Mobile Web Usage Continues to Grow

Internet users are increasingly cutting the cord according to new data from the Pew Internet & American Life project. 40 percent of American adults use instant messaging, e-mail, or the Internet on their phones at least once a day, up eight percent from last year.

The growth here likely has a lot to do with the recent growth of smartphones — Apple’s iPhone continues to sell very well, and Google’s Android platform has gained a lot of momentum over the past several months.

Among all phone owners, 38 percent use their phone to access the web and 34 percent to check e-mail, both up from 25 percent; and 30 percent instant message, up from 20 percent the previous year. The research firm also asked questions on emerging Internet trends.

Researchers found that 23 percent are checking their social networking accounts and 10 percent have updated their statuses via their phone on services such as Twitter. “The mobile user population is becoming more diverse over time and more people are relying on their cell phones as their primary form of wireless connectivity,” researcher Aaron Smith said.

Mobile web penetration is only set to grow dramatically as our youth — who are by far much more connected than their older counterparts — age. Nearly 90 percent of those 18-29 now have a cell phone, and their use of advanced features far outpaces the nation as a whole.

Among that age group, 65 percent access the web, 52 percent check their e-mail, and 46 percent use instant messaging. Social networking is also popular: nearly half log into their profiles while mobile. This is not to say older age groups are not getting into the act: Smith pointed out Pew found significant increases in mobile web usage among the 30-49 year old demographic as opposed to last year.

Dell’s Streak: Is It a Huge Smartphone or a Tiny Computer?

The time I’ve spent with Verizon Wireless’s Droid X has made one thing clear to me: I like great big smartphone screens. As impressively elegant as the iPhone 4′s 3.5″ retina display is, the X’s 4.3″ superscreen makes for larger type and easier tapping. It’s like the difference between a highly refined sportscar and a roomy SUV. I hope phones in both sizes flourish.

And then there’s Dell’s Streak…which makes the Droid X look like a pipsqueak. At five inches, its screen is so expansive that it’s not clear upon first glance whether this device is a phone. It is. Or at least it can be one: The Dell executive I spoke with at a demo yesterday described the Streak as being “capable of making phone calls.” In other words, Dell sees it as a data device that does voice rather than a phone that does data.

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Mossberg on Toshiba’s New Portege

The Walt Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg likes Toshiba’s new Portege R705, a light, reasonably powerful and well-equipped Windows 7 laptop at an attractive price.

Roku Holds a Channel Contest (I’m a Judge!)

Roku’s neat little Internet TV box is also a platform for third-party channels–app-like services which can offer music, photos, social networking tools, and more. The company is taking a logical step to encourage developers to create cool stuff: It’s holding a channel competition and giving away a total of $35,000 in prizes to the creators of the best channels.

Who decides which entries are the best? The first round of judging will be done by Roku owners. Then a final pass will be done by guest judges: Jim Louderback of Revision3 will look at video channels; Michael Endelman of Rolling Stone will handle music; Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny will take care of photos; actor, director, producer, and Twitter superstar LeVar Burton will be responsible for social media; and Roku founder Anthony Wood will choose a special award called Founder’s Choice. Oh, and I’m handling screen savers–should be fun.

The deadline for entries is September 6th, and winners will be named in October. Here are the complete rules.

What Facebook and World of Warcraft Have in Common

Starting later this month, World of Warcraft developer Blizzard will require its Internet forum members to post under their real life names, using an ID system that is otherwise voluntary for players. The goal is to fight flame wars and banish trolls, using the logic that people wouldn’t be so incendiary if everything they wrote on Internet message boards left a searchable trail.

Within Blizzard’s forums, this is a pretty big deal, even for perfectly civil people. The most reasonable concern I’ve heard is that requiring real names would also force peaceful forumgoers to shed their identities as private massive multiplayer gamers, or at least merge those identities with real life. To paraphrase one forum poster, his World of Warcraft habit could be immediately discovered by any romantic interest or potential employer.

