ComScore: 41 million US smartphone owners use Android

Android is dominating the worldwide smartphone game, and while there are markets where it’s even more dominant than it is in the United States, a combination of population and smartphone interest makes it one of the hottest markets on the planet. Android’s continuing gains were highlighted by Nielsen last month, and comScore backs up their numbers with the latest reports on the US mobile market. According to comScore’s math, 41.6 million Americans now use Android-powered smartphones.

That’s 46.3% of all US smartphones,which now number approximately 90 million. The second banana is Apple’s iOS, which has 28.1% of the market, which figures out to 25.3 million iPhones. Unsurprisingly, BlackBerry and Windows-based phones fell again, to 17.2% and 5.6%, respectively. These statistics are for the month of October 2011, when total smartphone ownership in the U.S. grew 10% overall from the last quarter. Android and iOS together made up two-thirds of the smartphone userbase.
There’s two things that we can take away from this report: one, total smartphone adoption in the US is growing fast enough for multiple OS and device makers to increase their sales at the same time, and two, Android may be approaching a saturation point within the next year. With nearly half the smartphone market running Google’s OS, and Apple controlling a the majority of what’s left, the two giants are essentially fighting over users that are abandoning the arguably weaker platforms of Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Symbian and others.
If you extrapolated that in the next year, half of all users from other platforms switched to Android, a quarter switched to iOS and another quarter stayed put, that would give Android a 59.1% share of the market, with iOS trailing at 34.5. That’s a very optimistic projection from an Android point of view (and, just to be clear, absolutely unscientific). That said, the continued expansion of the smartphone market in the US and worldwide makes it an imperative for just about every manufacturer and developer.
[via Fierce Mobile Content]

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Google Engineer Sets Facts Straight on Android Hardware Acceleration

With the release of Android Honeycomb and now Ice Cream Sandwich, we have heard a lot of talk about hardware acceleration in Android in recent months. Some of this talk has led to confusion over how Android handles graphics and rendering, confusion that Google engineer Dianne Hackborn is tired is tired of dealing with. She took to Google+ to set the record straight and offered a bulleted list of “facts” for interested readers to peruse. Older versions of Android relied on software rendering at the CPU level, an inefficient method that leads to poor performance and responsiveness on devices with slower processors. Android Honeycomb introduced GPU-level hardware acceleration, and Ice Cream Sandwich further improves on the technical challenges associated with the shift from software to hardware graphics processing.
Hackborn clarifies that Android has always had some sort of hardware acceleration dating back all the way to before version 1.0, including the rendering of menus, pop-ups, and dialogs. Hardware could always render the window that held content, but the “full” hardware acceleration brought about in Android 3.0 deals with rendering the content within a window. However, “hardware accelerated drawing,” Hackborn states, “is not all full of win.” Rather than offer a full paraphrasing of the lengthy writeup she has posted, I suggest you head over to the Google+ source link below to read a more detailed breakdown, that is, if talking nuts and bolts about smartphone software and hardware is of keen interest to you.
[Google+ via The Verge]

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Android 4.0 for $100: NOVO7 is the cheapest Ice Cream Sandwich tablet around

Android’s open source nature lends itself to a staggering variety of form factors and price points, but if Chinese manufacturer MIPS Technologies is to be believed, it’s breaking into the low-end in a huge way today. The company is promoting its brand new NOVO7 device as “the first Ice Cream Sandwich tablet”, and has priced it at a staggering $99 USD. The specs aren’t amazing and the hardware won’t turn heads, but if you’ve got to have ICS right now (and can’t bring yourself to try out a custom ROM) this would seem to be the cheapest way to do so.

