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ICS and Jellybean now on a quarter of all Android devices, but over half still stuck on Gingerbread
It seems like only yesterday that Google bundled Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 in its little biscuit layers and sent it off into the world (it was December, 2011, actually). That Android flavor has since climbed the charts rapidly, around four percent each month for the last while, and now occupies the ROM on 23.7 percent of robot-based devices -- up from 20.8 percent last month. That's in part due to new devices (like many in China) still coming out of the box with it, on top of older warhorses like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 finally grabbing some ICS. Meanwhile, its smooth-running younger sibling, Jelly Bean, made a slight gain to 1.8 percent of all Google-run slates and phones -- though that will likely change when the Galaxy Note II hits the market en masse and the Galaxy S III OTA 4.1.1 disseminates to all its owners. Meanwhile, Gingerbread still dominates Google OS installed devices at 55.8 percent, probably thanks to delays or denials of newer flavors to legacy devices.
Google Play hits 25 billion app downloads, holds celebratory yard sale with $0.25 games
Google Play crossed a rather significant milestone this morning: something to the tune of 25 billion app downloads. While the accomplishment is weighty enough on its own -- especially given that the store also offers books, music and movies, which aren't included in this tally -- Google is celebrating in symbolic style with a number of apps and games for sale at just $0.25 over the next five days. Among the mix of discounted titles, you'll find publishers such as Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Rovio, Runtastic and Full Fat. Not to stop there, shoppers will also discover a curated collection of 25 must-own movies, 25 banned books, 25 albums that changed the world and 25 top-selling magazines. With today's announcement, it was revealed that 675,000 apps and games now live in Google Play -- a healthy increase when compared to 600,000 titles and 20 billion installs just three months ago. As you might expect, Apple still claims the largest selection with 700,000 titles in its App Store, although with such a thin separation between the two, we may see Google Play eclipse its rival in short order.
IHS iSuppli: PCs no longer command biggest share of DRAM market
Times change, this is an indisputable truth. But nothing reminds us of this fact as well as a landmark statistic. If there was ever any doubt about the shift towards of mobile computing, then let this be it: personal computers no longer account for the majority of demand for DRAM chips. With 49 percent of all new memory still headed for PCs, it's hardly time to book the hearse for desk- and laptops just yet, but the statistic from IHS iSuppli remind us of the increasing market share that mobiles and tablets are taking. In fact, even though total DRAM shipments for PCs continues to rise, it's estimated that the total share will slip another 6 percent, to 42.8, between Q2 this year and the end of 2013. Of course, this is good news if you have a vested interest in both, not so good if you don't.
Google knows what you did this summer, shares it with the world
What we wouldn't give to have access to Google's treasure trove of human wonderings. Every day millions of folk tell the search giant exactly what they are thinking about, without even realizing it. It's not all take take take, though, as Mountain View has just released some data letting us all know what we and our (geographical) neighbors did this summer. By compiling popular search terms used in Google Maps between May and September, we can see that, while Canadians and the Spanish were looking for the beach, Britons were more partial to a game of Squash, or a trip around Trafalgar Square. Back home, Death Valley, Redwood and Yosemite National Parks were earning the most interest, while Paintball was the top activity -- but we're hoping the two are unrelated. Want to see how the Dutch like to unwind, or how Indians like to cool off? Jump on the tour bus source link to find out more.
ICS now on one in five Android devices, Jelly Bean grows to 1.2 percent
Last month was the first time Jelly Bean poked its head up in the Android distribution charts, debuting at 0.8 percent. It's bumped that stat by a significant proportion, if not a crazy absolute amount, to 1.2 percent of smartphones and tablets using Google's OS. But ICS 4.0 was the biggest gainer, moving up sharply from 15.9 percent to 20.8 of devices at the expense of Gingerbread 2.3, which dropped about 3.5 percent from July. Still, at 57.2 percent saturation, that version is still the richest Android confection by a wide margin. Our aging Galaxy S contributed a bit to its demise this month, thanks to CyanogenMod, so where does your own device sit? Check the source for a further breakdown of the stats.
