Hey kids, don’t tweet and run: fitness and social media collide head on with Motorola’s updated MOTOACTV gadget.
Motorola have released a comprehensive update for their fitness gadget MOTOACTV, giving users advanced fitness tracking features, and the ability to receive Twitter and Facebook updates during a workout.
As well as a redesigned screen, new options for workout plans and the ability to set targets, users can now read Twitter and Facebook updates. The gadget can already send and receive texts and phone calls, and the new update is designed to provide users with added communication options. While you can’t send updates using the device, you can still “Like” other people’s posts
But how useful is this feature? For the less coordinated among us, it takes enough brain power to put one foot in front of the other, let alone make a phone call, check Facebook or read the latest Twitter updates. Plus, the screen size of the MOTOACTV is designed to be small enough so that it can function as a watch or armband, which doesn’t make it the most user-friendly device for reading.
This raises the much-heard question: how much social media is too much? Is it really necessary to be able to stay connected with our friends and followers while pounding the pavement, on a bike, or letting off steam on the driving range? With this feature, it seems like Motorola are attempting to move their product out of the “only for exercise buffs” category and into the mainstream. Starting at $250, this isn’t exactly the cheapest watch on the market, so the availability of the optional social media plug-in somewhat sweetens the deal for users who aren’t persuaded by the watch’s existing features.
Even without the plug-in, the MOTOACTV’s latest update consolidates the gadget’s place in the top ranks of sophisticated fitness devices. Its GPS tracker uploads your exercise route to the website, allowing you to analyze time and speed statistics, measure your heart rate and set fitness goals. With a scratch-resistant touch-screen display that adjusts to lighting, and a smart player that learns what music motivates you the most, the device isn’t for the faint-hearted, but rather encourages users to get serious about exercise.
To download Motorola’s update, tether your device to your computer, then go to the GooglePlay store and search for MotoACTV Facebook and Twitter. There you’ll find the app’s software update and the social plug-in.
Vodafone in controversy over its tax bill - Daily Telegraph
It invests £1.5m a day in mobile networks in Britain, and is still writing tax off against the £5.96bn it paid the government for mobile spectrum in 2000. It also paid around £700m in payroll and other taxes last year.
Meanwhile, its highest paid member of staff, chief executive Vittorio Colao, saw his pay package more than double from £6.6m to over £14m last year, including more than £12m in bonuses.
In avoiding corporation tax in Britain, Vodafone joins a growing list of major multi-nationals that have a major presence in the UK but pay little or no corporation tax.
In the past, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, has blamed the low payments on the UK’s weak tax laws, saying it has a duty to shareholders to pay no more tax than required and his company’s hands are tied by the Government’s low demands.
“It is true we could pay more tax but we would have to do so voluntarily. It’s called paying the legally minimum amount of tax required,” he said.
Apple CEO Tim Cook expected to unveil iPhone, iPad software - Los Angeles Times
Apple Inc.Chief Executive Tim Cook is expected to show off new iPhone software, updated Mac computers and provide more details on future releases of Mac software when he kicks off the company's annual conference for software developers.
Monday's announcement of new software for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch has been confirmed by banners that appeared Friday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, reading "iOS 6." It's not much of a surprise. Apple has used its Worldwide Developers Conference as an opportunity to announce new iPhone software for the last few years.
The biggest mystery surrounds Apple's ambitions in television-making. Late company founder Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that he wanted to remake the TV. Apple does sell an "Apple TV," but it's a small box that connects to a TV to display movies from iTunes. There's much speculation that Apple plans to make a full-blown TV set, integrated with iTunes.
Few company watchers expect Apple to reveal such a set Monday, but there's broad speculation that it could make a minor step toward Jobs' goal by releasing updated software for the Apple TV, expanding on its relatively limited functions.
Also what's not known is what new features will come with iOS 6, or when it will be released to consumers. Usually, the new software becomes available for download around the time a new iPhone model appears. Apple-watchers expect the next version of the iPhone, the iPhone 5, to appear this fall, about a year after the launch of the 4S model.
Cook is also expected to announce new Mac models.Intel Corp.has just updated its processor line with faster, less power-hungry chips, and most of Apple's Mac lines haven't had a major update in a year.
iPhone soon to be available on prepaid Cricket network - Ogden Standard-Examiner
Beginning June 22, cellphone provider Cricket Wireless will sell the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, making it the first no-contract wireless provider to do so. Cricket has offered partial subsidies on the phones -- about $150 off what Apple charges for "unlocked" handsets that you purchase directly from Apple, rather than from a carrier.
This is a breakthrough for prepaid service providers. While prepaid phone selections have gotten much better over the past year or so, Android smartphones haven't been enough to overcome the stigma of prepaid service. But the iPhone could do it.