The NOVO7 is your basic 7-inch cheapo tablet, not altogether unlike the Polaroid models that were on sale everywhere on Black Friday. A “power-efficient” 1GHz processor it twinned to a 444Mhz GPU. A 2-megapixel rear camera and a front-facing cam of indeterminate quality cover the absolute basics. The 7-inch screen is thankfully capacitive, not resistive, but the marketing materials omit a resolution – I’d guess either 1024 x 600 or 840 x 400.
The manufacturer is quick to tout the tablet’s low-power status, claiming a power draw of less than 400mA during web browsing and a 30-hour standby time. An actual mAh battery rating is absent, but you get expandable storage via the microSD card slot. The tablet comes with 4GB of on-board storage. Wireless is limited to WiFi, but MIPS highlights support for “external 3G”. Obviously the Android Market is nowhere to be seen, but the ad mentions Google CTS Certification, so you can probably get the Market, Gmail, etc. running if you’re up for a little aftermarket hacking. The NOVO7 will offer support for Gameloft titles, including the pre-installed Spider-man.

So, how do you get one? Just click on the “$99″ link on the image-only website to be directed straight to a PayPal order form. But be ready for a nasty shock in the form of $60 shipping and handling, bringing the total price up to $159. That’s Nook Color territory, and even considering that it ships straight from China (with no assurance of a date, by the way) it seems a little stiff. I’d steer clear of this one for your holiday shopping, and wait for ICS tablets or updated software from more established brands. But if you’re feeling adventurous, head on over there and check it out. This is only the first of many Chinese ICS tablets set to hit the market very soon.

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Microsoft to show off Windows 8 app store tomorrow

Microsoft will be making the app store a part of the Windows 8 experience, but until now we don’t really know much about it except that it will be the exclusive way for developers to distribute new-style Windows 8 apps. The store will support free and paid apps, trial versions as well as in-app payments, and it won’t sell older-style (classic) Windows apps that work on Windows 8 and older versions of Windows.
Other than the aforementioned details, we don’t really know much about the Windows Store, but I guess we’re about to find out more. Microsoft will be holding an event tomorrow (December 6^th) in San Francisco – titled the Windows Store Preview, where it will show off for the first time what the store is about. Stay tuned for more details and we’ll keep you posted.

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LG Optimus Net looks to be an affordable dual-SIM Android smartphone

Juggling personal and business mobile phone accounts can be quite tiring and troublesome, especially if you have to carry around with you more than one device. LG’s Optimus Net appears to solve that problem for you in the form of a budget-friendly Android smartphone with dual-SIM card capabilities, allowing you to swap between mobile phone accounts and carriers at whim.
Now don’t expect anything fancy from the LG Optimus Net – in fact one could almost think of it as superseding the LG Optimus One. With an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM under the hood, a 3.2” HVGA display, a 3.2MP camera, with 512MB of internal memory (comes bundled with a 2GB memory card) and Android’s Gingerbread 2.3 on board, we don’t expect the LG Optimus Net to be breaking the bank any time soon.
The device will also feature a SIM switch key which will replace the search key on the phone, allowing the user to quickly change between the SIM cards. It is expected to cost around $290 and will be debuting in Russia first. It will also debut in Brazil under the LG Optimus Net Dual moniker but no word if there are plans for it to arrive stateside or anywhere else for that matter.

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Fujitsu ARROWS ES IS12F to be the thinnest Android smartphone?

At the moment the title of the thinnest Android smartphone is currently held by the very sleek Motorola DROID RAZR. Well, it looks like that title is about to be claimed by another device. Fujitsu has just announced what is said to be the world’s thinnest Android smartphone. Arriving in Japan next month, the Fujitsu ARROWS ES IS12F is said to be only 6.7mm thick (the DROID RAZR is 7.1mm thick at its thinnest part).

However, unlike the RAZR, the ARROWS ES IS12F only features a 4″ 800 x 480 OLED display (with Gorilla Glass), a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 5-megapixel camera, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of internal Storage, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, CDAM and GSM support, a 1,400mAh battery and runs on Android Gingerbread. So even if it might be the slimmest phone, consumers will probably overlook it due to its specs. No word on whether it’ll be arriving stateside, but it did hit the FCC not too long ago with the name ARROWS F-07D.

