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Google reaches 100 millionth Android activation, 400,000 Android devices activated daily
36 OEMs, 215 carriers, 450,000 Android developers all over the world, Google wants to say "thank you!" Android has recently crossed its 100 millionth activation milestone, and is also growing at its fastest pace yet: 400,000 devices activated each and every day. There are now 200,000 Android applications in the Market, which have accumulated a total of 4.5 billion installs, at a rate which Google actually says is accelerating. These figures have all been cited as a way to illustrate Google's mobile momentum, which is evidently not even thinking about slowing down.
IDC: smartphone market grows 80 percent year-on-year, Samsung shipments rise 350 percent
Smartphones are getting kind of popular nowadays, in case you hadn't noticed. The latest figures from IDC show a 79.7 percent expansion of the global smartphone market between this time last year and today, which has resulted in 99.6 million such devices being shipped in Q1 of 2011. That growth has mostly been driven by Samsung, which has more than quadrupled its output to 10.8 million shipments in the quarter, and HTC, whose growth has been almost as impressive. The other big gainer is Apple, with 10 million more iPhones shipped, but the truth is that all the top five vendors are showing double-digit growth. In spite of Nokia losing a big chunk of market share and RIM being demoted from second to third in the ranking, both of those old guard manufacturers improved on their quarterly totals. IDC puts this strength in demand down to the relatively unsaturated smartphone marketplace, and believes there's "ample room for several suppliers to comfortably co-exist," before ominously adding, "at least for the short term." And after the short term, our break-dancing robot overlords take over. Update: IDC has also released data for Western Europe that shows Nokia has lost the top spot both in terms of smartphones, to Apple, and in terms of overall mobile phone shipments, to Samsung.
The Daily generated 800,000 downloads, $10 million loss in first quarter of operation
It's still too early to pass judgment on News Corp's daring venture into tablet-only newspapers, The Daily, but at least we now have an idea of how much it costs to get a project like this off the ground. Having spent $30 million developing the concept before launch, the company's latest quarterly reports indicate another $10 million loss was incurred on the early operations of The Daily. That's resulted in 800,000 total downloads of the iPad-only app, though a breakdown of how many of those were just trying out the free trial and how many have stuck around for the paid version hasn't been forthcoming. News Corp stresses that The Daily is still a work in progress, one that we've heard may also be making its way onto Android tablets, and looks very much committed to seeing its plan through to the end. So if this digital-only, subscription-paid news idea fails, it won't be for lack of trying.
NPD credits Verizon iPhone with stemming the Android tide in Q1 smartphone sales
As much as we were hoping to get some definitive statements from AT&T and Verizon's Q1 2011 financials about the Verizon iPhone's impact on the smartphone market, none were really forthcoming. It's left to analyst outfits like the NPD, therefore, to try and parse the data for us and read between the official lines. The latest numbers from the NPD Group's Mobile Phone Tracker indicate that Apple's share of US smartphones sales jumped from 19 percent in Q4 2010 to 28 percent in the first quarter of this year, which helped stymie Android's prodigious expansion. The Google OS went from being on 53 percent of all smartphones sold to a flat 50 percent in the quarter. Also intriguing about the period is that, for the first time, smartphones accounted for more than half of all mobile phones sold in the US, at 54 percent. The top five best-selling cellphones also happened to be smartphones, with Apple and HTC providing two each; the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, Droid X, EVO 4G, and the Droid Incredible took home the NPD commendations. [Thanks, Matt] Disclaimer: NPD's Ross Rubin is a contributor to Engadget.
StarFox and Minecraft characters recreated in Munny form
This dashing Fox of the Stars above is none more than a custom-painted Trikky figure put together by artist Jared "nikejerk" Cain. Pretty swanky -- the gun is cool, but that headset is the real star. It's the perfect accessory to never giving up and trusting your instincts. While you're at the source link, be sure to check out the Bub customized Minecraft-style, with artist 8bit using what look like little paper squares to recreate those pixels.
