report Archive

  • Cellphones purportedly used more now for data, Gossip Girl blasts than calls

    Cellphones purportedly used more now for data, Gossip Girl blasts than calls

    Posted on May 14, 2010 | No Comments
    Ever notice how easy it is to find mobile plans with unlimited minutes these days? Yeah, it's because they're about as valuable as pea coats in the dead of summer. With more and more consumers disconnecting their landlines in favor of using their cellie for everything, the art of communicating via voice is also becoming lost. According to "government and industry data" cited in a New York Times report, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has "stagnated," with 2009 being the first year ever in which the "amount of data in text, email messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices [in the US] surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls." Dan Hesse, Sprint's head honcho, even chimed in with this nugget: "Originally, talking was the only cellphone application; now it's less than half of the traffic on mobile networks." We also learned that the average length of a mobile call was just 1.81 minutes in 2009, a drop from the 2.27 minutes per call seen in 2008, with many individuals feeling that other communication methods (email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) were far less invasive of someone's time, being that they could respond to those messages at their convenience. Of course, on the Upper East Side (where all the richies use Verizon dumbphones, apparently), we get the impression that yakking away about a cornucopia of drama is still the hotness.

    Cellphones purportedly used more now for data, Gossip Girl blasts than calls originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 May 2010 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • People like mobile ads, says JiWire

    People like mobile ads, says JiWire

    Posted on May 12, 2010 | No Comments
    JiWire has been watching mobile and in-app advertising, and says that "Advertisements in mobile applications are especially effective." Their new report, released today, "examines device use, consumer adoption of Wi-Fi and consumer preferences for mobile content and advertising delivery." Interesting take-aways from the report include the fact that iPhone has surpassed iPod Touch in number of ads delivered, and that the iPad has had a non-trivial effect on WiFi usage, indicating that people really do want to access content on-the-go but might not want to do so with a phone or a laptop.

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  • Apple brushes off NPD’s smartphone report, says it sees ‘no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon’

    Apple brushes off NPD’s smartphone report, says it sees ‘no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon’

    Posted on May 11, 2010 | No Comments
    Fresh off NPD's latest Mobile Phone Track report claiming that Android has leapfrogged the iPhone in US sales, Apple is commenting on the numbers -- and as you might expect, they're not exactly taking a congratulatory tone with Google. Speaking to AllThingsD's John Paczkowski, Cupertino had this to say:
    "This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide. IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis. We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon."
    The factual accuracy of Apple's words here can't really be disputed, but as Paczkowski notes, the context can: lumping the iPod touch into this equation isn't really fair, since NPD's report is about smartphones, not mobile operating systems (which would've let devices like non-phone Android MIDs into the picture). Besides, this is about the US market in the first quarter of 2010, not global sales, nor is it about Apple's development pipeline. In other words, Apple's not disputing NPD's report here -- rather, they're simply trying to change the subject, as any properly-trained PR department would. There's no question Android still has an uphill battle to dominate market (and mind) share the world over, but the odds that it outsold the iPhone in the US in Q1 remain very real.

    Apple brushes off NPD's smartphone report, says it sees 'no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon' originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 May 2010 14:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Pew Report: Kids who pay for their own phone are 4 times more likely to sext

    Pew Report: Kids who pay for their own phone are 4 times more likely to sext

    Posted on February 4, 2010 | No Comments
    The Pew Internet Project says that kids who buy their own phones are four times as likely to sext – that is send inappropriate images or texts to other kids. The sad thing is that some of these images make it into some of the 3,000 reports received by the National Center for Missing and [...]

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  • Nielsen stats: a lot of iPhones out there, but also a lot of everything else

    Nielsen stats: a lot of iPhones out there, but also a lot of everything else

    Posted on December 22, 2009 | No Comments
    Fact: most phones last. Thing is, for us (and likely many of you), they last far longer than our clinically-diagnosed Gadget Attention Deficit Disorder would ever tolerate -- but for your dad, your sister, your college buddy with the hand-me-down ZEOS Pantera running Windows 95, or anyone weary of re-upping a two-year commitment, a handset can easily become a serious long-term investment. That helps explain why Motorola's venerable RAZR series remains staggeringly high on Nielsen's latest US phone usage report -- third place, to be exact, at 2.3 percent of all subscribers behind the iPhone 3G at 4 percent and RIM's BlackBerry Curve line at 3.7 percent. Needless to say, that doesn't mean the ancient V3 line is still in third place for sales -- it's more a testament to the staggeringly huge RAZR user base Moto managed to develop over the years, many of whom scored their phones at sub-$100 price points as an attractive, midrange value in the phone's twilight and have no intention of upgrading any time soon if they don't have to. Maybe the most interesting part of this is that two V3 variants are also topping 2009's most-recycled list, so they're definitely getting taken out of circulation -- it just might take a few years yet before you don't know anyone that uses one, that's all.

    Nielsen stats: a lot of iPhones out there, but also a lot of everything else originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Palm loses $85.4 million in latest reported quarter — hey, it’s an improvement

    Palm loses $85.4 million in latest reported quarter — hey, it’s an improvement

    Posted on December 17, 2009 | No Comments
    We don't know just how quickly Palm (or Elevation Partners, for that matter) thought it'd become profitable following the release of webOS, but it's not there quite yet -- the company is in the process of outing its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal year 2010 right now, and in a word, they're still in the red. The good news is that it's a marked improvement from last quarter -- they've gone from a $164.5M GAAP net loss to an $85.4M one this time around. On a non-GAAP gross basis, they actually made $5.5M, which is up from $2.8M a quarter earlier. They've got $590 million in cash and other "short-term investments" on the book right now, which seems like it should be enough to keep the company going without a profit or additional cash infusion for at least a few additional quarters, but then again, burn rate is going to vary with just how much hardware and software R&D they're doing and the kinds of carrier deals they're scoring. We bet they're looking forward to this Verizon business going down, eh?

    Update: Palm's specifically saying that they're looking to grow carrier and geographic coverage right now -- a good plan, if we say so ourselves.

    Update 2: They've sold 784,000 phones in the quarter, which compares to 823,000 in the last -- a 5 percent drop. That's up 41 percent from the same quarter a year ago... but yeah, of course it's going to be way up from the pre-webOS days.

    Update 3: Over 800 apps in the catalog so far, once they graduate from the Early Access Program exclusivity, Palm foresees a "flood" of apps. No plans right now to change SDK strategy to a more native development environment.

    Palm loses $85.4 million in latest reported quarter -- hey, it's an improvement originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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