It’s further confirmation that Windows Phone is finally beginning to mature as a viable alternative to iOS and Android. With an official Instagram just around the corner, Windows Phone users certainly have cause for celebration.
Charles Arthur reports on The Guardian how Google maps lost to Apple maps when everyone thought it had won.
The break with the iPhone came when Apple became frustrated in late 2009 by Google’s refusal to provide turn-by-turn navigation for maps on the iPhone – a feature which was available on Google’s own Android, and which is hugely useful for car drivers. “They broke their promise,” one Apple executive told the Guardian. Google also wanted to collect more data from Apple users via maps, such as through its Latitude product, and held off offering vector graphics (which store data more efficiently, and can work offline). That sparked Apple’s decision to develop its own maps offering, licensing data from TomTom and other providers.
According to ComScore, in September 2012 – just ahead of the introduction of Apple Maps – there were a total of 81.1m users of Google Maps, out of a total of 103.6m iPhones and Android phones users.
Latest figures from ComScore, published for September 2013, say that the total number of iPhones and Android phones in the US has grown to 136.7m, the number who used the Google Maps app has kept dropping – down to 58.8m – while the number of Apple Maps users stands at 35m out of a total iPhone population of 60.1m.
It also noted that iOS users tended to use maps more often – 9.7m used it once a day, against 7.2m for Android. In addition, iPhone users spent longer on maps than Android users – 75.5 minutes per month, against 56.2 minutes for Android.
Line may not be as popular in western countries, but it’s extremely popular in Asia. Along with other players such as WeChat and Kakao, mobile messaging in Asia is a huge opportunity, and Line is well positioned to seize it.
Messaging App Line Now Brings In Nearly $100M A Quarter, But No Official Word On An IPO
The app has totally saturated Japan with 49 million registered users and completely upended the mobile gaming market in Japan, undermining the historical power of gaming platforms like DeNA’s Mobage network and GREE. These two companies ruled in the feature phone era, but DeNA has now seen its shares slide 32.5 percent while GREE shares have fallen 41.5 percent over the last year. Line’s rise, along with that of other apps like Tencent’s Weixin (which has 236 million monthly actives), shows just how volatile the mobile social networking and messaging space continues to be.
This pretty much sums up my experience when I switched from my iPhone 5 to a Nexus 4. There are pros and cons, but it takes a while to get used to the change, for better or worse.
Thoughts on the Google Nexus 7 from the perspective of a longtime iOS user
One striking thing, as I have noted in some updates throughout the body of this article, is how many of my observations can be addressed through third-party apps that would be impossible on iOS. Background services that sync iCloud calendars to the Android calendar list, for example, or third party apps that install AirPlay services. This is, it seems to me, a key strength of the Android offering — that third party apps have more control over the operating system, more flexibility to serve your needs. Of course with great power comes great responsibility; this very control leaves the door open to all manner of malware. I’ve certainly been wary of installing random apps from the store, rightly or wrongly, finding myself scrutinising the trustworthiness of an app in a way I never would on iOS.
David Sleight writes on A List Apartabout the exquisitely-designed articles such as the “Snow Fall” article ran by the New York Times last year.
The real implication of the time and resources critique is that there isn’t an adequate return on all this investment. Turns out that creates a damn nice opening for dealing with objections over ads, too.
This is something designers need to really consider, especially in today’s age of increasingly short attention span. Web pages only have split seconds to hook readers.
Certain pages can afford to invest the time and effort to build gorgeous designs, such as Apple’s product pages. But certain types of article do not appeal to as wide an audience and it would be a waste to expend such resources.
Andy Ihnatko of TechHive reviews the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9.
But the best features of the HDX are the ones that make it a Kindle. No other tablet—the iPad included—is so keenly tuned to the needs of content consumption.
People buy the Kindle to consume content. It is no surprise that Amazon makes it the focus of the Kindle Fire HDX.