Five Years Ahead

post from Daring Fireball on 09 January 2012 11:04:13 PM. © Daring Fireball

Dan Frommer on Steve Jobs’s claim five years ago today that the original iPhone software was five years ahead of the competition:

If anything, where Apple is the most ahead of Android today —perhaps even 5 years ahead — is on the business and customerexperience sides.
Apple still seems to have the power in its relationships withcarriers, demanding a clean user experience (no pre-installedcrap), control over software updates and the length of its updatepath, a mostly-reliable App Store that makes a lot of money in appsales for developers, distribution through its own retail stores,tight integration with Macs and the iPad, and great devices atgreat prices. Not to mention an extremely profitable businessmodel — selling tens of millions of iPhones per year for a bigprofit. These things seem to be more iffy in the Android camp.

I agree that these are the areas where Apple is most ahead today. But among the phones I’ve got here in my office right now are a Nexus Galaxy and a Lumia 800 — state-of-the-art phones representing two competing platforms. I also have an original iPhone running iOS 2.2. Web pages scroll the smoothest on the iPhone.

I’m not saying the original 2007 iPhone is a better overall device today than the Lumia or Galaxy. It has very little RAM and a much slower processor and you can feel it. But there are aspects of the original iPhone software, animation, scrolling, touch-tracking, that remain superior to any competition. Was everything about the original iPhone five years ahead of the competition? No, no way — especially in terms of hardware. But some aspects of its software were more than five years ahead.

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Speaking of iPhone and Android Market Share
Numbers

post from Daring Fireball on 09 January 2012 11:04:13 PM. © Daring Fireball

Ryan Kim, reporting for GigaOM On the latest US smartphone market share numbers from the NPD Group:

In a CES telecom fact sheet, the research firm said that iOS haszoomed up to 43 percent of sales in October and November, comparedwith 26 percent in the third quarter. Meanwhile, Android?s sharedropped from a high of 60 percent in the third quarter to 47percent in October and November.

I’m chalking this report up as a statistical outlier for now, but maybe this is simply what happens when the iPhone is available on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

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Samsung AdHub

post from Daring Fireball on 09 January 2012 11:04:13 PM. © Daring Fireball

What was it Jean-Louis Gassée said about Samsung versus Google?

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Buying Love

post from Daring Fireball on 09 January 2012 11:04:13 PM. © Daring Fireball

Greg Kumparak at AOL/TechCrunch, regarding the news that Microsoft will be offering $10-$15 bounties to retail salespeople push Windows Phones:

In turn, John Gruber asks: ?If this strategy was on the table, whydidn?t Microsoft start this a year ago?”
Here?s why: because it?s an admission of failure.
Microsoft?s obstacle isn?t an easy one. When people walk into aphone store in search of a new smartphone, the sales dudegenerally offers up two choices: iPhone or Android. Meanwhile, theonly people being handed Windows Phones are the ones who asked forthem right off the bat.
Now, why is this? Is it because Apple and Google are coughing uppiles of cash to get the sales reps to push their phones? Nope —while carriers and specific OEMs might offer spiffs for the salesof certain handsets, I can?t find evidence that Apple or Googlethemselves ever have.

But who cares who is paying the spiffs? Saying that neither Apple nor Google pay them isn’t really a fair comparison if handset makers producing Android phones are. A better way to put it is that there are no spiffs for iPhones, but there are for Android phones. Maybe Microsoft was hoping that handset makers would do this sort of thing for them, but obviously they haven’t. What I’m saying is if they’re willing to do this now, they should have been willing to do it a year ago to gain a foothold in the market as soon as possible.

Obviously this isn’t sustainable in the long run, given that $10-$15 per phone is probably the most Microsoft could be making in licensing fees. But if they were ever willing to do it, it only makes sense to do it as early as possible.

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Unfunny Republicans

post from Daring Fireball on 09 January 2012 10:03:16 PM. © Daring Fireball

Interesting observation from Slate’s John Dickerson: none of the Republicans left in the 2012 campaign are funny.

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Wow: Instagram’s website gets 300M page
views per month

post from Apple on 09 January 2012 08:03:55 PM. © Apple

Photo by Instagram user irenesco; More details below post

From day one, Instagram’s main priority has been building a great experience on its iPhone app — not on the web. But as it turns out, the photo-sharing service has become a huge web destination anyway: Instagram’s website is currently receiving 10 million page views each day, adding up to some 300 million page views per month, co-founder Kevin Systrom told GigaOM.

