There used to be just one smartphone everyone wanted – the iPhone.
Now that Google launched the Android in 2008 which is gaining popularity, customers coming to the end of their contracts are torn between the iPhone and Android. Here are some facts about each handset:
Apple vs Android
iPhone
If you love apple products, then this is great. You can play your itunes on the mobile phone, access all your music in one place.
When the iPhone launched in 2007, it was the first of its kind. It revolutionised smartphones and will always be recognised as changing the mobile phone landscape forever.
There have been now been four versions with the latest iPhone announced June 7th at WWDC by Steve Jobbs.
However, in the UK it was just on one network for two years when last November it opened to Orange and Vodafone. This meant a lot of people switching to O2 just for the handset.
The iPhone’s operating system is closed like Blackberry. The Blackberry operating system only runs on its smartphones and Apple is copying this. It is very hard for developers outside of Apple to build software or games for the iPhone.
Android
The first Android (called the G1) was released in the UK October 30, 2008 on the T Mobile network, just five weeks after it was launched in the US and since then there has been released on Orange, Vodafone, O2 and 3.
The Android like the iPhone also has cool and slick features, with touch screen, easy to access email and a wide range of apps
According to Nielsen, the growth of Android and iPhone market share increased by 2% from q4 09 to q1 10
If something goes wrong with your Android, there is no genius bar to take it to. But then it does take a long time to get your Apple products fixed with the huge waiting lists in the stores.
The main difference between Apple and Android is that Android is open source. This means anyone can have a look at the source code which is developed mainly by Google with a few other companies from the Open Handset Alliance.
It also means that companies who want to make a smartphone with the Android OS can do so without paying the licensing fee that you have to do with Apple. They can also modify the software the way they need to when building. This is the opposite of Apple which makes it very difficult for developers to build products for the iPhone. They must also pay a fee to Apple.
When I go into the mobile shops and ask which handset is better the sales assistants always seem perplexed. You are either an Apple fan or an Android fan. For me, I love both, but I have to say I have been disappointed with Apple recently. My sister had a problem with her iPhone and it has taken forever to sort out. Someone basically hacked into her itunes account (in China) and purchased music which they didn’t pay for. My sister now cannot buy anything from iTunes until this is resolved.
The market share for Android is growing. It offers just as much as the iPhone does to its customers but as it is open source it allows for further developments to be made without customers having to wait for the big releases as we have seen with the iPhone.
The other week, I went to a Google mobile event. – Google loves mobile
Love mobile
I knew mobile was big, but after this event, I knew it was no longer the future, it was happening now. Those that are not using a mobile strategy should be seriously thinking of starting one today.
It may seem daunting, but mobile internet is the same position that the internet was 10 years ago and look how big that has grown. A user should have the same experience on the mobile and on the web. It is interesting to see how much internet on desktops has grown. Check out on the bbc’s website to visually see the growth of the internet.
There are 4.6 billion mobile phones world wide, more than 1,000 customers sign up every minute. You can no longer ignore mobile.
So where do you start?
If you are working agency side, you should start to introduce mobile marketing to your clients. The first step is assessing their website, which should be visible on a regular handset. I do not just mean smart phones such as the iPhone or Android but symbian phones as well such as the Nokia 6303. There are a lot of retail, finance and travel companies that are planning mobile at the moment. If you do not have a site that can be seen on a mobile phone, make sure there is at least a landing page that can be built in line with your advertising campaigns.
To app or not to app?
A lot of people when they want to get into mobile think they should build an app. There are over 50 million iphone and iphone touches and more than 3billion downloads for these apps. I wrote about apps in another post mobile app or mobile site and when I was at the event, Carl Uminski from Somo mentioned that there was a life cycle of apps. If it gets featured in the App store (which is luck) then it can get to top 25 of the Apple app store. This equates to 500 downloads a day. If the app is promoted to the top 10, then it can get 1000 downloads a day. However, there is a sudden decline.
