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ComScore pegs Kindle Fire at more than 50 percent of the US Android tablet market
We've seen some pretty clear indications that the Kindle Fire was rapidly gaining market share among Android tablets, and ComScore is now out with a new report that indicates it recently crossed a big milestone. According to the research firm, the Fire's market share in the US fully doubled from December to February, with it standing at 54.4 percent as of the end of the month. Counted together, the Galaxy Tab family sits in second at 15.4 percent, while the Motorola Xoom and Asus Transformer come in at 7 and 6.3 percent, respectively. Of course, the Kindle Fire isn't quite your ordinary Android tablet, so this is likely better news for Amazon than Google. In addition to that, ComScore also looked at the browsing habits of tablet users, and unsurprisingly found that larger screens tended to lead to more content consumption, with 10-inch tablets boasting a 39 percent higher consumption rate than 7-inch devices. You can find all the numbers at the source link below.
The Engadget Show 32: ASUS, Huawei and a trip to Asia's gadget markets
Yep, we went way out for April's Engadget Show, taking our film crew to Asia this time out, to check out the markets of Taipei, Hong Kong and Shenzhen with our very own Richard Lai. We also scored interviews with Huawei's Chief of Design, Hagen Fendler and Michelle Hsiao of the ASUS Design Center. We'll be checking out the month's latest and greatest gadgets, including the HTC One X, S and V, Nokia Lumia 900 and the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, as well as a big ole pile of KIRFs -- some more convincing than others. We've also got a couple of performances by Brooklyn indie rockers Suckers and a whole bunch more. Hosts: Tim Stevens, Brian Heater Guests: Hagen Fendler (Huawei), Michelle Hsiao (ASUS), Richard Lai, Guy Streit Producer: Guy Streit Director: Michelle Stahl Executive Producers: Brian Heater, Joshua Fruhlinger and Michael Rubens Music by: Suckers Download the Show: The Engadget Show - 032 (HD) / The Engadget Show - 032 (iPod / iPhone / Zune formatted) / The Engadget Show - 032 (Small) Subscribe to the Show: [iTunes] Subscribe to the Show directly in iTunes (MP4). [Zune] Subscribe to the Show directly in the Zune Marketplace (MP4). [RSS MP4] Add the Engadget Show feed (MP4) to your RSS aggregator and have it delivered automatically. [HD RSS] Get the Engadget Show delivered automatically in HD. [iPad RSS] Get the Engadget Show in iPad-friendly adaptive format.
Samsung's AdHub Market advertising platform set to debut this year
Would it be such a bad idea if Sammy were to try squeezing more revenue out of those five million (and counting) Notes? Not by any means. According to The Wall Street Journal, Samsung, in partnership with OpenX Technologies, is planning to launch an advertising platform of its own at some point during the second half of this year. Dubbed AdHub Market, the service will be able to run on the company's handsets and slates, following a model similar to that of Apple's iAds. The AdHub Market would essentially allow advertisers to shell out cash in exchange for real estate within apps running on most of Samsung's devices. What's not clear, however, is how Google will react to the news...
AT&T lighting up three LTE markets on April 8th, Indiana and Texas feel the glow
Muncie. Bloomington. Bryan-College Station. If you're in one of these three markets, get ready to party hard, because AT&T LTE is officially lighting up in your neck of the woods on April 8th. If you recall, there are nine previously announced markets still on deck waiting for their turn to bathe in the faster network, but AT&T is holding strong to its promise of an arrival "by early summer." For all of you getting it on Sunday, just make sure you party responsibly Saturday night, kay?
Flurry's analytics: Apple's App Store revenue still leading, but Amazon Appstore close behind
Not like we haven't seen this dog-and-pony show before, but Flurry's latest round of analytics -- which measured revenue of 11 million daily active users from mid-January through the end of February 2012 -- shows Amazon's Appstore pulling in a shocking amount of revenue given the short life that it has lived. Apple's strength in sales has been well documented, but the latest report shows that for every $1 generated in the iTunes App Store, $0.89 is being spent in the Amazon Appstore. Looking more broadly, the numbers show that just $0.23 are generated in the Google Play halls for every $1 spent in the App Store, but that's hardly a new phenomenon; the ease of sideloading (amongst other factors) has raised complaints from Android developers for years now. Flurry's conclusion is that Google's core strength simply isn't in running a store -- something it's about to do once more with Android slates -- while both Apple and Amazon excel in doing just that. Curiously, Windows Phone and BlackBerry were left off of this report, but we're hoping to see those cats thrown in the next 'go round. After all, RIM sure seems certain that its developers are making out just fine.