Reading that argument, my mind jumped to Facebook’s privacy approach. For entirely different reasons from Blizzard, Facebook has pushed to make its users’ information more public, notably by defaulting status updates to be shared with the world.

The cynical view is that Facebook seeks more money by opening up user data, but chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also has an atypical worldview, which he shared with David Kirkpatrick in “The Facebook Effect.” To wit:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Now, I don’t think Blizzard’s new policy has any broader goal than to stop people from spamming and trolling message boards, but it’s hard not to see a bit of Zuckerberg in Blizzard’s actions. Here’s a game developer saying your real life identify and the one you assume as part of World of Warcraft’s Internet community are actually the same. No more hiding one persona from the other. Facebook, it seems, is guided by the same principle.

Whether we’re talking World of Warcraft or Facebook, the merits of this argument will be debated for years to come.

YouTube Leanback: YouTube That Looks Like TV

The average American watches five hours of TV a day. For YouTube, it’s more like five minutes–a fact which the folks at YouTube don’t like a bit. They think is due to it being too hard to consumer their service in mass quantities. So they’re launching a new service–which the company showed as a sneak peek back at Google’s I|O conference in May–called YouTube Leanback. (Yup, this is YouTube’s second new version of the day: I saw it and the new YouTube Mobile at a press briefing this morning.)

Leanback is an expansion of the basic idea in an earlier service called YouTube XL. It runs in any browser that supports Flash–iPads need not apply–and is designed to make watching YouTube feel a bit like watching a personalized TV channel with a really slick program guide that can be controlled by keyboard. Videos display in full-screen mode, and you press the Up Arrow key to search and the Down Arrow key to reach playback controls, a feed of videos tailored to your interests (which are search results if you’ve just searched) and a browsable directory of videos in major categories.

Unlike the revamped YouTube Mobile, Leanback isn’t trying to give you all the power of standard YouTube in a new format. It’s YouTube stripped down to its bare essentials, and judging from my brief hands-on time with it so far, it’s pretty nifty. Folks who have connected a PC to an HDTV will obviously be intrigued by Leanback–and it will run on Google TV devices once they’re available–but YouTube execs at the briefing said they think people who watch the service on a laptop or desktop PC display will like it, too.

Here’s YouTube’s video demo of Leanback–if you try the service, let us know what you think.

The Best Mobile Version of YouTube is Now YouTube, Not an App

YouTube is launching a new version of its mobile site today for HTML5-capable smartphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. I saw a demonstration at a press briefing this morning, and it looked like the most YouTubey mobile version of YouTube to date, with most of the major features of the full-blown version of the service, playback of videos within the browser (rather than in an external media player) [CORRECTION: I got the previous point wrong], and higher-quality video than is currently provided by the YouTube apps for iPhone and Android. Judging from the demo, it’s extremely snappy for a Web-based app–screens popped up as quickly as they would in a local application.

It also has a user interface that’s designed to be as touch-friendly as possible, without demanding the user to poke at the screen very precisely–Product Manager Andrey Doronichev even conducted part of this morning’s demo using…his nose.

The new YouTube Mobile looks cool, but it’s most interesting as a salvo in the war between local apps (a form of software championed by Apple) and Web-based ones (Google’s bread and butter). When Google writes iPhone apps–like, say, Google Voice–it’s at the mercy of Apple. When it creates browser-based services, it doesn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to distribute them to every iPhone user who cares to give them a try. And with YouTube, at least, it looks like there’s no particular advantage to writing an iPhone app–the Web-based incarnation works at least as well as a piece of native software would.

Even if the unique challenges of getting into the iPhone App Store weren’t an issue, there’s much to be said for YouTube being a Web app rather than a local one. With a Web app, YouTube can roll out new features on as aggressive a schedule as it chooses, instantly putting them in the hands of everyone who uses the service. It can’t do that with the YouTube app for Android, and the one for iPhone is completely out of its hands, since it was written by Apple. (For what it’s worth, a YouTube exec at the briefing I attended said he hopes Apple continues to update its YouTube app, and that YouTube would be happy to help.)

