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Chart showing mobile devices visiting Wired.com

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are the overwhelming favorites for mobile access to Wired.com.

Color us surprised.

While we knew that our readers use and are interested in iPhones, we weren’t prepared for just how drastically the logfile numbers skewed towards Apple’s mobile platform. Taken together, the iPhone and iPod Touch represent 91.6% of the mobile devices accessing Wired.com during June, 2009.

The next closest runner-up, the T-Mobile G1, commands just 1.6% of the mobile device total (based on number of visits to Wired.com), and the Nintendo Wii — bizarrely — is the fourth most popule “mobile” device, with 0.7% of our site visits. (We assume that our logfile analysis software, Omniture, is just confused about how mobile the Wii really is.) The RIM BlackBerry 9000 and Palm Pre also have about 0.7% of total visits.

Grouping by manufacturer gives a slightly different picture: Apple, as before, holds 91.6%, but Nokia comes in second, with 1.7% of the total visits. T-Mobile has 1.6%, while RIM takes 1.5% and HTC 0.9%.

We know from previous logfile analyses that Wired.com readers are more likely to use Macs and Firefox than the general population. But when it comes to mobile access to Wired.com, the massive skew towards iPhones is a little surprising.

One reason is surely that our site is poorly optimized for most mobile devices, so phones that render websites pretty much as desktop browsers do — like the iPhone — are more likely to work well with Wired.com. If your phone doesn’t render ordinary websites well, you’re not likely to come here often.

Also, with 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches in the world, there are a lot of people using them to browse the web.

And as previous studies have suggested, people are much more likely to browse the web on an iPhone than on other smartphones, even if those other phones have comparably featured browsers. That’s probably due to the iPhone’s super-easy (or dumbed-down, depending on your point of view) interface. For instance, Nokia’s latest S60-based phones, like the E71 and the N79, have browsers capable of rendering web pages faithfully. But the interface is clunkier: It just takes more steps to scroll, zoom, and click on links than it does on the iPhone.

The result is plain: Far more people actually use the iPhone’s browser, at least when it comes to visiting Wired.com.

Um, yikes? An unexpected (and unwanted) surprise struck some 145,000 BlackBerry users in the UAE this time last week, when an official looking prompt coerced many of the aforesaid Etisalat customers to follow through with a software update. Rather than bringing about performance enhancements, the SS8-built app enabled the carrier to keep tabs on customers’ messages. According to RIM:

“Etisalat appears to have distributed a telecommunications surveillance application… independent sources have concluded that it is possible that the installed software could then enable unauthorized access to private or confidential information stored on the user’s smartphone. Independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server.”

Like we said, yikes. The zaniest part is that Etisalat isn’t backing down, still assuring the world that the upgrades were “required for service enhancements.” At any rate, RIM has made remarkably clear that the update wasn’t one authorized by the company, and it’s even providing an app remover for those who’d prefer their BlackBerry to be in working order and, you know, not forwarding all their email to some dude in an Etisalat supply closet. Good on you, RIM. Bad on you, Etisalat.

[Thanks, Gerald]

Read – Confirmation of spyware
Read – RIM app remover

Filed under: Cellphones

Etisalat BlackBerry update was indeed spyware, RIM provides a solution originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon and some cellphone retailers have cut the price of the BlackBerry Storm by more than half in a move that could signal an updated version of the touchscreen device is on its way.

Verizon is now offering the Storm for $100 through its website, while Amazon Wireless has it even cheaper at $50.  At Wirefly.com, the Storm costs just $30 with a new Verizon account. The prices are all for a device with a two-year contract.

As we have said earlier, reports suggest the BlackBerry Storm 2 could be available in September. With the latest price cut, it looks very likely that Research In Motion is readying to get the Storm 2 in retail stores soon.

Research In Motion released Storm, its first touchscreen phone, in November last year. The $200 phone (with a two-year contract) received some harsh reviews on its debut from critics unhappy with the software and the user interface. But the Storm has become a big hit among Verizon subscribers. One million Storm phones were sold within two months of the launch.

The Storm 2 is likely to have Wi-Fi–a key feature missing in the first generation device–and an improved touchscreen. It’s fairly certain the phone will make its debut on the Verizon Wireless network and could become the telecom carrier’s weapon in its battle against AT&T’s new iPhone 3G S and Sprint’s Palm Pre.

