Android Mobiles

comScore, an internet marketing research company, reported that Android devices saw the largest U.S. market share growth in Q4, between September 2009 and December 2009. The firm found Android has increased its hold on the market by a total of 2.7% to a total of 5.2% in Q4.

Motorola was the top ranked with 23.5% of U.S. mobile devices, LG ranked second with 21.9%, followed by Samsung 21.2%, Nokia 9.2% and RIM with 7.0%. Check out comScore’s full report and see how Android is growing in the market. Surely the launch of the Motorola Droid cushioned these stats.

With such rapid growth and development, it just goes to show the superiority of Android and I, for one, cannot wait to see where 2010 takes us. Do you all think that 2010 will be the year of our favorite lil green robot?

Remember when we learned that Google’s Nexus One ETF (technically Equipment Recovery Fee) was not only a whopping $350 but also was imposed in ADDITION to T-Mobile’s ETF – and then we threw a hissy fit? Well the FCC promptly started an investigation and it looks like Google is either admitting they overdid it or doing some pre-emptive cost maneuvering – the WSJ is reporting they lowered the ETF from $350 to $150.

It’s true, it’s true… check out the new deets at “Terms of Sale for Nexus Device“:

I thought the $350 pricetag was outrageous but that wasn’t even my main complaint. I don’t understand why both T-Mobile AND Google are forcing these fees for cancellation/return. They’re systems/inventory/shipping is obviously integrated in some way if you’re able to purchase a T-Mobile contract through Google’s website, right? Do the customer a favor and condense those 2 separate ETF fees into one and choose either T-Mobile or Google to institute it.

The $150 is much more reasonable and I can appreciate the reason for its existence… but I think we’ve got a long way to go in terms of transparency and consumer education with these fees. At least this is a start.

Last week we heard that Motorola invested in ScanLife/ScanBuy. Now we’re hearing about ANOTHING investment with ANOTHER application developer with a heavy foot in the Android door. In a press release published today, Motorola announced their investment in TuneWiki.

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We first wrote about TuneWiki way back on May 10th, 2008 on our post about the ADC Round 1 winners. They’ve come a LONG way since then and are now one of the most popular applications on Android Market.

Not too long ago Motorola was considered to be selling its handset division. Now, not only is their handset division doing well, they’re investing in related company’s on the software side to strengthen their position in mobile.

Here is the full press release:

Motorola Ventures Leads Financing for TuneWiki
February 08, 2010

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. and TEL AVIV, Israel – Feb. 8, 2010 – Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), through its strategic investment arm, Motorola Ventures, today announced a strategic investment in TuneWiki Ltd., the award-winning provider of next-generation social media music players and related applications. Motorola acted as lead investor and was joined by new investors Intellect Capital Ventures, a venture fund initiative of TeliaSonera, the leading Nordic Telecommunications operator, managed by Intellect Partners, as well as HillsVen Capital, LLC and Novel TMT. TuneWiki’s previous venture capital investor, Benchmark Israel, also participated in the round.

TuneWiki will use the investment to expand and enhance its product offerings for leading mobile platforms and the Internet. The company’s upcoming releases will take further advantage of platform capabilities and new features found in recently released smartphones, including stronger CPUs, always-connected capabilities, larger displays and high-resolution screens. TuneWiki will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new and exciting ways that connect music fans around the world with new products, including an upcoming mobile game.

“Music is rapidly emerging as a key feature for smartphones, and TuneWiki is changing the experience of listening to music from a solitary experience to a social one,” said Reese Schroeder, managing director of Motorola Ventures. “We believe that TuneWiki has developed an innovative interactive social media player that can dramatically change the way people will listen to and interact with music.”

“Teaming up with a global company like Motorola is very exciting for us,” said Rani Cohen, CEO of TuneWiki. “We are passionate about connecting people through music, and having our applications running in many countries with different languages will allow our users to explore the world of music and better understand its meaning as part of a vibrant and engaged community.”

Very exciting; congratulations to both TuneWiki and Motorola.

When I downloaded Google Translate and associated language packs on my Motorola Droid one of the FIRST things I did was attempt to speak into the phone using the speech-to-text function, have it translate in a different language, and then hear it read back to me in the translated language. Unfortunately Google Translate can’t do this… yet.

Check out what Google’s head of translation recently told The Times Online:

“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently.”

I think its closer than “a few years” in a basic sense. Google can already translate English speech-to-text. Google can already translate text from pretty much any language into another language, even auto-detecting what language based on the text. Google can also already read text out loud which can be seen in their Google Nav software.

The only things missing are auto-detection of language when spoken audibly and the ability to take text and speak it out loud in multiple languages. Well… I guess there are about a billion other problems:

However, some experts believe the hurdles to live translation remain high. David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, said: “The problem with speech recognition is the variability in accents. No system at the moment can handle that properly.

