Mobile
Social Gaming Network OpenFeint Coming to Android
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5581997/social-gaming-network-openfeint-coming-to-android
Good news for Android users who are miserable due to the limited game selection on their devices: Social gaming network OpenFeint is coming to Android and it’ll hopefully encourage development of more games for the mobile operating system.
OpenFeint To Bring World’s Largest Mobile Gaming Developer Community To Google’s Android Platform
Mobile Social Games Network’s Expansion to Android will Accompany Titles from Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, And Hudson Entertainment.
Burlingame, CA – July 8, 2010 – OpenFeint, the leading mobile social gaming ecosystem for iOS devices, today announced that its 9,200 member game developer community with thousands of published games will soon have a complete solution to thrive in the Android apps economy. Launching later this summer, the company’s complete solution will include its de facto standard SDK, a game discovery store and mobile payment options. It will also include high quality content from leading publishers Astraware, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, Hudson Soft and independent studios like Distinct Dev (Moron Test), ustwo (Dot Dot Dot), Pik Pok (Flick Kick Football) and RocketCat Games (Hook Champ).
With a strong set of partners at launch, OpenFeint’s ecosystem provides Android users the most compelling way to discover and buy high quality online games. In addition to incorporating Google Checkout and leading community features into its developer SDK, OpenFeint will extend its wildly successful Game Spotlight discovery app to Android. Interested parties can register at www.openfeint.com/developers/android for details as they emerge.
At the same time, OpenFeint continues to invest in and expand its efforts on Apple’s iOS devices and maintains the largest mobile social gaming ecosystem on that platform with over 28 million users and a presence in over 2,200 live games.
“Android is an evolving gaming platform that will greatly benefit from OpenFeint’s industry leading online gaming and community technologies,” said Niccolo de Masi, CEO of Glu Mobile. “OpenFeint is leading the charge for game developers on Android, helping simplify and improve the game discovery and purchase process for players on the platform.”
OpenFeint also announced that its expansion to Android is backed by a recent strategic investment by leading Chinese online gaming company, The9. This marks the path for a significant expansion for the company as it rolls out its cross platform strategy. As always, OpenFeint will remain open source and free for both developers and players.
“OpenFeint continues to demonstrate leadership and innovation in building community technologies which drive considerable discovery and monetization for publishers,” said Jason Loia, COO of Digital Chocolate, one of the industry’s most highly-rated publishers of mobile and social games. “We are excited about their entry into the Android ecosystem and we look forward to partnering with them to bring the best gaming experience to the Android platform.”
With over 160,000 Android powered devices shipping daily, Google’s mobile platform is growing rapidly and leading game developers recognize the tremendous opportunity to bring quality content to the platform.
“This is a big step for OpenFeint and an even bigger step for Android as it becomes a serious mobile gaming platform,” said Jonathan Goldberg, Analyst at Deutsche Bank Equity Research. “OpenFeint ushered in mobile online gaming for iOS devices and we think they’ll lead the revolution on Android.”
OpenFeint also re-affirmed its continued commitment to the Apple iOS device community where thousands of games are in development and several games are approved in the App Store daily with OpenFeint enablement.
Pew’s 2010 Mobile Access survey shows more people are doing more things on their phones
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/08/pews-2010-mobile-access-survey-shows-more-people-are-doing-more/
As smartphones continue to extend their pocket-swelling domination of the mobile market, it should come as no surprise that people are less worried about talking and more concerned with doing other stuff on their handsets than ever before. But, still, if you want some hard numbers to make you feel better about making such conclusions, the Pew Research Center‘s 2010 Mobile Access survey has ‘em. Compared to April of last year, 76% of people take pictures with their phones, up from 66%, and over a third play games, up from about a quarter. A third of people now play music on their phones, compared to 21% in 2009, but the biggest jump is in recording video: 34% vs. 19% before. Given the number of new movie-capturing phones released over the past year, it’s easy to see why. So, no shocking numbers here, but sadly there’s no indication of the one usage statistic we think might actually be falling: making calls.
Pew’s 2010 Mobile Access survey shows more people are doing more things on their phones originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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More Kin Dirt Surfaces
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5581704/more-kin-dirt-surfaces
If people had talked this much about Kin while it was still alive, it might have stood a chance. Oh well! The battle continues to rage over who gets the write the final chapter in Kin’s history.
Mini-Microsoft has been a prime staging ground for these kinds of comments, with accusations aplenty being flung back and forth by current and former Microsoft employees. A sampling from today’s batch shows that Andy Lees is again a popular target:
All I can say as a former Windows Mobile employee who is now working for a competitor in the phone space is that this is good news for the rest of us. [...] Personally I quit because of the frustrating management and autocratic decision style of Terry Myerson and Andrew Lees. The only exec in the team myself and other folks respcted was Tom Gibbons who is now sidelined. Lees and Myerson don’t know consumer products or phones. Gibbons at least knows consumer product development. We often talk about how Andrew Lees still has a job but Microsoft’s loss is a gain for the rest of us.