Nintendo sells 3.61 million 3DS handhelds, but sees 2010 net profit decline by 66 percent
It's a "good news, bad news" kind of a day in Super Mario land, as Nintendo's announcement of a Wii successor has been followed up with the delivery of the company's financial results for fiscal year 2010, which don't make for happy reading. Nintendo's net sales of $12.4 billion for the period ending on March 31st 2011 was 29 percent less than it tallied during the previous year, while its $825 million of net profit was also a staggering 66 percent lower than it earned last year. The 3DS has sold well so far, reaching 3.61 million transactions worldwide, but the Wii is down to 15 million global sales, which marks a 25 percent contraction from its FY2009 total of 20 million. So the impetus for a hardware refresh of the Wii is clearly there, now it's just a matter of waiting for E3 to find out exactly how Nintendo plans to go about it.
Nintendo confirms next Wii coming in 2012, will preview it at E3
Nintendo has just announced it plans to introduce a successor to its Wii console next year, a "playable model" of which will be shown off at the E3 gaming expo in Los Angeles coming up on June 7th. No details are available as to how the next Wii will improve on the first one, though we imagine Nintendo will be happy if it simply matches the success of its current-gen home entertainer -- the brief note publicizing the new roadmap also comes with a total of Wii sales accumulated between its launch in '06 and the end of last month: 86.01 million. That's said to be on a "consolidated shipment basis," so maybe Nintendo is mixing its definitions of sales and shipments the way Sony likes to, but it's a mighty big number either way. Bring on E3, we say! Update: Bloomberg has provided the first official hint about Nintendo's next console with a quote from company President Satoru Iwata. Nintendo will "propose a new approach to home video game consoles," though it won't be a simple move to 3D, as Iwata notes "it's difficult to make 3-D images a key feature, because 3-D televisions haven't obtained wide acceptance yet." Given that motion gaming is no longer new and 3D is off the table until 3DTVs go mainstream, we're now left facing only one potentiality -- Nintendo is planning on bringing genuine innovation to our living rooms. We suppose it also adds fuel to the rumor of a crazy next-gen controller to go with this next-gen console.
Sony ships 50 million PlayStation 3s, eight million Move controllers worldwide
Sony has a couple of sweet, sweet numbers to report with regard to sales of its gaming hardware. The PlayStation 3, that venerable old powerhouse of console gaming, has surpassed 50 million units shipped around the globe, while the PS Move controller introduced late last year has also kept pace and rounded its own milestone with eight million units shipped. We say "shipped" in spite of Sony calling these sales, because what Sony reports are sales to retailers, not end users (the company calls 'em "sell-in numbers"), so they're not directly comparable with retail sales of the competition. Still, numbers are numbers, and these are pretty big ones. Full PR after the break.
Nintendo 3DS clocks up 400,000 US sales in opening week, nearly matches month-long total for DS
Now we're talking. After Nintendo slyly told us that the 3DS set a day-one US sales record for its handheld division, it has now been more forthright and actually disclosed some cold hard numbers. 400,000 3DS units were shifted in the month of March, says Nintendo of America chief Reggie Fils-Aime, which amounts to just one working week's worth of sales when you consider the portable console launched on March 27th. That was still enough time for it to threaten the DS' overall March tally of 460,000, however, and extrapolated over a full 30 days would total a whopping 2.4 million transactions. Of course, sales rarely sustain such a roaring pace after launch, but Reggie foresees good things for the 3DS with a marquee Legend of Zelda game, the launch of the E-Shop, and Netflix integration all coming over the summer. So the future's bright, we just wish it didn't have to be turquoise.
IDC and Gartner's latest PC shipment stats show why Acer needed to make a strategic change
Gianfranco Lanci's departure from Acer last month came as a bit of a surprise, but looking at some fresh PC shipment data from the IDC, we can now understand why it had to happen. In Q1 of 2011, Acer suffered a precipitous 42.1 percent drop in PC shipments to the United States, falling from 2.3 million units in the first quarter of 2010 to 1.3 million in the first three months of this year. That's matched by a global downturn of 15.8 percent for the company's computer business, taking its market share from 12.9 percent down to 11.2. A percentage point and a half might not seem like much, but in the high stakes business of selling high volumes of devices with low profit margins, that can clearly make the difference between winning and losing, between living and dying (as a CEO). On a happier note, Lenovo surged upwards by 16.3 percent globally amid a market that shrunk a little overall. The IDC -- whose numbers are considered preliminary until companies confirm them in their quarterly financial reports -- identifies Acer's exposure to the shrinking interest in netbooks as the chief reason why it's now having to reorganize itself. That overhaul is already underway with a new logo and some attractively priced tablets, but it's likely to be a while before Acer gets back to challenging HP for world domination. Update: Gartner has dropped its figures for the first quarter as well, and while it doesn't see Acer losing out quite so badly in the US (minus 24.9 percent year-on-year), it agrees on its worldwide market struggles, placing its decrease in shipments at 12.2 percent.
