Apple’s iPhone OS has successfully overtaken Symbian for the lead in all mobile web traffic, according to the latest data from AdMob. The combined iPhone and iPod touch share has jumped from 33 percent in February to 40 percent in August. Symbian, meanwhile, has almost exactly traded positions with Apple and fell from 43 percent near the start of the year to 34 percent in August.
RIM’s BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and Palm OS also dropped sharply in the same time frame. The BlackBerry fell more softly, from 10 to 8 percent, but the older platforms have dropped off rapidly; Windows Mobile fell from 7 to 4 percent, and the now-discontinued Palm OS has declined from 3 percent to just 1 percent. The fastest risers outside of Apple were relatively new platforms like Android and Palm’s webOS, which respectively account for 7 percent and 4 percent of the mobile Internet.
Category: Apple
The Sales Side of the Genius Bar
After my time was done with the Genius Bar folks, I kept my eye on some of the other Genius Bar visitors. Of the five folks I watched, four of them had purchases in hand when they left the store. (I imagine that Apple tracks the revenue generated by Genius Bar visitors, and knows exactly how much money the average Genius Bar visit is worth. It won’t ever happen, but I’d love to see those figures!)
Apple Looking to Redefine Print Media?
Some I’ve talked to believe the initial content will be mere translations of text to tablet form. But while the idea of print on the Tablet is enticing, it’s nothing the Kindle or any E-Ink device couldn’t do. The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video, interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft’s Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static e-ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it’ll get its feet wet with more basic repurposing of the stuff found on dead trees today.
30 Percent
Giz reader Manoj took his iPhone to the Genius Bar to have it looked at because it was dropping calls left and right, and AT&T swore stuff was totally kosher on their end, so he thought something was wrong with his phone. After doing a stat dump, the Genius showed Manoj that his iPhone had actually dropped 22 percent of calls.
The jawdropper: The Genius told Manoj that’s actually excellent compared to most people in the New York area, where a 30 percent dropped call rate is the average. There was nothing Apple could do for Manoj. His phone was totally fine. Which means there’s nothing Apple can do for rest of us.
2 Billion
It doesn’t exactly rival Moore’s Law, but Apple has doubled the number of iPhone app downloads in about half the time it took to reach 1 billion. But unlike the fanfare which attended the 1 billion mark, we don’t know who downloaded the 2 billionth app or what it was — and this time nobody wins anything.
Apple announced Monday in a brief press release that it the 2 billionth iPhone app had been downloaded. It didn’t say when, exactly, but it’s a little more than five months since the 1 billionth was retrieved from the iTunes Store cloud. And that was nine months after what is now the largest application store in the world first opened its virtual doors.
Apple, on Going Green
But now, Jobs thinks the time is right to report on what Apple has accomplished. The company has finished a multiyear data-mining project to fully understand its environmental impact on the planet and has published data that may stir up controversy. Apple takes issue with studies that hand accolades to rivals such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard for cutting emissions at their facilities. Apple’s research suggests that those emissions make up only a small slice of a company’s larger environmental impact—a mere 3% in Apple’s case. Far more of the carbon footprint, he says—53%—is generated by Apple’s products. “Everyone focuses on whether you have motion detectors in the conference room” so the lights will go off when it’s unattended, says Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. “But making products cleaner involves real engineering. It’s about innovating, and it’s hard work.”
Apple Details Environmental Impact of Products
Apple recently published new information about the total environmental impact of their products — from manufacturing and usage to Apple’s own facilities:
And today’s 20-inch iMac uses 55 percent less material than its first-generation, 15-inch predecessor. That’s a material savings of 10,000 metric tons — the equivalent of 7200 Toyota Priuses — for every one million iMac computers sold.
The transparency is impressive, but the numbers are even more so.
MMS, Apple and AT&T Exclusivity
Still, the agreement has had its benefits (larger margins, more creative freedom, better coordination, less carriers to deal with), and if Apple can find a long-term monetary justification for extending the agreement with AT&T, it will. However, as it stands today, AT&T remains the iPhone’s biggest barrier to mass adoption, and Apple knows it. So does AT&T.
That’s why Friday’s MMS launch is so important. It may very well be AT&T’s last chance to prove to Apple that it deserves to renew its extremely lucrative exclusivity contract. If AT&T slows or crashes during the influx of MMS, AT&T will have dug itself into an even deeper perception hole. It won’t have another shot to prove that it can handle the stress that more iPhones will bring, and Apple would likely bow to customer pressure and strike deals with other carriers.
MMS on Friday
We know you’ve been eager for this service so we wanted to offer a quick update on the launch plans for MMS on Friday, Sept. 25. Late morning, Pacific Time, on Friday, the new carrier settings update enabling MMS should be live and ready to download through iTunes. We’ll provide the steps and all of the details you need right here at that time.
Gym Bans iPod Nano
Compact camera-equipped devices, such as cell phones, have been gadgets non grata at health clubs for years. The Life Time chain, for instance, has long forbidden their use in locker rooms because of the potential for compromising photos or video footage to be distributed online.
And with the new Nano fitting this category, its use in locker rooms for any reason is forbidden, said spokesman Jason Thunstrom. Discerning whether someone is taking video or just queuing up a music mix can be difficult.
Aperture and Lightroom
More on the Macintosh Portable
On September 20th, 1989, Apple released the Macintosh Portable, the first true mobile Mac and a much-maligned machine. It didn’t sell well and is very rare today–not due to any particular design failure, but because the original price was a whopping $6,500-$7,300 ($11,288 to $12,677 in 2009 dollars). It wasn’t the only Mac to cost that much, but others in that price range offered top-of-the-line performance. The Portable was both too expensive and too underpowered to catch on. Its large size didn’t help, either.