Fitbit for Android helps track your I/O
The fitness fanatics from Fitbit are looking to aid and abet the Android-loving, calorie-counting masses. The company has announced the release of its self-titled Android application, which will assist users in tracking their health and dietary goals. Through manual entry, or with the assistance of a wireless sensor, Fitbit tracks your daily activity and creates a dynamic nutrition plan to help you achieve your weight loss and fitness goals. What's more, the app and service keep a log of your progress allowing users to feel shame track their progress. The app is available via Google Play for the always attractive price of $0. Have yourself a download... and a quick jog.
IDC: Android tablets will overtake iPad by 2015, despite everything
They're not center-stage right now, but Android tablets are still predicted to overtake the iPad within the next three years, according to IDC. The forecasters noted that Apple's worldwide share of the tablet market is shrinking with each new lower-priced Android competitor. Even as iPad sales continued to grow in 2011, surging 50 percent between Q3 and Q4, its market share fell during the same period, from 61.5 to 54.7 percent. That gives the iOS slate a weaker lead going into 2012 than suggested by earlier figures. Of course, the iPad remains an individual starlet in front of a troupe of Google dancers, so Apple's position as the upper-most vendor isn't under threat. In fact, IDC predicts it will remain the market leader in terms of revenue beyond 2016, which ought to put some fire in Amazon's belly.
EVE Evolved: Five scams to avoid
Anyone who's familiar with EVE Online will have heard stories of the game's criminal underworld, from devastating corporate infiltration to the daily grafting of common con artists. Most players will never perpetrate a scam, but those who do are constantly coming up with new tricks to part you from your hard-earned ISK. For every genuine smooth-talking con-artist who comes up with new schemes and socially engineers his way to a fortune, you'll find dozens of copycats who flood popular chat channels with scams they've seen perpetrated in the past. On an average day, over 90% of the chat in Jita's local channel is people posting copycat scams, with legitimate offers completely drowned out. There may not even be anyone at the helm with these scams, as a script could easily paste the scam message every few minutes for an entire day. Not confined to Jita, these scams are often replicated across all of the game's main trade hubs and popular mission-running systems. Knowing how these scams work is the first step to protecting yourself from making an expensive and extremely embarrassing mistake. In this week's EVE Evolved, I explain the trick behind five of EVE's most common copycat scams and how to protect yourself from them.
JP Morgan: Apple is a sector unto itself
JP Morgan's hardware analyst Mark Moskowitz has laid bare exactly how huge Apple has become lately, calling the company an actual "sector," not just a company any more. Of course, on paper, Apple is competing with other computer and device manufacturers like Dell and Samsung, but the numbers just don't make that comparison meaningful any more, says Moskowitz. Apple's stock is by far the largest single stock in the S&P 500 index, and when you compare the company's income to other tech sectors like Pharmaceuticals and Software as a whole, Apple's take actually lines up within the top 10. I'll say that again, because it's important: Apple's income and operations actually compete with whole industries, not just the rest of the PC market. This isn't just the iPhone or the iPad being a new class of device, it's Apple as a whole company creating a tech sector of its own. That's pretty incredible, and if you haven't yet realized how big Apple has gotten in the past few years (as if the $98 billion in cash wasn't clear enough), maybe that's your wakeup call. Now, this may all seem like financial types just making much ado about numbers, but it actually holds quite a bit of meaning, both for Apple and its competitors going forward. Apple's huge growth in the past few years will have lots of consequences, both for the company and the technology industry at large, and we still haven't figured out just what a lot of those consequences will be.
Darkfall slices away at 'initial unforgiving experience' with 2.0
"In the current version of the game, we've had many occasions where the steep learning curve and initial unforgiving experience, unnecessarily kept people out of the game," Aventurine's Tasos Flambouras comments on the latest Darkfall 2.0 post. This week's post illuminates three major systems on which the team is working to make Agon a more approachable world. With Darkfall 2.0, new players will start out in a safe training zone that is designed to teach the fundamentals of the game without the risk of imminent ganking. Plus, the devs promise "a nice adventure with an epic ending" to boot. The other two systems are coming up with a way to protect mount theft and to encourage the player economy. Mounts in 2.0 will remember their owners for a time, and any thief will have to contend with being branded a criminal and coming under fire by guard NPCs. Finally, new markets will appear in all major cities and allow players to buy, sell, and place orders for others to fill. There is one catch to shopping, however: If you buy an item from another city's market, you have to either travel there personally to get it or pay a surcharge for delivery.
