During the fourth quarter of 2011, 10.5 million Android-based tablets shipped worldwide, helping them secure 39.1 percent of the market. … For well over a year now, it has been believed that the iPad can fend off Android, due mainly to the general inability on the part of Apple’s competitors to come up with a highly sought-after alternative. Back in the fourth quarter of 2010, the numbers seemed to prove that point, as Apple secured 68.2 percent of the tablet space, and Android devices came in second with just 29 percent share. … “Dozens of Android models distributed across multiple countries by numerous brands such as Amazon, Samsung, Asus and others have been driving volumes,” …
Android is so far proving relatively popular with tablet manufacturers despite nagging concerns about fragmentation of Android’s operating system, user-interface and app store ecosystem.” … Regardless of which company is leading the way, it’s clear tablets are taking hold in a big way worldwide.
Compared to Android, Apple still has a dominant position in the tablet market, with a 57.6 percent share compared to Android’s 39.1 percent, according to Strategy Analytics’ most recent numbers. In terms of year over year growth, the tablet space has grown by 150 percent between the end of 2010 and 2011. …The PC market, on the other hand, contracted by around six percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to research firm Gartner. That’s despite 20 percent growth by Apple’s own Mac line of computers. … If the trend of growing tablet and smartphone sales continue, and PC sales continue to decline, we’ll soon be in a position where mobiles are considered a primary device by the majority of users.
A new report from one of the Web’s leading researchers spells out what news reports have suggested: that tablet computers and e-readers made a huge leap in popularity this holiday season.
The number of U.S. adults who owned tablets such as Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, or e-readers, like the Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, increased from 10% in mid-December to 19% in early January, according to the report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. …
Women were the biggest new adopters of e-readers, jumping from just 6% who owned them in November to 21% in January, according to Pew. Men went from 6 to 16%. …
The iPad still remains the most popular tablet by a long shot, although analysts say the emergence of the Fire, which runs a modified version of Google’s Android operating system, makes it the first serious challenger to Apple’s dominance of the tablet market.
Last year was the year that the tablet became an online retailer’s best friend as it emerged as the preferred device for many shoppers to make their purchases.
Based on its analysis of 16.2 billion visits to the websites of more than 150 retailers in 2011, Adobe Digital Marketing Insights found that Tablet Visitors spend over 50% more per purchase than visitors who use smartphones and over 20% more than visitors who use desktop/laptop computers. Additionally, Adobe found that Tablet Visitors are three times more likely to make a purchase than Smartphone Visitors and nearly as likely to purchase as Traditional Visitors.
Tablet Visitors respond to promotions: Conversion rates and average order values on Black Friday and Cyber Monday rose above their 2011 Holiday and Calendar 2011 averages.
Tablet Visitors are rapidly growing in size. Although they generate a small portion of total website visits, their share of total visits increased from 1% to 4% in just 12 months.
Tablet Visitors appear to spend more because of their demographics, the nature of the tablet user experience, and the environment in which Tablet Visitors shop online.
These findings suggest that retailers can no longer afford a “one-size-fits-all” approach to mobile optimization because Tablet Visitors and Smartphone Visitors are distinct customer segments. Retailers should evaluate the opportunity that Tablet Visitors offer and develop strategies to better attract, convert and retain them.
Another study by Ipsos OTX MediaCT on behalf of PayPal found that tablet owners were almost twice as likely to make purchases as those who only have smartphones. And 28 percent of dual smartphone and tablet owners said they were sure they spent more due to mobile shopping, compared with 13 percent of smartphone owners who said the same.
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… the iPad is finding a place in business all over the world. About 67% of iPad-owning professionals use their tablets at work, even if the vast majority of the devices are not supplied by employers, according to a recent survey by IDG. Of those people, 93% use the device for work-related communication. …
Between the “Business” and “Productivity” sections of the App Store, there are over 12,000 iPad applications available for download. … Some of the more popular choices include apps for word processing, document reading and signing, remote desktop, file-syncing, communication and collaboration.
The iPad and its chief competitors in the tablet space are not poised to replace laptops and desktops just yet, a fact confirmed in IDG’s survey. Only 6% of respondents said their tablet has “completely replaced” their PC and 16% said the iPad had ousted their laptop from their lives. Instead, the tablet is serving as more of a supplementary device. …
With cloud syncing of calendars, email and documents, the tablet becomes sort of an extension of the desktop. Content can be shifted seamlessly across devices via Dropbox, Instapaper or email.
… Starting around 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone, sales of devices running mobile platforms have eaten into a large portion of traditional desktop and laptop sales.
Apple sells far more iOS devices than those that run Mac OS X: in the last quarter of 2011, Apple sold at least 28 million iOS devices, vs 4.9 million Macs. And with a few niche exceptions that don’t account to a meaningful number of sales, Android devices are all mobile devices, not traditional computers.
Mobile devices are a cheaper starting investment, they have connectivity to the growing number of cloud services and they meet many needs that a used to be the sole domain of a PC. Is the PC “dead”? Nope. … But my future — and I think yours too — will become less reliant on the computer on your desk or lap today.
SIGNificant utilitzes the iOS “Open In” functionality to allow you to open a document from most other applications that have documents and contracts in them – including your inbox, Dropbox, Evernote, and others – and sign them via SIGNificant on the go. How? Hold your finger down on any PDF document for a few seconds. A pop-up appears. Touch “Open In” and SIGNificant will be a pre-installed option. Touching it will cause the selected PDF to open automatically in SIGNificant.
