Articles about iOS

Yesterday (yeah, yeah, I'm late), Google released a stunning new version of Gmail for iPad and iPhone. I tried to write this story several times on May 6, but the newsroom was short-staffed, keeping me extra busy. Vacations, bank holiday in United Kingdom and Orthodox Easter Monday just about emptied BetaNews. So, please, pardon this belated story about the great Google escape.

What a wild one, too. Control-freak Apple uses Safari to keep developers like Google in check. Especially such a rival that invades iOS with a remarkably rich set of apps tightly tied to myriad web services. So Gmail's sudden liberation is quite surprising. Links now go to installed Google apps -- gasp, Chrome, Maps and YouTube -- rather than opening Safari. Chrome linkage really is a shocker, and all the more so with Google kissing WebKit to the wind in favor of its own browsing engine. Expect it in the Chrome stable channel soon.

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Apple's supremacy as tablet market leader may be even shorter lived than previous analyst forecasts suggest. Already, Android topples iOS share, and there is simple catalyst: White-box slates accounted for one-third of shipments last year -- a level NPD DisplaySearch predicts will continue in 2013 and beyond.

Android is the big beneficiary of the trend. In third quarter 2012, shipments exceeded iOS models, according to IDC. During first quarter this year, green-robot slates took 56.5 percent market share. At this pace, contrary to analyst predictions just a year ago, Android does to iOS in tablets what it did in smartphones -- take early leadership away from Apple.

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Android may rule the roost when it comes to the mobile market these days, but Apple is certainly not faring poorly with its iPhone offering. Whenever its App Store hits a new milestone the company always makes a big production of it, for both celebration, as well as publicity.

In January of 2011 the Store hit 10 billion app downloads, a milestone that took nearly three years to achieve. However, adoption increased and, in little more than a year (March of 2012), 25 billion apps downloaded was the new cause for celebration. Now, again in just over a year, that number has been doubled.

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Twitter has released Twitter for iOS 5.6 and Twitter for Android 4.0.2, minor updates to its official apps for iPhone/iPad and Android mobile users. Both apps extend support for trend filtering by location to the mobile platform, the feature is already present in the web-based app.

Other changes to the iOS build include improved playback of Vine video, and the addition of an option to invite other people to join Twitter from within the app. Android users also gain enhancements to the menu button.

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So much for Apple's tablet reign that analysts stoutly stood by even just months ago. Android kicks ass, crushing iOS shipments during first quarter, according to IDC. Among the top four, the fruit-logo company posted the lowest year-over-year growth (65.3 percent), and considerably less than the overall market (142.4 percent). Meanwhile, the company's market share fell by 18.5 points to 39.6 percent.

Among tablet manufacturers, Apple is market leader, with the question being for how much longer. Samsung share rose 282.6 percent -- ASUS even more (350 percent). Strong Nexus 7 shipments pushed ASUS past Amazon to take third place. ASUS' challenge and opportunity could be Google I/O, where the tablet launched last year and new model is rumored for the event starting May 15. Challenge is maintaining shipments during product transition; opportunity is capitalizing on new sales.

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Amazon is not one to miss out on any revenue market and today proves this by making its free Kindle apps more appealing to customers who are either blind or visually impaired. The upgrades are not available on all platforms yet, but are certainly a move in the right direction.

New features will allow customers to access the read aloud feature for the more than 1.8 million titles available in the Kindle Store and seamlessly navigate within their library or within a book, including consistent title, menu and button names.

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Today's set-top boxes do not all come from the cable or satellite provider and they frequently contain much more functionality than those that do come from the big providers. One is Roku, a company that has been innovating and upgrading at a rather quick pace recently, having only just released the Roku 3 with added functionality.

Now the company rolls out version 2.2 of its mobile apps for both the Android and iOS platforms. Roku promises that this latest update addresses feedback received from users.

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"Windows strength appears to be the ability to attract first time smartphone buyers, upgrading from a feature phone", Mary-Ann Parlato, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech analyst, says about the U.S. handset market for the three months ended in February. "Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Windows smartphone, 52 percent had previously owned a feature phone".

