Category: Mobile

If you live in the U.S. and own a mobile phone, it’s most likely an iPhone, according to a new study conducted by Nielsen. From January through October of this year, Apple’s little wonder device was the most popular phone in the country.

It beat the BlackBerry 8300 (Curve), which came in at No. 2. BlackBerry’s cumulative share still exceeds the iPhone’s, however, as the touchscreen Storm and entry-level Pearl also placed quite high on the list. Coming in at No. 3 was Motorola’s RAZR V3, despite its considerable age and lack of smartphone features.

By the numbers, the iPhone 3G took 4 percent of cell-phone ownership in the U.S. (it’s unclear how previous models and the 3GS fit into this breakdown), while the Curve had 3.7 percent. The gap was wider between the second- and third-place finishers, with the RAZR taking only 2.3 percent. Meanwhile LG had a strong showing, with four handsets appearing in the top 10, and a cumulative market share of 6.4 percent.

As to web activity on cell phones, Google topped the list of sites accessed via a mobile device, and competitor Yahoo came in second with its Yahoo Mail site. Gmail came in third, and YouTube won out in terms of destinations for mobile video, making it a very solid year for Google in terms of the mobile web.

Notably, no Android devices made the top 10 list of popular devices, but Motorola’s Droid arrived late to the game. Expect to see it, or possibly the Nexus One, somewhere on this list in 2010.

The last few years have been brutal for some of the best-known companies in the handset business. Nokia has watched its dominance erode, Motorola failed to maintain the momentum it created with the Razr, and Sony Ericsson’s prospects look bleaker by the day. But while some venerable phone makers struggle to remain relevant, Taiwan’s HTC — a relative newcomer in an increasingly crowded field — has become a dominant force, reports Wired News. Here’s why:

• Smart about smartphones: HTC was early to recognize a shift in mobile toward a more PC-like model, centered on standard chipsets and operating systems and focused on the Internet. The company initially aligned itself with Microsoft and now is solidly in the camp of Google Android. Meanwhile, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and others dragged their feet. Lesson: See the future clearly.
• In Google we trust: HTC (GigaOM Pro profile) recognized that Android — not Windows Mobile — was likely to emerge as a winner, and then it moved quickly. The company is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance, a Google-led consortium of mobile players centered on the Android operating system. It produced Android’s first handset — T-Mobile USA’s G1 — and has continued to churn out Android phones as the OS picks up traction around the world. Wisely, it plans to ramp up its Android efforts and focus less on Windows Mobile, which is becoming less relevant by the day even as the smartphone space heats up. Lesson: Bet on deep-pocketed winners less hampered by their past.
• Touchscreen crazy. Apple (GigaOM Pro profile) was the first to gain traction with a touchscreen superphone, allowing users to eschew bulky QWERTY keyboards in favor of a more intuitive user interface. HTC saw that touchscreen technology would be the interface of the future long before bigger rivals like Nokia and Sony Ericsson realized it and joined the bandwagon. It has effectively drafted on Cupertino’s momentum with the G1 and, more recently, the Droid Eris from Verizon Wireless. And demand for touchscreen technology will only ratchet up as consumers increasingly demand higher tech in smaller form factors. Lesson: If you can’t invent first, then be a super-fast follower.
• Sense user interface. HTC introduced its new UI earlier this year with the debut of the HTC Hero, which received rave reviews for its software. The Sense UI continues to garner praise and looks to play an increasingly larger role as the company expands its smartphone portfolio. Lesson: Be unique and make your software stand out.
• Effective brand-building. Once happy to churn out handsets that sported carrier brands, HTC has stepped out of the shadows by building its own brand. The company ramped up those efforts in the last few months with its “You” campaign, which touts the personalized features of its handsets. The move not only allows HTC to market a phone as a must-have feature “that gets you,” it also prevents carriers from co-opting its phones with their own marketing campaigns — like Verizon Wireless has done with its Droid initiative. That marketing will be crucial if HTC is continue to grow its mind share among consumers. Lesson: Use marketing to help get people to love your products.

HTC still faces stiff competition in the cutthroat smartphone space, of course. The momentum of Apple’s iPhone continues to grow; Research In Motion has only gained traction in recent months; and a host of other manufacturers are joining the Android bandwagon.

But HTC has impressively built out its worldwide footprint in the last two years, and its ad campaigns are helping the company morph from a simple hardware manufacturer into a major consumer-electronics player. So while some mobile dinosaurs are fighting for their survival, the new kid on the block continues to pick up steam.