He said people should think ahead of time and have ad campaigns to promote it. There is a lot of competition, 130,000 other apps people can choose from. You need to have a mobile advertising strategy before you build.
Somo have witnessed conversion to download range from 4% to 12%
Advertising click through rates range form 1% to 4.8%
Cost per download can range from 80p to 1.50 for free applications
Mobile search
Another interesting point raised at the event was that people on mobile phones who access the internet have different needs, they are more hunters than researchers. They are out and about and use their phone to look for something specific. Therefore there needs to be different ad copy for the paid adverts. Your digital agency should be able to build creative for you.
2010 is the year for mobile search and I challenge you to start using it with your clients or with your agency.
Photo is from flickr
I know this site is also about SEO and optimising traffic to your own website, but we cannot ignore the growing mobile market and this new area called “the mobile cloud”.
According to a study conducted by ABI research, nearly all mobile money service providers will be impacted by mobile cloud computing. Cloud computing is defined as the evolution of computing processing in which processing and data storage move away from desktop and latops. In simple terms it means data storage and processing occurs outside the mobile device. Some you many have already seen is the mobile Gmail and Google Maps. Mobile cloud computing will continue to grow, ABI think it will expand rapidly over next five years, growing to 998.1 million subscribers by 2014.
Why are they so confident that this will happen? Well two reasons really:
1. There will be a rise in Platform as a Service players in the market. Otherwise known as PaaS these are are development platforms for which the development tool is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser. This means there is no need to install tools on developers computers to build Web applications. It can all be done on the PaaS platorm, making it cheaper and easier to develop these applications.
2. There are several standards intitiatives within the mobile industry such as the BONDI intiative and the GSM Associations’s OneAPI initiative that will help the growth of mobile cloud services. The GSM Association’s OneAPI sets the standards for network APIs which means developers can access parts of the network providers’ capabilities such as location services.
So who uses this PaaS?
A lot of companies, one of the first ones is Salesforce. They have their Force.com platform which allows business applications to be built and run in the cloud. Others are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google’s App Engine. I know you may be surprised by AWS, but this is what happens in the market place today, a company that starts by selling books over the internet, can expand into a greater and more diversified business and now AWS is used by over 500,000 developers.
Ok, when will this take effect?
It all depends on the market. Those markets that use internet more will lead the way such as Western Europe, North America and parts of Asia.
The next step is for these companies to offer the service to not just the smartphones – Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone but to the other Symbian and J2ME phones on the market. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are major players in this market.
So you may even find by end of this year, early next there will be a growth in these mobile cloud appplications and those who haven’t yet started using apps will start using them like there is no tomorrow. Who would have thought people would be using mobile phones for more than just calling?
The google giant is in the news again this week, for launching the Chrome operating system (OS) for the mobile.
This is separate from Android and Google Chrome OS is aimed for those who tend to spend most of their time on line. It will power all computers, from small netbooks to desktop systems.
A company having more than one operating system, is not unheard of. Afterall, Apple has three OSes including Mac, iphone and ipod.
Google first launched the chrome browser in September last year and now has over 30 million users. Now they want to bring chrome into an operating system and I have no doubt they will succeed in this area.
Google is performing well in the search area where it became famous. According to Hitwise, google is the top search engine with 74% market share week ending June 27th. This is up from last year’s 69%. Since my last blog posting here, Bing.com which only went live last month, has seen an increase in market share from 3.4% in the beginning of June to 6.63% by the end. Not bad for a company entering an already saturated market place.
There have also been changes in the keyword field. People are typing in longer search queries.
Longer search queries have increased in popularity over the past year, on average searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 8% from a year ago. Where there are searches of eight or more words, they have seen an increase of 16%. SEO experts be aware – the shorter search queries of one to four words long decreased by 2%. So next time you are thinking of bidding on keywords, think more along the lines of key phrases and insert these into your meta data.
Mobile technology | Jo Turnbull | 
June 9, 2010 3:33 pm | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe