According to a new report from AdMob, the iPhone and Android platforms continue to gain mobile web surfing market share, taking away from former leaders Symbian and Windows Mobile.
The company uses metrics reports to measure what smartphones are most popular for mobile web browsing, and passes the information onto advertising firms.
The Android platform has grown 47 percent since the release last year of the T-Mobile G1. By itself, the G1 captured 6 percent of the OS market in the US, and was the fourth most popular smartphone to access the Internet, behind the Apple iPhone, and the two most popular BlackBerrys, the Curve and the Pearl.
The iPhone however, was in a league of its own, taking almost 50 percent of all market share. Globally, the iPhone is still big, with 36 percent market share.
RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, had 22 percent of the US market share and Windows Mobile followed in third at 11 percent. Palm tied with Android at 6 percent but will most likely gain share with the release of the Pre.
Result for: metrics
SanDisk Corp. has announced a new flash memory management system that it claims will significantly boost performance from Solid-State Drives (SSD). ExtremeFSS will boost the speed of writing common types of data by 100 times, said Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at SanDisk. The system will allow data to be written to the drive without erasing and rewriting nearby data. The ExtremeFSS system will also boost the longevity of SSDs.
Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.
They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn’t very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.
As an example, a drive with a value of 40 TBW (terabytes written) would last for 11 years at an average of 10GB per day. Barnetson suggested that an LDE measure would be similar to an MPG (miles-per-gallon) measure for a car. A second metric SanDisk proposes is “virtual rpm,” which would measure how well the SSD compares to a mechanical drive at a certain speed (measured in revolutions per minute, or RPM).
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Result for: metrics
MySpace has announced that over 1 billion songs have been streamed so far through their newly launched MySpace Music service.
“We can confirm that we hit a milestone of one billion music streams only a few days after launching the new product,” the company said in a statement. “More importantly, we are still compiling our metrics on engagement and unique users which will tell a much richer story on how positively the community is responding to the new music experience. We’re excited to share more information and data as soon as it’s available.”
MySpace Music officially launched on September 25th, and includes the full catalogs of the Big 4 labels as well as many indie labels.
Although comparing the two is a far stretch (one is free, one is not), it is important to note that the iTunes store hit its five billionth song downloaded after five years in business whereas MySpace music hit 1 billion in a week.
