The analysis, from online advertising network Chitika, finds that those stodgy old PCs still produce just under 80 percent of Web traffic, with smartphones accounting for 14.6% and tablets making up 5.6%.<p>
Other findings of note: Windows Phone now accounts for a third as much traffic as BlackBerry devices. Undoubtedly its market share is far less than that, but its more powerful browser and larger screen likely make it more conducive to Web surfing.

Take a note of that Windows Phone stat in particular. Generally, for mobile to be that large a percentage in a country where most computer access is fixed is surprising. (Statcounter gives a lower figure.)

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

Keep this in mind for a little lower down. Read Bray's post first, though.

Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.</p><p>

The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.</p><p>

The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.

Amazing graphs. The number of devices, screens and resolutions is boggling.

Updated for the 14 days to May 1 showing the version running on devices accessing Google Play (the Android Market as was). Points of interest: the proportion of devices running 1.5 and 1.6 has remained static at 1% cumulatively for the past two months; Gingerbread (released near the end of 2010) is the majority, at 64.6%; Ice Cream Sandwich has passed Honeycomb (4.9% v 3.3%); devices running 2.1 ("Eclair") outnumber ICS ones (5.5% v 4.9%). ICS was released over six months ago.

The momentum has been shifting for a while, but now the trend is emphatic. People now spend <a href="http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Dominates-Web-Spurred-by-Facebook">more time in mobile apps</a> than they do online. There are more than 500m Android and iOS devices on the market, and giant countries like China and Indonesia are only just getting started in their smartphone and tablet push. Global mobile 3G subscribers are growing at <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69309864/KPCB-Internet-Trends-2011">over 35 percent,</a> year on year, and there’s a lot more room to move – there are 5.6 billion mobile subscribers on our fair planet. Even in <a href="http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/16/80-android-phone-sells-like-hotcakes-in-kenya-the-world-next/">developing countries</a>, <a href="http://www.intomobile.com/2012/04/22/baidu-launch-160-smartphone-running-their-own-custom-android-rom/">cheap smartphones</a> will soon rush into the market. And who here doesn’t think tablet sales are going to go gangbusters pretty much <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/us-apple-china-idUSBRE83Q07320120427">everywhere</a>?

Mobile is the present, and the future.

Tero Kuittinen:

The surprise revelation that Oracle considered buying RIMM and Palm as a way to enter the smartphone business already seems like a window to another era. The recent travails of Palm, LG,  HTC and RIM may have effectively closed the door on any major M&A moves in the industry.</p><p>

The difficulty of buying and integrating a mobile handset vendor started becoming obvious way back in the mists of time, when Philips and Lucent tried merging their mobile phone operations. The result was a $2.5 B platinum turkey that has by now been mercifully forgotten. Most of the resulting phones were so clunky only a Dutchman could love them – pale imitations of vintage Ericsson models.

He makes the very good point that there hasn't been a single successful handset merger or takeover: "the phone market simply shifts too rapidly for any such maneouvre to work."

Can anyone offer even one counterexample?

The wireless carriers say that in the next few years they may not have enough of it to meet the exploding demands for mobile data. The result, they ominously warn, may be slower or spotty connections on smartphones and tablets. They imply in carefully couched language that, given the laws of supply and demand, the price of cellphone service will soar.</p><p>

It will affect “the services they’re paying for because of the capacity issues,” said Ed McFadden, Verizon’s vice president for policy communications. “It potentially hinders our ability to meet consumer need.”</p><p>

But is there really a crisis? Some scientists and engineers say the companies are playing a game that is more about protecting their businesses from competitors.

To which one scientist retorts that their complaints are more like suggesting you'll run out of a colour: the finite spectrum idea dates to the 1920s, but there are much more effective ways of using spectrum.

Horace Dediu cuts to the chase:

Looking at product mix, Samsung growth is shown to be almost entirely due to smartphones while Nokia’s stagnant growth seems to be a failure to have any smartphone traction.</p><p>

It’s even more clear when showing the above mixes of devices as percents of total.

Note that it's not as simple as "Android": HTC, Motorola, LG and Sony Ericsson have all adopted Android too, but all dwindled (some even worse than Nokia). Samsung has stayed ahead of the curve. Its success is completely deserved.

