According to new research from the NPD Group, Apple passed LG and Samsung to become the top-selling U.S. handset brand in Q4 2011. Combined, the three available models of the iPhone (iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS) accounted for 43% of the U.S. smartphone market.
Android, however, continued to see larger market share at 48%. → Read More
As a gamer with admittedly poor impulse control, the newly-released Steam app for iOS and Android has me very worried. On the one hand, it seems like an ideal way to to keep tabs on the popular gaming service on the go.
On the other though, I could easily see myself going overboard on buying games I don’t need when I should be pretending to be a productive member of society.
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Our industry lauds cutting-edge UX. Look no further than the exceptional work of Path. One either swoons over it, or one is blind. But what if that sends a wrong signal? Don’t get me wrong, I feel very strongly about the importance of UX, but since I’ve played around with NewsFlash, a feature-stripped free news app for iOS (iTunes link), I’ve asked myself whether more often than not users work for the UX, instead of the other way around. → Read More
Modern day video editors can be daunting. While it’s better than the literal cut-and-paste practices of yesteryear, opening a new video editor can feel like stepping into the cockpit of a spaceship. Unless you’re trained to fly spaceships, in which case this analogy is broken (and also, you’re awesome.)
Looking to distill video editing down to its simplest form — a game like experience, they say — is Game Your Video, a new iOS app from Global Delight. → Read More
The guys from NimbleBit (developers of Tiny Tower, the game handpicked by Apple as iOS Game Of The Year) are on a bit of a tweeting spree tonight, blasting out two big ol’ gems of knowledge in as many hours.
First: Zynga just launched a new iOS game, and it looks a lot like Tiny Tower. Second (and this one makes that first bit all the more interesting): Zynga allegedly tried to buy NimbleBit at some point in the past, but NimbleBit turned them down. → Read More
There’s no shortage of novel things you can strongarm Siri into doing for you these days, but sometimes it’s the little things that get me excited.
While not as innately flashy as being able to start a car, a new (and currently nameless) tweak from developer InfectionFX does something that Siri should have been able to do from the beginning: tweet for you. → Read More
Thrillist-owned JackThreads has just announced the availability of their first mobile for Android and iPhone. Built by Fueled Mobile Design and Development using designs and user experience built in-house, the app allows shoppers to browse new deals and sales as they are announced on the site and, if so inclined, make purchases.
I spoke to lead developer Chris Steib who said that JackThreads saw that much of the traffic was coming through mobile sites, something they had not initially expected. → Read More
Ready for a blast of late 90′s fighting game nostalgia? Well, get those thumbs ready, because Namco’s arcade/Dreamcast classic Soul Calibur has just been released for iOS.
I enjoyed a long-standing fling with Soul Calibur in my younger days, mostly because it was the only fighting game I was ever good at. My skills seem to have dulled considerably over the intervening years, though the touch controls probably don’t help much. → Read More
FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces.
They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they surveyed isn’t very statistically useful, but they were able to grab quite a few percentages based on page views of various support questions.
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Nielsen just released its latest numbers with regard to new smartphone owners, and it would seem that the iPhone (particularly the 4S) is quite popular among those migrating over to the smartphone segment.
In fact, since the iPhone 4S launched in October, the number of recent smartphone buyers who chose the iPhone has reached 44.5 percent, up from just 25 percent in October. → Read More
Apple users probably have more than enough media on their iDevices to keep them entertained on the go, but Sony Network Entertainment President Tim Schaaff thinks there’s room for another media service on iOS. According to VentureBeat, the company’s Music Unlimited streaming service will land on iOS some time in Q1 2012.
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From Vannevar Bush to PageRank, the World Wide Web was built on hypertext, the notion that any morsel of information can link to any other. But that was always only a dream, and a rapidly-dissipating one of late.
Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that “Facebook is gaslighting the Web” with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinski complain that Google Plus will “mess up the Internet” for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds “they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.”) Google’s Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page JavaScript sites breaking the web.
Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough — clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page — but it’s very difficult to reliably link in to an app. → Read More
Who’s browsing the mobile web the most? Apparently, iPhone and iPad owners are. According to end-of-the-month data from statistics provider NetMarketShare, iOS users ended up with a 52% market share of mobile web browsing in December 2011. More simply put, that means that over half of the mobile web browsing last month took place on an iOS device.
Android, meanwhile, had a 16.2% share, behind Java ME at 21.27%, which fell into second place. → Read More
2011 was the year of Android. A little over a year ago Andy Rubin tweeted that 300,000 Android devices were being activated each day. In January we reported that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of US smartphone market share. In June Android’s activations-per-day reached 500,000; this month they hit 700,000. That’s more than double the rate at which it was spreading when it overtook iOS.
By comparison, UBS estimated in December that Apple would sell 30 million iPhones in 4Q 2011. Sounds like a lot, until you realize that Android devices — almost all of which are phones, as Rubin’s numbers don’t include Kindle Fires or Nooks — are being activated at a rate of five million a week, or 65 million in a quarter. In other words, Android phone sales were probably close to double Apple’s during the quarter in which Apple’s flagship iPhone 4S was released. I expect Apple outsold Android at Christmas, given that they boasted this year’s three most wanted gifts, but Android will make up that difference in a few short weeks.
How did this happen? Certainly not because Android is better. Almost no one disputes that Apple’s user experience is superior. Thanks to Android’s horrific fragmentation problems, the Android version that developers write apps for – 2.2, which was released in May 2010 – is distinctly inferior to iOS 5. The iPhone 4S is a fantastic high-end phone, the 4 a terrific mid-level one, and the 3GS still a respectable player in the free-with-contract market. So why has everyone gone Android? → Read More
Looking for a quick last-minute gift? Not feeling up to fighting the holiday traffic, crowds and checkout lines? Just too lazy busy to shop? Then you may want to consider giving the gift of an iOS app. You can gift any paid app from iTunes on your computer or from the app’s description page on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Just scroll down past the screenshot and look for the “gift this app” button. All you’ll need is the recipient’s email address to complete the transaction.
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Ready for some more SNES-flavored nostalgia on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Capcom has recently released Mega Man X for iOS, which should brighten the day of just about anyone who spent ehir formative years slaying robotic octopi. → Read More
In our previous post, we listed the top 20 iPhone and iPad apps of the year. But games are in a class by themselves, often pushing the limits of the hardware, software, and graphics capabilities of Apple’s iOS devices.
Instead of combining the platform’s great games with all of the other apps you should know about, here are our picks for the top 20 iOS games of the year: → Read More
In October of 2001, Rockstar Games dropped a bomb on the gaming world. That bomb was called Grand Theft Auto III. In just one release, Rockstar shifted their flagship 2D series into a 3D world, introduced an enormous chunk of the population to the concept of massive sandbox games, and stirred up the first of many controversies that the company has since become known for.
Just over 10 years later, GTA3 is back — but now it’s mobile. As of yesterday, it’s available for iOS and Android. Same game, same grit, same campy over-the-top action… but in your pocket.
So, how has the game held up? How well did it make the jump from controller to touchscreen? Is it worth your $5?
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If you are a “female” you apparently choose clothing in the form of “outfits,” a sort of ritualized selection process that allows you to look “good” in a different set of clothes each day. While I subscribe to Thoreau’s maxim – “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and, incidentally, when your neighbors come over to your place on Walden and catch a whiff of you, you’ll be even more alone” – it is my understanding that some “ladies” like to change their “clothes” daily and they often need help facilitating this process.
But what is a lady to do if she cannot remember what outfits she has worn in the past month? Cry? Yell at the barista? No. She uses Cloth. → Read More
Android tablet owners have been rocking the new Netflix app design for nearly a month now, and with today’s update, iPad users can finally join in on the fun.
The 2.0 update squeezes more movies onto a single page by trimming out most of the excess white space that made the original version feel a tad ill-suited for such a large screen. → Read More
