Hasta La Gadget!

Satisfaction studies can sound like broken records, with familiar leaders and positions that don’t move. Not so with J.D. Power’s first smartphone survey for 2013. While Apple maintained the top spot for the ninth time in a row through US customers’ happiness with the hardware design and ease of use, most of its major competitors made big strides in reliability, speed and camera quality in the past half-year — to the point where there was a virtual dead heat for second place between HTC, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung. They lifted the average by about 22 points and left only LG (which has few high-end US phones) and a pre-transition BlackBerry lagging behind. We wouldn’t be surprised to see an improvement for those last two by the September study.

Whatever your platform preference, J.D. Power has found some shared experiences. Bugs are still a problem on phones when about 17 percent of those asked ran into some kind of glitch. However, it’s clear that those who lean heavily on their smartphones tend to love them: survey takers who used social networking apps for 100-plus minutes a week were significantly more likely to recommend whatever they had. That might help explain a high conversion rate among basic phone owners, where three quarters of those planning to update their devices expected to move to a smartphone.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Google, LG, Blackberry

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Source: J.D. Power

Today Apple has updated their environmental page collection and have issued a new Facilities report, showing that at this point in history, global corporate facilities inside the Apple family are at a whopping 75% renewable energy use. Apple also reports that many of their facilities are running on 100% renewable energy, including data centers in Newark, CA, Prineville, OR, and Maiden, NC. These bits and pieces are part of a report that, on the whole, shows Apple to be heading directly toward a fully renewable energy future – one we’d all like to be a part of.

According to the report released this week, Apple has increased the renewable energy use at Apple corporate facilities worldwide by 114% between fiscal 2010 and 2012. Over the last three years, Apple’s now-75% global corporate facilities using has risen rapidly from the 35% it was three years ago. One example Apple is using as a key location where they’ve made significant progress is in Maiden, North Carolina.

Above: The nation’s largest end user-owned solar photovoltaic array providing renewable energy to Apple’s data center in Maiden, North Carolina.

Apple notes that their data center in Maiden is the only data center facility of its size and type to have earned full LEED Platinum certification. According to Apple, they’ve implemented the following in their Maiden data center location for the furtherance of energy efficiency and green building:

• A chilled water storage system to improve chiller efficiency by transferring 10,400 kWh of electricity consumption from peak to off-peak hours each day
• Use of “free” outside air cooling through a waterside economizer operation during
night and cool-weather hours, which, along with water storage, allows the chillers
to be turned off more than 75 percent of the time
• Extreme precision in managing cooling distribution for cold-air containment pods,
with variable-speed fans controlled to exactly match air flow to server requirements
from moment to moment
• Power distributed at higher voltages, which increases efficiency by reducing power loss
• White cool-roof design to provide maximum solar reflectivity
• High-efficiency LED lighting combined with motion sensors
• Real-time power monitoring and analytics during operations
• Construction processes that utilized 14 percent recycled materials, diverted 93 percent
of construction waste from landfills, and sourced 41 percent of purchased materials
within 500 miles of the site

It would appear that Apple is moving in the right direction when it comes to environmental and “green thinking” concerns, especially when you compare the raw numbers they present. The one significant up-turn that can be seen in their fiscal 2012 report is in electricity usage by business unit, with their Corporate segment staying essentially equal to fiscal 2011 while both Data Centers and Retail Stores, moving from 138 million kWh to 217 million kWh for the former and 122 to 159 for the latter.

Apple has also reported that the commute their employees take on the way to work has continued to decrease both for worldwide employees and for intercampus employees. Apple offered a transit subsidy for U.S. employees in fiscal 2012 that offered employees up to $100 USD a month for carpooling, also offering them special carpooling parking spots as a bonus. Over 11,000 Apple employees took part in this program in 2012.

This report also shows that Apple has achieved the fabulous 100% renewable energy usage goal in the following locations: Austin, Texas; Elk Grove, California; Cork, Ireland; Munich, Germany – and most Apple facilities across Australia. Apple’s Infinite Loop location in Cupertino also, of course, runs on 100% renewable energy at this time.

Head in to our massive Apple hub right this minute to get more information on the goings-on in the Apple universe and stay tuned as the 2013 product range comes raining down over the next few months – we’ll let you in on it all from top to bottom! Also make sure you have a peek at Apple’s Environment Pages to see what they’re up to in the green universe.

Apple corporate facilities hit 75% renewable energy use in new report is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If there’s one thing J.D. Power & Associates semi-annual report on customer satisfaction can agree upon, it’s that Apple is – and has been for quite some time – the best in smartphone customer satisfaction. Based on a 1,000 point scale with points given for performance, physical design, features, and ease of operation, Apple ranks a full 60 points ahead of the 2nd place combatant – Nokia. While the study average sits at 796 points, Apple is the only one that rises above it with 855 – that’s not to say that the competition isn’t relatively close behind, but it is true that Apple is also the only manufacturer that rates a 5 on the Power Circle Ratings 1-5 scale for smartphones as well.

After Apple you’ve got Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola one after the other, followed by HTC, LG, and BlackBerry. The average score, says J.D. Power & Associates, has risen for smartphone satisfaction since the last test done at the end of 2012. Past that, the one factor pushed up most amongst those considered in the polling done by the group was performance, which rose 26 points.