This was highlighted by the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/27/hugely-popular-ios-game-temple-run-is-now-available-for-android/">recent release of Temple Run</a> on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/temple-run-gets-a-lot-of-google-play-1-million-android-app-downloads-in-3-days/">1 million downloads</a> in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

Read the comments too, though: plenty of Android developers saying they don't have any problem. Seems like it's more of a problem for games developers.

Henry Blodget and his team take you through some home truths about the smartphone market. Nothing dramatic, yet all very clear reinforcements of the main messages about the mobile market: you ain't seen nothing yet.

Facebook has updated its S-1 filing (quick, someone do a diff):

The company estimates that 58m users accessed the social network solely through mobile apps or the mobile website during December 2011. It did not note what percent of these users are on feature phones versus smartphones, nor did it provide any demographic information about these users. In India, <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/what-is-facebook-worth-a-view-from-india/">for example</a>, many people access Facebook from phones when they don't have personal computers. The remaining 374m mobile MAUs accessed Facebook from both PCs and mobile devices during that month. The social network says it has 845m total MAU.

That's impressive.

Written ahead of MWC, but still true:

We've got the iPhone to thank. It set the pattern for the current smartphone paradigm because its design departed so radically from pretty much everything that had gone before--so much so that some people <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U" target="_blank">scoffed at the very idea</a> that it could be successful. It's sold so very well and has transformed the entire market to the extent that it's inspired all of these iPhone-esque designs (some of which Apple <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8460300/Apple-sues-Samsung-for-slavish-copying-of-iPhone-and-iPad.html" target="_blank">accuses of all but cloning</a> its ideas). </p><p>It's also the reason that MWC for this year and probably next will be very samey-samey, with all the innovation restricted to honing features like processor speed, screen technology for vividness, brightness, or pixel density, incorporating better camera technology, variations in the touch interface and the OS and the UI that controls how users interact with it. Phone CPUs will <a href="http://www.reghardware.com/2012/02/22/fujitsu_flaunts_nvidia_tegra_3_for_future_smartphones/" target="_blank">get more cores</a> (and marketing folks may try to spin this to an unknowing public as a benefit, much as during the megapixel wars when digital cameras were becoming popular). NFC and other sensors and interactive tweaks will be added. That's all innovative for sure, but it's hardly revolutionary – it won't take mobile phone tech in an amazing new direction.

With our most recent app updates, Promoted Accounts are now in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. And in the coming weeks, we’ll begin introducing Promoted Tweets in the timeline on these mobile apps. Initially, a small number of users may see Promoted Tweets near the top of their timelines from brands they already follow. This will help ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about.

For both products, the experience will be the same as on Twitter.com:
Promoted Tweets will appear in your timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once; as you scroll, the Promoted Tweet will flow with the rest of the Tweets in your timeline.
As with Promoted Tweets in search, we will only display Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they are relevant. If you see a Promoted Tweet that isn’t relevant to you, you can easily dismiss it from your timeline with a single swipe.
Promoted Accounts appear in your list of Who to Follow recommendations.

Not in third-party apps? Then again, Twitter must know what it does and doesn't control.

Social messaging applications cost mobile network operators $13.9bn (£8.8bn) in lost SMS revenue last year, a report has claimed.

Analysis firm Ovum studied global use of popular services like Whatsapp, Blackberry Messenger and Facebook chat.

It concluded that mobile operators must "work together to face the challenge from major internet players".

Get popcorn. You already know how it's going to end.

The [DoCoMo] deal [in Japan] was a breakthrough for Macromedia. Instead of giving away the flash client, the way it had on the PC, Macromedia could charge for the client, have it forced into the hands of every user, and continue to also make money selling development tools. The company had found a way to have its cake and eat it too! In late 2004, the iMode deal was extended worldwide (link), and I'm sure Macromedia had visions of global domination.

Unfortunately for Flash, Japan is a unique phone market, and DoCoMo is a unique operator. The DoCoMo deal could not be duplicated on most phone platforms other than iMode. Macromedia, and later Adobe, was now trapped by its own success. To make Flash Lite a standard in mobile, it would have needed to give away the player, undercutting its lucrative DoCoMo deal. When you have a whole business unit focused on making money from licensing the player, giving it away would mean missing revenue projections and laying off a lot of people. Macromedia chose the revenue, and Flash Lite never became a mobile standard.

More trouble followed. A very interesting potted history with smart lessons.

Details 26 platforms that are either dead or 'zombie' (hello Windows Mobile; nice to see you, WebOS) and looks at the reasons why they died. Generally: cost of ownership; conflicting revenue model; lack of network effects; high adoption barriers.

