Hasta La Gadget!

How far we’ve come from the heady days when Microsoft was willing to splash $44 billion to acquire Yahoo! Since then, the online portal has done whatever the opposite of going from strength to strength is, and today it’s suffered the somewhat predictable ignominy of losing its second spot in search to Microsoft’s upstart Bing. Statcounter places the February global share of search at 4.4 percent for Microsoft and 3.9 percent for Yahoo! (the Redmond giant can actually lay claim to a bigger slice since Bing “powers” Yahoo! search results in some countries), neither of which should give Google much reason for concern while it’s sitting pretty with a share of just under 90 percent. It’s the first time Google has dipped below the 90 percent mark for a long time, but Statcounter says “it shows little sign of losing its global dominance any time soon.” So that settles that.

Continue reading Bing advances past Yahoo! to become world’s second most used search engine — with 4.4 percent

Bing advances past Yahoo! to become world’s second most used search engine — with 4.4 percent originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are many players in the e-reader world, but few have managed to gain any sort of traction. Though it hasn’t achieved Kindle levels of success Barnes & Noble is taking pride in saying that its Nook series of readers has conquered 25 percent of the US e-book market. The company doesn’t cite any specific sales figures to back up that number, but we’ll go with it. Sadly, though, there’s another 25 percent number that is detailed and isn’t nearly so positive: that’s how much the company’s profits dropped from this period last year. That was said to be due to heavy investments in the Nook but, despite that, B&N managed to post a $60.6 million profit — certainly better than some of the competition.

Barnes & Noble says Nook owns one quarter of US e-book market, we don’t doubt it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bit of semantic juggling makes Apple the biggest player in both the personal computer and mobile platform markets.

A research report published today by DisplaySearch found that sales of the iPad propelled Apple past HP for the No. 1 spot in the “mobile PC” market.

To make that work, you have to count the iPad as a PC. DisplaySearch combined sales of Mac notebooks with the iPad and found that Apple sold 10.2 million, or 17.2 percent, of mobile computers shipped during the fourth quarter of 2010. HP shipped 9.3 million.

But you could also count the iPad as a mobile device, as some have done. If you lump together the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, Apple’s iOS is the mobile operating system most often used to browse the web, according to NetMarketShare.

“While we anticipate increased competition in the tablet PC market later this year with the introduction of Android Honeycomb-based tablets, Apple’s iPad business is complementing a notebook line whose shipments widely exceed the industry average growth rate,” said Richard Shim, Senior Analyst at DisplaySearch. “Apple is currently benefiting from significant and comprehensive growth from both sectors of the mobile PC spectrum, notebooks and tablet PCs. Cannibalization seems limited at this point.”

The reports seem slanted in Apple’s favor: traditionally the iPad wouldn’t be considered a PC, and most research firms have concluded Android is beating the iPhone in the smartphone market, which doesn’t count the iPod Touch or iPad.

But it’s rational to count the iPad as a personal computer because, well, it’s a computer, even if it has more limited capabilities than a PC. And it seems fair to combine iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone sales when determining which mobile platform has the most dominance: They’re all running Apple’s iOS.

When you look at the big picture, the labels don’t matter to the manufacturers: They just want customers buying their products, and they don’t care if you call it a PC, smartphone or tablet.

The two reports also demonstrate that the lines between “PC” and “mobile” are blurring. Technically all these products — the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, iPod Touch, HP notebooks, Android smartphones and so on — are mobile computers.

So if you look at the iPad as a personal computer, and the iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone as one mobile platform (which it is), one thing is clear: Apple may have lost the PC war, but it’s winning in the post-PC era.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

While much of the news lately has surrounded subscription internet movie and TV services the video on-demand market was up nearly 40% last year and is expected to keep growing. According to stats from IHS Screen Digest, video revenue for the Apple iTunes store grew 60 percent last year, but saw its overall market share shrink from from 74.4 to 64.5 percent. This is mostly explained as a side affect of the Kinect driving up Microsoft Xbox 360 sales at the end of last year and introducing its Zune store to a new market of families looking for digital entertainment. The up and comer to watch for 2011 appears to be the Wal-mart/Vudu combo, currently fourth in line behind Sony but poised to grow by showing up on more devices and increasing its promotional efforts. Of course, as NewTeeVee points out, the ultimate wild card in all of this is the launch of Ultraviolet buy-once/watch-anywhere DRM later this year (without support from Apple or Disney) and the effect it could have by causing consumers to see digital downloads as a viable option instead of the fragmented mess they are now — good luck with that.

[Thanks, Aaron]

iTunes stays on top of growing internet movie business in 2010, but 2011 could be very different originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Feb 2011 06:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One day somebody will write a book called “The rise and rise of Android” and this moment will be highlighted in bold. Canalys’ latest smartphone sales figures show that Android phone makers managed to shift a cool 33.3 million handsets in the last quarter — more than any other smartphone platform out there, including the previous leader, Symbian, which sold 31 million units. That’s a mighty leap from the 20.3 million Android devices the stats agency estimates were sold in Q3 2010. Symbian itself grew from 29.9m in Q3 to 31m in Q4, but Android’s pace of expansion has been so rapid as to make that irrelevant.

Update: NPD’s numbers are in as well, indicating that Google now has a 53 percent share in the US market, while Windows Phone 7 has managed to nab only two percent so far.

Continue reading Canalys: Android overtakes Symbian as world’s best-selling smartphone platform in Q4 2010

Canalys: Android overtakes Symbian as world’s best-selling smartphone platform in Q4 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Jan 2011 05:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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