get me wrong here, I am not looking for an argument. But Apple's implementation seems OK to me, sans a proper filing system.
Under the photos app there are 'collections' and within that are 'moments'. I have a 'moment' that includes all todays photos and email saved pics. If I am in the camera app, I tap 'collections' that takes me to the collections page.
I'm not sure how it could have been done much different really, although I am sure there are other ways. But it feels pretty intuitive.
Well, if pictures are detached from e-mails, it could inspect the metadata and put it in the timeline with the rest of them.
The one that kicked this off is that two people went to an event and took pictures with their own cameras, then shared them with each other. Cue obvious problem with the apple.
No sure I agree with the conclusion "more consumers are switching to the larger phone"
Apple's new phone forced everyone buying a new iPhone to the larger screensize. If you wanted the new shiny shiny, then the only option was the larger phone size, or the small phablet size of the 6 Plus.
Personally, it's the thinness and the lightweight of the 6 that i like. If they'd released a 6 Mini with the form of the new phones, but the screen size of the original iPhone, i'd have been more than happy with that.
"Apple's new phone forced everyone buying a new iPhone to the larger screensize. If you wanted the new shiny shiny, then the only option was the larger phone size, or the small phablet size of the 6 Plus."
That'll be besides the 5c and 5s that Apple will still happily sell you (new) so there is this actual thing called choice at different price levels.
But...but...but... They are not a new design. Well no, obviously but they are still very capable phones and probably of not dissimilar performance, in the case of the 5s at least, once the bigger screen of the 6 and 6 plus have been factored in.
Flurry are San Francisco based and now owned by Yahoo! Doubtful that their figures can be either proven or taken seriously. All of these analytics companies are extremely prone to influence and twisting figures to meet a predetermined result. They are in business and need to make money, that is all you need to know. Like the rest of the "analytics" sector, they produce meaningless reports based upon biased and manufactured data.
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