(Note that none of those is the reason why Windows Mobile died.)

A set of 16 slides looking at the principal mobile ecosystems in play right now - and how they break down in various ways.

Very neat - even if you don't do it life-size, you can compare the relative size of a huge number of phones.

If Android isn't growing in the US, what's happening elsewhere? It's exploding in China:

ZTE is now targeting 80 Million handset volume in 2012 – and 100% smartphone volume growth. ZTE Blade became the second-best selling W-CDMA phone in China last summer and is now cruising towards 10 million units sold globally. The ZTE Skate is off to an even faster start. And ZTE is actually behind Huawei in China – these two combined are likely to hit 25% share of China’s handset market by summer. By elbowing out old champs like Motorola and LG in China, Huawei and ZTE are building production scale they can leverage to undercut rivals even more aggressively in the rest of the Asia.

And they're killing mid-tier operators like HTC, LG, Sony Ericsson and Motorola. For 2012, they're coming to the US:

It would not be surprising if Google opts to wind down Motorola’s handset operations sometime over the next two years and Sony bails out entirely.

Note that.

Matt PAnzarino examines whether Apple could dump Google from iOS devices:

Apple is already working on what is, at least judging from acquisitions, a technically superior version of Maps built specifically for iOS devices. But you can’t build a search engine in a day, or even in a couple of years. So the only viable option is to change the default iPhone search engine from Google to Bing.

So I decided to take Bing for a spin, changing it to my default search engine for a month or two. What I found was that it actually could be a very solid alternative to Google for a large portion of iPhone users, and that it might even be a better fit for the majority of those than Google is.

However, that's not really a reflection of what he did find. Bing was good on local but less good on maps, news, gossip and some "geeky" searches. But of course, nobody changes defaults.

Good review which points out the advantages and drawbacks - particularly, that it's hard to adjust from Google 2.x to 4.x because so much is switched around.

"…we get it. Mobile is hot. Mobile is irreplaceable. And most importantly, mobile is the future. But this mobile future takes software for granted.

"We at Skritter are learning that because we’re building a version of our app for iOS. We have found that there are so many apps that the they have been devalued to the point of monetary irrelevance [1]. That’s sad because a good app is a piece of art. The buttons, the interface, the streamlined backend, all the pieces of a finely-tuned app take so much time and energy to perfect that I wanted to write a post to call attention to the level of software perfection that most people have acclimated to without even knowing it. Here are three reasons why it’s insanely hard to make a kick-ass iPhone app."

Lots of interesting data. Such as: smartphones are 13% of the mobile handsets in use, but use 78% of the mobile data traffic. Or: forecast is that 472m smartphones will be sold in 2011; by 2015, 982m (compared to total mobile sales for 2011 of 1.6bn).

"In his first response to a battering from stock markets -- HTC shares are down more than 30% in just nine trading days -- Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung told Reuters on Monday that HTC is not another Nokia, the Finnish mobile firm that experienced a rapid fall from market dominance as nimbler rivals overtook its stolid product line-ups.

"'I don't think it's so serious,' he said, noting that even the most conservative guidance is for shipments to increase to 45m units this year, from 25m last year.

"'We will focus on the product next year, better and more competitive. Other than new LTE phones for the US market, we have phones for the global market. We will launch some worldwide flagship products. We're confident in them,' said Yung."

"The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market.

"The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions..."

Among them: mobile generates 3.5% of Africa's GDP. Prices are falling, and 96% is pre-paid - but SMS is growing fast.

Compares the phone models Apple sells in the US with those that Samsung sells. One concludes that Samsung must have really good supply chain control, because that's some SKU [stockkeeping unit, ie different piece of merchandise] challenge there.

Mike Chambers is in charge of developer relations for Flash at Adobe: "given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

"This effectively meant that if you wanted to use Flash to deliver a rich web experience in the browser on mobile devices you would have to provide both a Flash based, as well as HTML5 based solution. Given the strong support for HTML5 across modern mobile devices, it simply made more sense to create an HTML5 based solution. Now, there are some exceptions to this, especially around advanced video content, but it is very clear that HTML5 is the solution to turn to if you want to provide a richer browser based experience that works across browsers on mobile devices."

Impressive how Adobe has grasped this - and wants to win it.