PlanetSide 2 lifts beta NDA, heads to PAX
We're another step closer to getting our combat boots on the ground and our itchy fingers on those triggers, as SOE has made the move to drop PlanetSide 2's non-disclosure agreement. This NDA drop follows a month of external beta testing and just prior to SOE's debut of the game at a North American show (in this case, PAX Prime). SOE President John Smedley reminded fans that this didn't mean the title was ready to ship. "Beta has a long way to go folks," he posted on Twitter. SOE released plenty of fun statistics about the beta process so far. According to the studio, 535 million shots have been fired, and out of those, 194.6 million hit a target. 6.3 million players were mowed down in the bloody conflict as well. The breakdown of the three factions is more or less even, with the Terran Republic edging out the other two sides by a couple of percentage points. If you're heading to PAX this weekend, you can see PlanetSide 2 at booth #3317. The team has plenty of demo stations on hand, and is planning to participate in several panels and daily livestream casts. [Source: SOE press release]
LG sells five million LTE smartphones, plans 'second to none' lineup soon and girds for patent battles
While LG's dollars and cents return on its cellphones have been up and down this year, the company just announced that since starting the LTE trend with the Revolution in May 2011 it's sold five million high-speed data connected handsets and has no plans to slow down. The counter ticked over three million back in May, four million in June and, according to LG, sales continued at a pace of one phone every two and a half seconds. That includes two million Optimus LTEs, over 500,000 Optimus Vus and about the same number of Optimus LTE IIs in the first 70 days alone. Now the Korean company is preparing to take its Optimus Vu phablet global, and CEO Dr. Jon-seok Park says its LTE phones in the next few months will be "second to none." Finally, there's a note about LG having the "largest overall" total number of patents, claimed to be worth $8 billion, which is possibly intended to ward off the kind of patent trouble currently chasing Samsung.
Census Bureau releases first mobile app, offers real-time stats on the US economy
The US Census Bureau just released its first public API last month, giving web and mobile app makers access to its vast stores of statistics, and it's now also gone the extra mile by releasing its first mobile app. Dubbed America's Economy, the app draws on data from the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor to provide a real-time picture of the US economy, offering details on everything from the country's gross domestic product to housing sales to the unemployment rate (all presented with the requisite charts and graphs). That's available for Android smartphones and tablets right now, while an iOS app promised in the "coming weeks." It's also the first of three planned apps from the Bureau -- the others are said to be coming over the next several months (both of which will also be available for both Android and iOS).
Google Chrome claims one-third of global browser share, according to StatCounter
Google's Senior Vice President of Chrome & Apps Sundar Pichai confirmed to the crowd back at D10 that Chrome browser use was soaring -- particularly in the consumer space -- and StatCounter's latest data most definitely backs that up. The newest report, ending July 2012, shows the Chrome creeping up to 33.8 percent worldwide from 32.8 percent in June. Internet Explorer is sitting at 32 percent, while Firefox is seen slipping a bit to 23.7 percent; meanwhile, Apple's Safari picks up the Participation Award with 7.1 percent. As The Next Web points out, it's also worth nothing that Chrome is doing particularly well in Europe, South America and Asia, while IE is still charging in the UK, US and Down Under. Granted, StatCounter is hardly the end-all when it comes to browser usage; that said, it's definitely useful to get a general idea of which browsers are moving in which direction, and it's certainly astonishing to see a piece of software that didn't exist four years ago already claiming such a significant piece of the pie.
IDC: Apple's still king of the tablet hill with 68 percent of the market
IDC's cabal of statisticians, nerds and people who just love spreadsheets have handed down their latest document about the state of the tablet market. Of the 25 million slates shipped in the second quarter, 17 million of them were iPads -- giving Apple 68.2 percent of the market. Samsung came second with 2.4 million devices and Amazon third, although since the Kindle Fire maker doesn't reveal numbers, there's probably some guesswork involved there. Rounding out the top five are ASUS and Acer, although the former should expect to move up a place (or two), depending on the success of the Nexus 7 when Q3's results are released in a few months time.
Ice Cream Sandwich takes a bite out of Gingerbread, represents 15.9 percent of Android devices
Two major updates later (three if you count the tablet-exclusive Honeycomb), and Gingerbread is finally starting to falter. According to Google's latest two week survey of devices accessing the Play store, Ice Cream Sandwich is on the rise, filling out 15.9-percent of the Android user base. That's a full five points ahead of Android 4.0's July score, and it's eating into the OS' other flavors: Gingerbread (Android 2.3) dropped by 3.4-percent, Froyo (Android 2.2) by 1.8 and Eclair (Android 2.1) by a meager half a percent. Google's latest confectionery update, Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), made an appearance as well, eking out a shy 0.8-percent of the market. Check out Google's collection of charts for yourself at the source link below or let us know where your devices falls in the comments.
