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iOS devices affecting Mac's web share worldwide
There's a new set of web share stats out in the US, and it appears that on a worldwide scale, the iPhone and other iOS devices are taking a bite out of normal computers' web browsing, but specifically more for Macs than Windows PCs. That's the conclusion in the new Net Applications report, which notes that iOS devices are now up to 1.25 percent of all web traffic, while the Mac has dropped below five percent for the first time in a while. Of course, these are only figures, not actual cause-and-effect, so any actual correlations are speculative. But it makes sense that people who previously used MacBooks to do their web browsing are slowly transferring some of that time over to iPads and iOS devices. On a US scale, the Mac is actually gaining share right alongside iOS, as Apple's gaining even more of a foothold on device time. Windows still has a huge lead at 83 percent, but Macs and iOS are bigger than ever; together, they make up the largest non-Windows share by far. In terms of actual browsers, Safari is still being beaten handily by Chrome, Firefox, and of course Internet Explorer, but that's mostly business as usual. Interesting stats -- it's wild to consider that Apple has basically created the iOS market from thin air in the past few years, and it'll be interesting to see if the company can start taking a bigger bite out of Windows users rather than sharing browsing time with the Mac product line.
Acer gains ground on HP as ASUS bumps Toshiba out of top five global PC vendors
Did you know that since the inception of the great and glorious PC industry the world leader in shipments has always been an American company? The biggest threat to this hometown hegemony right now looks to be coming from Taiwan, as Gartner's latest figures show significant growth from both Acer and ASUS, with the latter improving its global shipments by a stonking 78.5% between this time last year and now. Acer's ascent was a more modest 31.6%, though the whole PC market has taken a big uptick from 2009 with a 20.7% average growth in shipments. That's meant that even though HP and Dell have registered double-digit growth, both lost market share over that time. Toshiba has similarly had a strong showing, but ASUS' exponential growth has relegated the Japanese company to sixth in the world. That Toshibasus merger isn't looking like such a bad idea now, is it Toshiba?
IDC and Gartner award smartphone growth prizes to Apple and Google
Get ready to rumble, the latest Gartner and IDC smartphone numbers are out to give us a pretty good idea of how things shape up globally. Remember, IDC measures vendor shipments while Gartner measures actual handset sales to end users. So what does the data tell us? Well, to start with, in terms of smartphone devices, Gartner claims a 48.7% increase in smartphone sales of 54.3 million units in Q1 2010 compared to Q1 2009 -- IDC pegs growth at 56.7% on 54.7 million units for the same period. Both estimates easily outpace the 17% or 21.7% growth in worldwide units of mobile phones moved according to Gartner and IDC, respectively. IDC's list of top 5 smartphone device makers (pictured after the break) has Nokia at the number one spot repeating its 39.3% share as it did in Q1 of 2009 while RIM is down slightly from 20.9% in 2009 to a 19.4% market share in 2010. Apple (up from 10.9% to 16.1%) more than doubled its device shipments in the last year as HTC (up from 4.3% to 4.8%) and Motorola (up from 3.4% to 4.2%) all managed to increase their shares on higher volumes. Regarding smartphone OS market share, Android's global numbers echo its success in the US jumping from a 1.6% market share to 9.6% in just one year. Gartner claims that sales of Android-based phones increased 707% year-on-year to displace Windows Mobile in the top 5 for the first time. Apple's iPhone OS also saw growth from 10.5% in 1Q09 to 15.4% in 1Q10 as both RIM (down from 20.1% to 19.4%) and Symbian (down from 48.8% to 44.3%) dropped. See the OS numbers broken down into a no-nonsense table after the break.
iSuppli finds worldwide cellphone shipments are up 13.8 percent, Motorola's share slipping
We've already seen Motorola's market share slip a bit when it comes to US cellphone shipments, and it looks like the news is even worse for the company on a global scale. According to iSuppli's latest numbers -- which back up some earlier reports -- while worldwide cellphone shipments rose a healthy 13.8 percent in the first quarter of 2010, Motorola slipped from sixth to eighth spot in the global rankings, selling a total of 8.5 million phones compared to 14.7 million during the same period a year earlier. As you can see in the helpful chart above (with sales indicated in thousands), Motorola's loss came largely at the expense of considerable gains from market leaders Nokia and Samsung, with LG, RIM and Apple also seeing some smaller but significant gains. And, yes, this news also means that Motorola is also now in a neck and neck race with ZTE, for what it's worth. [Thanks, Katie]
Zen Studios' Planet Minigolf will be Move-enabled
Add one more title to the list of PlayStation Move launch games -- Zen Studios has announced that its Planet Minigolf game, set for a release as soon as this spring, will be "Move-enabled." Of course, Move isn't released until later this fall, but Zen promises that their game "will be fully-compatible" with the motion controller anyway. Presumably, that means you'll be able to swing the controller like a putt-putt club, but who knows -- maybe the game will incorporate any number of other minigolf-associated motions, from throwing your club in anger when the clown blocks your shot to stealthily nudging the ball with your foot when your opponent isn't looking. The possibilities are endless!
