Titbit: Some smartphone statistics

I guess depending on your age you may or may not find the following statistics about smartphones marginally depressing.

Note that the following relates specifically to smartphones and not mobile phones in general.

• The average person checks their smartphone 150 times a day (about once every 6.5 minutes).
• The average iOS and Android smartphone user has downloaded and installed 41 apps.
• Of these 41 only 2.2 are paid for (the rest are ‘free’).
• The average Windows Phone user has downloaded 7 apps (because most of what you need is built into Windows 8 Phone).
• 1.3 million new Android devices (smartphone and SIM-enabled tablets) are activated every day.
• The above means that in every 24 hour period 400 percent more new smartphones and tablets are set up than there are babies born.
• The average smartphone user spends about 1.2 hours per day browsing the Web from their smartphone.
• With iOS and Android users, of apps downloaded, one in four are abandoned/uninstalled after the first use.
• Over the last 12 months gaming on phones and tablets has become the single most popular activity accounting for 43 percent of battery usage.
• Social networking comes second accounting for 26 percent of battery usage.
• By the end of 2013 it is estimated there will be 1.82 billion active smartphones in use globally.
• Australia has the second highest smartphone penetration in the world with 37 percent of the population owning a smartphone.
• Singapore has the highest penetration with 62 percent of the population owning a smartphone.
• By comparison, the USA which is sixth, has 35 percent penetration.
• Two out of five people use their smartphones while watching television.
• Three out five use there smartphones while eating a meal in company.
• 80 percent of smartphone owners will check their phone within 15 minutes of waking up.
• For 60 percent of smartphone owners their smartphone is the first thing they will pick up on waking.
• Smartphone usage is the number one cause of ‘distracted driving’ motor vehicle incidents. Eating/drinking while driving is number two. Using a navigation system is number three. Distracted by passengers is number four.
• The Android smartphone operating system developed by Google now accounts for over 53 percent of the smartphone market.
• Apples’ iOS is less than half the Android share at around 23 percent.
• E-mail is the number one application downloaded for use on smartphones [I found this interesting. I though e-mail was a dead technology?].
• More e-mail is read via mobile devices than using a desktop client or via webmail [I wonder if this factors in businesses?].
• 82 percent of smartphone users use their smartphone for reading and sending e-mails [Not me! I don’t have any e-mail configured on my smartphone].
• Just under one third of smartphone owners purchased their first smartphone in the last 16 months.
• Only 12 percent of smartphone owners have had a smartphone for five years of more.
• 51 percent of smartphone owners are aged 12 – 34.
• Less then a fifth of smartphone owners use voice commands regularly [which could be because they really just don’t work that well … yet].
• Smartphone owners upgrade their phones more frequently than feature phone owners. Feature phone owners have an upgrade cycle of 3.1 years. The average upgrade cycle for smartphone users is 22 months (just under two years).

I collected these statistics from various sites. I often found statistics on one site that were different to those on the site I was referencing.

The problem with a lot of these kinds of statistics is that there is no crisp way to arrive at a perfect outcome so the organisations doing them have to average, flatten, weight, and adjust—hence there are differences between the various statistic collections. But the idea is to get a general view rather than to have razor sharp numbers.

Adobe’s de-blur technology—sales potential is enormous

I remember it being said on one of the photography podcasts I listen to now and then that “… since the invention of the smartphone, never before in the history of man have so many out-of-focus, blurred, under/over exposed pictures been taken by so many people” [this is roughly how I recall it being said but is probably not word-prefect].

Flickr is one of the Top 20 picture posting sites on the Internet and it is estimated that slightly over 60 percent (60.2) of the pictures posted to Flickr daily are from smartphones or tablets. The rest come from compacts, and top-end pro and semi-pro DSLRs.

Of the 60 percent from smartphones and tablets only 3.7 percent are judged to be in focus and correctly exposed. This means that a staggering amount of pictures uploaded to Flickr are not in focus, or a not correctly exposed, or both.

The boss of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, (Yahoo owns Flickr) recently said “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore”. She made this statement in context of the vast bulk of pictures uploaded to Flickr that are ‘snaps’ (or worse) and are not serious pictures taken with quality in mind.

Well Adobe may be coming to the rescue of all those out-of-focus blurred pictures.

After threes years of development Adobe recently announced their new de-blur (DeBlur)technology.

Nothing is perfect and the best way to get a sharp crisp image is still to use the right shutter speed, ensure the subject is in focus, and hold the camera shake-steady (best done with a tri-pod)—and don’t use a smartphone or tablet. However, depending on why the picture is out of focus, Adobe’s new DeBlur might be able to save your blurred pictures.

Following are two examples of Adobe’s DeBlur at work showing before (left) and after (right).

The success of DeBlur depends on the type of blur in the image. If it is focus blur or motion blur or camera shake blur then DeBlur will be quite effective. If it is a combination of any of these, so focus blur plus camera shake, or motion blur plus focus blur, etc., then the effectiveness of DeBlur is not as good.

Obviously something that took three years to get to the point where it can be made available is not going to be free, and Adobe have never ever been in the business of making anything ‘free’. Full Photoshop is one of the most expensive software tools on the market.