Canalys: PC and tablet shipments hit new high in Q2 with Apple in the lead, HP next in line
Wondering how the industry fared in the second quarter of 2012? Shipments in the PC sector, which in Canalys' book includes tablets, were higher than ever, totaling 108,708,780 units globally. iPad sales put Apple in the lead, with more than 21 million devices shipped (this figure also includes desktops and notebooks) in Q2, compared to just over 13 million during the year-ago quarter, representing a massive 59.6-percent year-over-year growth. HP, which led the way in Q1, has fallen to the second-place spot, with nearly 13.6 million shipments during the quarter ending yesterday, followed by Lenovo with about 13.2 million, Acer with nearly 10.7 million and Dell with roughly 9.7 computers sold. Manufacturers like ASUS and Samsung are represented in the substantial "others" category, which totals about 40.6 million devices. There's no question that the iPad is behind Apple earning the number-1 slot, and with the upcoming Windows 8 launch, those figures could shift drastically the next time around. Click on through to the source link below for the full Canalys breakdown.
SSDs kick up performance for developers and users alike
I'm a developer. One of the things we devs do to pass the time is complain about how long it takes to compile and brag about the power of our development systems. Hot-rodding your system isn't just limited to development, though. There are lots of people out there who sit and wait as their systems limp along from the start up chime to the login screen. You probably already know that adding RAM generally makes your Mac more responsive, but do you know how much of a boost you might get from a solid-state drive (SSD) versus a conventional hard drive? TUAW friend Maurice Sharp decided to test it out. He got down and dirty with his Macs and timed how long it look for HDD and SDD based systems to perform various operations. Here are the results he achieved, comparing solid state response times to hard drive response times. 1 MacBook Pro 2.3GHz i7, 16GB RAM 2 Project build folders were cleaned before each compile 3 Build phase only. 2000 C++ and 400 Objective-C files 4 Mac Mini 2GHz i7, 8GB RAM 5 MacBook Pro 2.4GHz i7, 8GB RAM 6 MacBook Air 1.8GHz i7, 4GB RAM 7 21296 lines of code Look at the typical differences he experienced. Although this chart is focused on code-based tasks, his day-to-day startup times also massively decreased. Sharp writes, "There is one caveat. To switch over to SSD, you have to clone your current hard drive to the new drive. For a 500GB drive, this took about 4.5 hours (thanks Carbon Copy Cloner). Plus another 15 minutes to install the drive. Of course this can be done out of hours, or by an IT department if you have one. [But] now you can generate the numbers you need to show your boss, or even yourself, why an SSD drive is a good investment." Don't expect miracles, however. Another TUAW dev buddy Matthias Ringwald reports, "I replaced the HD in a 2009 Mac mini in 2010 with an Intel 160 GB SSD. While it got more snappy/faster boot times etc, the compile time for our Dybuster Dyslexia C++/Qt project decreased only from 7 minutes to 6 minutes." That said, a 17% decrease in compile time is nothing to sneer at. What's behind the difference? Sharp proposes "There are obvious things like the speed of accessing information on a the drive comparing a rotational system where the sector may or may not be at the head, and may or may not be cached, versus no reliance on mechanical rotation. But there are other things that may account for the lack of gain that Matthias was seeing. That is related to using the disk for virtual memory paging. "As you probably know, the OS uses part of the disk to swap out parts of RAM that are not in use, especially when the memory needed is greater than the physical RAM. If there is a lot of paging, that will suck performance, even with an SSD, as the system dedicates cycles to swapping RAM contents on and off disk. This is why I boosted my RAM first and got a sense of how that worked. Using something like iStat menus, you can see how much memory is being used and how it is allocated (as well as the processes that are hogging it!)" If you've gone to an SSD-equipped system on your development machine, has it made a dramatic difference? Or have the improvements been more subtle? Join in the conversation below.
Ice Cream Sandwich consumed by one in ten Android devices
The latest Dashboard numbers for Google's Android operating system have been released. The verdict? One in ten devices is leveraging Ice Cream Sandwich as their mobile OS of choice. The numbers, which are current as of July 2nd, put Gingerbread (Android 2.3) in first place with a 64-percent install base; followed by Froyo (Android 2.2) with 17.3-percent and ICS with 10.6-percent. Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), announced just last week at Google's IO Developer Conference, was not included in this instance of the report (as it is not officially available yet). Hit the source link to view all the stats, and feel free to let us know what Android codebase your handset is rocking via the comments.
