As tablet ownership & usage continues its upward trajectory, little surprise that more people are expected to be paying for more stuff on tablets in the coming years. But analyst Juniper has put out a new mobile content revenue forecast predicting that purchases on tablets will be the primary engine for growth — so beating out handsets — in the mobile content market over the next three… → Read More
One of the most impressive things we happened upon at CES this year was the Tactus keyboard, a special fluid-filled layer that could be baked into a tablet or smartphone to provide users with a physical keyboard that could recede back into the screen when it wasn’t needed.
Since then the company has been flying under the radar, but it turns out Tactus has been hard at work on a prototype… → Read More
The mobile PC market isn’t doing great, but that’s only if you look at it independently of tablet device sales. NPD DisplaySearch now says that over the next five years, however, the mobile PC market will more than double, growing from 367.6 million units in 2012 to 762.7 million by 2017. → Read More
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins seems to be among the most transparent executives in tech in terms of showing his hand regarding future product plans, which may be partly because he doesn’t have much to lose at this point. In an interview yesterday, he downplayed tablet computing in what looks to be an indicator that BlackBerry will drop the PlayBook, its own lame duck tablet and the first of its… → Read More
Another sign of the swift rise of tablets today: last month tablet usage of the BBC’s on-demand online TV service iPlayer edged past mobile for the first time, with 41M programme requests by tablet vs. 40M on mobile, according to BBC stats for the month. There were 200,000 more requests on tablets than mobiles. Overall, across all device types, the service saw 272M programme requests. → Read More
During its Q3 2013 earnings call today, Microsoft’s outgoing CFO Peter Klein noted that the company plans to bring Windows 8 to smaller devices. Until now, Windows 8 was mostly geared toward desktops and larger tablets, including Microsoft’s own Surface and RT machines. With the forthcoming Windows 8 Blue, rumor had it that Microsoft would enable its OEMs to run Windows 8 on smaller… → Read More
Gartner has published its latest report with smart devices projections for smartphones, tablets, ultramobiles and PCs from 2012 to 2017. The numbers make unhappy reading for Microsoft — the company with the most to lose as the old empire of the PC continues its slow decline, trumped by the price, simplicity and convenience of Android and iOS-powered mobile computing devices. → Read More
Strong growth in tablet sales is helping to drive overall growth in the global smart connected device market, according to analyst IDC. The analyst notes that market expansion last year was “largely driven” by 78.4% year-over-year growth in tablet shipments — which exceeded 128 million units. It expects tablet shipments to surpass desktop PCs in 2013, and portable PCs in 2014. → Read More
In Larry Page’s note moments ago about Andy Rubin stepping down as head of Android to be replaced by Sundar Pichai, he also provided an update on Android device activations: there are now 750 million of them, across smartphones and tablets from 60 hardware makers. This an update on the 500 million figure noted in September 2012. → Read More
The proportion of web traffic coming from tablets has pushed past smartphones for the first time, according to Adobe’s latest Digital Index which looks at more than 100 billion visits to 1,000+ websites worldwide to compare which device types are driving the most page views. Tablets accounted for 8% of the measured page views vs smartphones’ 7%. → Read More
There are a number of ways to measure a mobile platform’s relative success, but if you’re looking at the number of mobile app downloads as the metric of choice, then the analysts at ABI Research have just predicted that Android will win it in 2013. According to the firm’s latest forecasts, 58 percent of smartphone app downloads this year will be Android apps, while iOS will come in at just 33… → Read More
The Galaxy Note 8.0 — the newest device in Samsung’s many-sized range of tablets, unveiled today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — has just managed to trump Apple’s iPad Mini in the small tablet category with one-tenth of an inch more of screen space (more on the device in our hands-on). At the same time, Samsung is also introducing a few new services and features — including expanded… → Read More
In a new report from mobile ad platform Millennial Media, the company compiles its data on mobile device share across its network for all of 2012, revealing that tablets in particular accounted for a rising percentage of impressions, with Android devices stepping up their game considerably. The Kindle Fire and Samsung tablets were the big share winners, helping Android slates grab a considerable… → Read More
Analyst Forrester is predicting tablet ownership in Western Europe will quadruple by 2017 — with the percentage of online adults owning a slate projected to increase markedly from less than a fifth (14 per cent) last year to more than half (55 per cent) in 2017. In 2011 the tablet-owner figure stood at just 7 per cent, underlining how quickly digitally connected consumers are adopting slates. → Read More
Mobile industry analyst Benedict Evans has crunched the numbers on newly-released tablet sales figures from Asus and arrived at an approximate estimate of total Nexus 7 tablet sales for 2012, which clock in at between 4.5 and 4.8 million units per his math. Google doesn’t release sales figures for its Nexus devices, so this is likely the closest we’ll get to a solid number on the 2012 totals, and… → Read More