You gotta wonder: How long will it be until Web apps are capable of doing nearly anything a local app can? It’s not going to happen in 2010, 2011, or 2012…but it will happen.

Here’s YouTube’s blog post on the new YouTube Mobile. One surprising note: The company says that it hasn’t finished polishing up the service to work well in Safari on the iPhone 4.

Facebook Users Like… A Lot

The Facebook “Like” has become one of the most recognizable features of the popular social networking site. It’s also used quite a bit — in fact on average we’re hitting that Like button an astounding 65 million times daily, according to statistics compiled by the blog All Facebook. To give you an idea of just how incredible this number is, that means the Like button is used over 750 times every second of every day.

Facebook says that about half of its users log in on every given day, and the site has about 500 million active users according to company statistics. Using those numbers, one out of every four users is liking something somebody’s doing every day.

Up until now, we have not really known the extent of user interaction with Facebook. But these statistics seem to give some color as to why in recent months so much focus has been put on the “Like:” it apparently is Facebook’s most popular feature.

Here at Technologizer, we’ve added the Like button to a majority of posts. There’s been a slow uptick in its use, and we are noticing some traffic as a result. There’s no doubt in my mind that the familiar “thumbs up” will only spread — there is definitely a benefit to getting on your readers news feeds, because content can go viral very easily that way.

It will definitely be interesting in the coming weeks as All Facebook releases more data on user interaction (such as commenting, etc.). What else are we doing when we’re spending — or in some cases wasting — time on the site?

Kin Recriminations, Kintinued

At the briefings I attended on the Kin, Microsoft execs repeatedly made the point that the Kin was for young, highly social people. The subtext, I assumed, was that Microsoft thought it had figured out what those folks wanted, but it was going to be hard for an old geek like me to understand. I thought at the time that I wouldn’t be wildly enthusiastic about the phone even if I was a young, highly social person. And there’s more and more evidence that the Kin represented a massive misunderstanding on Microsoft’s part about what its target market wanted.

Android 2.2 Aces JavaScript Test

I keep saying that JavaScript performance isn’t a definitive indicator of Web-browser performance in general. But these benchmarks by Ars Technica of Android 2.2 on the Nexus One and iOS 4 on the iPhone 4 still show Android trouncing iOS 4 in impressive fashion.

Apple Confirms iPhone 4 Reception Not a Software Problem

It’s been like pulling teeth, and it took journalists mailing AppleCare rather than Apple’s notoriously tight-lipped and selectively-responding public relations department, but we have our answer. That iPhone 4 software update will do nothing to fix the reception problems–it is a hardware issue.

Gizmodo e-mailed AppleCare support three times this week and got the same answer every time, which means that Apple has changed their tone ever so slightly. AppleCare representatives confirmed an antenna interference issue when the phone is held near that infamous lower left-hand corner. The software update would only make iPhone 4′s signal meter more accurate, and not fix the problem.

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Yearning for Color in Black and White Game Consoles

It makes little sense that I miss having Nintendo’s GameCube in my living room. The Wii plays GameCube games, and it has a slimmer profile, but something’s lacking. Frankly, I think it’s the GameCube’s indigo shell.

I came to ponder color in game consoles — that is, in their physical design — while reading about Sony’s plans to release a white Playstation 3 in Japan. That completes the trifecta; with the Wii and Xbox 360 both going black, all three current gaming consoles have reversed polarity, or at least offered the option for customers to do so.

But isn’t there room for game consoles in the middle of the color spectrum? Not if history’s any indication. Take a few minutes to scroll through TheGameConsole.com’s brief retrospective of home gaming systems. You’ll find a few funky outliers — Magnavox’s Odyssey 300 from 1976 was bright yellow — but for the most part game consoles come in black, white or gray.