You'll pay $300 more for an iPhone 4S at Cricket than with a contract at AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. But since Cricket's plan, at $55 a month, is less than half the cost of service from the others, you could wind up saving more than $1,200 over a two-year period, and that's including the extra you paid upfront for the phone.
While it's true that Cricket's no-obligation month-to-month plans don't lock you into a two-year contract like AT&T, Verizon or Sprint, you will have dropped up to $500 on an iPhone, and that may be tough to abandon if you're unhappy with your service or want another phone. The Cricket iPhone cannot be used on other networks. (Unlocked iPhones purchased directly from Apple can be used on either AT&T or T-Mobile, giving you some choice.)
Cricket is a regional carrier with decent service, according to Brad Akyuz, director of NPD Connected Intelligence. "Cricket operates on its own network in regional markets, but does provide a nationwide coverage via the roaming partnership with Sprint," he said.
Despite offering coverage around the U.S., many locations are not included. The company will release iPhones in about 60 U.S. cities. If you're in one of many major metropolitan areas -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City or Chicago, for example -- you're out of luck, but people from smaller cities, including Fresno, Albuquerque and San Antonio, will have the opportunity to buy the first prepaid iPhone. To see whether Cricket iPhones will be available in your city, check www. mycricket.com/iphone.
Cricket's $5 monthly discount for additional phones on a single account -- referred to as family plans by other carriers -- will not apply to the iPhone, a Cricket spokesperson told me.
And while Cricket says the plan includes unlimited data, that's not really the case. For $55 a month, Cricket includes unlimited talk and text, along with 2.3GB of data. Once you reach that amount, Cricket will slow speeds. Rates are slowed, but not stopped -- a common practice with nearly all carriers these days.
The iPhones will be available at Cricket stores and online at mycricket.com. Other retail partners, such as Best Buy and Target, will not get the iPhone.
Cricket is not the only prepaid provider to cash in on the popularity of the iPhone. Virgin Mobile, owned by Sprint, is said to be getting the iPhone as early as July 1, but no further details on plans and rates are available. Like Cricket, Virgin begins throttling data at 2.5GB, which it calls unlimited. Sprint also owns Boost Mobile, another prepaid service, which may get the iPhone, but not until September.
To choose between prepaid carriers, compare plans and coverage. I expect Virgin and Boost to charge about the same monthly fee as Cricket. However, the Sprint-owned prepaid carriers offer far greater coverage than Cricket, about 278 million people compared to Cricket's 60 million.
Is there any reason not to buy your iPhone from a prepaid carrier? First, are you currently on contract with a carrier? You'll want to wait until the end of your contract to avoid an early termination fee. Second, check with friends or others who use either Cricket or Virgin (and perhaps Boost) to make sure you'll have the service and coverage you need. Do you always want the newest model? If so, Apple is due to release the iPhone 5 this fall and there's no word from the prepaid carriers on whether they'll be included. Best to wait and make your decision after the iPhone 5 launch.
If you aren't on contract, you've confirmed you'll get reliable service and you don't care about the upcoming iPhone, go for it -- prepaid carriers are no longer just for those who can't pass a credit check. They offer real value in today's market.
Ogden-based TopTenREVIEWS.com guides consumers by comparing products in the world of technology, including electronics, software and Web services. Have a question for TopTenREVIEWS? Email Leslie Meredith at lesliemeredith@technewsdaily.com.
iOS v Android: why Schmidt was wrong and developers still start on Apple - The Guardian
As Apple prepares for a full week in which it will fete and educate the developers who write apps for the iPhone and iPad (and also its Mac computers) at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco - and with Google preparing to do the same for those writing Android apps at its I/O event on 27 June - the question many are asking is: if Android phones outsell iPhones, why do developers still prefer to write for Apple first?
It wasn't expected to be this way. Speaking at the LeWeb conference on 7 December 2011, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt was in ebullient form as he considered the success of Google's Android mobile operating system. "Android is ahead of the iPhone now," he told the audience of techies and entrepreneurs. Ahead in terms of the number of phones, the quality of the software, the lower price, and having more companies making devices that used it, he said.
He also had some predictions: "Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favoured by the open approach Google is taking," he said. "There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like ICS [Ice Cream Sandwich, the name for version 4.0 of Android, released in October] or not… you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first."
When one Android user told Schmidt it was frustrating to see iPhone and iPad - known as "iOS" - versions of apps coming to market before the Android one, Schmidt said that in part because of the new software, "my prediction is that six months from now you'll say the opposite". That is, that Android versions of particular products would be written before the iOS ones.
