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Google Android Catching Up with iPhone In US Market, Confirms Comscore
Internet market research company comScore has released fresh mobile phone usage data which indicates that smartphones based on Google’s Android OS are eating into Apple’s and Microsoft’s smartphone market share in the US.
The market share report released by the research firm disclosed that Android OS had increased the highest out of the all the smartphone OS present in the market and ended up gaining a market share of 9 percent, which comes out to be an increase of 5.2 percent since November 2009.
Meanwhile, Research In Motion, the company behind the highly popular BlackBerry Curve smartphone, managed to clock a 1.3 percent increase in its smartphone share from November 2009 to February 2010, acquiring a US market share of 42.1 percent.
On the other hand, Apple, which just launched its iPad tablet device, was seen nursing the 0.1 percent drop its market share since November 2009 to February 2010, thanks to the rising popularity of Android based software devices.
Technology pundits credit the rise in popularity of Android based devices to the Motorola Droid smartphone, which is by far the most advanced Android based smartphone in the market when it came out although it has since been superseded by others like the HTC Desire.
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Google US Smartphone Marketshare Grows
Android-powered handsets continue to lure the smartphone enthusiasts in the US, as the company’s share in the smartphone market has more than doubled in the quarter ending in January 2010, according to data released by comScore.
Figures released by the market research firm revealed that Google’s share rose dramatically from 2.8 percent in October 2009, to 7.1 percent at the end of January 2010.
Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry continues to reign the US smartphone arena with a massive 43.0 percent share, up by 1.7 percent from its previous quarter’s 41.3 percent share, followed by Apple’s iPhone, which grew steadily by 0.3 percent to reach 25.1 percent of the total.
The losers were Microsoft Windows Mobile and Palm webOS, as both saw their shares in the market plunge during the period.
While Microsoft’s Windows Mobile went through the steepest decline of all, plummeting by 4.0 percent from 19.7 percent to 15.7 percent, Palm webOS market share declined by 2.1 percent from 7.8 percent to 5.7 percent during the quarter ended in January, a bigger fall proportionally.
In addition, the study revealed a considerable rise in the number of smartphone users, aged 13 or above, in the US, with number of such users rose to 42.7 million during the quarter, registering 18 percent hike from the August-October 2009 period.
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Google Translation Tool Inches Closer To Perfection
Google’s recently heralded translation tool for the Android-powered smartphones has been growing by leaps and bounds since it was launched in January, and is set to add spoken forms of several new languages in the near future.
The tool, dubbed “Google Translate”, has the capability to translate text to and from around 50 different languages, including Slovenian, Swahili, Icelandic, to mention a few, more than any of its competitors and has been downloaded 250,000 times since its January release.
But it still is in its infancy stage when it comes to spoken words, as it can only recognise English, Japanese, and Mandarin languages although the support for German and several other languages is to be added soon.
Interestingly, The New York Times carried out a comparison of Google Translate, Microsoft’s Bing Translator, and Babel Fish.
Though none of the services were found to be perfect or anywhere near to human translation capabilities in translations of various languages, Google translate was the most accurate among all.
The search giant has reportedly been pouring intense efforts to bolster up the translation capability by making use of new technologies, such as image to text translation, which helps users to get info about anything by simply uploading the image of the entity with the translation software, the NYT added.
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Google’s Android Smartphone Marketshare Growing In North America
According to the recent mobile web usage report released by web analytics firm Quantcast, it has been revealed that iPhone OS, which has the largest share of mobile users accessing the web, is slowly losing its market share to Google’s Android OS and RIM OS, which powers the popular Blackberry platform.
The data released by the company indicated that Apple’s iPhone OS share in the North American mobile web consumption market, fell by 3.2 percent to 63.7 percent for the month of February where as market share enjoyed by Google Android OS increased from 8.2 percent in January to 15.2 percent in February.
RIM OS’s share increased to 13.2 percent in the North American mobile web consumption market, a rise from roughly 9 percent in January 2010.
According to several industry experts, the reason for fall in Apple’s iPhone OS market share, is the increasing popularity of Android based devices and the aggressive marketing campaigns launched by RIM.
Users of iPhone OS are migrating to other devices running Android OS or RIM OS due to the fact that users are getting attracted towards better functionality and user interfaces.
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Google CEO Says 60,000 Android Devices Shipped Every Day
Eric Schmidt has revealed at MWC 2010 that more than 60,000 Android devices were shipping every day, which is roughly twice the amount compared to the last quarter.
However, Schmidt did not confirm whether these devices were actually sold or whether these devices were exclusive smartphones or if they were a mix.
60,000 Android phones a day would mean 22 million phones a year which would mean that Google would not be very far behind Apple when it comes to shipped phones; the Cupertino-based company flogged slightly more than 25 million iPhones over the last year.