See Also:

• Reviled by Reviewers, BlackBerry’s Storm Rages On
• Teardown of BlackBerry Storm Reveals Device Cost
• RIM BlackBerry Storm
• BlackBerry Ready With a Sequel to Storm?

Photo: BlackBerry Storm (Juan Benitez/Flickr)

[via RIMarkable]

Research in Motion hit a milestone today, only “achievement” wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to describe it. The BlackBerry maker has finally ended a long-running patent dispute with Visto Corp., paying out $267.5 million to settle the matter — a much larger fee than the $7.7 million Visto got from Seven Networks, but conversely a fraction of the reported $612.5 million RIM paid to settle with NTP years back. With it, however, comes a fully paid license to use Visto’s patents, and some of the plaintiff’s intellectual property by way of transferred ownership. So now that we can move on from that dispute, who’s next to take the mantle and vie for a piece of BlackBerry’s pie?

Filed under: Cellphones

RIM settles with patent holder Visto to the tune of $267.5 million originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In what appears to be a last-minute effort to play catch-up, Microsoft and Verizon have put out a call for developers to code for their mobile platforms.

Verizon is planning a July 28 conference in San Jose, California, to attract software developers to its mobile platform. And Microsoft announced that on July 27, the company will start accepting mobile application submissions in advance of its launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 in the fall.

The companies appear to be responding to Apple, which announced this morning that its iPhone App Store, now only one year old, has surpassed 1.5 billion downloads and is serving 65,000 applications.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

Though press releases are inherently boastful, Jobs is correct that Apple is well ahead of its competitors in the mobile software space. The company launched its application store in July 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G. The App Store’s consumer friendly interface, which makes purchasing and downloading applications as easy as downloading songs in the iTunes Store, is benefiting software developers, some of whom have become rich thanks to explosive sales of their apps.

Other tech giants, including Research In Motion, Google and Palm, followed with announcements of their own mobile-application stores, but their launches were underwhelming compared to Apple’s. For example, Palm’s application store had only 30 apps after its first week; Apple’s App Store opened with 500 applications ready for download.

“The OS wars have finally begun,” said Michael Gartenberg, technology strategist and vice president of Interpret, in a June interview with Wired.com when Apple launched its new iPhone 3GS handset.

Verizon is the latest to join the application-store fray, which is an uncharacteristic move for the telecom giant. Historically, the company has not given developers control over pricing of their apps. But now, Verizon promises to provide a lucrative and simple process for its developers, Verizon vice president Ryan Hughes told GigaOM. However, the company has not disclosed details of its revenue-sharing program.

How will Verizon compete with Apple? The company is adopting a “platform agnostic” philosophy, hoping to aggregate mobile apps from four developer communities: Windows Mobile, Palm, Android and RIM’s BlackBerry. This way, developers can code for whichever platform they wish. And they can decide whether to share their software with Verizon, which would provide APIs and tools to make the software compatible with Verizon phones.

The idea, then, is for developers to maximize profit from a single application by selling it to not only BlackBerry customers, but Verizon subscribers as well, for example.

Though Apple is ahead of its competitors in numbers, it does not mean the company is going to stomp rivals into nonexistence, Gartenberg said. Rather, many companies can compete and still co-exist in the new smartphone OS space.

“At the end of the day, for Palm to succeed does not mean that Apple has to do badly, and likewise for Apple to succeed doesn’t mean that Palm is going to go out of business. There’s going to be a lot of room in the market for several players here,” Gartenberg said. “What’s hopefully going to drive a lot of this stuff forward is who gets the developers, who gets the exclusive apps and who gets the additional functionality beyond the out-of-the-box experience.”

See Also:

• Palm Pre App Catalog Makes a Slow Start
• Nokia Ovi App Store Faces Turbulent Start
• Android Market Allows App Store Returns
• Microsoft Reveals New App Store Strategy
• BlackBerry App Store Gets a Name
• Apple Pre-Celebrates App Store’s First Birthday
• Android Welcomes App Store’s Rejects With Arms Wide Open

Photo: B.K. Dewey/Flickr