Calendar time
Six months later, there are few signs of that happening. Instead, even while the number of Android phones in use has continued to grow steadily, to more than 300m, and with Android phones making more than 50% of the 150m-odd smartphones sold worldwide every quarter, developers still look to Apple's platform first.
It's not initially obvious why. A huge number of apps are being launched on Android. Analytics firm Distimo, which tracks the various app stores, reckons that in the first four months of 2012 more than 100,000 apps were added to the Google Play store, versus 63,000 for Apple's App Store. Microsoft's Marketplace, for Windows Phone, and BlackBerry's official stores added 35,000 and 22,000 respectively in the same period.
But follow the money - a big factor for the important developers, who can easily spend thousands writing a new app - and it's a different story. Distimo and analyst firm CCS Insight launched their App Vu Global service in early April 2012, tracking downloads and revenues from the app stores. Its initial findings claimed that Apple's App Store is generating $5.4m every day in app sales for the top 200 grossing iPhone and iPad apps. For Google Play, their estimate was just $679,000 for the top 200 grossing apps on Google Play, or about 12% of Apple's revenue.
Another mobile app-tracking service, Flurry, noted on 7 June that "For every ten apps that developers build, roughly seven are for iOS." Though the total volume of apps being developed has doubled - from over 9,000 in the first quarter of 2011 to more than 18,000 in the second quarter of 2012 - that 7:3 ratio in Apple's favour has remained consistent.
Part of that has been because iPhone users have shown themselves willing to pay for apps in a way that Android users so far have not. In January 2012, Apple said that since 2008, when its App Store opened, developers had been paid a total of $4bn, of which more than $700m was paid in the last quarter of 2011 alone. Google hasn't given a comparable figure, though Horace Dediu, who runs the Asymco consultancy, puts the figure for Google's total app sales in 2011 at $300m - meaning developers would get $210m in total.
In March 2012, Flurry crunched data from developers using its tracking tools in their apps, and claimed that given the same number of users per platform, a developer who got $1 on the iTunes App Store would get $0.23 from Google Play.
Nine-year headstart in credit cards
That's a key pointer to why developers don't look to Android first. Some cases are simple examples of what economists call "opportunity cost". Dave Addey is managing director of Agant, a British software developer which has written, among others, the Train Times app which costs £4.99 on the iPhone, and uses National Rail data to offer real-time data feeds, plan journeys and show timetables. "We still prioritise iOS," he says. "Because it's the main platform on which people will pay for an app. We haven't done Android apps for business reasons. It comes down to this: do you port [translate] to Android, or do you develop another app for iOS? In the end, iOS is the better business case. Apple's greatest trick has been making it really easy to pay for apps. Once you have your iTunes account, you just enter a password." Google is trying to emulate that by encouraging people to add a credit card when they first set up a phone; but it is coming from a long way behind Apple, which started its iTunes Music Store selling music online in 2003, and is now one of the web's biggest five holders of credit card details, along with Amazon, eBay and PayPal.
Addey points to the problems encountered by Imangi Studios, developer of the hugely popular Temple Run game - in which you are pursued along stone-lined routes by fast-moving unseen monsters - when it ported the app to Android, releasing it at the end of March.
It was a huge success in terms of downloads, hitting 5m in about 10 days. But Imangi Studios - a husband-and-wife team, plus a designer - soon discovered that Schmidt's promise of Android being ahead in the number of phones and manufacturers was only too true. Despite writing it to run on 707 Android devices, they said that 99% of the emails requesting support were actually complaints that it wouldn't run on the user's particular phone model or version of Android. They were pilloried on Facebook, despite having what would be regarded by anyone as a successful release.
Breaking up is easy
Those subtle differences between devices are known in the industry as "fragmentation". While Apple does have some fragmentation - there are seven models of iPhone, three different iPads and four of the non-phone iPod Touch - they pale into insignificance compared to Android's, where OpenSignals, which provides a network coverage app, recently found 1,363 device models running Android, from 599 different brands - though Samsung dominates with about 40% of the market.
Android fragmentation, as perceived by OpenSignals based on devices downloading its Android app. Click for original post. "It's a problem, especially for testing your app," says Agant's Addey. "You need to get a representative set of [Android] handsets so you can try it out. But that makes it hard to create a best-of-breed app because of the fragmentation, and because people are less likely to have the latest version of the [Android] software. You have to build to the lowest common denominator, rather than using the latest features." Google's statistics to the beginning of June say that just 7.1% of phones actively using its Google Play app market run version 4.0, or "Ice Cream Sandwich". The most-used version is 2.3, or "Gingerbread", released in December 2010, running on 65%; in total, 84.1% of devices using Google Play run Android version 2.3 or 2.2, dating back to June 2010.