From December 2010, and also relevant to the discussion about Android previously on this site: "Currently, Android devices provide the following (in addition to standard info) in the User-Agent: 'Android', a version number, a device name, a specific build, Webkit version info, and 'Mobile'. For example, Froyo on a Nexus One has the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

"The 'Mobile' string in the User Agent indicates that this device would prefer a version of the website optimized for Mobile (small form factor devices), if available."

No mention of spoofing iOS or the iPhone there at all.

"Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area."

Interesting, though what's hidden is the extent to which carriers are slowing this down, and to which handset makers are slowing it down.

An infographic prepared for Nokia World showing that though you might not realise it, lots of people click on ads on Nokia apps. Counter-intuitive. Our question (which isn't answered in the graphic) is what the actual numbers are, and how that translates into per-handset figures. Then we'd really start to know about Nokia's value.

"Ask anyone who ran or invested in a mobile app startup pre-iPhone (I invested in one myself). Since the carriers had all the power, getting any distribution (which usually meant getting on the handset “deck”) meant doing a business development deal with the carriers. Business development in this case meant finding the right people at those companies, sending them iPods, taking them to baseball games, and basically figuring out ways to convince them to work with you instead of the 5,000 other people sending them iPods and baseball tickets. The basis of competition was salesmanship and capital, not innovation or quality.

"The carriers had so much power because consumers made their purchasing decisions by choosing a carrier first and a handset second. Post-iPhone, tens of millions of people started choosing handsets over carriers. People like me suffer through AT&T;’s poor service and aggressive pricing because I love the iPhone so much."

Ahonen is a former Nokia executive who now ranges over the mobile world. The first eight are worth bearing in mind too.

Fascinating description of the good and the bad about programming for Android v iOS. (thanks @1723985 for the link.)

"Apple’s staggering Q3 reports might allow them to buy Dell twice and still have a boatload of cash in reserve, but they’ve got a real ecosystem and strategy problem."<br />
<br />
Apparently part of the problem is not having a search engine that loses torrents of money every quarter, and that it doesn't have LinkedIn baked into iOS5.

Killian Fox: "Africa has experienced an incredible boom in mobile phone use over the past decade. In 1998, there were fewer than four million mobiles on the continent. Today, there are more than 500m. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% of the population, own a mobile phone, and that number is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, these ubiquitous devices are more than just a handy way of communicating on the fly: they are a way of life.<br />
"It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers.. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on."

Nice animation.

"The verdict from latest "Do mobile phones fry your brain?" study is in, and the answer is a resounding "Nope".<br />
"This new study was a monster: based on data from 2.8 million Danes, it studied the comparative likelihood of long-term users, newer users, and non-users of mobiles coming down with a non-cancerous form of brain tumor."<br />
<br />
Will this satisfy the tin hat brigade?

As ever, check the alt text.

Also from 2006, but just as relevant today. It will be interesting to see how the big analysis firms will handle the fact that Acer says it's going to do a fire sale of millions of machines that were part of something that's almost inventory fraud in Europe.

"In 2011, Smartphones are ubiquitous and everyone and his dog is writing mobile apps, but using apps when you're not in range of a fixed wifi hotspot or standing still in an urban area is often extremely frustrating. How often have you tried to refresh and found yourself staring at an interminable spinner that makes you want to throw your phone at the wall? Here's why (and a plea to app developers to do something about it!)."<br />
<br />
The short version: latency. (Via @zzap)

"At WWDC this year Apple and Twitter announced a new partnership to bring Twitter to iOS devices. While this is impressive, the total number of new iOS users is dwarfed by the number of people who use feature phones worldwide. So how will services like Twitter bridge this opportunity gap?<br />
"The answer may be found in BlueVia, a prime example of the next generation of developer-friendly telco platforms. BlueVia is a spin out from Telefonica, itself a large telecommunication provider. The BlueVia platform exposes a simple set of REST APIs that enable developers to use SMS, MMS, location, and other services previously obscured with telco-only technologies like IMS and ParlayX. Perhaps more importantly, it is based on an attractive business model: pay developers for using telco APIs."<br />
<br />
Interesting too that it means the mobile operators are becoming smart pipes, not dumb ones.

US results, but probably apply to the UK too: "While the average data user eats up 400 megabytes per month, around 60% of users are actually using less than 200 megabytes per month. Interestingly, the median user is around 100 megabytes per month."