HP is looking into getting back into the mobile hardware game, according to a new report from ReadWrite which the Verge says is being confirmed from their own sources. HP famously bought webOS and then brought a tablet to market based on that Palm-developed platform, the TouchPad, which ended up being a dismal failure that the company shut down very quickly. → Read More
The PC market is fast shifting into a touchscreen world, and Apple is leading the charge. Some new numbers from the analysts at Canalys note that in Q4 of 2012, one in every three PCs shipped was a tablet, that Apple’s iPad accounted for about half of them, or one in every six of PCs. By combining PC and tablet figures — a logical thing to do, given that many are substituting tablet purchases and… → Read More
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has given the company’s clearest hint yet that it wants to get back into tablets. Speaking to the Australian Financial Review, he stopped short of announcing a Nokia-branded tablet is coming but confirmed the company is taking a close look at the space. → Read More
ABI Research has put out its latest projections on the lay of the land for smartphones and tablets worldwide in 2013: it says that there will be 1.4 billion smartphones, and 268 million tablets in active use this year, with Android keeping its lead in handsets and iOS continuing to dominate in tablets. Microsoft and BlackBerry will continue to remain in the game in smartphones with small shares of… → Read More
Apple’s iPad led the charge as total worldwide tablet shipments hit a record of 52.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC’s preliminary data from its Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, but its market share continued to slide due to competition from Samsung. Meanwhile, PC shipments declined during the quarter for the first time in more than five years. The tablet market… → Read More
According to Strategy Analytics, about 1.6 billion mobile phones were shipped in 2012, with 700 million of those being smartphones. That doesn’t even take tablets into account. Compass Intelligence estimates that 18 million new tablets were sold during the fourth quarter of 2012. Naturally, as waves upon waves of new smartphones and tablets hit stores, people need a way of disposing of their old… → Read More
Android tablets have nearly caught up to iPad devices as the world’s most popular tablet platform, and some project that they may even overtake iPads later this year. According to new research from app analytics company Localytics, the U.S., and specifically Amazon, should take the most credit for that trend: some 59% of all Android tablet usage came from the U.S., with over half of that… → Read More
Smartphones including the iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy SIII and HTC Sensation XL are consistently consuming more mobile data than tablets, according to a new report by mobile data analytics company Arieso. The firm looked at the data demands of more than one million distinct subscribers over a single, 24-hour weekday in November 2012. The data was taken from a tier-1 UMTS network in Europe. → Read More
As trends go, it’s been hard to miss this one: Smartphones are getting bigger. Much bigger. But unlike many a flash-in-the-pan craze, the so-called phablet (phone-cum-tablet) phenomenon is, I would argue, here to stay, because phones are getting bigger for a reason: what we use them for is changing. This is technology evolution in action. → Read More
Attention dumbphones, point-and-shoot cameras and music players: sorry to tell you this, but it looks like your days may be numbered. According to a new survey out from Accenture (embedded below and released to coincide with the CES show), consumers are moving away from buying “single-use” devices and opting instead for those that offer the ability to do many things, with smartphones (at 41% of… → Read More
Polaroid’s newish image as a digital media company got one more boost today, with the launch of a new, $150 Android tablet aimed specifically at children. Simply/obviously branded the “Polaroid kids tablet,” the 7-inch device has sidestepped the holiday shopping rush to try its luck instead launching among the throng at the CES show later this month in Las Vegas. The news comes… → Read More
Forrester Research just published its annual “State of Consumers and Technology” report. As usual, it’s chock-full of interesting statistics about how U.S. consumers use the Internet, but the most interesting statistic is probably that the overall online penetration rate in the U.S. has stabilized at 79 percent (the same number Forrester found in 2011). That’s the percentage of U.S. adults that go… → Read More
Research by Ofcom suggests the U.K. leads international markets for mobile device adoption and usage, driven by mobile social networking. Internet shopping on mobiles is also on the rise, while the U.K. leads for online shopping generally — with Brits spending £1,000+ per year buying stuff online. The rate of on-demand online TV viewing is also at world leading levels in the U.K. → Read More
Apple was responsible for an impressive 84 percent of total mobile PC shipments in Q2 2012, owing primarily to the success of its iPad line, according to a new report from supply chain analysis firm NPD DisplaySearch. LG Display reaped the benefit of that market domination, leading the industry in mobile PC panel shipments in 2012 thanks to its supplier relationship with Apple. → Read More
Google just announced that it is updating the design of the Google News reading experience on tablets, including the Nexus 7, Nexus 10 and iPad. The new design, says Google, will make the service feel “even more natural and fluid on tablet devices.” → Read More
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