Google Play: proportion of devices running different versions of Android accessing within 14-day period, since January 2010. Source: Google By contrast, although Apple's oldest handset on sale - the iPhone 3GS - dates to June 2009, before Android 2.2, it can run the latest version of iOS – so app developers can target apps at features it includes, confident the majority of users will be able to run them.
And iPhone users definitely do update. Addey points to data for the UK Train Times app, which is available for every iPhone and iPod Touch ever made. The latest version of iOS, v5, was released in October 2011: Addey saw the proportion of devices using the preceding version, iOS 4, drop dramatically - while the proportion using iOS 5 leapt.
Update fever
iOS versions accessing UK Train Times app feed, by time. Source: Agant. Click for larger version with longer time series Now, just under nine months since iOS 5's release, 86.2% of devices using the Train Times app run iOS 5, 12% use iOS 4, and just 1.7% use iOS 3 (released in 2009). Other developers put the proportion of iOS 5 users at 75% - lower, but still overwhelming.
"Compare this to the 7.1% uptake of Android 4.0, and it's pretty easy to see why we develop new apps for iOS first," Addey says. "Apple is constantly pushing its users and developers to be running the latest versions." He says Agant has tended to focus on bigger apps, "because we know we can support the latest features from Apple." The team's latest product is a World War 2 app for the iPad which includes a day-by-day timeline that interacts with a map, Pathe newsreel videos, and commentary by the historian Dan Snow.
There's no a priori reason why Apple should be able to get updates out more quickly. Changes to the "baseband" software which operates the radio systems in mobile phones (to connect to networks) have to be tested and approved by phone carriers; Apple has to go through those just like Android handset makers. Such changes are part of every major version both of Android and iOS.
But Apple has a clear incentive to roll out updates - to keep users and developers happy - whereas carriers and Android handset makers are less eager; fragmentation and opportunity cost hits them too, and they may have more incentive to encourage people to buy a new handset than see them using the same one with newer software.
Putting kids first
However, generalisations about what "developers" are doing in terms of platform support are risky. In key fast-growing categories – particularly free-to-play social mobile games – a number of companies launch new titles simultaneously on iOS and Android, or even on Android first. Glu Mobile, TinyCo, Storm8 and TeamLava, who have some of the most lucrative iOS games according to Apple's "top grossing" chart, are also fixtures on Android. Some companies are adopting an Android-first strategy here too.
Japanese social games publisher DeNA, which recently reported revenues of $529m for the first quarter of 2012 alone, chose Android as the platform to launch its Mobage community globally in 2011. Its recently-released Rage of Bahamut game is on Android but not iOS yet.
US publisher Pocket Gems launched a game called Tap Dragon Park exclusively for Android in May. Another US studio, Bionic Panda, focuses on Android games rather than iOS.
Certain kinds of apps can only work on Android rather than iOS, too. British startup SwiftKey is a good example: its natural-language keyboard app SwiftKey X has notched up millions of paid downloads on Google's store. It works by replacing the default keyboard on Android devices – which Apple does not allow on iOS.
"The early adopter community on Android is quite tech-savvy, and very keen to shout about the latest thing that they've discovered," says Ben Medlock, chief technology officer at SwiftKey. "We're one of the rare paid apps which is making money on Android."
Other app categories remain dominated by iOS – for example book-apps and children's apps. Swedish developer Toca Boca recently passed its 20 millionth kid-app download on iOS, but chief executive Bjorn Jeffery outlines the reasons it has so far shunned Android.
"It is a highly fragmented ecosystem to develop for, and the business model for upfront sales of apps still has its issues," he says, pointing to a question of how to allocate resources. "The answer there is unique to each developer, but I don't see 'Android first' becoming something strong in the kids app community within a foreseeable amount of time."
Resources are at the heart of why Schmidt's hopes that more companies would put Android first are currently certain to be disappointed. Toca Boca, Instagram, Temple Run... These companies were well aware of strong demand on Android for their apps, and they all knew they could probably make money there. But, faced with a decision to double down on iOS or put already-stretched resources into Android, they prioritised Apple's platform.
Volume, scale, or revenues?
Schmidt's bold statement that "application vendors are driven by volume" was, it turns out, inaccurate. True, the economics for certain kinds of apps – particularly free and social ones – are driven by scale. Yet the majority of app developers are driven by two simple motives: where they see the most revenues, and by the constraints of their resources and team size. And both those presently favour Apple - substantially.
Vodafone caught up in new tax row - WalesOnline
iPhone 5 Release Date And Video, iPad Mini, And More: This Week In Apple Rumors - Huffington Post
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