However, Google has many more players at hand and is likely to continue growing at this rate while the number of handsets and the rate at which they will improve, will expand exponentially.
Furthermore, apart from Smartphones, expect other Android devices to pop up in 2010 including the likes of tablets, ebook readers and smartbooks which may sold hundreds of thousands of units per quarter.
Finally, with the launch of Chrome OS towards the end of the year with a possible merger (and shift to the desktop/thin client market) in sight, Google could well look towards selling four Android/Chrome-based devices every second, that’s more than 125 million units per year by next year.
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Google Software To Allow Any Smartphone To Translate Foreign Languages
In a major boost for travellers who often have to deal with linguistic barriers while exploring unfamiliar destinations, Google has announced it is working on a smartphone software technology that can translate several foreign languages with great accuracy.
The search company asserted that the new device would have the capability to almost instantly convert speech into another foreign language.
This new breakthrough technology from the search giant would reportedly eliminate the accent and pitch problems that have hitherto plagued all the existing translation services introduced till date.
While early iterations of the Google’s translation services have been somewhat incomprehensible at times, the company’s ever-soaring database of languages has in fact paved the way for high degree of accuracy in translation tools.
As of now, Google’s database incorporates as many as 52 of the estimated 6,000 languages known across the globe, with most recent addition to the list being Haitian Creole.
However, Google admitted that translating speech would be a tougher job, but asserted that the smartphone would adjust by learning the user’s speaking style.
Divulging details about the company’s initiative, Franz Och, Google’s chief of translation services, said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on”.
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Google Unveils Web-based Voice Tool For iPhone
Google has unleashed the entirely web-based iterations of its signature Google Voice app for Apple’s blockbuster iPhone, as well as handsets sporting Palm’s WebOS platform.
The search engine touted that these new versions would enable mobile users to use its Google Voice service as a web-based tool, with users accessing the service’s features, like placing calls, via their mobile handset’s in-built browser.
In addition, the mobile tools will let users receive and send texts, along with feature to show the outgoing calls as the user’s own Google Voice number.
In order to access the service users would need to have both a Google Voice subscription and mobile phone network services.
By introducing the service as completely web-based, Google has indeed managed to sidestep the restrictions that have hitherto prevented the search giant from launching the service on slew of handsets.
Apparently, this move from Google comes in response to Apple’s last year rejection of the Google Voice app from its App Store, claiming that the service intervened with the handset’s in-built telephone components.
Announcing the application, Google noted on its Mobile blog: “Today, we’re excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google Voice because it uses the latest advancements in web technologies”.
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Google Pushes Android 2.1 SDK Out
Only a couple of days after the release of the Nexus One smartphone, Google has announced that the Android 2.1 software development kit is available for developers and mobile phone manufacturers to download.
Google says that it is a “minor” platform release that includes a few API changes and a number of bug fixes. Thise interested can already download the SDK – which includes a fully compliant Android library and system image – from Android’s website (link).
Amongst the various improvements, is one can provide information about the device’s current network signal. There’s also new API’s for those looking to develop animated wallpapers up to a screen resolution of 480×854 pixels.
It will be interesting to see whether handsets that carry the newest iteration of the operating system also suffer from the same major networ problem that is currently affecting the Nexus One; there have been numerous reports of handsets dropping from 3G to 2G randomly.
Some might have noticed that Google’s first device was the first one to come with Android 2.1 and as of today is the only one with it thereby highlighting the competitive advantage Google has over other Android device manufacturers.
Alongside the new SDK, Google as also released a new USB driver for recent versions of Windows which will provide Nexus One connectivity.
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Nexus One, iPhone, Milestone, Pre, N97 : Total Cost Of Ownership Comparison
Respected website, Billshrink, published an article about the respective costs of owning Google’s new Nexus One, Apple’s iPhone 3GB 8GB, the Motorola Milestone and the Palm Pre.
One problem is that the article was only for an US-audience and this prompted us to write a similar one for the UK. On top of that we’ve added the Nokia N97 and looked at the phones both from a pay monthly (where available) and a pay as you go basis.
For PAYG models, we chose Talkmobile’s 400 minutes, 400 texts and unlimited internet for £15 per month package as well as Vodafone’s SIM only package which offers 900 minutes, unlimited texts and internet for £20 per month.
The slightly unsexy table can be found here.
Comparing PAYG to Pay Monthly contracts is like comparing apples to oranges and choosing a smartphone is a matter of personal choice rather than just relying on hard facts and figures.
You can find out more such SIM Only deals here. For Palm Pre deals, check O2 here. For iPhone deals, check Orange here. For Nokia N97 deals, check E2save here. For Motorola Milestone deals, check Expansys here. For Nexus One deals, check Google here.
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