Android Gaining Momentum Among Future Smartphone Buyers
New survey data released today by ChangeWave Research indicates that Google's Android smartphone operating system has been rapidly gaining momentum over the past few months as the release of the Motorola Droid and the hype around the Google Nexus One have brought Android considerable publicity. In particular, the survey found that 21% of customers planning to purchase a new smartphone in the next 90 days would prefer Android, up from just 6% only three months ago. That performance puts Android within striking distance of Apple, which is reportedly preferred by 28% of future purchasers, down from 32% in the earlier survey.
Customer satisfaction ratings have also shown Android approaching Apple's typically strong performance, finding 72% of Android users "very satisfied" with their phone, while the iPhone checks in at 77% according to the same metric.
When breaking Android's performance down by handset manufacturers, the report sees the strength of the Droid line, which boosted Motorola's share of planned purchases over the next 90 days from 1% to 13% between the September and December surveys. On the other hand, market leaders Apple and Research in Motion saw slight declines, while interest in Palm's offerings plunged by 50%.
While some degradation of Apple's "mindshare" could be expected at the midpoint of its release cycle with the iPhone 3GS having been available for six months now and anticipation of the next-generation iPhone not yet ramping up, Android is certainly showing itself to be a growing force to be reckoned with in the smartphone market.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...