Daily Bits

Archives for April 2010

Twitter Awareness Among Americans Exploding Exponentially

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Another day, another report. This time it’s from Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series detailing on Twitter awareness among Americans. Key findings of the Edison report revealed that awareness of Americans on Twitter increased significantly from 5% in 2008 to 87% in 2010.

The study, which was a result of three years of tracking data from a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,753 Americans conducted in February 2010, also showed that Twitter and Facebook both have almost the same awareness (Facebook has 88%) but in terms of usage, Twitter is still behind Facebook. There are now 7% Americans of the 17 million Twitter users who actively use Twitter, while 41% actively maintain a Facebook account.[Read More]

Survey Says: Smartphones are Being Used for Travel

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Today’s smartphone will not be called as such if  it isn’t smart enough to perform day-to-day functions that affects our lives. One proof? – the plethora of mobile applications available on various platforms. These mobile apps vary from the most useful to the most absurd ones. One  app which smartphones are supposed to come in handy is for travel purposes.

There are various travel-related apps available on various smartphone platforms. But are these applications being maximized by users? Compete’s analysis of available data shows that indeed, smartphones are being used for travel purposes. The bad news is, the usage is not significant enough, leaving more room for, growth perhaps?

Compete’s study utilized behavioraly targeted surveys that asked smartphone users whether they use their smartphones for travel research and booking.  Surprisingly, 69% of the respondents to Compete’s survey said that they do not use their smartphone’s for travel purposes and 78% said they don’t use smartphones for travel booking as well.

Quite interestingly, the survey also revealed that respondents see their smartphone’s usage more for post-travel bookings. These pertain to following up room availability, check-in time and other travel-related activities that you need to do.

The survey thus revealed that smartphones are not replacement tool but rather additional tools that aid users in their travel-related needs. And smartphone’s usage to follow-up bookings and other travel-related purposes are still growing despite the relatively low usage.

The fact is smartphones can be used in various ways that we can possibly imagine. And one of these is for travel bookings and other related information.

via Compete

Google Redesigns its Image Search for Android and iPhone

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How often do you search for images on Google mobile? Well, if you do this a lot, you would have been annoyed by how hard it is to scroll through image thumbnails on your Android 2.1 phones or iPhone. Well, say goodbye to the old ways and welcome the newly refurbished Google Image Search for mobile which was just rolled by Google.

So now when you see the thumbnail images, you’d noticed that these were squared to maximize the number of images that can be displayed on the small screen of the iPhone or any Android 2.1 devices. In addition, you can also now do the swipe gesture to scroll through the next or previous pages of search results. Or even tap the large, stationary “next” and “previous” page buttons. Finally, the speed at which images appear were also enhanced display them as quickly as you browse.

Meanwhile, as you view the images on the mobile search results pages, this is now made larger through a special image viewing page wherein a black background image emphasizes the image and the buttons fade after a few seconds. This allows you to see images with little distractions. And you can also easily browse through the images by swiping from picture to picture, just like how you normally do it when browsing for photos on your iPhone Camera library or Android photo gallery.

To try Google’s new image search for mobile, simply point your phone’s browser to google.com and tap on the “images” link. This feature is available in 38 languages worldwide.

Firefox aka Fennec for Android Looks Good, Saves Web Pages to PDF Too

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Although it is just a “pre-alpha” build you can see outright that Mozilla’s browser for Android phones nicknamed – Fennec or Firefox for Android has the makings of a pretty good if not great mobile phone browser.  One of Fennec’s developer’s slipped out some details about Fennec for Android and while it’s full of precautionary statements, I went ahead and installed the browser on my Nexus One.

The download and installation process went well without any hitch. Right after installing, I immediately fired up the browser – puff!  My phone’s screen goes blank. So, I rebooted my phone and fired up Fennec again.  Then there it was, rendering the startup page for Fennec on my Nexus One’s screen. I immediately type it some sites and noticed how fast the pages loaded up considering that it was still a “pre-alpha” release.

Now for some key features of Fennec or Firefox for Android that we should all look forward to:

Saving web pages into PDF – This is something that caught immediately caught my attention. This would come in handy for some offline reading of pages later on.

Tab Browsing History – You’d see this pop out from the left-most side of your screen. A pretty neat way of saving your browsing history and accessing them again later on.

Weave Sync – This looks like a pretty interesting feature. It will let you share bookmarks, browsing history, tabs and password between your Fennec on your mobile phone and Firefox on your desktop.

Some bugs

Fennec for Android is still buggy at this stage and that’s pretty understandable since it is just a pre-alpha release. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use and evaluate how good it is right now.

One thing that I noticed that the browser lacks and which I hope the developers will work on before the public release are pinch-to-zoom and +- controls for zooming on web pages.

Overall, Fennec for Android is a promising mobile browser that could give Opera Mini and the others a good competition.

To download Firefox for Android pre-alpha release, scan the QR below.

AdMob: 11 Phones Account for 96% of Android Traffic

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Mobile analytics firm AdMob has just released its March 2010 Mobile Metrics Report and I can’t help but cringe over the fact that while the Android OS is enjoying significant traffic it is still falls inferior over the iPhone OS. According to AdMob’s report, while the Android OS is steadily gaining traffic while it tries to reach the iPhone’s status, the fact still remains that there are more mobile phone helping the Android OS achieve this feat.

In fact, 11 Android devices account for 96% of the Android platform’s overall mobile traffic. Total Android phones currently available in the market is around 35 handsets from several phone manufacturers. In contrast the iPhone is running on devices developed by one manufacturer.

Looking at the specific Android platforms and their share of market will give us the Android 1.5 with 38% of market share, Android 2.0/2.1 gets 35% of the share and Android.6 getting 26% of the market share.  In terms of manufacturers, both Motorola and HTC tops the list with 44% and 43% of March 2010 mobile traffic.

Other key results of the AdMob report include:

  • Motorola Droid was the leading Android handset in March 2010 generating 32 percent of Android traffic, while the Google Nexus One drove only two percent of Android traffic.
  • At least 54 percent of Android traffic came from devices with a QWERTY keyboard.
  • Three devices – the iPhone 3GS (39 percent), second generation iPod touch (25 percent) and iPhone 3G (20 percent) – generated 84 percent of total iPhone OS traffic.
  • iPhone 3GS traffic share has increased from 30 percent in September 2009 to 39 percent in March 2010. The 1st Generation iPhone only generated 2 percent of iPhone OS requests in March 2010.
  • Total worldwide traffic in AdMob’s network increased 18 percent month-over-month.