Worms Reloaded beta going worldwide on Monday
News from the Steam Community tells us that Worms Reloaded, that new "extended" version of the old game in which sentient invertebrates do battle with rockets and/or sheep, is moving up to a worldwide beta. Previously, the game was only available for testing in Europe, but it's opening it up globally on Monday, so children of all nations will be able to throw airstrikes and ninja ropes at each other then. The only catch? You need a key, and they've only got a few. So you'll just have to hope you come up when they spin the random numbers around. We do know that you have to be a member of the official group, so sign in over there right now ... and then begins the waiting game. [via LA Examiner]
Apple gains 19% share of portable gaming market, 5% of everything
Flurry's got lots of new data this week -- earlier, we heard that 44% of apps coming to the iPad are going to be games, and now they're saying that Apple is making huge headway into the gaming market overall. According to the latest numbers, the iPhone OS has nabbed 15% of the mobile game market away from bigger handhelds like the Nintendo DS and the PSP, and the iPhone itself has actually claimed 5% of the worldwide video game market. That's pretty astounding. In just a few years, the iPhone has picked up a sizeable amount of share in one of the biggest markets in the world, and Apple has done it all while actually selling the device as a smartphone. What's even more amazing is that Apple has done all of this without actually making a single game themselves (Update: Reader Sunny reminds me that they made one). Video game console manufacturers have long had to deal with the relationship between first-party and third-party games -- Nintendo, especially, has struggled with getting their third-party software up to snuff. For Apple, however, there is no first-party; they just open up the App Store and let the sales fly. Of course, that drum beating you hear in the distance is the iPad. While Apple has, again, focused on productivity and media rather than gaming, there's no question at all that a bigger touchscreen can, and will, create a whole new experience for gamers. The iPhone has come a long way in the past year and a half, but I'd expect the iPad to take an even bigger bite out of the game industry after all is said and done. [via iPhone Savior]
Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate
Gartner just released its annual numbers for worldwide mobile phone sales to end users in the year known as two thousand nine. Looking at smartphone OS market share alone, Gartner shows the iPhone OS, Android, and RIM making the biggest gains (up 6.2, 3.4, and 3.3 percentage points from 2008, respectively) at the expense of Windows Mobile (off 3.1 percentage points) and Symbian (off 5.5 points). Although Gartner says that Symbian "has become uncompetitive in recent years," (ouch) it concedes that market share is still strong especially for Nokia; something backed up by Nokia's Q4 financials and reported quarterly smartphone growth by 5 percentage points. Regarding total handsets of all classifications sold, Nokia continues to dominate with 36.4% of all sales to end users (down from 38.6% in 2008) while Samsung and LG continue to climb at the expense of Motorola (dropping from 7.6% to 4.5% of worldwide sales in 2009) and Sony Ericsson. See that table after the break or hit up the source for the full report.
Apple hires two more for mobile ad sales
In addition to their Quattro Wireless buy last month, Apple has picked up two more new employees that seems like additions to an incoming mobile advertising business. Theo Theodorou was picked up from Microsoft's mobile advertising sales department and will head sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And Todd Tran, from mobile ad agency Joule, will serve as general manager in Europe. Apple hasn't announced exact details of what they plan to do with all of this mobile advertising, but they did say in the conference call last week that they plan to use their Quattro Wireless acquisition to help app developers make money, especially on free apps. We don't yet know the exact specifics of that plan ("iAds," coming soon to an App Store near you?), but it looks like Apple is making a significant investment in putting mobile ads on their devices.
Worldwide PC shipments up slightly in 2009 -- is an even more decent 2010 underway?
An IDC Quarterly PC Tracker report released yesterdays found that PC shipments overall for 2009 were up about 2.8 percent over 2008 -- not exactly a game changing stat or anything, but we're sure the manufacturers will take what they can get. The upswing was apparently largely due to the strong fourth quarter (and the positive debut of Windows 7), which made up for the abysmal first quarter, second quarter, and semi-abysmal third quarter. In that last quarter of the year, PC sales showed a 15.2 percent growth over 2008 worldwide, while in the US, sales were up 24 percent over the last year, with 20.7 million units shipped. Another trend noted in the report, is, unsurprisingly, the fact that people continue to purchase cheaper PCs -- mostly in the form of laptops and netbooks. All this means that retailers and manufacturers profit margins are thinning out, but hey, we'll leave the worrying to the economists -- where's that circular for the fifteen dollar netbook?
