Android Grew A Whopping 500 Percent In India Last Year

More than one million android activations are happening around the world in a day and the statistics places India among the most Android loving countries. According to Hugo Barra, director of product management, Android, India saw a whopping 500 percent growth in Androids in the last one year.

The fact was revealed at the ongoing Google’s I/O developers conference. “Android is a truly global phenomenon. We now have 400 million Android devices. In countries like Brazil, India and Thailand we have seen it grow by 500% in the last one year,” Barra said. He also showed a heat map representing the number of Android activations around the world in which India was depicted in yellow color, indicating high number of activation.

The whopping growth of Android in the country may be due to the vast range of Android powered devices available in the market from Rs 5000 to Rs 40,000. Apple’s iOS powered devices are above the reach of an average Indian. Moreover other platforms like Blackberry, symbian and Windows failed to provide the user experience and features offered by Android and iOS.

Android has a 59 percent share in the Smartphone market as on May 2012, followed by Apples iOS with a market share of 23 percent. Among the Android vendors, Samsung leads the Indian Smartphone market with a share of 45 percent, which the company hopes to increase to 60 percent by this year end.

The latest version of Android, Jelly Bean, announced at the conference will come with a support for Hindi, inbuilt in the OS.

Mozilla Building an Extreme Alternative to Android and iOS

For people who want to run all the applications under one roof- the web, Mozilla is building a new platform, exclusively based on the industry standard HTML5.

Mozilla will release the first open web device in association with Telefonica, the third largest carrier in the world.

The product will be based on Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project, which focuses on making HTML5 as the standard platform for mobile devices.

“In a joint press conference, Telefonica revealed their intention to work with us to deliver the very first open Web devices in 2012. These devices, architected entirely on the Web and built based on an HTML5 stack with powerful Web APIs will mean significant advances in speed and cost reduction for mobile devices in the future,” Mozilla said in a post.

Many other companies including Deutsche Telekom, Adobe and Qualcomm are supporting Mozilla in building the open web platform. The company will also preview the open web apps and Mozilla marketplace this week, which will enable the creation and distribution of applications powered by HTML5, JavaScript and CSS, the open web standards.

Google is currently the leading developer of open source mobile operating system, the Android. HP also recently announced its plans on releasing WebOS as an open source platform. But with it’s completely web based platform for mobile, Mozilla is planning to do something bigger than what it did to computer with its Firefox.

Apple Beat Google in US Smartphone Market

Apple’s iOS overtook Google’s Android to become the leading smartphone platform in the US in the fourth quarter of 2011, thanks to strong demand for its latest iPhone model, a study said Wednesday.

In October-December quarter last year, Apple’s share of the US smartphone market doubled from a year earlier to 44.9 percent, while Android’s share fell from 50 percent to 44.8 percent in the same period, according to market research firm Kantar Worldpanel.

While Android retains global smartphone crown, Apple is now growing at a faster rate, driven by the launch of its latest iPhone 4S model in October last year, Kantar Worldpanel noted.

“Overall, Apple sales are now growing at a faster rate than Android across the nine countries we cover,” Xinhua reported quoting Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at the research firm.

Apple posted better-than-expected quarterly results Tuesday, saying it sold a record-breaking 37.04 million units of iPhone in total in the fourth quarter last year, an increase of 128 percent over the year-ago period.

More Android Devices are Born than Babies

Approximately 700,000 Android devices are activated each day around the globe based on the statistics from December last year.

Youtube’s Head of Content, Robert Kyncl revealed the number in CES last week. According to this, Android activations are double than the number of births, which is approximately 300,000 per day according to the UN.

The number seems to remain high at least for a short time as many manufacturers continue to launch their Android devices. An Italy based company had launched their Android based ‘Smart Watch’ at CES 2012, which has a music player, applications and is also compatible with Smartphones.

As quoted in ZDNet, Android OS is going to power a variety of devices including TV, oven and the future is going to witness an ‘in home Android revolution’.

With Androids main rival iOS, currently powering only Apple’s devices and Windows Phone7, still struggling to find the market share, the future seems bright for Android if Google can address the increasing ‘fragmentation’ problem.

I’m Watch: An Android Smart Watch

Wearing your Smartphone at your wrist sounds interesting, isn’t it?   “I’m Watch” from Italy has launched a smart looking Smartwatch at CES 2012 which runs on Android – 1.6, has music player, Twitter, Facebook and weather apps.  It also has access to an app store for additional functions and is compactable with your Smartphones through Bluetooth.

I’m Watch comes in a variety of models, ranging from aluminum to gold to carbon and has 1.54-inch display with the resolution of 240×240, 64 MB RAM and 4 GB ROM and a non-removable 600mAh battery providing a 2 hours back-up and 48 hours back-up in stand-by mode. The device connects your iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth 2.1., so you can see who’s calling you in your watch screen.  It’s has also got a nice touch-screen interface due to which it is easy to move between apps.

To owe this tech luxury item you have to shed $299 for the basic model, for other fancy or gold version you have to pay a lot more. The product will be available in the U.S. market by this quarter. Its reach and price for Indian market is not declared yet.