And that the folks at Danger, acquired by Microsoft to help bring Kin to life, were confounded by the sudden perceived incompetence around them:
You are correct, the remaining Danger team was not professional nor did we show off the amazing stuff we had that made Danger such a great place. But the reason for that was our collective disbelief that we were working in such a screwed up place. Yes, we took long lunches and we sat in conference rooms and went on coffee breaks and the conversations always went something like this…”Can you believe that want us to do this?” Or “Did you hear that IM was cut, YouTube was cut? The App store was cut?” “Can you believe how mismanaged this place is?” “Why is this place to dysfunctional??”
Please understand that we went from being a high functioning, extremely passionate and driven organization to a dysfunctional organization where decisions were made by politics rather than logic.
So: we get it. All is not right with Microsoft’s corporate culture, which may spell trouble for Windows Phone 7. But in the meantime, can’t we just let sleeping Kins lie? [Mini Microsoft]
On Facebook, A Wal-Mart Employee Is More Valuable Than A Goldman Sachs Employee
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-ads-2010-6
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In the real world, using salary as a measure, a Goldman Sachs staffer is worth much more than a Wal-Mart employee. An average Goldman Sachs employee is paid a bonus of $500,000, while the average Wal-Mart employee salary is $20,000.
On Facebook, the opposite is true. In the eyes of an advertiser, a Wal-Mart employee is worth nearly twice as much as a Goldman employee, according to Facebook’s suggested advertising bid prices.
Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat looked at Facebook’s suggested advertiser bid price on per category basis. What she found is pretty interesting.
As you can see in this chart, the most expensive company to target is Facebook. The next most expensive is Wal-Mart. Goldman and Bain employees are duking it out for the cheapest.
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iPhone OS Still Triples Android’s Market Share
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5556346/iphone-os-triples-androids-market-share-for-now
Nielsen’s new “iPhone vs. Android” report offers up the latest numbers in the big mobile battle: Both platforms have loyal users, but Apple’s still on top by a long shot.
They don’t come as much of a surprise, but with all the talk of Android’s surging popularity and explosive app growth, Nielsen’s numbers do serve as a reminder that Apple still has a comfortable lead. Versus Android, that is—nationally, the iPhone’s still in second place, with a 28% market share compared to RIM’s 35% (Android has 9%; Windows Mobile has 19%).
But it will be interesting to see how things shake out over the course of the year. With the new iPhone dropping in a matter of weeks, prospective smart phone buyers (23% of U.S. mobile customers now have them) will be faced with the choice of hopping on the Apple wagon or exploring the multitude of Android options. As Matt noted in his Froyo review, Android is as polished as it’s ever been and is likely to improve even more in coming months. And while it’s hard to top the iPhone hype machine, reception to early versions of iPhone OS 4 hasn’t exactly been rapturous.
Another Nielsen graph shows that both platforms enjoy loyal users—80% of iPhone users want another iPhone; 70% of Android users want another Android phone—with Android’s group slightly more curious about the iPhone than the other way around. But in my experience, it seems like things are trending to the opposite. With Android’s app offerings increasingly matching up with the iPhone’s, I’m seeing more and more people considering Android a viable option for themselves, as well as one they can recommend to others.
Though still on top, Blackberry’s loyalty is only 47%, and as current Bold owner, I’m definitely of the 53% that’s planning on jumping ship when it comes time to buy my next phone. I’m just not sure what ship I want to jump into. [Nielsen via CNET]
IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/idc-and-gartner-award-smartphone-growth-prizes-to-apple-and-goog/
Get ready to rumble, the latest Gartner and IDC smartphone numbers are out to give us a pretty good idea of how things shape up globally. Remember, IDC measures vendor shipments while Gartner measures actual handset sales to end users. So what does the data tell us? Well, to start with, in terms of smartphone devices, Gartner claims a 48.7% increase in smartphone sales of 54.3 million units in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009 — IDC pegs growth at 56.7% on 54.7 million units for the same period. Both estimates easily outpace the 17% or 21.7% growth in worldwide units of mobile phones moved according to Gartner and IDC, respectively.
IDC’s list of top 5 smartphone device makers (pictured above) has Nokia at the number one spot repeating its 39.3% share as it did in Q1 of 2009 while RIM is down slightly from 20.9% in 2009 to a 19.4% market share in 2010. Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) more than doubled its device shipments in the last year as HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) all managed to increase their shares on higher volumes.
Regarding smartphone OS market share, Android’s global numbers echo its success in the US jumping from a 1.6% market share to 9.6% in just one year. Gartner claims that sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year to displace Windows Mobile in the top 5 for the first time. Apple’s iPhone OS also saw growth from 10.5% in 1Q09 to 15.4% in 1Q10 as both RIM (down from 20.1% to 19.4%) and Symbian (down from 48.8% to 44.3%) dropped. See the OS numbers broken down into a no-nonsense table after the break.
Continue reading IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google
IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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How-To View Gmail for iPad on Your Regular Computer – Chrome and Safari
Type the following User Agent String according to the screen shots for Chrome and Safari
Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10
For Safari (see screenshots below)
Go to Prefrences -> Advanced Tab
– make sure “Show Develop menu in menu bar” is checked
Go to Develop -> User Agent -> Other
- in the popup window, copy and paste the User Agent string from above and click OK
Log into Gmail — voila
For Chrome
Go to Windows Start Menu -> Run -> Type “cmd” and click enter to get to a command line window
- from your current directory you need to cd (change directory) into the directory where your chrome installation resides; for example C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR NAME]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application>
- once in this directory, you type chrome.exe -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″
- once the application launches, log into Gmail — voila
How the iPhone Could End Up In Second Place
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5504622/how-the-iphone-could-end-up-in-second-place
Here are the US mobile web traffic figures for iPhone OS and Android, getting ready to collide: Android, on its way up; iPhone, on its way down. So when will Android overtake the iPhone? Try next month.
AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report sees a predictable continuation of what we’d seen before from the ad tracking firm—specifically, that Android is on a serious tear, thanks in no small part to the massive success of the Droid. But before, the iPhone seemed unassailable. Now, it’s about to get trumped by Google’s OS, on terms it defined. In the US, that is. The rest of the world’s still warming to Android.
Modern smartphones are as much browsing devices as they are phones, so while mobile traffic isn’t the best way to measure total sales for a device, it’s a solid way to measure a device’s success, both in terms of how many people are using it, and how it’s getting used. The iPhone is a browsing device. So is the Pre. So are all the Android phones. But Windows Phones? BlackBerrys? Symbian devices? As popular as some of these are, they’re obviously not being used as smartphones.
The other key piece here, and one that’s not obvious from looking at the chart, is total browsing: It’s up. Way up. 193% up, in just one year. So when I talk about the iPhone falling to second place, I’m not declaring a loser—just a platform that’s winning more slowly. (Note: AdMob was recently, and generously, acquired by Google, though their advertising solutions are still cross-platform.) [Ars Technica]
Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/23/gartner-apple-android-and-rim-winners-in-2009-smartphone-os-g/
Gartner just released its annual numbers for worldwide mobile phone sales to end users in the year known as two thousand nine. Looking at smartphone OS market share alone, Gartner shows the iPhone OS, Android, and RIM making the biggest gains (up 6.2%, 3.4%, and 3.3% from 2008, respectively) at the expense of Windows Mobile (down 3.1%) and Symbian (down 5.5%). Although Gartner says that Symbian “has become uncompetitive in recent years,” (ouch) it concedes that market share is still strong especially for Nokia; something backed up by Nokia’s Q4 financials and reported quarterly smartphone growth of 5%. Regarding total handsets of all classifications sold, Nokia continues to dominate with 36.4% of all sales to end users (a 2.2% loss from 2008) while Samsung and LG continue to climb at the expense of Motorola (dropping from 7.6% to 4.5% of worldwide sales in 2009) and Sony Ericsson. See that table after the break or hit up the source for the full report.
Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Windows Mobile’s Incredible Death Spiral
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/YplxNHBy8r0/windows-mobiles-incredible-death-spiral
Before Windows Phone 7 was even an embryo of a concept, Windows Mobile was king: It powered nearly half of smartphones in use, a led the industry in features. Then, in 2007, things started to go wrong. Very, very wrong.
Silicon Alley Insider has charted Windows Mobile’s platform share, which is to say the proportion of users who were using it at a given time, over the last four years. For showing decline, figures like these are more telling than sales—they mean that, for years now, people haven’t been buying Windows Mobile phones nearly as fast as they’ve been ditching them.
More interesting than what it shows is what it projects: Windows Mobile 6.x phones have been collectively kneecapped by Microsoft’s announcement yesterday, and rendered spectacularly unbuyable outside of enterprise circles. In other words, that line—the one that dragged down past RIM in 2008, and that dropped past Apple last year—is going to keep plunging for the rest of this year, until Windows Phone 7 tries to haul it back up. And until then, it’s only going to get steeper. [Silicon Alley Insider]
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