You’ve gotta hand it to Google: The company is never shy about throwing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall to see if it will stick. Over the years, it’s introduced countless projects that have gone through long beta cycles only to fail miserably — or achieve a degree of success far below what was expected. Google Docs, for example, was supposed to topple Microsoft Office, and is still predicted to do so, but if that ever happened, I missed it.

Next year, Google will introduce one of its most ambitious projects yet: Chrome OS. There are quite a few misconceptions going around about the new operating system, among them that it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft’s operating system hegemony. It’s not. Chrome OS is targeting netbooks, not desktop and server systems. Still, the operating system includes some bold gambles from Google. Here are four of them.

Return of the thin client. Take a look at this CNet news story, which reports that  “Oracle’s Larry Ellison today resurrected the company that designs a scaled-down desktop system — known generically as the network computer — and announced plans to ship new models in the first quarter of next year.” But note the date: 1999, not 2009. Indeed, Ellison was championing thin clients — computers with few local hardware resources that would get applications and data out on a network — back in the late 1990s.

It was an idea that was subsequently tried many times, and failed. Yet fast-forward to today, and Google’s Chrome OS is placing the very same bet. As company officials noted yesterday: “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud.” Chrome OS netbooks will be thin clients.

All data in the cloud? Many of the smartest people predicting the future of cloud computing are noting that companies want to deploy hybrid public and private cloud applications, namely because they don’t want to have all of their data on a remote network, with little control over it and the potential for lock-in and losses. However, Google’s Chrome OS is a bet that consumer and business netbook buyers will be perfectly happy to trust everything to the cloud. There won’t even be hard disks on Chrome OS netbooks — only solid-state drives. Will users accept such an absolutist model?

Poof goes the OS. Chrome OS is architecturally very different from other operating systems, bypassing many types of boot processes and others in order to optimize performance. Additionally, however, the OS will actually reimage itself if malware is detected. If Google pulls this off, Chrome OS systems may be free of the guaranteed performance decay that Windows systems tend to have over time. Still, users may be wary about an operating system that’s ready to exit stage left at any given moment.

Drivers? Support? Fuhgeddaboudit. Have you ever called Google for Google Docs support? I haven’t either, even though I use the applications. When you release an operating system, though, if it reaches a large audience, that audience is going to want support. Just ask Microsoft, which spent years trying to effectively support and patch Windows Vista.

In addition to excellent support, which I don’t think of as Google’s specialty, users of Chrome OS are going to want their netbooks to work seamlessly and instantly with their printers, digital cameras, smartphones and more. Chrome OS isn’t being built from scratch. It’s Linux-based (the Ubuntu team at Canonical has been helping it take shape), so Google can get a headstart by incorporating existing driver libraries and the like.  But Microsoft spent years trying to catch up to Apple in terms of automatic hardware detection and installation with its Plug-and-Play initiative, and Apple users will tell you that it never quite succeeded. Is Google about to find out what a huge headache it can be to support an operating system? History argues that will be the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Chrome OS will be one of the most interesting tech stories to watch next year. In many ways, though, it’s a Hail Mary.

Text messages and banners on the mobile web are the most noticeable kinds of wireless ads, according to new research from Parks Associates, but mobile video and click-to-call campaigns draw the best response from consumers. Such contradictions underscore why advertisers need to use a variety of tools as they deploy their mobile campaigns.

Text-only ads generated the highest recall rates of 11 types of mobile come-ons, with 49 percent of respondents saying they noticed such pitches all or some of the time, the market research firm said during a webcast today. Ads at the top of a mobile web page were the second-most noticeable, with 45 percent of users recalling them. Click-to-call ads fared worst, with 27 percent of people noticing them, and movie trailers were recalled by only 31 percent.

Fascinatingly, though, the least-noticed ads drew the highest response rates in Parks’ study. Movie trailers drew a 38 percent response rate, outperforming all other ad types, while 35 percent responded to click-to-call campaigns. Meanwhile, text-only ads managed to draw responses from only 26 percent of users, and ads atop web pages generated a 30 percent response rate.

Parks’ figures highlight why advertisers need to have a wide assortment of weapons in the mobile arsenal as they try to target users via their phones. Nearly every phone on the market supports text, allowing advertisers to potentially reach broad swaths of mainstream users via SMS (GigaOM Pro, sub. required), for instance, but advertisers also have a chance to engage tech-savvy consumers via mobile video and to encourage would-be customers to call them directly with click-to-call ads.

Mobile advertising has long underperformed amid excessive hype, and the space will continue to endure growing pains over the next several years. But Parks predicts the North American market is poised to take off as the economy recovers, exploding to $1.5 billion in 2013 from $208 million this year. For those figures to become reality, though, advertisers will need to employ a number of tactics — and pick the right ones based on what they’re trying to sell and who they’re trying to reach.

Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing.

Goals

With Chrome OS, Google had three goals, according to Pichai: speed, simplicity and security. ”Chrome on Chrome OS will be even faster than Chrome [the existing browser],” he noted. “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud. If a user loses a Chrome OS machine, the user should be able to log back into the cloud and retrieve cached data.” Pichai also demonstrated that Chrome OS loads in only a few seconds.

The demonstrations made clear that the OS relies heavily on “panels,” pop-up windows housing web-based applications that are similar to multiple open windows in a browser.  Papakipos, meanwhile, characterized the security model in Chrome OS as very much like the one in the Chrome browser, and unlike the one in standard operating systems: If malware is detected, all cached data is saved; Chrome OS is subsequently re-downloaded, then freshly imaged on a machine. If an application crashes in a tab, only that tab goes down.

Coming to Devices Next Year

The target date for delivery of Chrome OS machines is the end of next year. Google is working with hardware partners to bring Chrome OS to market, Pichai said, and doing so in unusual ways. Chrome OS is not aimed at hard disk-enabled machines, for example, but rather at systems with solid-state drives. Google is also working with hardware vendors on what Pichai described as “slightly larger netbooks,” with full-sized keyboards and large displays. All the open source code is available today, as are all the design documents, said Papakipos.  You can find the source code for the OS and other links here.

So does Chrome OS have a fighting chance in the hot netbook market that it’s squarely aimed at, given that it won’t make its debut on devices until late next year? Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM processors, which as jkOnTheRun has noted, will give it a broad spectrum of coverage on devices, and could make it a significant player in the emerging ARM-based smartbook hardware category. Still, the OS will significantly trail the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which is also squarely aimed at netbooks.

Even though netbooks have already been exploring new low-priced territory for portable computers, Chrome OS-based netbooks could also take prices much lower. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in July that “we do not plan to charge for it, in an open source form,” but that “there may be other ways we can make money from it.” He added that:

“The rough argument is we do things that are strategic because they get people to ultimately use the Internet in a clever and new way. We know that if they use the Internet more, they search more, watch more on YouTube, and we then know that our advertising [will reach them]. We do not require each and every project to be completely profitable or not profitable — we look at them in a strategic context: are they making the web a better place?”

Could Google subsidize Chrome OS-based netbooks in an effort to attract users with low prices and feed them into its search-and-advertising ecosysytem? As is true for most of Google’s projects, feeding that lucrative ecosystem tends to be a high priority for the company. It will no doubt be one as Chrome OS makes its way into devices next year.

Verizon Test

WiMAX Test

Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one.

And before any WiMAX boosters despair, I was told that the local 4G network should continue to improve over the next few weeks, which is why I’m holding off on an all-out review. For a sneak peak, check out the experience in the video below. You can see some freezing in the Hulu video stream during the demo; John Taylor, the Sprint spokesman I interviewed, said the location we were in had only two bars of coverage, which may have been the problem. Given the paucity of devices on display for mobile use and the lackluster network quality so far, I’m still thinking the bet that Clearwire (which is powering the 4G part of the Sprint network) and Sprint made on WiMAX is a bad one, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant.

Laptops are still consuming most of the data on carrier networks that don’t have iPhones on them, but once folks get a touch-based smartphone such as the iPhone (and right now it’s the most popular touch-based smartphone out there), the volume of data used by those devices far exceeds that of laptop usage. In other words, when it comes to the network and data consumption, the device does matter. The report also offers some self-serving data about video consumption on mobile devices that may help carriers save on bandwidth consumption. (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Cisco expects mobile data traffic to increase 63-fold over the next five years, driven in part by video. But while it’s clear that laptops and touch-based smartphones make video consumption easier, the rise may not be as steep as Cisco predicts. The report found that while the average video online is about 5 minutes in length, about half of the people only watch 60 seconds of a video, which means that sending the entire file to a user would be a waste of bytes and bandwidth. Only 31 percent of people watched all of a video, and 30 percent watched less than 10 percent. The rest of the viewers stopped watching somewhere in the middle. In addition to bandwidth consumption, such findings also could help determine where best to place ads. Although I for one hate getting pre-roll ads on my phone because that data consumed counts against my mobile bandwidth cap. But maybe I’m just super cheap.

Regardless, the problem with the iPhone is that it’s both a gateway drug for consumers, who’ve now tasted the mobile web and want more of it, as well as a canary in the coal mine, as it shows carriers what’s likely to happen as other touch-based smartphones become more popular on their own networks. Curtailing video, as suggested by the report, will solve some issues, but once you give folks a taste of broadband, they’re going to want more.