Global Nerdy

Click to see the photo at full size.

Yes, I’ve seen and heard about successful agile projects, but the ones that friends and colleagues have told me about lately have ended up like the photo above.

comScore’s Smartphone Market Numbers for the End of April 2013

comScore have published their numbers on smartphone market share for the end of April 2013, but for some reason, they decided to publish only tables and not graphs. I’ve always been of the mind that nothing helps you get a better handle on numbers like some pictures, so I picked up comScore’s slack and made my own.

First, the graph of smartphone platform market share:

It clearly shows the Apple/Google duopoly still going strong, as well as the BlackBerry/Windows Phone struggle for distant third place. comScore’s numbers indicate that BlackBerry is currently winning that struggle, which is at odds with IDC’s recent report that Windows Phone is overtaking BlackBerry.

For those of you who like diving into the details, here are the numbers behind the graph:

Platform	Share of smartphone subscribers End of Jan 2013	Share of smartphone subscribers End of Apr 2013	Change
Google	52.3%	52.0%	-0.3%
Apple	37.8%	39.2%	+1.4%
BlackBerry	5.9%	5.1%	-0.8%
Microsoft	3.1%	3.0%	-0.1%
Symbian	0.5%	0.5%	0.0%

 
Here’s my other graph, showing smartphone OEM market share:

Apple and Samsung are the biggest OEM players, with HTC, Motorola and LG in a three-way tie for third place. Once again for the completists, here are the numbers behind the graph:

OEM	Share of smartphone subscribers End of Jan 2013	Share of smartphone subscribers End of Apr 2013	Change
Apple	37.8%	39.2%	+1.4%
Samsung	21.4%	22.0%	+0.6%
HTC	9.7%	8.9%	-0.8%
Motorola	8.6%	8.3%	-0.3%
LG	7.0%	6.7%	-0.3%

Pew Internet: 56% of American Adults Own Smartphones

The Pew Internet and American Life Project have been tracking smartphone adoption for some time, and they report that the majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind, with 56% of U.S. adults owning one as of May 2013. At the same time, the numbers of U.S. adults who own non-smartphone cellular phones and who don’t own a cellular phone at all have been steadily dropping:

The folks at Pew have sliced and diced their numbers in numerous ways — be sure to check out their article for the full details.

…especially if you tend to overdo dependency injection.

After a couple of weeks of neglect, Global Nerdy is back in business! Let’s start with a little French wifi humour:

Translation: “He has wifi.”

Here’s a map of my travels last week:

Click the map to see it at full size.

I started last Sunday in Tampa, flew back to Toronto, where I hung out at the airport for about four hours until I caught another flight for Calgary.

While the Tampa trip (which took place the previous week) was about seeing the Special Lady (and getting work done remotely during the day), the Calgary trip was all about business. I was there to do an assessment of the current mobile device setup for an energy company, which involved going there, doing a series of 15 or so hour-long interviews with the company’s various business units, looking at their wireless, server and application infrastructure, and doing all manner of suit-meets-geek things.

We’d start our days early with a good breakfast…

…then make our way over to the client’s building…

…where they very generously set us up in a corner office with a great view of Eau Claire and the Bow River Valley. Unfortunately, we spend the lion’s share of our time in a conference room rather than our swanky corner office, but it was still a nice place to decompress between meetings and interviews, as well as to catch up on email and other administrivia.

We also spent some time at the Calgary office of Rogers, our partners in a number of projects. As you can see in the photo, we started our days fairly early during this trip.

Our earliest day was Thursday, when we caught a 6 a.m. flight…

…to Christina Lake, where we got to see the client’s operation in action. As you can see, the “tarmac” and runway aren’t paved — that’s just flat-packed dirt:

Here’s the terminal building:

And here’s the runway:

A short bus ride down a dirt road later, we arrived at the client’s production site, where we interviewed the field people and talked about their mobile infrastructure:

With our interviews complete, we caught the last flight out of Christina Lake back to Calgary…

…where we had a precious little bit of downtime before heading back to hotel and compiling our data. A busy techie’s got to have at least a little downtime, after all!

I’m heading back to Calgary to see our client, report on our findings, give them one of those whiz-bang presentations that are my stock in trade, present them with a whole lot of recommendations and a technology roadmap, and if all goes well, earn a fair profit for my efforts. It’s a lot of work, but I rather like this job.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Modern Android Takes Over

Click the graph to see the source article.

To the great annoyance of many a developer, Android 2.3 (a.k.a. “Gingerbread”), which was originally released at the end of 2010, has been the most common version of Android in the wild. Even until late last year, the general word was that accounted for half of all Android operating systems in the market.

Here’s some good news: according to Engadget, who are going by Google’s cleaned-up metrics (which are supposed to better reflect the number of active users), modern versions of Android — that is, 4.0 and higher (“Ice Cream Sandwich” and “Jellybean”) — now account for more than half the active Android installations. I think it’s safe to say that this is being driven by big sellers like the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note II, and should continue with the release of the S4 and HTC One.

Who Sold How Many Tablets in 1Q13?

Click the graph to see the source article.

IDC’s report on the worldwide tablet market for the first quarter of 2013 came out yesterday, and I’ve turned their numbers into the chart above. Some numbers of note:

• Total tablet shipments for 1Q13 were 49.2 million units — that’s more than were shipped in the first half of 2012.
• The year-over-year growth in tablet shipments in 1Q13 is a healthy 142%.
• Apple’s performance — selling 19.5 tablets in 1Q13 — outperformed IDC’s projected 18.7 million.
• ASUS is now the third biggest seller of tablets, thanks to its Nexus 7 tablet.
• The combined sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets make up 900,000 units in 1Q13.

iOS Users Still Way More Active

Click the graph to see the source article.

You’ve probably seen a couple of articles on how iOS users account for more online activity than Android users even though there are more Android units out there, such as GoGo: in-flight Internet use 84 percent iOS, 16 Android and Time’s iOS vs. Android article. Here’s another data point: NetMarketShare’s latest web usage share data for various mobile operating systems, which shows iOS accounting for nearly 60% of web usage, more than double Android’s share.

Click to see the Twitter search for #ThorstenTips.

Wow — Karen Geier is killing it on Twitter with her “Thorsten Tips”, a bunch of silly predictions inspired by Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins’ crazy predictions that in five years, no one will care about tablets and that Blackberry will be the undisputed leader in mobile tech. They’re tagged with #ThorstenTips, and you should get in on the fun!

I’ve posted some of my favourites below:

in 5 years, you will have fax machines in every room of your house (even the bathroom) #thorstentips

— Karen Geier (@karengeier) April 30, 2013

in 5 years, everyone’s “playlists” will be put on a “cassette” and put into a “walkman.” Sony will be a giant. #thorstentips

— Karen Geier (@karengeier) April 30, 2013

in 5 years, no one’s going to be drinking coca-cola. it’s all going to be about elk milk #thorstentips

— Karen Geier (@karengeier) April 30, 2013