End of story, or could be, if not for something else. Fifty-five percent of iOS buyers, and 51 percent for Android, are repeat smartphone purchasers. The two more popular platforms, while growing because of their larger bases, sell more to existing customers, which make up a more finite market. "With over half of the U.S. market still owning a feature phone, it’s likely that many will upgrade over the coming year, which will ultimately contribute to more growth for the Windows brand", Parlato emphasizes.

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During the 1980s and 90s, Microsoft embarked on what the U.S. Justice Department refers to as an "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. Google revises the approach for the new century, but out of necessity. Many of its products or services entered categories where others dominated, such as email, operating systems, productivity suites and web browsers. The company's business is long about co-opting other platforms, everything from desktop search app for Windows to Google Frame for Internet Explorer, and more.

But there's nothing quite like Google's recent invasion of iOS, where many of the apps are even better than Apple's. Today, a new search app brings one of Android's best features, Google Now, to iPad and iPhone. There's irony here, too. On Android, the feature is only available on Jelly Bean, which makes up about 25 percent of the install base. The majority of Apple mobile device users are on iOS 6, and the app supports version 5, too. In short order then, depending on installations, a greater percentage of iPads and iPhones than Androids may have Google Now.

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Back in December, I explained: "Surface RT sales are quite good, you just don't know about it". The Internet Idiocracy called the tablet a failure, while based on sales per store I saw success. Surface Pro shipped the following month. Now there are real numbers, and they're quite good -- for all Windows tablets -- validating touch-focused Modern UI.

During first quarter, Windows captured 7.5 percent global branded tablet market share, according to Strategy Analytics. That's up from zero a year earlier. Unit shipments: 3 million. Right now, Microsoft is the major seller of branded Windows tablets. Granted there are others, like Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Samsung.

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Gmail shows little sign of becoming any less popular, but any iOS user will find that dealing with a Gmail account on an Apple device is not the most pleasant experience. Mailbox was released to help address this fact and proved so popular that newcomers were greeted by a lengthy waiting list before they could get started. The app has now been updated in a number of key areas and, perhaps most importantly, anyone is free to jump right in and get started without the need to wait on a reservation list.

This is obviously great news for people who have been waiting to try out the app, but there is also plenty for existing users to take advantage of. One of the major standout features of the app from its inception was the way in which emails could be dealt with using little more than a swipe; swipe one way to delete or mark as read, and the other way to snooze.

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Marissa Meyer is bringing big changes to Yahoo and one of them is apparently getting the old search site back into the public focus with new mobile apps. That process begins today in the world of both Apple and meteorology -- fitting since tornado and thunderstorm season is getting underway and hurricanes are on the horizon.

Today the company announces a sleek new weather app that is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch -- uninspiringly named "Yahoo! Weather App". Marco Wirasinghe claims the new app will "bring together beautiful images from our Flickr community to show you current local conditions, with all the details you want to know about the forecast".

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If you don’t look after your computer, it will start to slow down and misbehave. Smartphones too can get clogged up and begin to lag as the amount of storage space and available memory starts to diminish with use.

There are lots of good, free apps available that you can use to make sure your Android (or iOS) device is running at peak performance. Here are some of the more recent.

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Popular business-oriented social network LinkedIn has unveiled new mobile apps for Android and iOS, touting a "brand new mobile phone experience, completely revamped with the general professional and everyday use case in mind". This comes a day after LinkedIn updated its Windows Phone 8 app, with major new features.

However, unlike the Windows Phone 8 app which offers a similar user experience as before, LinkedIn for Android and iOS sports an overhauled UI (User Interface) that is both more modern as well as better looking. Gone are the darker colors of before as lighter ones take their place instead.

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Facebook has released Facebook for iOS 6.0, a major update for its iPhone and iPad app. The major new feature in version 6 is the introduction of "chat heads", which allow users to chat from anywhere in the app -- this feature isn’t yet universally available, but should be rolled out to all users "soon", according to Facebook.

Chat heads are small circular icons representing both individual chatters and Facebook Messages. The chat head appears automatically when receiving a message, or can be manually set up by tapping the contact’s name in the contacts list.

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