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While most U.S. consumers are aware of text messaging and the ability to change ringtones, the "Mobile Phone Usage Report" reported:
- 20 percent of mobile phone users prefer to use their phones as an all-in-one multimedia device for music, videos, web surfing, and other activities beyond making phone calls
- 34 percent of mobile phone users know that their current phone's memory can be expanded.
- 28 percent know that they can watch videos.
- 12 percent know they can access the Internet via Wi-Fi.
- Nearly a quarter (23 percent) were not sure if their phone included GPS.
- 21 percent were not sure if their handsets would play music.
Research firm Landor & Associates has released its second annual trends outlook. Landor analyst Luke Mansfield expects that 2009 will herald the next generation of user-friendly technology.
He wrote:
"We'll continue to see Apple on the march, but I expect a robust response from Nokia, striking back hard against the iPhone and leveraging its distribution muscle.BlackBerry will also challenge with its new Storm. Business users were quickly seduced by the iPhone, but turned off by its clunky connectivity and poor battery performance. My guess is that BlackBerry will win the battle for the corporate world."
HubSpot’s “State of the Twittersphere”
report for Q4 2008 shows a dominance of new users this year with 70% of Twitterers joining in 2008.
The report reveals 5,000-10,000 new accounts opened per day while 35% of Twitter users have ten or fewer followers.
Other fiindings from the report:
- Nine percent of Twitter users follow no one at all.
- There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow.
Opera Mobile watches how its mobile browser is used. Here are there latest findings. It's interesting to note that many of the top handsets are BlackBerry, making Opera a very popular browser on BlackBerry Devices.
Trade association 3G Americas, announced that in December
2008 with 4 billion connections to mobile devices worldwide.
The estimate by Informa Telecoms & Media represents 60% of the entire global population today. In some countries, millions of people are now experiencing connectivity to the world for the first time through wireless and changing their economic, social and political fortunes forever.
The Latin America and Caribbean region continues to show steady consumer growth with 16% year-on-year growth as subscription numbers are expected to reach in excess of 440 million, equating to 76% penetration.
Mobile social network users is growing quickly.
According to a study conducted by The Kelsey Group and ConStat, the percentage of mobile phone users who said they accessed social networks from their handset jumped 182% from September 2007 to October 2008.
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ChangeWave Research's new survey looks at the marketshare of the RIM vs Apple. New RIM products such as the BlackBerry Storm have provided a jump in consumer
planned buying that suggests RIM is gaining steam.
A total of 12.2% of respondents plan on buying a
smartphone over the next 90 days, 0.3% more than previously, surveyed by ChangeWave.
While RIM (41%) is still the consumer market share leader, it has fallen 1-pt since the previous survey in September to its lowest percentage of the last 12 months.
At the same time, Apple (23%; up 6-pts) has witnessed explosive growth - up 6-pts just since September. Importantly, its overall market share has more than doubled in the past six months - a direct result of the late-June release of the 3G iPhone.
Once again Sprint received a top ranking in customer care, from a Pali
Capital Inc.survey. This is the second time for the past two quarters.
Sprint answered 89 percent of 1,000 calls to its customer service lines within 30 seconds. Sprint is also the only major carrier to score above 80 percent in the current quarter.
"Sprint's performance over the past two surveys is well above the prior five surveys when Gary Forsee was CEO, and the company answered a little over half of calls to customer care in less than 30 seconds," Pali analysts said in a note about the results.
Here are some of the other results:
79% of T-Mobile calls were answered within 30 seconds.
68% of Verizon calls were answered within 30 seconds.
43% of AT&T calls were answered within 30 seconds.
"AT&T continued to have the worst response times, but its results improved to 43% from 33% due to greatly improved response times in the morning and early afternoon," Piecyk wrote. "AT&T's response times are very poor after 2PM."
Sources: Wichita Business Journal
and Sprint Connection.
Over the past several years, the mobile phone market has enjoyed double-digit annual growth due to an increased emphasis on emerging markets. However, emerging market growth has been steadily slowing as these markets mature. IDC now expects worldwide growth to be just 7.1% in 2008 before slipping into negative growth in 2009.
AdMob has released some new information about smartphone ad serving and Wi-Fi- The iPhone is at the forefront of Wi-Fi usage and recently launched smartphones such as the G1 and BlackBerry Bold suggest that Wi-Fi traffic will continue to grow in the coming months. Mobile devices that aren't phones (e.g. Sony PSP, iPod Touch) are also generating significant traffic on WiFi.
National Health
Interview Survey (NHIS) show that the number of American homes with
only wireless telephones grew once again. More than one out of every
six American homes (17.5%) had only wireless telephones during the
first half of 2008, an increase of 1.7 percentage points since the
second half of 2007.
