Research firm IDC–a sister company of my former employer, PCWorld–has released its latest estimates of the current and future marketshare of major smartphone operating systems. The headline news: It’s predicting that Android will continue to boom and that Microsoft’s Windows Phone, currently on the ropes, will bounce back to second place by 2015.
Here are IDC’s numbers for 2011 and 2015 (I swiped them from Don Reisinger’s post at Cnet):
For all the rapid improvement that both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have seen, one thing about both mobile operating systems hasn’t changed much at all: their browsers. True, their technical underpinnings have been refined. But featurewise, they haven’t evolved at anywhere near the pace of their counterparts on PCs, where the competition among browsers is never-ending.
That’s one reason why I’m in favor of browser competition being as healthy on smartphones and tablets as it is on computers. On iOS, that’s not going to happen anytime soon–Apple doesn’t permit full-blown browsers with their own rendering engines in the App Store. (Ones that use the Safari engine, such as the excellent Atomic Web Browser, are permissible; so is Opera Mini, which does most of its work on Opera’s servers, not on your phone.) On Android, however, there’s nothing stopping other companies from competing with the OS’s built-in browser. Opera announced new versions of both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android a couple of weeks ago. And now Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 4 for Android.
One of the neater features on many recent smartphones is support for displaying high-def video stored on the phone on an HDTV through an HDMI connection. I just bought an adapter for doing this with my iPad, but using it can be a little awkward: Once you hook up the phone to the TV, you often have to worry about also connecting it to a power source, and to pause or otherwise control the video on the phone you might have to crouch next to the set since connector cables typically aren’t that long.
A nascent standard called MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) seeks to address these issues. It allows the TV to charge the mobile device over the same HDMI connection used to deliver video and other content to the set. The MHL spec (version 1.0 is already out) also lets you use your TV’s remote to control playback on the connected device.
It might take a while for the technology to gain traction since both the mobile device and the HDTV must support it. But at least you wouldn’t have to get a new TV: The MHL Consortium says you should be able to add MHL functionality to your TV through an short adapter cable that hooks into an HDMI port. As for phones and mobile device support, MHL Consortium members include Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image, Sony, and Toshiba, so that’s a decent start in the manufacturing community.
I hope MHL catches on: I hate crouching by my TV.
A little smaller than a hockey puck and triangular in shape, a Tunebug turns pretty much any hard surface into a decent speaker for digital music from any device it can connect to via a standard audio jack or, depending on the model, Bluetooth.
While David Pogue at the Times recently took a look at Bluetooth speakers, they were (as I understood it) conventional speakers. Tunebug’s SurfaceSound technology makes the surface part of the speaker.
The company offers a wired version, the $70 Tunebug Vibe, that connects to a digital audio source (e.g. iPod, laptop, MP3 player) with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Tunebug says the Vibe’s internal rechargeable battery can power the device for up to 5 hours.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the post-PC era. After Steve Jobs repeatedly described the iPad and other Apple products as post-PC devices at this month’s iPad 2 launch, I decided that the post-PC era is already well underway–and that it’s less about the PC going away and more about it being joined by a bevy of other gizmos, from phones to tablets to car-dashboard gadgetry. In other words, the PC is being replaced not by something but by everything. I wrote about that in this TIME.com column.
But after I finished that piece, I kept thinking about the whole subject. And I decided that the PC is, in some respects, going to be replaced by one thing, in a variety of versions.
I don’t like writing about stuff I haven’t tried. Plenty of products that look swell in demos to tech journalists don’t work very well. Sometimes, in fact, they don’t work at all. So I sometimes pass on covering new gadgets, apps, and services until I can spend time with them–even as other sites are expressing opinions based largely on having the items in question described to them in glowing terms by tech execs.
Yesterday, however, I wrote about Color, a new smartphone app that automatically shares photos and videos with people near you. I thought it was a nifty idea. It comes from a company cofounded by Bill Nguyen, whose previous startup Lala was definitely a nifty idea. And I did get to fool around a bit with the app during a demonstration in a real-word setting–a restaurant, which is the sort of place that Color is supposed to be fun and useful. That’s a major step beyond just having it explained via PowerPoint.
I have a confession to make. I am absolutely addicted to HeyTell, and I’ve actually managed to get a good portion of my friends on it. What is HeyTell? Putting it simply, it’s a smartphone app for both iOS and Android which gives you “push-to-talk” capability. Users send messages to one another by recording messages. The company says that these audio files typically are no bigger than an e-mail, allowing them to be transferred quickly.
The fun factor of this app hasn’t escaped mobile phone users: about four million registered users are now on the app. The most surprising thing may be the fact that there is no huge company behind this: it’s merely a husband and wife developer team–Steven Hugg and Jen Harvey.
What happens when you install the new Logitech Squeezebox Remote app from the Android Marketplace and proceed to play around with the interface from a remote location? You scare the pants off anybody who’s still at home and wondering why the little radio box is suddenly playing music all by itself*. That’s what happened this afternoon when I decided to test out the new Android app despite not being anywhere near my Squeezebox. The app loaded beautifully, and apparently it had no trouble communicating with my player. Here’s the text message I received from home shortly afterward: “Your squeezebox just came on by itself. #afraidtogodownstairs”
Between the controversies over gay “cure” apps and police checkpoint tipoff tools, it’s been a tough week for Apple’s App Store. But while it’s pretty clear that an app designed to “cure” homosexuality verges on hate speech, are we courting trouble, turning which apps are “acceptable” and which ones aren’t into a political nannying game?
Take “police avoidance.” Senators Frank Lautenberg, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and Tom Udall are asking Apple, Google, and RIM to scupper mobile applications designed, it seems, to help inebriated drivers dodge police. The senators also dispatched letters to the companies that designed the apps, requesting they either pull them or excise a “DUI checkpoint” feature.
The apps allow users to view realtime updates of checkpoints reported by others, a kind of “citizen awareness” system designed to give drivers who may or may not be inebriated a tactical edge. Think of it as a more sophisticated version of the light-blink signal oncoming driver sometimes give to warn of a speed trap up the road in the other direction.
Back in November, entrepreneur Bill Nguyen–the founder of Lala and other companies–bought himself a cool domain name: Color.com. Now his new startup is announcing a cool free app to go with it: Color, a photo- and video-sharing program for iPhone and Android handsets. It should be available for both platforms tonight.
While I’ve met with the company, received a demo, and played with the app a bit, I haven’t had extensive hands-on time with the service. So this isn’t a review. But I’ve seen enough to know that Color is a fresh take on the seemingly well-trodden concept of photo/video sharing; it’s nothing at all like Flickr or Instagram or Path or other services you might be using. And if it lives up to its potential it could be a big hit.
Like umpteen other apps, Color lets you snap and share photos and videos. But instead of sharing them with people you specify, it shares them with people near you–and if those people are using the Color app to capture stuff, you can see it, too. It all happens in real time in one shared stream, without anyone involved having to do anything except shoot photos. And it creates a group-created visual record of events large (like a concert or a conference) and small (a birthday party or a dinner out).
