Smartphone Wars: iPhone Trade-Ins

 

 

On the heels of recent news that Samsung has overtaken Apple as the largest Smartphone manufacturer, one is seeing more aggressive marketing. There was a recent deal on Groupon in Hong Kong, which offered a Samsung Galaxy SIII in return for an iPhone 4S plus 90 US dollars. While this seems quite a steal, there were not many takers for this deal. This implies that either folks are not keen on the switch (iPhone 4 s to SIII), or that there are better (cheaper!) trade-in offers available in the Hong Kong market. Note that long-term contracts are not in vogue in this market, hence contract lock-in can be plausibly ruled out as the cause for low uptake of this offer.

 

Image via Groupon (Hong Kong)

 

Free 3G connection with Android phones sold in India

Reliance Communications, India‘s second largest telecom operator, has announced that all Android smartphones sold in India for the next two years, will come with a free bundled 3G connection (albeit, with a 1GB limited download capacity). This marks the first major competitive move by a telco in this fast growing market segment, to grab market share by providing free connections. This will help moving consumers from the slower and cheaper 2G data connections (which cost 2$ a month for 2.5 gb) to the more pricier 3G connections (which cost $15 a month for 3 gb).

Android currently rules in India’s small, but fast growing smartphone segment. With its large installed base of cellphone subscribers, it offers a huge market opportunity, which Google seems determined to tap.

Image via Economic Times

 

RCOM and Google have entered into a two-year deal according to which all Google-endorsed android mobile devices from companies like Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and LG will come with the telco’s third generation, or 3G, mobile connection with 1 GB of free downloads for the first six months.

 

Read more at Google-endorsed Android smartphone will come bundled with a Reliance Communications connection – The Economic Times.

History of iOS and Android

This infographic, by mylookout.com, details the history (release milestones) of the iOS and Android operating systems. The data includes release milestones, number of activated smartphones using each OS and app availability over time.

See the original infographic here.

Box reports huge Enterprise Android growth

Box.net (which is moving from being a cloud based storage to a cloud based enterprise sharing and collaboration platform) looked at its 8 million users and developed the below infographic – a key highlight is that mobile adoption of box grew nearly 9 times in the past year and though iOS still rules the roost, Android adoption by businesses has seen a huge boost (10x for tablets, 4.3x for phones). India remains Android land – a majority of mobile Box users access the platform using Android devices.

Image by Box

See the original infographic here.

Related articles

• More Cloud Wars: Another 50gb giveaway by Box.net (abhishekkathuria.wordpress.com)
• Box.net’s Enterprise Strategy (abhishekkathuria.wordpress.com)

Devs, here's your 6 month window for mobile app success

Reblogged from GigaOM:

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a crystal ball to predict the potential success for a mobile app? Unfortunately, there isn't (yet) but the next best thing might be here: A look at the success rate over 6 months from more than 100,000 Android(s goog) apps in 200 countries.

In-app monetization exchange inneractive worked with AppsGeyser to find out the percentage of apps that gained wide adoption within a half-year of launch, noting that the chances of getting 50,000 downloads has diminished over time.

Read more… 52 more words

An analysis of Android Apps shows that the best way to combat the App Deluge is to create a network of Apps that cross-promote each other. In other words, with App Discovery becoming more and more difficult (especially in the Android ecosystem), if customers find one of your apps, make it count by cross-selling your other apps to them!

The App Economy

This infographic summarizes some key points about the App Economy, such as the half a million US jobs created by the App Ecosystem, the key players in the ecosystem and that more than 50% Android apps are free versus just 25% for iOS apps.

Via Frugal Dad

See the original infographic here.

More Cloud Wars: Another 50gb giveaway by Box.net

Box.net is giving away another 50gb free to its existing and new users. This coincides with their launch of the Box for Android app, which introduces bulk upload, commenting and collaboration features. To get this free upgrade, users have to access their Box.net account from an Android device.

 

box.net (Photo credit: thejedi)

 

A note – iOS users who availed of the free 50gb offer last year cannot use this offer to get a 100gb account.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read more at Android Users Get 50GB FREE. Get Your #Box50GB and Enter the Box Mobile Giveaway | The Box Blog and Bonjour! Box for Android Adds New Collaboration Features and a 50GB Upgrade to Boost Productivity | The Box Blog.

 

 

More recap of news from Google

Besides the Great Google Data Merge, the past couple of months have seen some other interesting news about Google. It was business as usual as Google announced the discontinuation of several products and the introduction of some others. Google Sky Map was open-sourced into a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University (similar to the App Inventor model with MIT), and Picknik and the Social Graph API were retired. On the other hand, Google released updates for the Google Bar and Google Docs for Android and introduced Chrome for Android. There was also the small issue of receiving approvals from the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice for its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility.

 

 

 

MIT launches App Inventor Beta

Google‘s App Inventor has been reborn. The MIT Center for Mobile Learning has announced the opening of the Beta version of App Inventor to the public.

App Inventor provides a graphical interface for programming, thereby allowing users to create Android apps without the need for fancy programming skills. While Google discontinued its support for App Inventor on December 31, 2011, it tied up MIT to opensource the project.

Image via Wikipedia

MIT’s involvement in the project has made it more class-room and educator friendly. MIT also plans to add several learning resources to its APP Inventor website.

App Inventor will now be suitable for any use, including running classes.

A list of education resources for App Inventor can be found here.

We will also be developing more resources and support for using App Inventor as a learning tool. We look forward to working with you over the coming months to build the community of App Inventor educators.

Read more at Announcing: MIT App Inventor Open Beta Preview | App Inventor Edu.

Related articles

• With this tool, even you can write Android apps (gigaom.com)
• Google Leaves App Inventor In Limbo (developers.slashdot.org)
• Google App Inventor- an Ambitious Project That Met an Untimely Death, Only to Be Resurrected Soon at MIT (techie-buzz.com)

Using Layar Vision to implement Augmented Reality

Layar Vision, which is an extension of the Layar Augmented Reality browser,  offers another means by which iOS and Android App developers can use Augmented Reality (AR) to interact with physical objects. Compared to the Qualcomm AR SDK, the Layar Vision API takes a different approach by pushing the image identification processes to the server-side and having a usage based freemium pricing mechanism.

Below are a few videos of the power and potential of this product.

 

Here is a video introducing Layar Vision.

 

More explanations of Layar Vision

 

A sample of three applications

 

Read more about the API and associated toolkit here.

Related articles

• Layar now augments reality on BlackBerry (intomobile.com)
• Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality SDK (abhishekkathuria.wordpress.com)
• Augmented Reality: Layar Creation Challenge winners (wired.com)