"The analysts are right. RIM has very limited future growth prospects. Companies are already switching into iPhones, iPads and Androids. Simultaneously, Microsoft will pour billions into helping Nokia push Windows 7 phones and future tablets the next 2 years, and that will be targeted at “enterprise users” which are RIM’s “core.” Microsoft will spend far more resources than RIM could ever match trying to defend its “installed base.” Not to mention the huge flock of app developers Microsoft will attract. RIMM is stuck fighting to keep current users, while the market growth is elsewhere. And emerging competitors are quickly going to hollow out RIM’s market – and its financials."

"For this report, Flurry used data from over 45,000 companies across their more than 85,000 applications.  Flurry Analytics tracks over 15B user sessions per month across iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and J2ME."<br />
<br />
UK has the greatest penetration of smartphones.

The fascinating point that nobody else has pulled out: Nokia's forecast that it might not make a profit (ie, might make a loss) in the current quarter wouldn't matter... except...<br />
<br />
"..xcept for the strange fact that as far as I’ve been able to observe, any company in the mobile phone market that ended up losing money has never recovered its standing in terms of share or profit (i.e. AMP index value has never recovered)."<br />
<br />
Dediu then lists the 13 (thirteen!) mobile phone companies since 2003 that, having dipped into loss, never came back to former glories.

On the phone-in about mobile phones and cancer: "Bob Park: The frequency of cell phone radiation is about 1 million times too low [to cause DNA damage].<br />
<br />
"Caller: Wow! When did this news break?"<br />
<br />
"BP: Albert Einstein let it out in 1905."

"Marissa Mayer VP of Maps and Local for Google disclosed that Google Maps for mobile has now reached 200 million intalls and active users. Mayer went on to tell Arrington that currently Google Maps is seeing 40% mobile use and 60% desktop use.To that, Google Maps for Mobile naturally sees more use on the weekend.<br />
"Mayer said that in June Google Maps will cross over, with more users for mobile rather than desktop."

Intriguing forecast.

"The joint venture, known as Isis, had originally planned to take market share from Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc, by setting up its own payments network and collecting fees on every transaction conducted via mobile phones.<br />
"But Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA, AT&T and Verizon Wireless have now adopted a less ambitious goal to set up a "mobile wallet," that can store and exchange the account information on a users' existing Visa, MasterCard or other card, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter."<br />
<br />
A win for the credit card companies.

"The tough part about focusing on the first-run user experience is that, as a developer, you never see it. You start up your app, start adding data and using it, develop, test, develop, test, debug, use it some more, then launch it. Unless you're consciously thinking about it, you'll probably never see a bunch of blank screens. This is incredibly dangerous because all your users will see a blank screen in the first 10 seconds, and you may not have seen it in weeks, months, or ever."

But you know that in three months nobody is going to remember that Android phones track you too.

Nice idea - render it as a "who plays who" square grid. Not sure about the icons though.

"As the tablet market enters its second year, the role the wireless carrier plays in the market remains somewhat cloudy. Should wireless carriers subsidize tablets? Should they stock the gadgets on their store shelves? Should they expect to generate significant revenues from the category?<br />
"Tablets are a 'medium-sized opportunity' for carriers, explained Current Analysis analyst Avi Greengart. The devices will represent an important revenue stream for wireless carriers in the coming years, but won't hold a candle to carriers' primary business selling voice and data for phones."<br />
<br />
But: of the 17m tablets sold last year, about 40% had a 3G modem - but only half were ever connected to a mobile network. Big, missed opportunity for the carriers.

"The problem of upgrade failure is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction inherent in immature modular business architectures. It’s not just that the brightest at Microsoft or Nokia or Google can’t make an upgrade stick. It’s that the upgrade is not universally beneficial to the value chain. To remedy this, licensors have to resort to contractual obligations to ensure upgrades, but enforcement is non-trivial and can lead to aggravated relationships."

"Evangelists say the HTML5 movement has so much momentum that it could defeat the native app — an application that is designed to run on a single platform — in as little as two years.<br />
<br />
"Sundar Pichai, who leads Google’s HTML5-happy Chrome OS initiative,  agrees that the 'incredible advantages of the Web will prevail' over the dominant native app model. Another mobile developer expert Mike Rowehl adds: 'We’ll forget that we even passed through another era of native apps on the way to the mobile web.'"<br />
<br />
This is tantamount to saying that games companies will never want to write to device-specific code, or that developers will never want to use platform-specific interface tricks or APIs. In other words: overblown. What's clear is that the balance will shift. But how far, and how quickly?