Mobiles @ NCSU

The Find: State of Smartphones in 2013: Part I of the new Ars Ultimate Guide

Moto x is especially interesting on republic wireless.

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More phones than you can shake a phone at.

Andrew Cunningham

It's been just under a year since the last time we examined the state of the smartphone. The intervening months have brought us the expected annual hardware refreshes and software updates, but it's striking just how similar things are at a high level.

Apple and Samsung are still standing at the top of the field, and at the moment there's not a strong third-place contender in sales or in reach. HTC continues to be down on its luck despite the critical darling that is the HTC One. LG is still taking pages from Samsung's playbook, trying lots of odd ideas in an effort to differentiate. Microsoft is still struggling to improve Windows Phone 8's standing with consumers, developers, and hardware partners. All of this is more or less as it was a year ago.

That doesn't mean there aren't interesting things happening at the margins. The Motorola division is still a big money-loser for Google, but the Moto X is a surprisingly good, usable phone that has been very well-reviewed. Alternative operating systems like Ubuntu and Firefox OS are trying new things, even if they're strictly for hardcore early adopters as they currently stand. BlackBerry (née RIM), which at this time last year was pinning all its hopes on the then-forthcoming BlackBerry 10, is circling the drain. Microsoft bought the part of Nokia that makes its Lumia smartphones. Few of these events drastically alter the state of the smartphone today, but they all have interesting implications for 2014 and beyond.

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Find: Indystate - Android and Windows Phone make huge third quarter gains as BlackBerry crumbles

// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

We know BlackBerry is a withering mobile brand, but how fast is it crumbling, and who is gaining from its demise? IDC's latest quarterly numbers yield some answers, showing that Android continues to solidify its dominant lead in the smartphone market, crossing the 80 percent threshold to hit a solid 81 percent of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013, according to the market research firm. Perhaps more impressively, Windows Phone posted a huge jump, increasing smartphone shipments by 156 percent from last year to capture 3.6 percent of all smartphones shipped in the quarter, which IDC rightly calls "amazing."

Find: os market share isn't what's in users hands

Market share counts what carriers buy, not what users buy. Only comscore surveys user ownership.

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// published on Daring Fireball // visit site

Charles Arthur has written the best piece I’ve ever seen on the folly of putting too much stock into “market share” as a metric. Bookmark this one:

But if the market share figure is so useless, why does everyone quote it all the time?

Now we get to the key point. Because it’s easy to measure market share — much easier than measuring installed base, which requires large panels of people who you interview on a regular, repeated basis. (ComScore does this in the US, where it provides a picture of the installed base of smartphone users that is consistent back to the end of 2009. Its figures for the three months to September 2013 show a 51.8% installed base for Android — that’s 76.6m — and 40.6% for iPhone — that’s 60m. It’s not 80% Android; not even close.)

Plus “market share” gives journalists who like nothing better than a metaphorical horse race (look at the preponderance of polls, especially in the US presidential election) something to write about. Trouble is, it doesn’t necessarily give us useful information.

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Find: flexible oled displays on smartphones promise less reflection from environment

When concave, displays needn't be nearly as bright, because they reflect background less.

Oleds will work outdoors. Better enough to compete with lcds?

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// published on Daring Fireball // visit site

Display expert Raymond M. Soneira:

Introducing a slightly curved cylindrically concave screen is a very important and major innovation in Smartphone display technology — very far from being a marketing gimmick as has been widely reported. The Galaxy Round screen curvature is very subtle, just 0.10 inches away from flat, which is similar to the slight curvature in a handheld magnifying mirror. But that small curvature is the key to a series of optical effects that result in significantly reducing interference from reflected ambient light by a large factor. It substantially improves screen readability, image contrast, color accuracy, and overall picture quality, but can also increase the running time on battery because the screen brightness and display power can be lowered due to the reduced light interference from ambient light reflections.

But that’s for a concave display. Bloomberg’s report regarding Apple’s supposedly forthcoming displays describes “larger displays with glass that curves downward at the edges” — downward sounds like convex, not concave. It’s possible that Bloomberg’s source is describing a design where the display is flat but the glass surface above the display tapers at the edge of the device.

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FInd: FCC’s new app will need your help to quantify mobile broadband speed

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Late last week, the FCC published the agenda for its commission meeting next week—the first with newly-appointed chairman Tom Wheeler at the helm. In that agenda, the FCC said it would hear a presentation on the new FCC Speed Test App for Android. The organization plans to make this app public in the hopes that smartphone users will measure their data speeds and send the results back to the FCC to compile and analyze the results.

This isn't the first speed test app that the FCC has been a part of, but it will be the first time the FCC has made efforts to crowdsource information on carrier speeds. (The author remembers using an old app made by a developer called Ookla that had the FCC's logo emblazoned on it back in 2011 when she was employed at PC World. It appears that the “FCC-approval” branding was dropped from that app in the years since.)

The new app will likely function much like the old one, measuring upload speeds, download speeds, and latency for all major carriers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the commission has the cooperation of all four major carriers as well as the wireless trade association CTIA. “Given the paucity of information on mobile broadband availability and prices, this type of data collection seems like the first step toward evaluating whether Americans are getting what they pay for from their carriers in terms of mobile data speeds,” writes the WSJ.

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Find: The FCC is rebooting a three-year-old plan to crowdsource mobile broadband speed tests

Um, yeah. Why'd this take so long?