“Maybe Google will be able to get there faster than everyone else, but I think it’s unlikely we’ll have a speech device in the next few years that could handle high-speed Glaswegian slang.

“The future, though, looks very interesting. If you have a Babel Fish, the need to learn foreign languages is removed.”

Slang. I think THAT is the main problem. Slang and local sayings. If I were to say “that’s a bummer”, “break a leg”, or “make like a tree and leave” and it translated to a different language what would the result be?

I would LOVE this as a travel tool and it would make me MUCH more comfortable to travel. For example I could travel in Italy and if for some reason my broken Italian couldn’t be understood and others didn’t understand English, I could speak English into my phone and have them listen to my output in Italian from Google Translate!

It will be almost impossible to perfect bridging the language gap – some things simply don’t translate. Regardles… this would be an EXCELLENT time to institute that “no bad words” feature. Not trying to get myself jailed and beaten in a foreign country for Google translating me wrong, ya know?

UPDATE: AF/Phandroid family member Phases just informed me that Google Translate DOES read back foreign language translations but only for select languages like Spanish, French, etc… I think I only tried Chinese, Japanes and a few others. I should have known better!

Google could be airing a SuperBowl ad tomorrow in 3rd quarter. Rumor has it that the commercial will be called “Parisian Love” and it documents a series of Google searches done over a long period of time that follow a long distance relationship from first glance to married with kids. Here it is:

Tonight Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted about “hell freezing over” and mentions the 3rd quarter of the SuperBowl, which set the rumors ablaze:

John Battelle from Battelle Media provided a pre-emptive scoop of the news. The awkward thing is that USA Today’s list of SuperBowl advertisers does NOT include Google. But you know who it DOES include… it includes Motorola. And according to AdAge the Bowl is sold out so there isn’t likely to be a “late entry” although I suppose Google could have requested anonymous entry.

So is Eric Schmidt tweeting about this Paris Wedding commercial or the Motorola Superbowl commercial or something else or both or WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON? This year I’m DEFINITELY intrigued by the commercials and the game should be amazing as well. Or the other way around. Whatevs.

One of the coolest apps to showoff and simultaneously (at least for me) most useful apps around has to do with barcode scanning. Whether it’s he basic barcode scanner made by Googlers or something more advanced like Shop Savvy or Amazon’s App, it’s hard to deny the ability to scan a barcode and immediately tap into a wide range of information about a product is outstanding.

It goes further than that, too. Barcodes can be used for MUCH more… for example you could have an advertisement in a magazine which, when scanned, sends you off to a specific webpage associated with that particular ad. There are a wide range of possibilities and opportunities and Motorola wants in on the action – they’ve invested in a company called ScanBuy who have a product on the Android Market called ScanLife.

Here is an intro video from the ScanLife website – but you’re probably already familiar with the process:

Has Motorola made this investment simply because they think it has potential on its own? Or do they have intentions of creating an application to bundle with Motorola Android Phones and MOTOBLUR that further benefits them monetarily? I would assume the latter… if you already had a barcode scanning app by default you’re much more likely to try it and keep it rather than seeking an alternative.

We’ll keep an eye on ScanBuy, ScanLife and Motorola’s activity with the company. If you were Motorola, what would you do?

[Via Press Release]

One great feature of the Google Nexus One is the fact that it has TWO microphones. Basically, one microphone is positioned directly on the “mouthpiece” while the other microphone is positioned away from the mouth. While the first microphone captures your voice, the second captures your voice along with background noise, compares the two, and is able to transmit a signal with the overlapped background noise deleted/removed/reduced.

The call quality of the Nexus One was reviewed as excellent and the 2 microphone technology, referred to as Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), is the reason. The microphones used to accomplish this are called Microelectromechanical Systems  Microphones (MEMS) and iSuppli thinks more and more mobile phones will begin using the tech – great news for consumers.

It’s also great news for people in the ANC business as iSuppli is predicting global shipments of MEMS microphones to be 1.2 billion in 2013 compared to a previous estimate of 1.1 billion. That “.1″ sounds like a small number… but for non-Doogies out there it is 100,000,000 extra units because of growth in the mobile sector.

I’ll definitely take this technology into consideration when making my next phone purchase because hey – it IS a phone and call quality should still be a top factor in the decision making process… right?

[Via Cellular News]

Uhohs! It appears that the Google Android Code has been deleted from the Linux Kernel. The change is explained in depth at Kroah.com but the folks at RegHardware sum it up nicely:

“No one cared about the code, so it was removed,” writes Kroah-Hartman. “As I’ve stated before, code in the staging tree needs to be worked on to be merged to the main kernel tree, or it will be deleted.”

But the larger problem, he continues, is that Android uses a new lock type, new hooks for its “sometimes bizarre” security model, and a revamped framebuffer driver infrastructure. All this, he says, prevents “a large chunk” of Android drivers and platform code from merging into the main kernel tree.