Our annual data consumption estimated at 9.57 zettabytes or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
The internet is a mighty big place that's only growing larger each day. That makes it a perfectly unwieldy thing to measure, but the traffic it generates has nonetheless been subjected to a rigorous estimation project by a group of UC San Diego academics. Their findings, published online this month, reveal that in 2008 some 9.57 zettabytes made their way in and out of servers across the globe. Some data bits, such as an email passing through multiple servers, might be counted more than once in their accounting, but the overall result is still considered an under-estimation because it doesn't address privately built servers, such as those Google, Microsoft and others run in their backyards. On a per-worker basis (using a 3.18 billion human workforce number), all this data consumption amounts to 12GB daily or around 3TB per year. So it seems that while we might not have yet reached the bliss of the paperless office, we're guzzling down data as if we were. Check out the report below for fuller details on the study and its methodology.
Visualized: eBay's iPad 2 sales, thus far
Although eBay figures don't exactly correlate with Apple's sales numbers, it's interesting to note who's buying what, and where. Last year, for example, in the first two weeks after the Apple iPad hit shelves, 65 percent of all iPads sold on eBay went abroad. This year, in the same timeframe, the percentages have been flipped -- 65 percent of iPad 2s sold on eBay remained in America, or around 7,800 tablets. Perhaps we're just seeing higher demand or maybe people don't like waiting in line. Peep the source link to dive deeper into the comparison.
Firefox 4 clocks up 7.1 million downloads within first 24 hours, fails to beat Firefox 3 record (updated)
We noted Firefox 3's spectacular eight million downloads in a day when discussing the recent launch of IE9, and that mark shall live on as a record for another day. Firefox 4 looks to have a had a thoroughly successful debut, going past the five million milestone within the first 24 hours of its release, but it hasn't quite been able to overshadow its predecessor. And before you go comparing its numbers to the latest Internet Explorer, do be cognizant that FF4 released on a wider set of platforms, rendering direct stat comparisons a little dicey. That's not stopping StatCounter, however, who notes that the latest Firefox already has a 1.95 percent share of the browser market, almost exactly double what IE9 can claim so far. Better get working on that XP compatibility, eh Microsoft? Update: Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs has the final stats for the first 24 hours and it's actually even higher than we thought: 7.1 million downloads around the globe. That's in addition to three million users already running the release candidate for Firefox 4, which turned into the final release. Good work!
'Hummer' handsets now account for 24 percent of US smartphone sales, prove Steve Jobs wrong
Remember when Steve Jobs had a dig at Apple's mobile competition and proclaimed that "no one" would buy their Hummer-like 4-inch-plus smartphones? Well, going by the latest NPD data, that group of "no ones" among US smartphone consumers is now a meaty 24 percent. Separating handsets into screen categories of 3.4 inches and below, 3.5 to 3.9 inches, and those above 4 inches, the stat mavens discovered that the midrange is holding steady, but smaller-screened devices are starting to lose out to their jumbo-sized brethren. No prizes for guessing that Android-powered devices were behind that big sales increase, with the HTC EVO 4G and Motorola Droid X leading the way, followed by Samsung's multivariate Galaxy S range. Now, care to tell us more about our mobile future, Steve? [Thanks, Skylar] Disclaimer: NPD's Ross Rubin is a contributor to Engadget.
Ebook sales in the US double year-on-year, paper books suffer double-digit losses
We doubt the world will ever get to a stage where it'll completely ditch ye olde paper books, but the US consumer market seems to clearly have its heart set on the electronic kind right now. Net ebook sales in January were this week reported to have accumulated $69.9 million in revenue for their publishers, which amounts to a 116 percent jump from last year's total for the month. During the same period, adult hardcovers were down 11.3 percent to $49.1 million and paperbacks faced a similar reduction in demand and fell to $83.6 million, a precipitous drop of 19.7 percent year-on-year. Educational and children's books weren't spared from this cull of the physical tome, either -- skip past the break to see the full statistical breakdown.