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

After being sworn in earlier this week, new FCC chair Tom Wheeler is preparing to pick up where his predecessor left off. The Wall Street Journal reports that today, the FCC said it's almost ready to preview an app that will let users test and report their mobile broadband speed. Using this data, the agency will compile its first nationwide study of mobile broadband service across different carriers — much like the broadband tests it's been conducting over the past few years. An open meeting on Thursday, the first with Wheeler in command, will include a presentation on the app, which is set for release on Android in the spring of 2014.

The mobile broadband report has been a long time in the making: the FCC announced its intention to...

Apple's share of mobile market grows to over 40 percent, but Samsung also shows momentum

Apple 40 % in us, android. In devices, apple 40, samsung 25.

// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

According to new figures from comScore, 40.6 percent of US smartphone subscribers are using iPhones. In the three month period that concluded September 30th, Apple's share grew by 0.7 percent from where it stood in June. The company launched two new iPhone models on September 20th, and the ensuing ten days of sales likely helped boost Apple's position some. Still, the jump wasn't enough to put a dent in Android's commanding lead: Google's OS is running on 51.8 percent of smartphones used by consumers in the US. That's actually a slight (0.2 percent) dip compared with Android's standing in the prior three-month period, when it enjoyed an even 52 percent share.

BlackBerry's customer base continues to dwindle; only 3.8 of US smartphone...

Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary

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Aurich Lawson

Six years ago, in November 2007, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was announced. The original iPhone came out just a few months earlier, capturing people's imaginations and ushering in the modern smartphone era. While Google was an app partner for the original iPhone, it could see what a future of unchecked iPhone competition would be like. Vic Gundotra, recalling Andy Rubin's initial pitch for Android, stated:

He argued that if Google did not act, we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice.

Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, Android was launched as an open source project.

In that era, Google had nothing, so any adoption—any shred of market share—was welcome. Google decided to give Android away for free and use it as a trojan horse for Google services. The thinking went that if Google Search was one day locked out of the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the "moat" around the Google Search "castle"—it would exist to protect Google's online properties in the mobile world.

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Find: Pebble Update with Better iOS 7 Integration, New APIs, Enables Bluetooth LE

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Today Pebble has released a major update for its popular smartwatch, enabling better integration and notification delivery from attached iOS 7 devices, a new version of the SDK (2.0) with additional APIs, and newly-enabled support for Bluetooth LE on applicable iOS devices.

I've been wearing Pebble basically nonstop since first getting it, and have watched the platform slowly mature from its initial state to where it is today. Changes initially focused on improving stability, adding more watchfaces, and changing navigation, but the update today seems to be the largest yet. Pebble gave us a few days with a prerelease version of the firmware and iOS application to play around with, which dramatically improves the types of notifications that can be delivered to Pebble from attached iOS devices.

The update specifically enables notifications to be sent from ANCS (Apple Notification Center Service) over Bluetooth LE to Pebble. ANCS is a new part of iOS 7 which seems catered almost exactly for the kind of application Pebble is designed for – a service which works with iOS applications to deliver simple notifications. One of the limitations with Pebble previously was that lacking iOS integration due to limitations with the platform, this update fills in the gap and enables iOS to deliver notifications from all applications and system apps, from what I can tell. Apple has a list of categories that APNS works with, such as incoming calls, voicemail, emails, news, and so on, this also seems to extend to all the notifications delivered by third party applications as well. In practice the new ANCS based notifications worked well for me on iOS 7 and an iPhone 5s, although there were a few hiccups where Pebble would detach from Bluetooth while running the prerelease version of the firmware, although Pebble has a fix for this.

Pebble simultaneously is launching their SDK 2.0 which includes the promised accelerometer data support and a few other new APIs – JavaScript, data logging, and persistent storage support. Accelerometer data APIs have been something people have wanted for a while now for health and fitness, the other APIs add support for web interaction and storing data on the watch for logging.

Last but not least this update enables Bluetooth Smart (formerly Bluetooth LE) on the Pebble's integrated Bluetooth controller (TI's CC256x inside a Panasonic PAN1316 module), which initially shipped disabled. Interestingly enough the implementation under iOS has Pebble show up as two devices, one for Classic, another for Smart (LE). It's important to note that only notifications from ANCS are delivered on the LE connection, the Bluetooth 2.1 (Classic) connection is used for caller ID, music remote control, installing watch apps and faces, and updates.

It hasn't been long enough to really tell what affect enabling LE has had on Pebble's battery life given the short time I've been using it. Going to Bluetooth LE shouldn't magically change the power demands from Pebble for the same notification workload, however, and Pebble's guidance is still 5-7 days.

All in all though, this is a major update to Pebble that addresses many of the limitations that it previously had when used in conjunction with iOS.

Gallery: Pebble Update

Internet Explorer continues to Find: Webstate - ie grows on desktops, chrome falls; on mobiles, android up, safari down

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Net Market Share

If nothing else, the browser and operating system numbers from October showed the huge behavioral differences between Mac users and Windows users. Both Microsoft and Apple released new versions of their desktop operating systems last month, with Windows 8.1 from Microsoft and OS X 10.9 Mavericks from Apple. In raw terms, Windows 8.1 already has many more users than Mavericks—about double—but as a proportion of the actual user base of the two platforms, it's the Apple software that's in the lead. 10.9 percent of Mac users are on the latest version of the operating system. Just 1.9 percent of PC users are on the newest Windows.

Net Market Share

In a month that also saw Microsoft release a new version of its browser, not a great deal has changed among desktop browser preference. Internet Explorer picked up 0.42 points, Firefox gained 0.10 points, and Chrome dropped 0.54 points. Safari and Opera saw a gain of 0.07 and a loss of 0.05 points, respectively.

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