On an annual basis, estimated U.S. tablet sales of 37.9 million this year are expected to grow to 60.3 million in 2016.

On the eve of the expected release of the iPad 3, the report also showed that 61% of people surveyed said they are considering buying the Apple tablet, compared to 24% who are looking at the Kindle Fire. But the survey was fielded last September, before the November release of the Amazon tablet. The percentage of people who want a Kindle Fire could be higher by now.

While the Amazon tablet has benefited from being priced $300 less than the iPad, the Forrester study suggested price wasn’t the only consideration for tablet buyers.

“For better or for worse, price is becoming a more important factor in tablet choice. But it’s not the only factor, or even the primary one. Forrester’s data shows that the top reason consumers don’t buy tablets isn’t because of price, or technology — it’s because they say “I don’t think I need it,” wrote Forrester analyst and study author Sarah Rotman Epps in a blogpost Tuesday.

She added that the services a device provides — what you can do with it — are also critical. That’s why Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble have succeeded in the U.S., while pure hardware plays have failed. Still, the report suggests Apple should introduce a smaller, cheaper iPad this year to ward off competition from Amazon. Speculation about the forthcoming iPad 3 is that it will have the same 9.7-inch screen size and carry the same $499 price tag as the current model.

Forrester also points out that Google has gained share in the tablet market, thanks to the success of the Kindle Fire — which sold an estimated 5.5 million units in the fourth quarter — and the Nook Tablet. Both use a version of the Android platform. The report suggests that manufacturers like Samsung, Lenovo and HTC should abandon Android in favor of Windows to take advantage of Microsoft’s still-strong consumer brand and corporate acceptance.

In addition to consumer adoption, Forrester notes that tablets are also gaining ground in the workplace. While people mainly use them in the living room, 37% of U.S. tablet owners bring them to work. Tablets are also a global phenomenon, with only 43% of the 55 million iPads sold through the end of Apple’s last fiscal quarter bought within the U.S. The remainder went to consumers and businesses in the other 90 countries where the iPad is available.

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and Mexico actually led demand for wanting to use a tablet for work — and being willing to share the cost of the device with their employers, according to Forrester.

Source:  http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169522/tablet-demand-explodes-creates-global-phenomenon.html?edition=44276#ixzz1oTD6yOKe

Almost a quarter (24%) of tablet owners and 11% of smartphone owners have clicked an ad they were viewing on their respective devices to learn more about a product or promotion, according to data released last week by Nielsen. Doubling the screen size may not always double the interaction rate, but it seems to help.

Among other findings, the Rhythm report showed that combining video with full-page ads increased engagement on mobile devices from 9.4% to 11.5%. When it comes to in-stream video ads, it also indicated that adding custom buttons for social networks like Facebook or Twitter or specific brands pushed up engagement rates from .97% to 1.21%

Fifteen-second ads continued to have better completion rates than 30-second ads, but only slightly — 89.2% compared to 88.3%. The shorter format still accounts for the vast majority of video ads, although 30-second spots grew slightly in 2011 in connection with people increasingly watching full episodes on mobile devices.

Read more:  http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169145/tablet-ads-have-twice-interaction-rate-of-phones.html?edition=44169#ixzz1oG7KNG6N

The numbers come from UK-based analyst firmMobile Squared, which has worked out that Facebook will be making an average revenue per mobile user of around $6.50 per year — some $2 more than Facebook currently makes per users online, using figures supplied in its S-1 earlier this month. The caveat here is that the modelling appears to be hinged on mobile display-style ads, while in truth it’s not known what Facebook will do when it comes to formats; and several reports have pointed to them first opting for something altogether different — sponsored stories.

This is how Nick Lane, chief strategy analyst, arrived at these figures:

He estimates that across these six markets, there are a total of 185.3 million users of Facebook on mobile. (That’s something worth noting in itself: Facebook has something of a long tail when it comes to mobile users it seems, with the top six markets still accounting for less than half its 425 million mobile users.)

Read More:  http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/17/analyst-facebook-will-make-1-2-billion-annually-from-mobile-ads/

Nielsen tends to be the most aggressive among research firms when it comes to estimating how many Americans have smartphones. Most put the level closer to 40%. comScore, for instance, estimated smartphone penetration as of December at 42%. The Nielsen findings are based on a survey of 20,000 mobile users.

Younger adults are more likely to have smartphones. The 24-34 age group had the highest proportion of smartphone owners at two-thirds. That was followed closely by people ages 18-24, at 62%, and people 35-44, at 58%.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/168085/nielsen-smartphone-penetration-reaches-48.html?edition=43671#ixzz1n2ksmE7V

OEM Market Share

For the three-month average period ending in December, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices. Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 25.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, followed by LG with 20 percent share and Motorola with 13.3 percent share. Apple continued to gain ground in the OEM market with 12.4 percent share of total mobile subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 6.7 percent share.

Smartphone Platform Market Share

97.9 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in December, representing 40 percent of all mobile subscribers. Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 47.3 percent market share, up 2.5 percentage points from September. Apple maintained its #2 position, growing 2.2 percentage points to 29.6 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.7 percent) and Symbian (1.4 percent).

Read More:  http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/print/node/23645

Facebook, it would appear, agrees.

