Weekly Mobile Mash-up #2

The hottest mobile industry news of the past week, selected by the ON team!

Mobile Industry News

• iPhone4 announced: Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 4 on Monday at the WWDC event. It will be available on the 24th of June – http://bit.ly/absLoZ. Here are the new features:
  • The antenna is integrated in the stainless steel band around the iPhone
  • 3.5 inch screen with 326 pixels per inch
  • Better batery life thanks to A4 processor (like in the iPad)
  • 5 megapixel camera
  • Front facing (and back) camera that records HD video
  • iOS4 is the new operating system’s name
    • On the same day, Apple updated the terms of its iOS developer agreement to allow independent advertising agencies to collect data with user consent. And it appears that they’ve excluded AdMob, Google’s mobile ad network. – http://bit.ly/cqJ8Uo
• Massive success for the Skype’s iPhone app: Skype’s iPhone application hit 5 million downloads in four days. The app allows Skype-to-Skype calls with the 3G network, but also to landlines and mobile phones to a low rate. The previous version of the Skype iPhone app only enabled users to make Skype calls over wifi – http://bit.ly/dunUrw
  • Skype’s founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have decided to take on the mobile music industry and launched Rdio, a music streaming application similar to Spotify or our very own WorMee – http://bit.ly/cNM413
• iPad and newspapers: At a London-based m-publishing event, it was made public that UK Times iPad app reached 5,000 downloads in 3 days. The Financial Times app reached 130,000 downloads in 2 weeks and the paying Wall Street Journal application ($17.29 a month) has 10,000 subscribers. – http://bit.ly/ct8Hkh
• iPad and advertising: AdMob just published a Software Development Kit (SDK) for advertising in iPad apps, following IAB standard ad pages – http://tcrn.ch/dpOeBM
  • BuzzCity also published its SDK, for mobile apps only – http://bit.ly/bHRrE5
• Acer wins mobile geeks favors: It was a hot topic for car and mobile geeks last week: Acer launched the official Ferrari branded version of the Liquid. Plus, Acer Stream (Liquid successor) reviews seem to be positive -http://bit.ly/cX5Bpr and http://bit.ly/aIVc89
• HTML5 vs. Flash:
  • Adobe announced a partnership with Greystripe to make Flash ads convertible to HTML5 – http://bit.ly/9xYbnU
  • MoMac published a whitepaper on the implementation of HTML5 technology in mobile platforms. A useful tool to understand the differences between HTML5 and Flash! – http://bit.ly/ahg960. MoMac highlights the following benefits:
    • videos can be played direct from the browser
    • ability for users to perform drag and drop operations
    • ability to perform tasks in the background
    • advanced form management

Mobile statistics and reports

• Most popular applications: Nielsen published its The State of Mobile Apps report, confirming that mobile game apps are still the most popular for smartphone users (65% of smartphone users downloaded one in the past month), followed by weather and news apps (56%), maps/navigation apps (55%) and social networking apps (54%) – http://bit.ly/dfYWev
  • The top 3 mobile apps across smartphones are Facebook, Google Maps and Weather Channel

  

• Mobile applications – Europe vs. US
  • A comScore MobiLens study published last week says that the most popular app in Europe is Google Maps. In EU5 countries (the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy), 82 million people used mobile apps in April (that is a 14% growth compared to April 2009) while 59 million used their mobile browser (40% of growth). As a reminder on the same period, there were 69.6 million mobile apps users in the US. – http://bit.ly/aLxmT2
  • Another comScore study focused on the US market shows that social networking is by far the biggest winner for mobile applications, as the audience went from 4.2 million in 2009 to 14.5 million users in 2010, that is to say a 240% increase – http://bit.ly/do2DPo
• Media convergence: A survey lead by YouGov for Telegent shows that 58% of UK residents are interested in free-to-air mobile TV. This number reaches 80% in the younger demographics – http://bit.ly/cwsbS2
• Mobile phone shops: According to a Local Data Company report, number of mobile phone retail stores rose from 3,847 to 4,329 in the UK. Quite surprising in an e-commerce and m-commerce world! – http://bit.ly/cV0rbr

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