Android Marketing

By 35% a month lately, according to the ad requests pouring into AdMob’s network

Click to enlarge. Other includes HTC Desire, Samsung Moment, Samsung Galaxy and HTC Tatoo. Source: AdMob.

“Traffic from Android devices has increased dramatically over the last year,” according to a report issued Friday morning by AdMob, the world’s largest purveyor of mobile ads.

In November alone, Android devices accounted for 27% of the hits on AdMob’s U.S. ad network, up from 20% in October — a 35% increase in one month.

Of course, AdMob is counting ad requests, not handset sales, so its numbers cannot be used to measure market share in the traditional sense. But its reports do provide a monthly snapshot of where the rapidly expanding smartphone market is headed. The growth in Android traffic — fueled by the release of new Android-powered devices — is one of the featured themes of AdMob’s November report.

Among its Android-related findings: Read the rest of this entry »

Seesmic has released their variation on a Android Twitter App.  It promises to be a full featured application even allowing you to upload videos from the phone to YouTube before tweeting them. Read the rest of this entry »

 Verizon Wireless has begun advertising its upcoming “Droid” smartphone, giving the first official details on a model that’s been the subject of many rumors. On the list of confirmed features are Android 2.0 and a November release.TV ads for this upcoming smartphone began running during the Baseball playoffs game last night, and will continue to run today during NFL games.

The theme for this campaign will be contrasting the features the Verizon’s upcoming device will offer and that the Apple iPhone does not, including a physical keyboard, multi-taking third-party apps, widgets, and a replaceable battery.

The TV ads direct people to a website — DroidDoes.com – that gives more details, including the fact that this smartphone will run Android 2.0, an as-yet unreleased version of Google’s operating system. The Droid will also have a 5 megapixel camera with a flash, mobile broadband, and speech recognition capabilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Acer has unveiled two new Android products: a dual-OS netbook and a touchscreen smartphone. Acer is a “fast follower and is probably going into where it sees other significant activity,” observed Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney. Android has become the mobile platform to watch, with a slew of smartphones hitting the market this fall. More netbooks are sure to follow.

Acer  has announced details surrounding two hotly anticipated mobile devices running Google’s  Android mobile operating system: the Liquid A1 touchscreen smartphone, which Acer first said it was developing when it joined the Open Handset Alliance earlier this year; and the Aspire One netbook, which is available for preorder at Amazon  for US$349.99. Read the rest of this entry »

The day Android fans have been waiting for since at least last week has arrived! The ultra-thin Android “mystery MID” launches today at a press event in Shenzhen. The event is ongoing, but thanks to Cloned in China the first details of the new Ramos MID, now known as the W7, have emerged. Read the rest of this entry »

What do Starbucks and Bono from U2 have in common? They are the latest converts to the power of the app. Last week the Seattle coffee giant released an app that will allow users to find their nearest outlet, details about whether it has a drive-through facility, and the nutritional details of its drinks. U2 released their U2 Mobile Album app, which tells users the group’s latest news and messages them when a new blog is posted by one of the band members.

They join tens of thousands of apps already available for mobile phones that are fuelling an industry which this year will be worth billions of dollars. The subjects covered include everything from news to social ­networking to music, such as the Spotify app for the iPhone, which gives its users access to a library of millions of tunes. They can also turn your iPhone into a light ­sabre or a pint of beer, or just manage your to-do list.

Although Apple is the best known with its pioneering app store for the iPhone, which launched in July 2008, other phone makers are quickly following: Nokia’s Ovi Store, BlackBerry App World and Google’s Android Market are all offering thousands of apps for smartphone users — and in Nokia’s case, owners of the company’s cheaper phones too. Read the rest of this entry »

MIPS Technologies along with Sigma Designs demonstrated an Android-based set-top box that is capable of 1080p video. It’s being hailed as “a major milestone toward the creation of a reference platform” that will allow Android-based devices to enter your living room.

They’ve made enhancements to Android libraries and the MIPS architecture so that the OS can run on a full-sized display at HD resolutions, rather than small handset displays. The specific Sigma SoC (system-on-chip) used for the prototype is unknown, but it may be the SMP8640-series chip already used in Blu-ray players and other video devices.
Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s deal to provide China Unicom with iPhone handsets is the headline news of the day, but the really important deal is HTC’s agreement with China Mobile, which has three times the number of subscribers as China Unicom, showcasing the Android operating system pushed by Google.

Apple made the deal with the second-largest carrier in China because it’s the only one with a 3G network that’s compatible with the iPhone, giving Google a golden opening to strike a deal to showcase its operating system to some 438 million potential subscribers. A third Chinese wireless carrier, China Telecom, is expected to strike a deal with either Nokia or Research in Motion, further crowding Apple’s space.

Ultimately, the handset battle will boil down to a contest between the status-symbol iPhone and more functional Android. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that Motorola is readying several Android smartphones, but it looks like the company wants to do more than just providing the hardware for the handsets.

According to Boy Genius Report, Motorola is working on a customized User Interface that should run on top of Android – this reminding us of what HTC has done with the Sense UI, or what Sony Ericsson wants to do with Rachael’s UI.

Motorola’s customized interface will apparently be called Blur. It will be upgradeable over-the-air and “heavily web-connected”, combining “personal contacts and social networking sites into a clean and easy to use interface.” Somewhat similar to Palm’s WebOS platform, which has proven to be quite successful until now. Read the rest of this entry »

If you thought, Opera Mini was already there for Android eons ago, we are talking about the ‘full’ Opera browser. Well, Opera Mini does the job, but there are some users who would want to experience the full web, as it is, on their phone browsers. That’s where the Opera Mobile comes to your rescue.

So, Opera Mobile for Android, which is expected to make its updated appearance in the near future brings with it full Flash and Google Gears support. The latest build of the browser skips both, so the next update seems to be a major one that is set to integrate these two important features. The current version of Opera Mobile for Android does have Opera Turbo though. Opera Turbo works similar to the compression technology used in Opera Mini. In this case however, you can control, switch off and toggle the browsing pattern according to your needs. Read the rest of this entry »