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Samsung shows off a concept transparent tablet

KOREAN HARDWARE GIANT Samsung has released a video showing what could be a device of the future, a transparent and flexible tablet.
Samsung is keen to whet our technology appetites with a short video touting an amazing looking device capable of what seems like anything. Of course, this isn't a gadget we're likely to see any time soon but it's good fun to see what might become a reality someday.
The video shows a user walking around the streets comfortably using a flexible and see through tablet that appears to able to increase in size, as well. We're shown the device performing various tasks including video calling and even displaying some holograms.
Somehow the wafer thin display has a camera and a microphone built in and can even display images on both sides at the same time. The technology used is an AMOLED display, as are in Samsung's products such as the Galaxy S II smartphone.
The company has been working on transparent screens like the ones we reported about earlier this year. We also saw something similar from Nokia recently called the Kinetic, which uses bending for navigation.
Of course we're hoping that this device or one like it will tip up sooner rather than later so we can get it in for review. µ

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Sony to drop Ericsson brand in mid-2012, focus only on smartphones

Sony has said that it will drop the Ericsson brand from smartphone devices in mid-2012 following its acquisition of Ericsson’s 50% stake in the Sony Ericsson joint venture for €1.05 billion in October.
Speaking to Times of India, a senior Sony executive noted that the Sony Ericsson brand would be phased out as the company looked to become a “complete smartphone company”, selling its new smartphones under the Sony label.
The move is aimed at galvanising Sony’s smartphone sales, which slowly picked up following Sony Ericsson’s decision to focus solely on developing smartphones that are powered by Google’s Android platform. With Sony Ericsson’s decision to phase-out its feature phone development, the new unit will invest significant amounts into its marketing and advertising channels – something that Sony Ericsson’s Kristian Tear, executive VP & head of sales & marketing, said was lacking in previous years:

“A lot of planning goes into getting the branding right but we will be done by middle of next year. It will also mean that the marketing and advertising investments will go up. We haven’t been as fierce as we were a few years back but we will step it up, refocus and invest more in brand-building in select markets and India is one of those markets.”

Times of India reports that the company as its stands holds around 2% of the global smartphone market. However, with Sony’s huge worldwide presence as the world’s biggest entertainment company, the company expects its mobile presence to gain from its assets:

“Sony is the world’s biggest entertainment company. We were earlier a 50-50 JV, but now that we are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Corp. We expect to gain from its assets on the content , technology and brand side.”

Sony’s acquisition still requires approval, so changes aren’t expected to be implemented until next year, including the phasing out of the Sony Ericsson brand. Executives have said that Sony will continue to focus on the value-end of the smartphone market, targeting India where it has a 19% and 12% share of the Indian and global Android market respectively.

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Samsung denies collecting Galaxy smartphone user data in S. Korea

Samsung is the latest tech firm to be embroiled with accusations of data mismanagement in South Korea, after the manufacturer denied accusations that it is collecting user data on three of its smartphones, according to news agency Yonhap.
The company responded to research findings from the Graduate School of Information Security at Korea University which suggested that the Galaxy S, the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy Note devices were all pre-loaded with data-collecting software.
According to the study, which looked only at devices in Korea, the software can collect and store information relating to each phone’s owner, such as contact numbers and location information. However a statement from Samsung denies the existence of the alleged software and any collection of data on its phones:

Samsung never collected or used private information of smartphone users. All applications provided by Samsung have no ability to collect private data.

The allegations come just one week after Apple and others faced widespread criticism over the inclusion of data collection software, Carrier IQ, in its mobile operating system. Smartphone giants Apple, HTC, Samsung and Motorola and US operators Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T were named in a class action lawsuit filed in Delaware Federal Court.
Carrier IQ launched a campaign to clear its name over complaints, stating that it acted on behalf of the carriers to monitor conditions when calls were dropped, and when SMS messages failed, so that engineers could assess what may have caused them to happen.
Also in Korea, last week, search engines Google and Daum were cleared of allegations of illegally collecting smartphone owners’ location data, bringing to an end a long-running investigation. However, Google is still being investigated over claims that it bans all Korean phone makers from including third-party search applications under its marketing contract.

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