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There is no denying that Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, is big. For example, Android is the OS on 42% of all consumer compute devices.
We have scoured the web for data that will help us show exactly how big Android is in the smartphone world. And in every way we looked at it, Android is ginormous.
The eventual death of the text message, or SMS has been discussed for years now. And is it any wonder, with smartphone sales booming and mobile data skyrocketing?
The demise of SMS would indeed be bad news for the phone companies since revenues for text messages were $128 billion in 2011. Instant Messages (IM), on the other hand, are free and just keep increasing in popularity.
In 2011 we concluded that the volume of SMS was still growing around the world, but the rate of increase was slowing down. Now we are back with new numbers, showing that relatively soon, WhatsApp (one of the more popular IM-services) alone could be as big as SMS.
With so much happening in the mobile space today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added a team that is dedicated to all things mobile to the growing Pingdom family.
This will help us on our quest for making the web a faster and more reliable place, regardless of what device is used to access a website.
The United States may be overtaken by China as the world’s largest smartphone market this year, but it’s nevertheless a huge and highly influential market. According to Comscore, more than 100 million Americans now own a smartphone, a number that keeps growing.
We thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the state of the US smartphone market. Where is it, and what are the trends? As you’ll see, things have changed dramatically in very little time.
For everyone who has a GSM mobile phone, the SIM card has become a way of life, or at least a way of mobile life. That thumbnail-sized plastic card, which houses our mobile identity, is a necessary evil we’ve had to endure for far too long.
Apple pioneered the micro SIM card with the iPad and iPhone, and now it wants to go even smaller.
We, however, join the ranks of people asking for the total abolishment of the SIM card, and here’s why.
Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.
In this show we get some updates on the progress of the Carbon Twitter app for Windows Phone, we discuss Intel coming back to smartphones, and Saleh picks a bone with some iOS fanboys criticizing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. He has a chance to explain himself.
In December, we looked at how the Internet has spread across the world from 1991 to 2010. We presented this in the form of an animation, highlighting each country in different colors depending in what percentages of the population were online.
Now we bring you a follow-up. This time we use data from the World Bank for mobile subscriptions per 100 people and map it out over the years.
As it turns out, there’s quite a difference between the two.
The Middle East is perhaps not what many people think of as one of the hottest telecom market in the world but new numbers by Informa Telecoms & Media may change your mind.
In total, the Middle East will see over 250 million mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2012. Iran, by far the biggest market in the Middle East for mobile phone subscriptions, will account for around 90 million by end of 2011, predicted to grow to 122 million by end of 2016.
In terms of smartphones, the UAE is predicted to have over 70% smartphone penetration by 2016, up from 47% today. Compare this with the United States, with a smartphone penetration of 40% as of September 2011.
Let’s have a look at some of the other numbers to see what else is interesting.
Mobile Internet adoption and speeds are increasing across the world. Sweden is one example of a country where Internet connections – mobile as well as fixed – are plentiful and fast.
The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) is in charge of monitoring the electronic communications and postal sectors in the country. In the latest report from PTS on telephony and the Internet, which covers the development through the the first half of 2011, we found some nuggets of information in terms of mobile data subscribers and traffic we felt worthy of a comparison to what’s happening globally.
These numbers should also be a good indication of how rapidly mobile Internet use is ramping up in other, similar countries (for example the rest of Scandinavia).
Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.
A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.
But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.