The indomitable LFG chat channel
The first thing I thought when I saw the new LFG interface coming in patch 3.3 was what I said on last week's podcast: that's cool, but where's the LFG channel? If you remember way back during patch 2.0.1, when Blizzard originally released the LFG system, there was quite a clamor raised when they took away the LFG channel then, so much so that they eventually had to resurrect it. And so, when I saw in the latest patch notes that the LFG was set to return as a citywide channel, it didn't come as a surprise at all -- even in the new era of cross-realm LFG, there's still a place for just talking about which groups you can join. But citywide still isn't enough for a lot of players -- some are saying that they want the channel to be worldwide. Ghostcrawler himself shows up in that thread and says a worldwide LFG channel would be nuts. And he's right: way back in the day when it was worldwide, it was "mass chaos," like a Barrens from everywhere. So why are people so tied to it? Blizzard seems to be missing a major way people used the LFG channel.
WoW as a channel for news from Iran?
Normally, this wouldn't rate too high for us -- lots of people have ideas about how to use World of Warcraft, and many of them never actually come about. But then again, this is in the Wall Street Journal of all places, so we'll give it a look. If you're on Twitter, you've probably heard about what's going on in Iran right now -- there was an election, the "official" results given were judged as rigged by many involved, and the government seems to be cracking down on both news media and citizen journalism, as well as protesting citizens, to very sad results. How does World of Warcraft fit in to all of this? Andrew Lavallee of the WSJ's Digits blog points to this report by Craig Labovitz, which talks about how Internet traffic has been filtered out of the country around the election. At the very end of his analysis, Labovitz points out that channels for videogames, including both Xbox Live and World of Warcraft, have shown very little government manipulation. That suggests that if the government in Iran does continue to shut down certain channels, citizens there might be forced to spread the news through any virtual route they can, including possibly Azeroth.This is obviously all just analysis and speculation so far -- while there clearly (from those charts) has been interference in the media, no one (as far as we know) has yet had to resort to chatting in World of Warcraft to get their message out, and though what's happening in Iran is made up of some very serious (and seriously unfortunate) situations, the fervor online about using brand new channels like Twitter to share real-time news is often overstated. Personally, I believe that even if Twitter didn't exist, this information would find another way to get out. Still, the interesting thing to take away here is that even our "silly" video games today are actually media on a global level.Thanks, Cedars!
Leaf Trombone out now in the App Store
I've been down on the fine folks at Smule in the past -- I've said that their app Ocarina seems kind of silly (even if people have created some pretty awesome stuff with it and other less annoying music apps). And about the only thing they could have done to make it up to me was to develop some sort of super massively multiplayer music app, some app in which you could play a tune and have it sent all around the world. So I guess I have to call off my pretend grudge against them once and for all, because that's exactly what they did: Leaf Trombone: World Stage is in the App Store right now.This is, of course, the app with the strange name that we saw at Apple's iPhone 3.0 demo. It features a Chinese leaf-type instrument that sounds, as you can hear above, like a trombone. But the World Stage part is the most interesting -- Smule has set up a way to share the songs you play in the app with people around the world, and the people who hear your work can send back short messages and emotes to say how they felt. It's an interesting idea -- kind of combines what they were trying to do with Zephyr into a more Ocarina-like app.At just 99 cents, there will undoubtedly be lots of musicians out there picking it up. And while the video above is... cute... we're sure there'll be some even better stuff to listen to soon.
