Smart phone wars

Posted by Rob Borley on Aug 23, 2011 in Android, mobile, news | Comments Off

Yesterday Google took their turn in the latest round of the smart phone wars when it was announced that Google is to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn. Motorola split their business sometime ago with Mobility being the development and manufacture of mobile phones arm.

It seems that, for now at least, Google will continue to run Mobility as a separate business. Motorola are already dedicated to producing Android devices and so, you would imagine, that this is a great opportunity for Google to have control over the hardware as well as the software in it’s mobile ecosystem.

One device to rule them all

Posted by Rob Borley on Aug 15, 2011 in mobile | Comments Off

The rise and rise of the smart phone has made a lot of other devices very nervous. Your smart phone; Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, yes even blackberry, is a Swiss army knife for the digital age. It’s a multi-tool. It can do pretty much everything. And if it can’t, well, there will be “an app for that” soon. But does this super tool make all the other specific devices redundant? Are we heading for a world where everyone has just one, shiny, pocket sized box?

Androids that mean business

Posted by Rob Borley on Jul 13, 2011 in Android, mobile | Comments Off

While iOS is the undisputed consumer app king, Android sits as the mobile device OS whose growth is accelerating the fastest. However, quite opposite to some of the headline stats out there, Android does not have a larger install base than iOS. It is true that there are more Android based devices than iPhone’s but  if we want a true picture of the current situation we need to not compare a phone (iPhone) and an operating system (Android). Instead we should compare like for like; iOS and Android .  Then we see that there is still a larger install base of iOS devices. If current rates of growth are sustained then Android will, eventually, overtake iOS. But we are not there yet.

Is mobile web the future?

Posted by Rob Borley on Jul 5, 2011 in mobile | Comments Off

I recently read, and commented on, an article on eConsultancy (Moments in Needless Bi-Polarity: Apps vs the mobile web). However, as I was moderated, I thought that I’d share my thoughts on it here instead. *smile*

It seems that this issue, and the misunderstandings surround it, will not go away. I do agree with much of what Stefan Tornquist had to say in his article. He discussed the idea that the battle between apps and mobile web has been over hyped and, in fact, they should be allowed to complement each other as they serve different purposes (as I may have mentioned before). However, some of the points in his article are likely to confuse the casual investigator.

PC free changes the iWorld

Posted by Rob Borley on Jun 7, 2011 in mobile | Comments Off

Yesterday saw the much anticipated keynote at the Apple Developers Conference. This is the time of year when Apple tells us all what shiny new toys we get to play with in the coming year.  And by all I mean, well, quite a lot of us. A staggering 200 million iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) are out there in the wild. That’s a big number and represents a huge market for your Apps. In fact Apps have been downloaded from the App Store 14 billion (even more zeros) times!

This time around the focus has been on software and the key point for us is the announcement of iOS5. With 200 new features there are a lot of new bells and whistles to play with. The new developer tools are also out now and once we’ve taken a look we will be sure to tell you what we are looking forward to playing with the most.