Category: Tech

Thoughts on gadgets and tech news or some cool new thing I am messing with.

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More Consumers Use Mobile Internet Daily than Fixed-Line Internet

The phenomenal growth of mobile Internet usage continues.

Based on the recently released MEF Global Consumer Survey of over 8,000 consumers in nine countries (including the US), more people now access the mobile Internet on a daily basis than do fixed-line Internet. This was true of each market in the survey.

Other numbers that immediately stand out from the report are that 72% of survey respondents use the mobile Internet daily and an amazing 18% no longer access the Internet using a land line at all. Product research for both online and offline shopping was a huge driver of mobile usage.

Is your company still neglecting mobile? Then you are also neglecting a good (and rapidly increasing) portion of your visitors. Talk to MarketNet about what your company’s mobile strategy should be and we’ll make sure you’re not just meeting but exceeding your customers’ mobile expectations.

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RIP Steve Jobs. 1955 – 2011.

Steve Jobs Death 675x448

Shocked and saddened by the news of the passing of Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs tonight. Despite his illness and his resignation as CEO just a few weeks ago, this still has affected me greatly. I had to excuse myself from dinner to compose myself and acknowledge my feelings when I learned of the news tonight, via a push message from CNN’s iPhone app of course. As US President Barack Obama put it, “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

From Apple.com:

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

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Amazon Announces New Kindles, New Cloud-Accelerated Web Browser

amazon-kindle-fireSome huge technology announcements from Amazon today as they introduced three new Kindle devices, a new $79 Kindle, the Kindle Touch, and the Android powered Kindle Fire tablet. As a web agency, the most interesting device is the new 7″ tablet. So far the iPad has largely been the only tablet to capture enough market and mindshare that it is even considered during the design and development of new web sites. With the Kindle Fire’s low price ($199) and Amazon’s ability to slap it front and center everyday on the homepage, the tablet has a strong chance to make a significant impact.

Equally interesting is the announcement that the Kindle Fire will feature a cloud-accelerated web browser called Silk that splits the work of fetching and rendering web sites between the device and Amazon’s cloud services. The browser promises to speed web browsing by reducing DNS requests, caching site data on Amazon Web Services cloud, optimizing site files such as images, and prefetching webpages based on aggregate browsing data.

Read on to learn more about the Amazon Silk web browser.

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No Flash Support in Internet Explorer 10 Metro

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The touch friendly, Metro-style version if IE10 will not support Flash or other plug-ins. (Image: Favbrowser.com)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 will not support any browser plug-ins when running in the new slick Metro mode. Most notably, that means no Flash support and a reliance on HTML5, JavaScript, and other standards-based technologies for video and other interactivity. When running in standard desktop mode, IE10 will support both plug-ins and extensions.

Metro is the touch-friendly, full screen interface that will run on top of Windows 8 and be the main mode for touch devices such as tablets. According to Microsoft, “running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers.”

This is another big blow for Flash, which is already not supported on many mobile devices including iPhones and iPads. While there are still things Flash does better (or more consistently across browsers) than HTML5 and JavaScript, developing in Flash is making less and less business sense as mobile web usage continues to explode.

Source: Metro style browsing and plug-in free HTML5

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HP Kills Off TouchPad, webOS Phones

HP TouchPadThe complicated mobile development market got just a little simpler yesterday as HP discontinued operations related to the production of webOS mobile phones and tablets. Not sure anyone saw this news coming, despite rumors that sales of the TouchPad in particular had been abysmal and prices for the tablet had recently been slashed. HP will “continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward” however so webOS itself isn’t quite dead yet.

webOS is a great piece of software but HP’s hardware didn’t wow and their devices never found a place in a competitive marketplace. The OS itself was great to use. It felt intuitive and responsive, and from a aesthetics and usability perspective might have been the closest thing yet to matching Apple’s iOS. Hopefully HP can find a partner or a buyer for webOS and maybe by this time next year we’ll see webOS software on HTC phones or even the next BlackBerry.

Hey, at least the HP Touchpad lasted one day longer than Microsoft’s Kin.

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PhoneGap 1.0 Released

The PhoneGap open source mobile development platform released their 1.0 version on Friday at the first ever PhoneGap Day in Portland. The platform originally launched in 2009 and after some iPhone App Store hiccups, they have steadily improved by fixing bugs, adding features, and extending platform support as they approached their 1.0 release. Seven mobile platforms are currently supported including iOS, Android, Blackberry, WebOS, and Windows Phone 7.

PhoneGap is a development platform that allows our developers to leverage standard web technologies to build native, cross platform mobile applications. HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript (along with server-side databases and code) are used to build the base of the mobile web application and then we can wrap that code with PhoneGap in order to leverage native APIs to access a mobile device’s camera or GPS functionality. That standards-based app can then be deployed to the various platforms and app stores.

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Apple Helping Microsoft Convince Windows XP Users to Finally Upgrade

Microsoft themselves had tons of trouble getting their customers to upgrade from Windows XP, but now maybe more people will finally take the plunge to the actually very good Windows 7 thanks to Apple and iCloud. Straight from the Apple press release: “Using iCloud with a PC requires Windows Vista or Windows 7; Outlook 2010 or 2007 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars.” If you want to use all the new features of iOS 5 you’ll have to upgrade to an operating system less than 10 years old.

My work laptop was finally upgraded from WinXP to Win7 just a few months ago so I no longer have any computers running it but there are still plenty of office computers out there still chugging along on XP.

Source: Engadget

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The Difference Between the Top 10 iPhone & Android Applications

Maybe the best example of the differences between iPhone users and Android users is the difference between the top apps for the respective devices. Here are the lists of top apps from Retrevo:

Top 10 iOS Apps
  1. Angry Birds
  2. Angry Birds Rio
  3. Tiny Wings
  4. Fruit Ninja
  5. Where’s Waldo?
  6. Tetris
  7. Words With Friends
  8. The Sims 3
  9. Cut The Rope
  10. Plants Vs. Zombies
Top 10 Android Apps
  1. Beautiful Widget
  2. Rom Manager *Premium*
  3. Root Explorer
  4. Fruit Ninja
  5. Better Keyboard
  6. Robo Defense
  7. SetCPU
  8. Weatherbug Elite
  9. Titanium Backup Pro
  10. Power AMP *Full Version*

As much as Android fans love to tout how customizable their phones are, I think the fact that the top apps are almost all ways to change CPU settings, manage RAR archives, and other random hardware tweaks is a little crazy. I’m not sure what a normal Android user thinks when they first check the app store and sees this kind of stuff.

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Toyota releases, pulls down iPhone theme for jailbroken phones

Toyota Scion theme for the iPhone

There are lots of reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. Getting this official Toyota Scion theme is no longer one of them. It wasn’t actually good looking or useful, but it was interesting to see a big company like Toyota putting something out of Cydia. Of course Apple didn’t like that, and has forced Toyota to pull the theme down and it is no longer available. (via MobileCrunch)