by Jonathan Cassell – Editorial Director and Manager, Public Relations
via iSuppli

What do you call a mobile phone that owners employ for voice communications less than half the time they are using it?

Apple Inc. calls it the iPhone, and iSuppli Corp.’s latest consumer survey research indicates that U.S. owners of the popular product are spending their time enjoying all its capabilities, i.e. voice, data communications and multimedia entertainment, rather than exclusively using it for traditional voice calls.

Owners of all types of mobile handsets use their phones for voice communications 71.7 percent of the time, according to research from iSuppli’s ConsumerTrak survey of U.S. residents. In contrast, iPhone owners spend just 46.5 percent of their time with the product engaged in voice calls. So what are consumers doing with their iPhones instead of talking?

U.S. consumers said they spent 12.1 percent of their iPhone usage time accessing the Internet, a stark contrast with 2.4 percent for all mobile phones on average. Furthermore, iPhone owners spent 11.9 percent of their usage time listening to music or other audio, compared to just 2.5 percent for all mobile handset users.

“This usage pattern shows Apple has succeeded in producing a true convergence product that consumers like to use for multiple purposes,” said Greg Sheppard, chief development officer for iSuppli. “Apple has come as close as anyone to achieving a balanced convergence in mobile-handset features and usage.”

The attached figure presents the breakdown of average time usage for iPhone owners as well as for all mobile handsets.

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By Sean Michael Kerner on March 19, 2008

All right here’s the question everyone wants to know – What’s better – Apple iPhone or Google Android?

According to Andrea Gazzaniga, software development manager at mobile open source vendor Funambol the answer is not entirely clear. In a rambling overflow presentation at AjaxWorld’s iPhone Sumitt, Gazzaniga attempted to outline the differences and similiaraties between iPhone and Android.

“iPhone is cool and that’s what’s bringing us all here,” Gazzaniga said. “With Android the claim is that it will be open and we’re hoping it will overcome the closed nature of current mobile development.

Gazzaniga had a few other (not so startling) points such as Android is based on Linux while the iPhone is based on Mac OS. For the most part Gazzaniga implied that Android from an app developers point of view behaves much the same as iPhone, though he did point out a few serious limiations to the iPhone (from what he could tell from the iPhone SDK).

According to Gazzaniga iPhone does not allow in its SDK for background processes. That is an app must close when the users leaves it. The obvious question resulting from that issue then is – how does an application listen for a network event after a user leaver it ? (for instant messaging or sync operations).

There is not official email integration in the iPhone SDK which begs the question  – is it possible to deliver email other than with Apple’s client and built-in protocols?  Gazzaniga also noted that developers of iPhone native applications will need Apple to distribute their applications. As an example Gazzaniga commented that you can’t get Skype for the iPhone today.

Overall though in my view, Gazzaniga’s presentation left the audience with more questions than answers. It will be interesting to see as the iPhone and Android SDKs mature and gain adoption, precisely what the differences between the two are from a practical point of view.

Google’s new GData Objective –C Client Library adds support for the Google Contacts Data API and YouTube API. So essentially, any applications written in Objective-C (including those created for the iPhone) will be able to take advantage of features such as uploading video to YouTube account or directly editing their Google account contacts.

According to Google blog post, GData Objective-C Client library is 100% compatible with the iPhone SDK.

“Perhaps you want your iPhone software to send photos to a Picasa Web Albums account, or keep a journal of phone calls automatically in Blogger. Maybe your iPhone application accesses a database of information from a Google Spreadsheet or from Google Base. With the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library, creating software for these tasks is straightforward.”

“If you are writing iPhone software, just drag the “GData Sources” group folder from the GData project file into your iPhone project, and use the GData APIs as you would when writing a Mac application.”

More information on GData Objective-C Client Library can be found at the project page. [Via iPhone Atlas]

If Google’s Rich Miner was a developer, he’d be coding for the iPhone; however, he’s actually Group Manager for Mobile Platforms, and as such is more interested in boosting Android’s profile with confident predictions that handsets based on the platform will wildly outsell Apple’s cellphone.

“Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. [Apple is] a single manufacturer, it’s targeted at a particular demographic, and it falls far short of the 1 billion mobile phones sold every year worldwide” Rich Miner, Google

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