Market research firm Book Marketing Ltd has revealed to GigaOM that in the UK both the iPad and iPhone are beating the Kindle as an eBook reader most used by consumers based on data from last September. The story however is very different in the US however with the Kindle far ahead after stellar growth throughout 2010 as the graph below the break demonstrates.
Posts tagged with "iPhone"
iPad and iPhone Beats Kindle In The UK, But Not In The US
Make GIFs From Your iPhone With Giffer!
If you’re looking to create the next hit animated .gif for Internet laughs, Giffer! for the iPhone can chain photographs together to create those animated favorites. While you can’t take photographs from Giffer!, you can choose from several pics in your library to link together a series of images for quick animations which can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, or copied to the clipboard for easy pasting into MMS or an online message board. The animations are super easy to create: simply add photos from the library, adjust a few settings like frame delay and background color, give your .gif a name, and you’re off watching your creation in a mobile theater. It’s very cool, I love the button styles in the app, and you’ll find lots more to like once you’ve embarrassed a few friends on Facebook. Giffer! is only a $1.99 in the App Store.
#MacStoriesDeals - Friday
Facebook Messenger Brings Free VoIP Calls to Facebook Chat
Facebook Messenger, a new iPhone application by the Crisp App developers, promises to bring the ultimate Facebook Chat experience to iOS. The app, unlike several alternatives that use Facebook Chat to let you communicate with your friends in a native iPhone interface, doesn’t only provide a clean design for chat, conversation views and photo attachments, it also lets you receive and place free VoIP calls through Facebook. That’s right: Facebook Messenger leverages the Facebook contact list to allow you to call your friends, for free, over the Internet. Read more
#MacStoriesDeals - Thursday
Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!
MANsaver: The iPhone App That Will Save Your Relationship
It is no secret that men usually forget about things. Especially if you’re married and you have to think about paying the bills, your job, kids and that car insurance that just won’t go away, it might happen to forget about your 4th anniversay, the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day, or the anniversary of the day your first met with your wife. While girls seem to remember any kind of holiday, anniversary and important milestone with ease, guys…well, usually just forget. And if your relationship is anything like mine, you know this could become a problem. Like, a huge problem.
Now, for as silly as it sounds, we there’s an app for that. MANsaver, a free iPhone app by Oven Bits and Creation Code, is aimed at collecting all these kinds of holidays and anniversaries you should remember into a single list view that – and here comes the real trick – will also send you notifications five days ahead of a scheduled event, and on the same day as well. This app, also nicely designed, is literally a man saver: it allows you to build custom lists of dates based on your relationship, set up reminders and even send text messages based on “romantic templates”. This is an iPhone geek’s relationship-oriented OmniFocus, basically. Read more
“Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography”
Attention budding iPhoneographers, think you can shoot some mean pixels with your iPhone? Addicted to photo apps like Instagram, Camera+ and Hipstamatic? Why not test your creative ability and submit some of your own original works of art?
The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, or OCCCA, in Santa Ana, California, is opening an exhibit from March 31 to April 20, 20111 called “Pixels: The Art of iPhone Photography.” If you are interested in participating, here are the rules: all photos must be shot and processed with your iDevice (iPhone and iPod Touch devices are both acceptable) and you cannot use any photo editing software on a desktop computer. Read more
Are iPhone App Users Really Worth More Than Android Users?
An interesting chart put together by mobile advertising company Mobclix shows that the value of iPhone app users is higher than Android app users. This value has been calculated dividing the average revenue of apps from the Utilities, Games and Entertainment categories by the number of unique users per month. Other criteria used to create this infographic include “active users” (people who launch an app at least 3 times a week and use it for at least 5 minutes) and apps that spent “an average of two weeks in their categories ‘Top 10′ listing and are Free apps”.
As you can see in the image above, apparently the value of iPhone app users is higher. But as noted by TUAW, we have to consider the nature of this chart. First off, the value of the Games category is lower, but only because there are lots more users playing games on the iPhone than doing math with a utility app. Just think about the 200 million minutes spent every day playing Angry Birds. Similarly, we could apply this concept to Android users overall: paid apps struggle to generate great numbers in the Android Market, but it’s not a secret that there are more Android handsets out there than iPhones (basing on the shipment numbers that come out every month from companies like Millenial).
So the question is – are iPhone users really worth more, or does a chart like this simply play well with the revenue and average users from the iOS platform? I believe a little bit of both. Perhaps categories (games) and platforms (Android) with large userbases aren’t really meant for an infographic like this, but there is no doubt the App Store offers developers a more solid source of income than Google’s Market. It’ll be interesting to take another look at this chart a year from now, with several Android tablets on the market and after Google’s rumored efforts to put more focus on paid software.
Quick Weather with QuickWeather
I love watching the weather and enjoy checking extended forecasts via my iPhone. The weather category in the App Store is flooded with sub-par apps with horrible UIs. Even some of the more popular ones look like they are being neglected in the pixel department. There are some great weather apps there but this review is only about one, a newcomer to the App Store, QuickWeather.
Although I like weather data, sometimes I want a simple weather reading that gives me some visual stimulation, not just numbers. If my hometown weather isn’t the best, I usually check Destin, Florida, where it’s always sunny and where my family goes once a year. QuickWeather, by App Jon, simply does this; it’s a beautiful app that makes it easy to quickly access weather anywhere in the world. Read more