Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
A recent study on more than 4200 people who had downloaded a mobile application in the last month showed that there was an increase in smartphone app usage these days. On average, the number of apps a smartphone user has on an Android phone is 22.
The average number of installed apps based on various smartphone OS:
The most popular apps across smartphones showed pretty consistent results. A few had strong showings, with the obvious and leading ones dominated by Google Maps and Facebook.
Source:
Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
In addition to being supported in browser, Google Maps 4.0 is now in the Android Market and it’s all Buzz-ed up and ready to go. Google just announced that it’s bringing some serious location-based integration to its services, all centered around the new Buzz social networking tool built into Gmail.
Google’s going to do location better than the usual latitude / longitude coordinates — it’s able to snap those to actual place names and then take context-aware actions depending on where you are. The new location services is integrated into the main mobile Google.com search page and the new buzz.google.com page for the iPhone and Android, and into maps for Android, S60, and Windows Mobile. Buzz is rolling out starting today, and it should hit everyone within “the next few days.”
Google buzz will be accessible via mobile in three ways: from Google Mobile’s website, from Buzz.Google.com (iPhone and Android), and from Google Mobile Maps.
Sources:
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz-gmail/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz-takes-mobile-location-services-to-the-next-level/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/09/google-maps-4-0-with-buzz-support-now-available-in-android-marke/
http://mashable.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz/
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100209-717524.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
Motorola announced on its official Facebook page that all of those frustrated Droid users can rest assured that help is on the way and will be here sometime this week. The post says that it’s “happy to relay the 2.1 upgrade to Droid will start to roll out this week”.
The upgrade will means that Motorola Droid is going to get the new update as pushed to Nexus One last week. Google goggles will be pre-installed, as well as other news and weather widgets that available on Nexus One. The browser will now be multitouch enabled, just like Google Maps 3.4. However, the home screen still look the same, not adopting the Nexus One’s rotating 3D grid of app icons.
Sources:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/motorola-says-android-update-2-1-coming-to-droid-soon/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/08/motorola-droids-next-update-to-be-android-2-1-includes-multito/
Daily Mobile Industry Snippets!
Google just rolled out a software update enabling multitouch, fixing a glaring weak spot for the phone since its launch last month. There was some speculation that Google had initially backed off from implementing multitouch because Apple, a rather litigious company, held patents around it.
Google’s software update also has a few other bonuses. It’s added a night viewing setting for Google Maps. And Google Goggles, its visual search app, now comes automatically with the Nexus One.
Sources:
http://www.androidguys.com/2010/02/02/nexus-one-ota-update-enables-pinch-to-zoom/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/nexus-one-gets-a-software-update-too/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=5937
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/02/nexus-one-multitouch/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/02/nexus-one-gets-a-software-update-enables-multitouch/?s=t5
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/02/video-android-multi-touch-nexus-one/