It is likely that Adobe will make DeBlur available via some monthly or annual subscription model, plus I would expect they would also be adding it into the full Photoshop product as well—as everything to so with picture editing is usually available in the full Photoshop package.

For those of us armed with capable camera who don’t take out of focus pictures with camera shake this is probably not something we would buy. But for a big percentage of the 1.5 billion smartphone and tablet users out there this is going to be an interesting tool. Even if Adobe make it something like $9.99 per month and only 2.5 percent of smartphone users subscribe then that makes $314 million per month ($3.8 billion per year).

When (if) Adobe puts a trial version of DeBlur up for download I will get it down and have a quick play. Assuming I am still posting to my site when that happens I will let you know how I find it.

Surface Pro for Australia next Thursday (30th May)

Microsoft will formally release their Surface Pro tablet in Australia next Thursday the 30th of May in both the 64GB and 128GB versions.

For those of you who might now be saying something like “I have already seen that at Harvey Norman stores” then I would have to correct you. You haven’t! You might have seen something that looks very much like it, but that was the just the regular Surface. It was not the Surface Pro.

So now some folk might be saying “Oh Well! It’s the same thing. Just the pro probably has a faster processor or more memory”. If you did then you would be wrong again. There is a MUCH bigger difference between the Surface and the Surface Pro.

Those people paying attention would know that the normal Surface only runs Windows 8 RT whereas the Surface Pro runs full Windows 8 Pro. And if you don’t know the difference between these two incarnations of Microsoft’s latest Windows operating system then you need to go back and find my posts about what the difference is. Because it is HUGE.

To give you a small hint you can run applications like Windows Live Writer, Vuze, Adobe Photoshop and/or Photoshop Elements (my current favourite photo editing tool), Adobe Lightroom, FireFox, Google Earth, HDR Express, and DxO Optics on a Windows 8 Pro computer, but you can’t run any of these on a Windows 8 RT computer.

So, in theory, as I have not tried it yet to see how well it works, you can do full photo post-processing on a Windows Surface Pro. This would be impossible on a Windows Surface because you cannot install the required tools.

I currently lug around a Toshiba Tecra A5 as my own personal portable computer. I have had this unit nigh on three years and it has been an awesome computer. It has an awesome colour-correct 1600x900 screen. This was a beautiful screen three years ago when I bought it and is still superior to almost all screens on all but the higher-end range of current laptop computers. But I am hoping to be able to replace this with a Surface Pro because there is nothing that cannot be connected to or used with the Surface Pro.

For those interested the Surface Pro is supposed to be available from the Australian online Microsoft Store (which you can find here or by clicking on the picture above), and from JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores, as from the 30th.

Boo! . . . 21 days since I last posted . . .

I have not checked back through all my posts to see what my previous largest posting gap was. It is too hard. But I am pretty sure this is a record for me. Twenty one (21) days since I last posted. That is three weeks.

It is not because I can’t or don’t think of things to post. Pretty well every day I pop up OneNote and enter in an idea for a posting. Now that I have a Windows 8 smartphone I can pop up OneNote with the greatest of ease and enter in notes about posts on my phone.

I would confess I was a sceptic about Cloud Computing but I do see it has its uses. Using Microsoft’s Skydrive I can have my OneNote notebook file in the ‘cloud’ at Microsoft. Then I am able to check and add notes from any computer that can access OneNote someway or another—which basically means any computing device anywhere including all the various Android, iOS (Apple), and (obviously) Windows phones devices.

I think the reason behind my 21 day posting gap is a combination of the intensity of work over the last month or so, plus the relatively low daily unique count for my site that is not getting any higher over time (like it is supposed to); on top of which I have been in a bit of grump rut for a few months.

Anyway I am going to pick at least three topics out of my OneNote notebook and craft up a post on them over this weekend.

Update >>>>

Can you believe it? I craft up my first post in 21 days yesterday morning and then when I go to post it I find that there is something not working between SquareSpace and Live Writer and I can’t upload it. I logged the issue with SquareSpace immediately and by 11:00 p.m. Sunday night they had a working solution for me.

Pity I have to take off to site again at 5:00 a.m. in the morning so I won’t get to do any posts tonight before I go.

GoT season 3 improves with episode 4

I have just finished watching Game of Thrones season 3 episode 4 and I was so relieved.

Previously I had watched episodes 1 through 3 and I must confess that I was getting a little concerned. Episodes 1 through 3 left me a little flat. They just did not have the power and punch that all of season one and season two managed to impart and maintain.

The settings are amazing. The costumes are superb. The acting is top class. But something was missing.

I was getting worried.

Had Game of Thrones lost its mojo?

Was it heading for the same end as Deadwood after its third season?

Had David Benioff and D. B. Weiss lost their magic in transferring George R. R. Martin’s amazing books over to the visual medium of television?

I have read the third book and it is riveting; and yet that was just not coming through in the first three episodes of this third season.

Well with episode four Game of Thrones gets much of its power and punch back. Now it feels more like the ‘old’ Game of Thrones from seasons 1 and 2 again.

I have high hopes now for episode five.