Such numbers would be impressive for any service, but they’re especially interesting given that the Instagram experience is so tailored to users of the app (currently available only on the iPhone), not viewers on the web. For example: If you don’t have an Instagram account, you can only look at individual Instagram photos people link to — you can’t click around on the site to see users’ full photo galleries or other personal profiles. (There are third-party services such as Hashgram that let you search and see photo galleries.) While photo services such as Flickr have been built to facilitate public web browsing, Instagram as it is now is a mobile service. Yet despite all these access hurdles to the general public, Instagram is fielding some crazy web traffic.

And it’s very possible that Instagram still has a lot of growth ahead. On Friday, the company launched the ability for people to share full-sized Instagram photos within Facebook and create Facebook albums of Instagram photos. Now, this could theoretically cause Instagram’s web traffic to take a dip, but the company’s hope is that it will ultimately lead to more growth, as it could give Instagram more visibility beyond the hip early adopter crowd and increase awareness among mainstream web users. Meanwhile, the debut of Instagram for Android is on deck for 2012, which could lead to a another big user growth spike for the service.

But all this good news is not completely untempered. Competition in mobile photo sharing is stiffer than ever, and a bevy of companies — from Flickr, to Hipstamatic, to Path, to Twitter and beyond — are working hard to dominate in the space. Instagram’s growth so far has been nothing short of amazing; when you add the fact that President Obama, General Electric and many big celebrities have recently caught on to the service, it hints that Instagram may now be hitting a tipping point.

Photo by Instagram user irenesco via Instagram’s 2011 Year In Review blog post

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Vimeo releases apps for iPad, Android, Kindle
Fire & Windows Phone

post from Apple on 09 January 2012 08:03:55 PM. © Apple

Mobile users are increasingly turning to their handsets to watch and share videos while they’re on the go. That’s one reason why IAC-owned video site Vimeo is going mobile in a big way with the release of apps for Android, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Microsoft’s Windows Phone marketplaces that will let users upload, share and view videos on their mobile devices. It’s also rolling out an iOS app built specifically with the iPad in mind.

The new mobile apps follow the release of Vimeo’s iPhone app, which was launched last spring. Vimeo already supported mobile devices with an HTML5-friendly website and universal player that were accessible from most modern handsets. And it has a sizable mobile audience with between 10 and 15 percent of its monthly views occurring on mobile devices.

But the new apps will give users more flexibility and features than accessing the site through a mobile browser. In addition to watching videos, users will be able to like, comment on and add videos to their “Watch Later” queue. Users will also easily be able to share those videos with their social graph with built-in sharing support for networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and WordPress, as well as through email and SMS. They can also download their own videos from the site into their own camera roll.

More importantly, they’ll be able to upload videos from their mobile devices, which users are increasingly using as their primary photo and handheld video cameras. They will also be able to replace videos and edit any titles, descriptions tags, etc. that they’ve added to their own videos directly through the apps.

According to Joe Schmitt, lead mobile developer at Vimeo, the introduction of new apps to complement its mobile website will give users a better way to access and upload videos while on the go. “We feel that apps we’re giving users are the best way to create a great user experience,” Schmitt said in a phone interview. With mobile becoming ever more important in the video space, that will be a big step forward as Vimeo courts new users.

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Study: iOS set to win share as smartphones surge

post from Apple on 09 January 2012 08:03:55 PM. © Apple

Apple is set to reap the benefits of increased consumer interest in smartphones, according to a new study by market research firm Yankee Group. A survey of 15,000 U.S. shoppers found that Apple and Google will dominate, with Apple’s winning back share of the smartphone market over the next six months.

It is a trend that already appears to be in motion: Ryan Kim wrote about how, according to the latest NPD numbers, Apple’s iOS mobile platform made big strides in closing the gap between itself and Android in recent months. The Yankee Group survey anticipates that this will continue: While a quarter of those it surveyed already own an iPhone, 35 percent said they planned on getting one within six months’ time. The Yankee Group’s study echoes results from ChangeWave that we wrote about earlier, but it covers a wider user base, time period and focus on platforms instead of individual handset makers.

Android is and will remain strong in terms of consumer interest, according to the survey, but it won’t put any more distance between it and Apple. Nearly 40 percent of respondents indicated that they already own an Android device, but just the same amount said they planned on getting one within the next six months; in other words, Android won’t drop share to Apple if people stay true to their buying plans, but it won’t expand its current reach in the U.S.