Worldwide cellphone use hits 60 percent, developing nations largely to thank
Outfits like Nokia have been just rolling in profits from selling oodles of low margin handsets in developing nations across the globe, so it's no shock at all to hear that those very countries have propelled the worldwide usage tally well above the 50 percent mark. According to a wide-ranging United Nations report, around six in ten people across the globe now use mobile phones, and as expected, fixed line subscriptions have increased at a much slower pace. If you're wondering just how significant this figure really is, chew on this: in 2002, just under 15 percent of the global population used a cellie. Impressive, eh?[Via TG Daily]
HTC says Touch Pro2 will be "broadly available," North America included
In October of last year, HTC informed us that the Touch HD would sadly not be coming to the States via its Twitter feed. Shortly after Mobile World Congress, that same feed has delivered much, much better news in regard to the Touch Pro2. Directly from HTC: "And to answer the big question on everyone's minds, the Touch Pro2 will be broadly available in all major markets, including North America." A followup tweet affirmed that a launch date and country wasn't yet set in stone, but that the phone would begin shipping out in "late Q2." Oh, where art thou, May through July time frame? [Via Brighthand]Read - HTC tweet IRead - HTC tweet II
UN communications chief predicts four billion mobile phone subs by year's end
No need to adjust your set -- the United Nations communications chief has boldly predicted that half of planet Earth's population will be hooked on some sort of mobile phone before 2009 dawns. Granted, the numbers he's talking about do look strictly at subscriptions, so a small percentage will be skewed by those with multiple accounts (and thus, multiple numbers), but really, the forecast isn't all that outlandish. After all, we already hit 3.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions back in November of last year (and 4 billion lines overall). As predicted, it's growth in developing regions such as Africa and the Middle East which will boost the overall figure the most, with yearly increases in those areas expected to hit 27% and 25%, respectively. So, what are the chances a post eerily similar to this pops up in 2012 or so saying the entire world has a cellphone? Our trusty Magic 8-ball says "Signs Point to Yes."[Via Core77, image courtesy of Road and Travel]
Resident Evil 5 to offer online co-op, delayed to March 2009
When Resident Evil 5 drops, you won't be alone against the legions of zombies -- a second player will be able to join in the gory fun as well. The online co-op mode is confirmed at E3, with another player taking control of Sheva, Chris' female companion.Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a while -- Microsoft says that it won't be available until a worldwide simultaneous release on Friday the 13th, March 2009. "Please hang on just a bit longer," they say, "we'll have it to you shortly."Update: Press conference walkthrough video embedded after the cut.
Worldwide PCs in use surpass 1 billion, next billion to come in 2014
So, we hear that Planet Earth is home to four billion phone lines. Now it can claim to house over one billion installed PCs -- what do those neighboring planets have on that, huh? According to research firm Gartner, the number of "installed PCs worldwide has surpassed 1 billion units," and it estimates that said figure is growing at around 12-percent annually. Should this trend continue, we'll be reporting on 2 billion sometime during 2014. It should be noted that this figure accounts for computers in use rather than units shipped, and while the current ratio remains slanted towards mature markets, Gartner expects emerging markets to (expectedly) account for a larger share as we climb to 2 billion. Unsurprisingly, the firm also suggests that around 180 million PCs will be replaced this year, with around 35 million of those hitting landfills "with little or no regard for their toxic content." Kind of puts a damper on things, wouldn't you say?[Via Reuters, image courtesy of Wikimedia]
WorldWide Telescope: Works great on a Mac (if you have Windows)
You might have heard that Microsoft Research has released WorldWide Telescope (WWT), it's software to devour the universe whole provide a fun way to browse the planets and stars. The BBC mentioned that you can run WWT on your Mac ... so long as you have Windows on your Mac. Sigh. VMWare helpfully gave the system a try, though, and found it worked great (and even posted a video about it.) I fired up the ol' Boot Camp and saw it wasn't bad. It boasts high-resolution photography of many parts of the sky, and is reasonably easy to use (for a Microsoft product). There were some weird, annoying flicker problems, but I'll chalk that up to the fact that it's beta software on a MacBook with a pokey graphics card. As an amateur astronomer with his own 10-inch Dob (that's right, ladies), I tend to use astronomy software less as a casual browsing tool, but more to find interesting things in the sky on a particular night. And for that, WWT ain't great. You won't find any satellites (like Iridium flares) in WWT. Worst of all -- there's no horizon I could easily find. (Found it, thanks to commenter dh!) So good luck trying to find that fuzzy thing next to the blue thing when it's under your feet. The Mac, however, is blessed with a great variety of native astronomy tools, most of which are free. Stellarium is excellent, free planetarium software. It's worth noting that Google Earth has a spiffy sky tool built-in, too. Last but not least, Starry Night Pro is the king of all astronomy software (and my favorite), but is a little spendy at $150.
Sony Pictures reaches DVD, Blu-ray distribution deal in Vietnam
Vietnam is finally getting some love from Hollywood, as Sony Pictures is the first studio to release DVDs in the country. Blu-ray discs are expected to come ashore sometime after the initial package of 15 movies (including Casino Royale) as SPHE expands its worldwide reach in partnership with Galaxy Studio. Variety indicates Vietnam's home video market has been almost all pirated content until recently, but it remains to be seen how legitimate releases and next-gen DRM schemes work out.