StatCounter: Windows 7 now powering most PCs, passed 50-percent threshold in June
Windows 8 may be on the horizon with a fall 2012 release, but Microsoft's current OS, Win 7, just became the world's most prolific PC operating system, passing the 50-percent threshold last month. According to StatCounter, Windows 7, which overtook XP around the time of its golden anniversary last fall, has made its way onto 50.2 percent of the world's computers, compared to 29.9 percent for Microsoft's eXPerience during the same period. Launched in 2001, XP remains in the runner-up position, but shows a steady decline along with Vista, which never had much of a share to begin with. Oddly enough, iOS also appears as a modest portion of StatCounter's chart, which we presume represents iPads, which in this case fall within the same category (the company tracks mobile operating systems separately, where Android has ticked slightly ahead). If you own a PC running Windows 7, you can rest assured knowing that you're in good company. And we imagine that an even greater number of those current XP users will depart come 2014, when Microsoft has pledged to discontinue support of the aging millennial. Hit up our source link below for all of StatCounter's charts.
Netflix goes 'beyond five stars' in a more detailed explanation of recommendations
The Netflix Tech Blog produced part one of a deep dive into how its recommendations work back in April and now the team is back with the other half. If you're among the many wondering why certain movies get pushed to the front of your recommendations and others don't, the key is their attempt to predict, mostly based on data from other users, what you will both play and enjoy. The most interesting bit we found? There's a lot more at play here than just popularity, as one graph shows ratings plus the team's other optimizations improving rankings over the baseline by 200+ percent. Data parsing heads should definitely dig hearing about logistic regression, elastic nets and matrix factorization (job applications are accepted at the end if you make it that far), while those of us that fall asleep when the spreadsheets come out can probably focus on the broader strokes of Netflix's testing methodology and approach.
Google: Ice Cream Sandwich now accounts for 7.1 percent of Android user base
Well, it's about time that Ice Cream Sandwich made some headway -- even if the process is much slower than consumers deserve. According to the Android developer hub, Android 4.0 now accounts for 7.1 percent of all Android smartphone and tablet installations, which is a sharp and welcome increase over the 2.9 percent figure that we reported just two months ago. Naturally, Gingerbread users still account for the lion's share of the Android ecosystem with 65 percent, but it's worth pointing out that this segment also grew during the last month -- no doubt at the expense of Froyo and Eclair. Don't know about you, but we like our desserts fresh, thank you very much. Go ahead and hop the break to see the full breakdown.
LG celebrates three million LTE phones sold worldwide, shockingly finds high speed data is awesome
LG has hitched its mobile fate to the future of LTE high speed data equipped phones basically since the technology was introduced and today it announced the fruits of its labor: three million LTE phones sold to date worldwide. While some will quibble over shipped / sold to end-user counting methods, or how this compares to figures recently touted by competition like Samsung and Apple, we need only look at LG's most recent earnings report to see the positive impact its LTE-infused lineup has had. According to LG, most of the gains have been in South Korea and North America so far, although it plans to have LTE phones in 20 countries by the end of the year. After kicking off the LTE frenzy with the Revolution last year on Verizon, it's talking up the combination of LTE and HD LCD screen features in its Optimus LTE phone, already a million seller in Korea just as its successor, the Optimus LTE II arrives on shelves.
Exploring the patterns of Diablo 3
After thirty hours of incessantly clicking my mouse, I completed my first run of Diablo 3. Of course, the game could have been finished in far less time – I was constantly going back to explore every area to the fullest. Any dark space on my map, signaling an area I didn't explore, gnawed at my obsessive completionist attitude.But it had me wondering: I know how long it took to get to my final destination and I'm well aware of the spoils obtained along the way, but what had I actually done in those hours? Strip away everything about a game and you may see a simple series of patterns. So when you take the game systems, graphics, and progress out of the equation, what does the pattern of playing Diablo 3 look like and is it ever different?%Gallery-155928%
Gartner: mobile phone sales fell two percent last quarter, Samsung confirmed as numero uno
Gartner's latest dispatch reveals a wobbly global trade in mobile phones. Although our love of smartphones continued to blossom, with sales of that subcategory up nearly 45 percent, it wasn't enough to stave off a two percent overall decline compared to the same quarter in 2011. A total of 419.1 million handsets were sold, representing the first hiccup after nearly three years of growth and leading analysts to point fingers at a slow down in the Asia / Pacific region as well as a lack of product launches at the start of the year. Meanwhile, these figures also confirm what was already gleaned from IDC's shipments data: Samsung has knocked Nokia off its 14-year-old perch to become the padrone of the mobile phone market, with a cut of over 20 percent. It also replaced Apple as the number one smartphone vendor, claiming ownership of almost half of that segment. Damn, it feels good to be a pebble.