The real losers, however, are the smartphone platforms that account for less than 20 percent of today’s market share, since, according to the survey, their percentage will only continue to slide. Yankee Group predicts that only 12 percent of respondents intend to buy a BlackBerry in the next six months, despite that 20 percent of those surveyed already own one. Interest in Windows Phone devices similarly drops from a current high of 14 percent to only 9 percent’s intending to purchase one within six months’ time. Of course, this is based on consumer perception of the field as it stands: New devices, changes to software and pricing could always alter buying plans.

Overall, Yankee Group predicts that smartphone ownership should increase, since only 47 percent of those polled currently own one but 58 percent indicated intent to purchase one within the next six months. Yankee Group expects the smartphone market to surge to 175 million devices in the U.S. by 2015, up from 91.4 million as of Nov. 2011.

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Siri: Enabler of more data consumption, not the
root cause

Last week, Arieso released a report stating iPhone 4S users were consuming twice the data as their iPhone 4 counterparts. Arieso placed the blame squarely on Siri, the new personal assistant that allows users to initiate searches and basic phone actions through voice command. Siri, however, is just a scapegoat. Siri may be the mechanism for more searches on the iPhone 4S, but the application itself consumes a miniscule amount of data.

I reached out to Vlad Sejnoha, CTO of Nuance Communications, which provides the automated voice recognition technology that powers Siri. Sejnoha said he couldn?t comment on Siri specifically, but generally, network voice recognition platforms send highly compressed audio files from the phone to network-based servers any time a voice command is initiated. Nuance?s own Dragon Go voice-search app usually only sends tens of kilobytes per voice prompt, and the amount of data sent back to the device is even tinier, since Dragon Go doesn?t have to futz around with an audio recording on the return path, Sejnoha said.

However, that doesn?t mean Siri isn?t driving more data usage even if it isn?t draining bandwidth itself. Sejnoha said voice-driven user interfaces and natural speech recognition are encouraging more and deeper searches for mobile web content simply because the technology is easier to use on the go than the usual finger-tap methods. If customers are using Siri to get to video sharing and streaming sites or using it to find applications to download more often and more easily, then you would expect a big increase in data usage.

?Invoking searches or media consumption may require greater bandwidth, but no more than if these actions were initiated in conventional ways, and the size of the data ‘payload’ can vary immensely depending on what the user is doing,? Sejnoha said in an email.

Still, it?s hard to imagine those Siri-driven searches are producing a doubling of data traffic to the 4S versus the iPhone 4. You can use Siri to easily get to YouTube or Pandora websites, but Siri can?t open the YouTube or Pandora iOS apps, which are infinitely more useful for actually streaming video and music. Many of Siri?s most tantalizing features ? setting reminders, dictating text messages, initiating calls, getting weather and schedule updates ? would consume only the most miniscule amount of network data. The bevy of new features in the iPhone 4S, from iCloud over-the-air music and data synchronization to its more powerful processor, all could be contributing to an explosion in data usage much more than Siri.

It?s more accurate to look at Siri as another of Apple?s long line of user interface innovations — the original iPhone touchscreen, the first Safari microbrowser and the concept of the mobile app ? that have made it subsequently easier for smartphone users to interact with Internet services on a tiny device.

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MacBook Air shipments jump as notebooks plummet
overall

Apple’s MacBook Air continues to be a hot seller according to the latest sales estimates coming out of Apple’s Asian supply chain. Shipments of the ultra-slim notebook were up to 1.2 million units in the fourth calendar quarter of 2011, up from 1 million the quarter before.

The MacBook Air was the only notebook that saw increased shipments during the quarter, according to Digitimes Research, which said on Monday that notebook shipments slowed by 8.7 percent sequentially to 48.59 million units worldwide during the quarter.

In Apple’s last quarterly earnings report, it reported 4.89 million Macs sold, meaning if we use Digitimes’ estimate of 1 million MacBook Airs sold, the notebook represented roughly 20 percent of the total. We know Apple’s iMac is also performing well, but it’s logical to assume the Air is growing in influence in terms of the overall Mac picture. Expect that trend to continue, since analysts expect the so-called Ultrabook category to explode in the next six years.

Apple doesn’t usually break out sales of individual Mac lines from the overall Mac category total, but it will still be interesting to see if it has any official comment on the success of the Air during its quarterly earnings conference call on Jan. 24.

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