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We published a new version of our popular Android App which supports the native pens of a lot of new devices like Samsung Galaxy Note or Lenovo Thinkpad.
Try yourself and sign documents right on your android device…for FREE.
Another positive article about the Samsung Galaxy Note. Dylan Tweney wrote on MobileBeat:
With a 5.3-inch display, it’s a gigantic phone — but also a pretty small tablet. Unusually for a modern tablet, it comes with a stylus, though it works with your naked fingers, too.
To my surprise, it works pretty well. I spent some quality time with the Galaxy Note at CES 2012 today and came away impressed with its flexibility and responsiveness. The stylus was unexpectedly useful, particularly when enclosed in the larger shell that makes it into a full-sized pen. The Note ships with its own note-taking app, called S-Memo, and can even do handwriting recognition on your scribbles. The handwriting recognition was relatively accurate, in our limited testing, although it’s slow.
Antonio Rodriguez was very skeptical in his last blog post about the future of Android and predicts that it will die in the next two years:
The dream of a common Android that developers can write/deploy apps to and users can become familiar with is burning. More specifically, three events in 2011 burned it and we’re now holding on to a charred corpse that is quite different: an Android so splintered that it will make the glass on your Galaxy Nexus S2 Prime Pie dropped on concrete look like an ice skating rink.
The three events:
Google buying Motorola and alienating all of the tier one handset makers (none of which to this day have the spine to state it publicly but all of which have now come up with their “plan B”),
Microsoft extracting licensing fees from these same handset makers in the form of IP indemnification and
Amazon shipping a wildly successful, yet unidentifiable, version of an old Android build over the holiday… and making it a wild success.
Of the the three, #1 was completely avoidable but the other two may just have been the name of the game when there is so much at stake in the fight of who paints the interface for the next generation of computing.
These changes mean challenges for the developers who now need to make some tough choices. Over the holidays a developer friend asked me which Android should his startup focus its energies on? Since his company is making apps focused primarily on the U.S. and European market, it makes no sense for him to start obsessing about Huawei or ZTE at least in the near term. Motorola and HTC are slipsliding away.
My answer to him was to go for Amazon Kindle Fire for tablets and Samsung for the phones. Samsung and Amazon both are spending an incredible amount of advertising dollars to promote their platforms and it makes perfect sense for small startups (depending on their regional focus) to tie their lot with them. Between those two platforms, he would be backing winners that would bring the highest return on investment for his little company.
That is, and will be, the reality of the Android ecosystem.
With SIGNificant you can load any PDF right from your inbox, SD card, or Dropbox and add your handwritten signature. Once a signature is captured locally on the Samsung Galaxy Note and is embedded into the PDF, the document is sealed with a digital certificate. Anyone can verify the signature and content integrity of this PDF anywhere at any time, making unrecognized post-signing manipulation impossible.
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Why did Android tablets flop in 2011? There are four main reasons. Let’s count them down, and then talk about what 2012 looks like.
By Jason Hiner, TechRepublic
The price – Google and Motorola announced the first big Android tablet — the Motorola Xoom — for $800.
The lack of tablet apps – Google has not created enough of its own apps and third party software developers have hit the snooze button on Android tablet apps.
The enterprise doesn’t trust Android – 96% of tablet activations in the enterprise were iPads
The 16×9 problem – When you turn a 16×9 tablet to portrait mode, the screen feels oddly squished
What now? At the very least, Google will have to fix No. 1 and No. 2, and that might be enough to overcome No. 3 and No. 4.
SCOTTEVEST promises that a normal looking women’s trench coat can store an iPad, two smartphones, camera, glasses, keys, travel documents, change and lipstick. You can store a good sized water bottle inside the jacket.
The coat isn’t very heavy, even with the iPad, phones, camera and other gadgets. It doesn’t look bulky from the outside either. It’s lightweight and definitely not warm enough for New York City in January — but it should be just fine for the Las Vegas Convention Center.
For industry CIOs, senior business executives and IT leaders, navigating economic and market volatility will be a critical success factor in 2012 and beyond.
The top industry predictions include:
By 2014, major national defaults in Europe will lead to the collapse of more than one-third of European banks.
By 2015, new, external social Web and cloud-based services will generate 25 percent of consumer-driven banking products and services.
By 2013, iPad penetration among pharma sales reps will reach 85 percent, then shift to applications that improve delivery and interaction tracking.
By 2016, the iPad will gain less than 50 percent of the K-12 market as CIOs favor devices that are deployed more readily.
By year-end 2014, at least one social network provider will become an insurance sales channel.
By 2014, the five largest PLM software providers will make social networking an integral part of their solution.
Can Ultrabooks push up laptop prices? There’s no doubt that Apple has made ultrathin PCs fashionable. In theory, Ultrabooks should now be able to catch a free ride on the MacBook Air by offering better specifications at lower prices, and by offering a more familiar Microsoft Windows 7 environment. But that’s not guaranteed.
Obviously there are cognoscente who will spend whatever it takes to get what they want, and people who are buying status symbols or off-the-shelf lifestyles. However, this is not the bulk of the Windows PC market.
PC manufacturers who operate on cut-throat margins would no doubt be delighted if Ultrabooks increased the average selling price of Windows laptops, but consumers may have other ideas. http://bit.ly/y7f14M
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