The exception to this rule is portable gaming. Nintendo’s DSi XL comes in debuted in burgundy, and the DSi launched stateside in black or light blue (white and pink followed). Though Sony’s PSP comes mainly in black in the United States, blockbuster games are sometimes accompanied by limited edition color PSPs.

I think I understand why this happens. Portable consoles are a personal thing, onto which gamers can project their self-image with color. At home, a game console’s best bet is to blend in. Entertainment centers are black tie affairs, so don’t be the only set-top box wearing a Hawaiian shirt, so to speak.

Thing is, game consoles are supposed to be the fun ones, the crazy uncles that do all the fun party tricks. Colorful game consoles may not be totally appropriate, but the living room just feels a little too bland without one.

Firefox 4: Beta 1 is Here

Mozilla has released Beta 1 of Firefox 4–an update with a more Chromelike, minimalist interface, an improved add-on manager (it occupies a full window rather than a teeny-tiny one), speed improvements, more support for emerging Web standards like HTML5 and Google’s WebM video format, and more. (Only the Windows version has the new interface so far–it’ll arrive for the Mac and Linux in a later beta.)

At the moment, I find myself in the weird situation of not having a favorite browser–I leap between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Flock without giving it much thought, and sometimes take side trips to IE and Opera. I am, however, rooting for Firefox 4 to be good: I love browser competition, and I don’t want it to devolve into a battle between Microsoft and Google, which is the likely scenario if Firefox doesn’t stay popular and inventive.

More thoughts to come, but I have to do some troubleshooting–the Windows version I downloaded and installed is refusing to load Web pages. Here’s Mozilla’s blog post on the new version.

Windows 8: What Should Be, if You Ask Me

Last week, a passel of leaked PowerPoint slides appeared to give a sneak peek of Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8. (I should call them “alleged Microsoft PowerPoint slides” or something, but Mary Jo Foley and Ina Fried are accepting them as the real deal–and that’s good enough for me.)

Among the features mentioned: A new technology for superfast startups (a perennial boast of new versions of Windows dating at least back to Windows 98), multiuser login via face recognition, an improved help system, and a tool for restoring Windows to its original settings without munging your data. The company would apparently like to help PC makers build machines that have some of the “it just works” reliability associated with Macs. (It turns out that consumers are willing to pay for a better experience–apparently, the price premium that Apple commands is about more than unicorn tears.)

It would be a mistake to take the leaked slides as a definitive guide to the upcoming OS: Windows 8 is still early in the development process, and the details in the deck were prepared to address early questions from hardware types, not to serve as an overarching prospectus. And Microsoft’s early pitches for forthcoming versions of Windows usually haven’t been a terribly reliable predictor of the products it’s actually shipped–just ask anyone who took the initial scuttlebutt about Vista very seriously.

But thinking about Windows 8 left me mulling over what I’d like to see when the the OS (which may well be called something other than Windows 8) arrives. Here’s my quick wish list–I’m assuming that Win 8 will still be recognizably Windowsesque rather than an utter reimagining for the Web era…

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Apple Records to Release Digital Downloads. Not Those Ones, Though

Wait, Badfinger has opted out of digital delivery until now, too?

HTC’s Android Gamble is Paying Off

Smartphone maker HTC was one of the first manufacturers two years ago to announce devices for the then-unproven Android mobile OS. It was a gamble — there was no guarantee that the new platform would survive, even with Google’s muscle behind it. If HTC’s latest financials are any guide, that gamble is paying dividends (literally!).

The company reported a $268 million profit for the just ended quarter, up a third over last year. It also sold 4.5 million phones just in April — beating current smartphone juggernaut Apple and its iconic iPhone as consumers pulled back from the iPhone 3GS in anticipation of the iPhone 4.

HTC had for much of its corporate life focused on Windows-powered devices. However with Microsoft’s mobile phone division apparently in chaos, and the company’s mobile focus on its Windows Phone 7 operating system due later this year, the company is increasingly turning to Android as its primary operating system.

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