Windows Phone 7 Marketplace hits 10,000 apps, Microsoft WP7 updates still way outnumbered
It's a milestone in the life of any OS: the day you reach that magical 10,000 app number. Windows Phone 7 is the latest kindred soul to achieve the feat, accomplishing the task in just over four and a half months -- that's faster than both the Android Marketplace and iTunes App Store. Microsoft's been adding around 1,000 apps a week since it hit 5k right before the New Year, and as of late that rate's been picking up. Congrats WP7 devs, you've officially issued more software updates than Microsoft itself. Your move Microsoft, we're still waiting for copy & paste.
Electric car sales watch: 281 Volts and 67 Leafs sold in US during February
Neither Chevrolet nor Nissan have felt proud enough of their EV sales numbers to list them on their latest press releases, but our colleagues over at Autoblog Green have dug those numbers up anyhow. They make for dispiriting reading if you're an electric car well-wisher, as the Volt's sales declined from January's tally of 321 to an even less impressive 281, while the Leaf closed February with only 67 US sales, down 20 on last month. Upon seeing their previous numbers, we postulated that both cars are suffering from constrained supply, which is likely still the case, but it feels ironic to us that electric vehicles, whose driving experience offers instant torque, are taking their sweet time to rev up their sales.
Shocker! UK regulator finds average broadband speeds are 'less than half' those advertised
You don't have to go to the lengths of compiling a statistical project to know that advertised and actual broadband speeds are two pretty disparate entities, but it does help. Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, recently took a thorough look at 11 broadband packages, which collectively account for over 90 percent of all British broadband subscriptions, and found that actual download throughput was less than half (only 45 percent) of the advertised "up to" speed. The worst offenders were resellers of BT's ADSL lines, with Orange dipping below 3Mbit on its 8Mbit lines and TalkTalk occasionally offering only 7.5Mbit to users paying for a 24Mbit connection, while Virgin's cable connectivity won out by sticking most loyally to its listed rating. What Ofcom proposes for the future is that all these service providers start offering Typical Speed Ranges that more accurately reflect the bandwidth a potential subscriber would be buying into -- a proposal that might actually have some teeth as the British Advertising Standards Authority is currently in the midst of a review specifically concerned with broadband advertising practices. Transparency in the way we're sold broadband? That'd make a welcome change!
United States gets a National Broadband Map, finds much of its nation doesn't have broadband
The FCC of the Obama administration has been very keen to highlight the fact that many Americans today still aren't riding the information superhighway, a mission of awareness-spreading that was advanced a little more yesterday with the introduction of the National Broadband Map. Mostly the work of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, this $200 million project provides broadband data for thousands of providers with over 25 million searchable records -- all of which can be visualized in map form, categorized by connectivity type, or downloaded in full to your computer. APIs have been made available for anyone interested in remixing / using the NBM elsewhere, while information updates are promised every six months. In terms of the maps' content, we're still seeing unsatisfactorily wide swathes of broadband-free countryside, but we suppose the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one.
Gartner and IDC dispute Android's dominance over Symbian in Q4 2010
According to Gartner's latest mobile sales numbers, the rise of Android hasn't been quite as meteoric as you might think -- even with 888.8 percent growth in 2010. Last month, Canalys quoted Android as the top earner for smartphone platforms in Q4 of last year, beating out Symbian for the top spot, but Gartner says it ain't so. In fact, IDC already quietly chimed in on the topic a few days ago saying that Symbian was still the smartphone OS "market leader." Gartner's numbers do show Android overtaking Nokia's Symbian devices in unit sales, but it points out that the OS' use across a variety of brands in Q4 actually "kept Symbian slightly ahead of Android." Symbian ultimately outsold Android by more than 44 million units last year, but considering the little green robot's astronomical growth in 2010, we'd say even super star is an understatement. Check out the PR after the jump to see how the rest of the competition stacks up.