Google, he ultimately argues, has forked its mobile OS.

Kroah has a ton of great things to say about Google and Android. The removal of Android from the Linux Kernel isn’t the end of the world, but more an admittance that Android is paving its own path. If Google doesn’t alter directions now to account for this, it’ll probably be too late to turn back.

What does Google have to gain?

Because Google doesn’t have their code merged into the mainline, these companies creating drivers and platform code are locked out from ever contributing it back to the kernel community. The kernel community has for years been telling these companies to get their code merged, so that they can take advantage of the security fixes, and handle the rapid API churn automatically. And these companies have listened, as is shown by the larger number of companies contributing to the kernel every release.

It seems like, according to Kroah, we would get more secure builds with less bugs and quicker OTA fixes/patches if Google were to follow the necessary Linux procedures. Kroah is reluctantly hopeful… and I’m less optimistic. I definitely recommend reading the full article for those interested.

I’m no Linux expert but I’m sure we have plenty of readers who understand this on a much deeper level. So chime in – how does this affect us and what’s your opinion?

After one month, the Nexus One has only sold a reported 80,000 units which is a much more than a hop, skip and jump from the numbers the iPhone and Motorola Droid did upon launch. Google themselves were cautiously optimistic about sales numbers and the reason for this huge gap is OBVIOUS: the distribution model and advertising.

The iPhone and Motorola Droid both had marketing campaigns that likely rank as the most expensive for a consumer electronics device so far this millenium. Furthermore, those seeing the commercial knew exactly where to get the object being advertised and had few questions about how to obtain the product. On top of that, customers oblivious to the commercials still had a high chance of purchasing the device just by walking into the store and being told about it.

The Nexus One ad campaign was based entirely online using Google Ads and a brief feature on Google’s homepage. Customers had to purchase the device through the Google website and, since it wasn’t tied directly into a carrier, most customers were probably confused about how this affected their regular/existing contract or what this meant by signing a new contract. It was a new way of obtaining a phone and people aren’t comfortable with “new” because things that are new are often confusing – ESPECIALLY when you’re talking about technology and service contracts.

Much of Google’s goals were to break this pattern of purchasing mobile phones in the FIRST place. And based on only selling 80,000 units I think they’ve got a LONG way to go. And although the iPhone and Droid had huge traditional media campaigns, you would think that a featured spot on the Google homepage for DAYS along with millions of ad impressions across the interwebz would move more units in 1 month.

Especially because the Nexus One is Google’s first sponsored phone and many are saying its better than the iPhone. I’m wondering if – one year from now – we’ll consider the Nexus One to have been a consumer success? I think that depends on how the Nexus Two fares and if Google’s model can gain some momentum. But cmon now… we know Google has some more tricks up their sleeves, right?

[Gizmodo, WSJ, Flurry]

We love T-Mobile USA. Say whatever you want about them… they were the first carrier to embrace Android and they took a risk that other carriers were unwilling to take. Android was a strategic advantage to them, but without SOMEONE initially stepping up, Android never would have gained the momentum it has now. Someone needed to step up and T-Mobile was that “someone”.

But Deutsche Telekom are the owners of T-Mobile USA and although its the 4th largest American carrier, the division has consistently lost money while Verizon and AT&T gain significant ground. There have been rumors of sell-outs and spin-offs before and it seems they are returning.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the most likely scenario is a T-Mobile USA IPO that would sell about 20% of the company. The possibility of selling TMO USA to an American rival is still a possibility, but less likely. Verizon and Sprint both run a CDMA-based network and AT&T’s GSM network runs different 3G bands. Clearwire could get in on the action but the company – owned by an array of conglomerates – doesn’t seem to be headed in the right direct; even Google has decided not to put any more finance/resources into the struggling company.

I’m not sure WHAT will happen with T-Mobile USA but I am truly hoping they don’t get sold to another American carrier. In the past 2 years, both on their own and in conjunction with Google Android, the company has been innovative and willing to push the envelope for their customers. In many cases, the opposition has responded, but they never would have if T-Mobile USA didn’t make the initial move.

Competition is good for customers and I would love to see T-Mobile USA stay in the market. However, to sell 20% of the company and have them invest in infrastructure and services as we move towards a 4G world… could prove ominous. If they’re losing money now, what path will prevent that from happening in the future?

If the company is losing money, T-Mobile USA definitely needs to make a move. But don’t be mistaken – selling the company or opening an IPO is NOT a strategy. Even with more money and/or a new owner there needs to be a plan that will help reverse the company’s financial woes.

Personally, I’m surprised to see T-Mobile’s problems as they seem to really have a handle on what their customers want. We’ve seen Sprint face similar fortune. I would love to be at the round table meetings discussing “What to do, what to do”… in the meantime we can only speculate and hope for the best.