EVE Evolved: New tools for the community
Earlier this week, CCP Games released a much-needed complete overhaul of the official EVE Online website. Having been in operation for nine long years, the old website had become a mismatch of marketing information aimed at new players and tools for the existing player community. The overhaul split the page into two awesome websites, with a new community site to cater to existing players and an impressive new main page to attract future players. The main page uses HTML 5 to deliver incredible interactive views of the EVE Online galaxy and dozens of in-game ships right there on the website. The community website houses all of the news, devblogs, knowledgebase articles, fictional chronicles, and support tools that existing players use, but with a much neater layout than the old website. In web developer CCP Alice's recent In Development video, she revealed that the team would be working on new community tools following the launch of the new websites. With the community site completely de-cluttered, there's now room to incorporate a lot of the tools players want or currently use, opening up some interesting possibilities. In this week's EVE Evolved, I discuss the new EVE Online website and community portal and speculate on awesome new community tools we might possibly see in the future.
Study: 'App Economy' has created 500,000 jobs since 2007
It's no secret that the rise of smartphones, tablets and social networking has fostered an entirely new market for app developers, but a freshly released study has now attempted to quantify this impact, in terms of real jobs. According to TechNet, a bipartisan network of tech execs, the so-called "App Economy" has created an estimated 466,000 jobs since 2007, when the iPhone was first unveiled. The report specifies that this estimate includes all jobs at Facebook-focused companies like Zynga, as well as dev gigs at Amazon, AT&T and Electronic Arts, in addition to the obvious heavyweights, Apple and Google. As far as geography goes, California leads the way as the most app-friendly state, though New York City tops the list of metropolitan areas. It's not an entirely bi-coastal affair, though, with some two-thirds of all app-related jobs located outside of California and New York. TechNet acknowledges that the App Economy "is only four years old and extremely fluid," so it's likely that these numbers will fluctuate in the years to come, though the organization says these numbers underscore a fundamental principle: "Innovation creates jobs, and in this case, lots of them." Read the full report at the source link below.
IDC: Nokia, Samsung, Apple are the new top 3 handset makers
The latest figures are in from IDC: the top three global smartphone makers are Nokia, Samsung and Apple, in that order. Drilling down into the figures finds some surprises: Cupertino's third-place with only 8.7 percent of the market, while the giants of Korea and Finland are duking it out with 22.8 percent and 26.6 respectively. LG and ZTE are tied for fourth, but that's hardly good news for Goldstar, given that it's lost a staggering 42.2 percent of its market share in the last twelve months (Nokia was the other loser, eating 8.2 percent). The cause for the drop is in part the world's rejection of feature-phones (dropped faster than fashionistas rightly abandoned Ugg Boots and Jeggings) as millions upgraded to smartphones. After the break we've got the tables in full for anyone who wants to have their mind blown at the sheer quantity of handsets shipped in the last year, both financial and calendar.
Aventurine 'sprinting' toward Darkfall 2.0
As Darkfall "sprints" down the road toward its second incarnation, bloodthirsty PvPers are looking to Aventurine for more information about how their favorite game world is being remolded. Tasos Flambouras came forth today with word that not only is the project still powering forward, but the development team is growing as new hires are brought on to assist in the efforts. Flambouras uses the post as a progress report and To Do list all in one. Perhaps the most exciting teases that he mentions are new methods of progression in the game. "These are significant and exciting changes to the way the game is played because they add more purpose to player freedom," he writes. Currently the art team is adding and revamping many of the game's objects and animations, while the world builders are hammering away at Mahirim. As part of Darkfall 2.0, introductory dungeons will be integrated into the game to help newbies get a foothold in the cutthroat MMO. The team is also experimenting with "alternatives" to player respawn time after deaths, as well as a brand-new market system and improved trading experience.
Strategy Analytics: Nokia tops global handset shipments, Apple sees quarterly surge
Fresh off the publication of its latest tablet report, Strategy Analytics has come out with a new batch of statistics on the global mobile market. In a report published yesterday, the research firm crowned Apple as the world's largest smartphone vendor by volume, on the strength of the 37 million iPhones it shipped during Q4 2011 -- good for 23.9 percent of the market. Samsung wasn't too far behind, though, with 36.5 million smartphones shipped during the quarter, comprising 23.5 percent of the market. Nokia finished in third place, with 19.6 million smartphones and a 12.6 percent market share, though it fared notably better among handset makers on a global (i.e., smartphone and feature phone) level. According to Strategy Analytics, the Finnish manufacturer shipped 417.1 million handsets for the full year, 113.5 million of which were shipped during the fourth quarter of last year. For the year, Nokia accounted for 26.9 percent of the market, followed by Samsung, which shipped 327.4 million units shipped during 2011 and finished with a 23.1 percent market share. As for Apple, it accounted for 8.3 percent of the market in Q4 (its best showing, according to Strategy's metrics), with 37 million quarterly shipments. You can find more details in the pair of press releases after the break, or at the source link below.