In Wednesday’s filing to go public, the social networking giant mentions several times that more than 425 million users access the service each month from a mobile device. However, it also notes that the company currently makes little ad revenue from all these mobile visits and that it expects a continued shift to mobile devices.

“We believe that mobile usage of Facebook is critical to maintaining user growth and engagement over the long term, and we are actively seeking to grow mobile usage, although such usage does not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue,” the company states in one part of the document.

The challenges in mobile feature prominently in the “risk factors” section of the company’s S-1 filing. In other sections of the document, mobile is also listed as both a key growth opportunity and an investment area for the company.

By my browser’s count, the word mobile appears 123 times in the document.

To date, much of Facebook’s work has centered around bringing its applications to all manner of smartphones and feature phones, but the company has said it wants to be a more serious player in mobile and last year released the first part of an HTML5-based platform it hopes developers will take advantage of.

In addition, as reported by AllThingsD in a series of articles last year, Facebook is quietly developing its own mobile phone design as part of a project code-named Buffy.

Read More:  http://allthingsd.com/20120201/mobile-highlighted-as-key-risk-factor-and-opportunity-in-facebook-filing/?mod=mailchimp

[2]

41% of all sessions came from Android devices with 4.3 inch screens.

While significant differences in Android manufacturing partners, device form factors and OS builds do exist, Localytics states that 73 percent of all apps leveraging its analytics solution run a variant of Android 2.3, a.k.a. Gingerbread. Another 23 percent of user sessions run some flavor of Android 2.2/Froyo, meaning that developers targeting both OS builds can achieve 96 percent compatibility across the Android ecosystem.

Forty-one percent of Android app sessions in the Localytics study originated on devices with 4.3-inch screens, followed by 4-inch screens at 22 percent, 3.2-inch models at 11 percent and 3.7-inch smartphones at 9 percent. Screen resolutions of 800 x 480 pixels contributed 62 percent of sessions; resolutions 480 x 320 made up 14 percent of sessions, trailed by 960 x 540 (6 percent), 480 x 854 (5 percent) and 320 x 240 (5 percent).

“For both screen size and resolution, Android developers have more to deal with than iOS developers, thanks to Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL [3]) single handset form factor,” Localytics states. “However, with five options accounting for more than 90 percent of all Android app usage, the fragmentation is not particularly daunting.”

Looking at Android tablets, a segmented dominated by Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, 74 percent of usage takes place on devices with 7-inch screens with 1024 x 600 resolution. Twenty-two percent of app sessions occur on 10.1-inch devices with 1280 x 800 resolutions. Localytics adds that 71 percent of Android tablets run Gingerbread, with 21 percent running a flavor of Android 3.0/Honeycomb.

Android fragmentation is regularly cited as a decisive factor behind developer preference for Apple’s iOS platform, despite Android’s commanding lead in terms of international market share. Speaking at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt maintained Android is not fragmented, but differentiated.

Read More:  http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/print/node/23568

The $5 billion is seen as just a preliminary fund-raising target that Facebook could expand to the expected $10 billion to meet investor demand. The company’s actual market debut isn’t expected until this spring, when it will set pricing for its shares.

In a letter to potential shareholders, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reaffirmed the compay’s often-stated goal of making the world more open and connected. “We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services,” he wrote. If nothing else, the IPO will certainly provide more money for Facebook to create better services.

Post-PC era? Here we come: According to new data from NPD, tablet PC shipments are expected to grow from 72.7 million units in 2011 to 383.3 million units by 2017. For comparison purposes, worldwide PC shipments for 2011 were 352.8 million, after seeing a 6% decline in Q4.

While those numbers are remarkable enough on their own, what’s really interesting is where much of the growth will come from: the emerging market.

Emerging markets are expected to account for up to 46% of worldwide shipments by 2017, up from the 36% share in 2011.

“The emerging market opportunity for tablets has been flying under the radar mainly because the device brands aren’t household names and there are concerns regarding the sustainability of the market,” says NPD Senior Analyst Richard Shim. But the firm believes that won’t always be the case. “We are beginning to see investments by some of the better known brands in developing regions, and we expect this to not only continue, but to flourish as competition improves,” he notes.

The tablet surge won’t be courtesy of the iPad alone, especially in these emerging markets. Specifically, the report cited the introduction of new brands like Aakash in India, for example, as well as older brands like Dell, as contributing the overall tablet growth.

Read More:   http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/tablet-shipments-to-reach-383-3-million-by-2017-46-in-emerging-markets/

HP’s proposed open-source transition timeline covers release phases, governance, tools and documentation, with plans calling for the company to make additional individual elements of the source code (e.g., its Linux standard kernel and core applications like Mail and Calendar) available each month. HP (which acquired webOS in 2010 when it purchased Palm for $1.2 billion) will issue its open webOS beta in August, followed a month later by version 1.0.

“In any large project, it’s imperative to communicate the plan for achieving the project’s goals,” writes HP CTO and head of technical strategy Sam Greenblatt on the HP webOS Developer Blog. “This plan is usually presented in the form of a roadmap, which outlines the steps necessary to achieve project goals and shows the path forward. For an open source project to be a success, that roadmap must be public so all contributors have a sense of where the project is headed.”

Read More:  http://developer.palm.com/blog/2012/01/welcome-to-webos-open-source/