More than one out of every eight
American homes (13.3%) received all or almost all calls on wireless
telephones even when they had a landline telephone in the home.
The report
shows interesting facts. Men, younger people, Hispanics, and poor people are more likely to be wireless only. Wireless only household were more likely to drink alcohol often, report excellent health, be without medical insurance, and to have been tested for HIV AIDS.
Nortel’s share price recently dipped to about 40 cents. While ABI Research in no way singles out the beleaguered network equipment vendor as worthy of particular criticism, according to senior analyst Nadine Manjaro Nortel’s low fortunes are symptomatic of several current industry trends.
A recent study from ABI Research, “Mobile Network Vendor SWOT Analysis,” examined the strengths, weaknesses and strategies of the world’s major wireless infrastructure providers. It provides insights into why bad economic times affect some companies more than others.
“Nortel is strong when it comes to the enterprise,” she says, “but recently they have made a lot of investments aimed at winning business from service providers, efforts that have not really taken off because of an unclear strategy and changes in operators’ technology choices. That was an ominous situation, which the global recession has now made more serious.”
Teenage girls and boys are sending, receiving, posting, and sharing naked or barely-clothed photos at an alarming rate. According to a survey released by The National
Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, parents and teens have a lot to be concerned about.
Photo sharing technology, social networking services, and MMS make it easier than ever before for people of any age to send photos that can come back to haunt them.
Annual revenues from the global mobile market will top USD 1.03 trillion by 2013, when the number of subscriptions worldwide will have risen to more than 5.3 billion, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. From end-2007 to end-2013, the global mobile market will see huge growth, increasing in size by over half (56%), according to the latest edition of Informa Telecoms & Media's Global Mobile Forecasts to 2013.
When Apple’s iPhone transformed the public’s idea of how a mobile handset should work, one of its most impressive - and apparently disruptive - features was its slick touch-screen interface. While resistive touch screens activated by physical force had been around for years, the iPhone’s was different: it was of the capacitive type, activated by a finger’s electrical charge.
The great appeal of this interface led many in the industry to conclude that they had seen the future of most mobile handset displays. But according to ABI Research director Kevin Burden, nothing could be further from the truth. “The reality is that existing operating systems, legacy applications, and regional aspirations make the change to capacitive screens for many devices very challenging.”
Although cellular handset accessories such as chargers and batteries ship far more units in what is today a $58 billion industry, memory cards provide the greatest revenue of all mobile phone add-ons, according to a new study from ABI Research.
Driven by the photo, audio and video demands of media-centric handsets and smartphones, these memory cards, largely from third-party suppliers such as SanDisk, will see a 17% compound annual growth rate in shipments over the years to 2013.
However, says industry analyst Michael Morgan, it’s not just about units shipped: “Of all accessories, memory cards deliver the best revenue return. In fact, as production has outstripped demand the market is currently oversupplied, leading to a 60% year-over-year fall in per-Megabyte prices. However, the memory capacity of the cards being sold is always increasing, and the resulting higher Megabyte volumes more than offset the decline in ASP.”
A new study by University of Tasmania psychology lecturer, Dr. Nengah Kemp, found that reading
a super-abbreviated
text message some call "textese," can take 2x as long to comprehend while it saves the sender just a few
seconds of texting.During the two-month study, Dr. Kemp asked students to write as many abbreviations as possible in five minutes and then read a series of shortened messages.
"Though it was quicker to write a message with abbreviations than conventional English, it took twice as long to read and many students made interpretation errors," Dr Kemp said.
The most easily understood texticons were 2, 4, c and u. While, harder to comprehend abbreviations included:
- ttyl - talk to you later.
- bbs be back soon.
- pu - pick up.
- cn - seeing you soon.
The study also found people used abbreviations too often and in formal documents.
"It's fine to use textese on a mobile phone, as it saves you time, but you have to make sure your reader understands it," she told Reuters, "And don't let it creep into your emails, student essays or job applications. Keep the boundaries."
Nielsen mobile is doing quite of job of investigating the mobile text revolution. According to a report
released Monday by Nielsen's Telecom Practice, Americans should expect
to see more text message marketing in the future. Marketers have ramped
up their use of the medium to engage their customers -- where there's an
audience, marketers are not far behind.Here are a few key facts from the report:
- As of Q3, 57 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers use text messaging regularly
- While the U.S. still lags behind other markets in terms of SMS penetration, short code marketing is gaining momentum
- 16 percent of U.S. text message users recall seeing some form of advertising while using text messaging
- Younger and minority subscribers are more likely to recall seeing some for of SMS advertising
So far, Nielsen's report notes, marketers have used short code marketing in a tight but creative range of ways: from simple information messaging, to rewards programming, to couponing, and even direct SMS purchasing.