Strategy Analytics: Apple still owns tablet market, but Android narrows the gap
Strategy Analytics has come out with another report on the state of today's tablet market, which, not surprisingly, remains dominated by Apple. Cupertino's iOS comprised about 58 percent of the global slate market during Q4 2011 -- well ahead of Android's record high 39 percent share, but down from the 68 percent it commanded during the final quarter of 2010. Android, in fact, has seen quite a jump over the past year, with total shipments reaching 10.5 million units during the last quarter, up from just 3.1 million last year (Apple, by comparison, shipped 15.4 million iPads during Q4, versus the 7.3 million it shipped last year). On a global level, the tablet market continues to blossom, with total shipments reaching an all-time high of 26.8 million units last quarter, representing a whopping 150 percent increase over last year. Read the full report at the source link below, or head past the break for a more succinct press release.
Pew: Tablet, e-reader ownership nearly doubled over the holiday season
The number crunchers over at the Pew Research Center have released another batch of market statistics today, this time, with a focus on tablets. According to the Center's latest survey, 19 percent of all adult Americans now own some form of tablet, marking a nearly twofold increase over figures from a poll conducted in mid-December. E-reader ownership, meanwhile, increased by exactly the same margin over this period, jumping from 10 percent to 19 percent. These numbers also signal a healthy acceleration from the middle of this year, when the slate and reader markets apparently stagnated, ahead of the holiday shopping rush. Overall, about 29 percent of US adults own either a tablet or an e-reader, up from 18 percent last month. You can find more stats and breakdowns at the source link below.
Apple seems to buck declining PC shipment estimates
The PC market is in a serious decline both in the US and globally. According to Gartner, most manufacturers are struggling, except Apple which is on the rise. Gartner's latest figures show that worldwide PC shipment estimates for Q4 2011 fell 1.4 percent. The biggest losers in the last three months of 2011 were HP and Acer, which declined 16.2 percent and 18.4 percent respectively. These numbers were even worse for the US market where shipment estimates declined 5.9 percent, the worst performance in the last decade. The only bright spots, in an otherwise abysmal report, were recorded by Lenovo, Asus and Apple. While Acer and HP struggled in Q4, Lenovo and Asus were booming globally. Lenovo increased its shipments by 23 percent, and Asus grew an equally impressive 20.5 percent. Apple, however, was the star of the US market. The company's US shipments increased a significant 20.7 percent, while competitors like HP and Acer slipped 26.1 percent and 11.4 percent, respectively. Analysts blame hard drive shortages for this quarterly decline. The supply of hard drives declined after devastating floods ravaged Thailand earlier in 2011. Though other manufacturers were struggling with supply constraints, Apple cruised along without missing a beat. Sales of the MacBook Air, which ships with flash storage and not a hard disk drive, probably gave Apple this extra bump. [Via Engadget]
Qualcomm's Snapdragon GameCommand app ready to take on TegraZone
Didn't think Qualcomm was going to just sit around and let NVIDIA have all the fun, did you? The latter company's launch of TegraZone -- an app portal designed to show off mobile games that work best when using the Tegra 2 dual-core SoC -- appears to have inspired the competition, as Qualcomm announced the debut of its dedicated Snapdragon GameCommand app today. The idea is pretty much the same: the app, accessible on phones and tablets, will essentially be a marketplace that offers Snapdragon-optimized games (such as Qualcomm's GamePack selection) as well as some exclusive content. The app will make its official entrance on the Android Market on January 10th, but will only be available in North America until "a later date." Texas Instruments, you're up next. Head to the press release for more details.
Windows Phone getting four fresh Xbox Live gaming titles, optimized for Mango
It looks like our friends over at Microsoft have outed a quartet of new Xbox Live games that will be delivered to the Windows Phone Marketplace in the not-too-distant future. Being billed as "optimized for the newest Windows Phone 7.5," the aforementioned -- and somewhat familiar -- titles include: Age of Zombies by Halfbrick, Bullet Asylum by UberGeekGames, geoDefense Swarm by Critical Thought, and Tamagotchi by Namco. Why are these touchscreen-tickling titles familiar, you ask? Three of the four have been proving their mettle on other mobile platforms. GeoDefense Swarm and Tamagotchi are currently available in the iOS App Store; Age of Zombies is available in both the Android Market and iOS App Store; and Bullet Asylum has been in the works for some time -- we were treated to a video preview last summer, which you'll find below. No word yet on release dates, but the foursome's mere presence on Microsoft's site makes us think that we won't have to wait all that long before initiating the download sequence.