This is, again, the 9th consecutive time that Apple has topped this chart with their iPhone line. This report is released semi-annually, and Apple has always ranked highly particularly in physical design and ease of operation.

As for traditional cellphone design, LG tops the tower with a paltry score of 719. This is well below even the lowest score on the smartphone scale, BlackBerry having had a 732. Below LG you’ll find Nokia once again hitting the second spot, the study average being 703 (just below Nokia’s 714), and the rest lining up as such: Sanyo, Samsung, Pantech, Motorola, and Kyocera.

Have a peek at other iPhone customer satisfaction posts we’ve reported on recently and let us know how satisfied you are with your own smartphone or more traditional cellphone right this minute!

[via J.D. Power & Associates]

Apple No 1 for 9th consecutive time for smartphone customer satisfaction is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Today it’s come to our attention that a collection of iPhone users out there believe that Apple might, in their next iteration of iOS, decide to give the average smartphone user Android-level customization options. I couldn’t disagree more. Though it’s clear that Apple should – in an early adopter’s dream universe – need by now to bring some major changes to their mobile operating system iOS, it’s just not going to happen. With Apple, change comes only when change is needed, and if you’ve seen the cash this company makes with each new iteration of its iPhone line and think they’re in dire need of any sort of radical change, you’re out of your mind.

What Apple should do, on the other hand, is tap two markets that it’s been avoiding since the dawn of the iPhone. The first of these is the customizing developer/hacker community that so ravenously devours each new Android phone. The second is the vast group of people rather rapidly accepting the ultra-large (but not quite tablet-sized) smartphone screen.

With the amount of attention each post about Jailbreaking gets here on SlashGear compared to the chatter that comes up each time iOS is updated, an instant conclusion can be drawn: it’s much more interesting (to those that reach tech blogs) to see the iPhone broken into than it is to see Apple bring on updates and upgrades. Where it gets really interesting is when Apple’s updates appear to be the direct result of Jailbreaking – hacks take a turn, Apple takes a turn, and so on and so forth.

So what if Apple created a Developer Edition iPhone?

Would it be so very anti-Apple to release a device that they encouraged the very real – and rather giant – developer community to customize?

Or would it be releasing their hardware to those that would change the software as they saw fit that made the iPhone into a device that’s not all that different from phones made by the Android-toting competition?

Then there’s the more obvious next step for the iPhone – a larger display size. Now that Apple has cracked the illusion that the iPhone 4′s screen size was the only one that – because of the massive amount of time that went into perfecting it – was ever going to be perfect, they can move on. Apple should and will create an iPhone that’s larger that the iPhone 5′s 4-inch display size limit.

But before they do that, they’ll have the ability to make this handheld machine bring on innovations we’ve not yet seen implemented on smartphones. If the rest of the smartphone universe is the Borg, they’ve already assimilated vast amounts of the “cool” that has pushed the iPhone to the top spot and kept it there for so many years. “The iPhone and Apple do not need help surviving”

The iPhone and Apple do not need help surviving – this is no call to action for Apple – they’ve still got one massively successul smartphone line on their hands. Instead consider this a call-to-action on the part of you lovers of game-changing innovation: Apple creates products people love. If everyone on the planet made it clear to Apple that they loved iOS better on the iPad mini than they do on the iPhone 5, you’d see a smartphone right between the two rather quick.

The same goes for you Jailbreaking-loving developers out there – continue to spread the love that is community evolution in software and you might – not any time soon – see an iPhone Developer Edition in your holiday stocking. Some day!

Dear Apple: Android-loving hacking developer hordes await you is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In a single post to a Google+ community, the newest Motorola “advisor” Guy Kawasaki has stoked a wildfire of suggestions for the upcoming so-called X Phone. This Kawasaki fellow was for many, many years an Apple/Macintosh evangelist, having “switched” to Android just this past year – and just this past month (February 27th, to be exact) – he joined Motorola as an advisor, focusing on, as he puts it: “product design, user interface, marketing, and social media.” He’s made a post today asking whether it’d be amazing to be able to custom-order a smartphone the way Porsche allows with their “Exclusive” series.

Of course as this suggestion was posted to Kawasaki’s own “Mobile Devices” Google+ community, it could simply be that the man is just asking interesting questions about the future in smartphones in general. If on the other hand he’s a social media specialist and doesn’t know that creating a post such as this with his current title would create a bit of heat for Motorola in the near future, then he’s no social media specialist at all.

So what’ve we got? The still very, very hypothetical Motorola X Phone, a mystical unicorn of a device that’s supposedly going to be Motorola’s first Google Nexus smartphone. This device will, it’s said, work with the following:

• Motorola Ruggedness (metal, kevlar, splashproof innards)
• Google’s next-generation Vanilla (Google-only) Android software
• Next-generation display
• Next-generation processor
• Next-generation camera
• Innovations in back-facing touch panels

And that’s it. Really, there’s no confirmation on what this device will be, and we’re truly going on threads that lead to nowhere at the moment. But with Kawasaki’s suggestive post, we can add the following to the list:

• Custom-order casing and features

At the moment you’re already able to get many smartphones in several different colors – the Samsung Galaxy S III comes in blue, black, white, red, brown, and sometimes pink! You’ve also got a choice of what size internal storage you’ll be working with for most of the major smartphone releases. So what’s left? Maybe some Apple-esque back-facing casing etching – fun!

Motorola hype advisor tips Custom-order Smartphone Hardware is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.