Mobility is the biggest source of growth and innovation in the digital sphere and this is now spilling over into broadcasting despite past failures to make mobile TV work. Yet its very success is causing problems inhibiting deployment of some advanced features of mobility. One of the problems is device fragmentation across the board, which in particular dogs the Android platform and has held it back in its bid to overtake Apple.
But this fragmentation is also a source of innovation inside the Android community as individual device makers seek to gain advantage. This leaves Apple still as number one in terms of devices, although now falling ever further behind Android in terms of level of usage, according to the latest Web Trends Report from mobile cloud platform vendor Netbiscuits.
This has found that Android has extended its lead as the operating system that most often hits its platform, rising from 44% in Q4 2012 to 46% in Q1 2013. The report noted that Apple’s main problem now was the encumbrance of legacy, given that the top device during the six months spanning Q4 2012 and Q1 2013 was the iPhone 4S running iOS 6+, accounting for 16% of total hits in the sample from the Netbiscuits platform comprising more than a billion pages and content items requested per month.
Conversely, the latest iPhone 5 ranked just 13th in the overall list with little over 1% total share of Netbiscuits’ traffic, being beaten even by the iPhone 3GS running iOS 6. In fact 87% of Apple devices to hit the Netbiscuits Cloud Platform were running iOS 6+. On the other hand newer Android devices ripple through the population more rapidly because legacy is smaller, with the more recent version 4 the most common, with 56% of hits. Yet, Android 2+ still represents 43% of Android hits on the platform and the most prominent specific version of Android was Android 2.3.
Both Android’s problem of fragmentation and Apple’s of legacy are a microcosm of the whole mobile sphere. Fragmentation and legacy are an issue for developers of apps and providers of services because on the one hand they have to target multiple platforms and on the other retain support for ageing ones. As a global average, the top 10 devices account for just 52% of total traffic, and many websites have not yet got as far as catering even for all of the top 10. The result is that few providers reach even half their potential customers on a global basis. As a result Netbiscuits recommends a twin track approach to mobile brands, on the one hand ensuring services or products are future proof and to support the principle leading edge devices, while also catering for the long established devices that still make up the majority of the market.
This means on the one hand that a mobile web site can get away with supporting fewer devices in a given market, but also implies that those with global ambitions will find it harder to deliver a consistent joined up experience everywhere and will face high costs. The Netbiscuits survey notes that in Australia, which is heavily dominated by Apple and Nokia, there were no Android devices in the top ten list for traffic in April 2013. Meanwhile across the Middle East and Africa, Apple was not the vendor of the top device for accessing the mobile web, here being surpassed by both Nokia and BlackBerry. Apple is also less dominant than elsewhere in Latin America, and this region is the most fragmented of all with only 35% of traffic generated by the top 10 devices.
There is every sign of the fragmentation getting worse, split not just between different types of smartphone and tablet, but also with new form factors emerging, again the consequence of innovation. One new category is the hybrid device sitting between the smartphone and tablet, coming in from both sides. Examples include HTC’s 5 inch Butterfly S ‘phablet’ and the 6.4 inch screen Sony Xperia Z Ultra, along with the 5.55 inch Samsung Galaxy Note 2. These can be seen as the obvious meeting in the middle as smartphones increase in size, while tablets diminish, but the practical outcome is a blurring of categories into a continuum of screen sizes from the smallest handsets to the largest TV displays. There is also a blurring between tablets, laptops and netbooks. The aim there is to combine the workhouse functionality of the computer with the easy intuitive browsing, near instant boot-up and TV watching of the tablet.
Samsung for example has announced its Ativ Tab 3, a 10.1 inch Windows 8 device with 2 GB RAM, with Microsoft Office Home and Student edition pre-loaded, and a cover that doubles as a stand and slim keyboard, holding the device via magnets attached to its base. This is almost more a laptop doubling as a tablet, but Samsung has gone a step further and developed a true hybrid with its 13 inch Ativ Q, which runs both Windows 8 for the office productivity applications and Android 4.22 more suited to browsing and content consumption.
At the smartphone end there are also true camera hybrids emerging, rather than just phones that take admittedly ever better quality pictures, Samsung’s 13 inch Ativ Q being an example.
There is also the relatively new category of wearable devices stimulated by the Google Glass head-mounted computer driven by natural language commands. Wearable devices so far seem to be more accessories complementing smart phones, such as Sony’s SmartWatch 2, the first smart watch with near-field communication capability.
The emergence of hybrid devices should serve as a health check on some of the analysis and predictions in surveys such as Netbiscuit’s. One such finding is that the traditional smartphone is now in decline when it is just that its functionality is being subsumed by other devices, which is really just taking things forward by delivering better quality video on bigger screens for example.
Similarly the predicted demise of the PC has to be seen against the emergence of devices that do incorporate a traditional keyboard and office productivity software in some guise or other. Gartner may project sales of tablets to grow by almost 70% in 2013 compared to 2012, while traditional PC sales are forecast to fall by more than 10%, but it is unclear to which of these categories those two new Samsung laptop/tablet hybrids are assigned. What is certain is that laptop makers can no longer get away with devices that are slow to boot up and prone to crashing. To some extent tablets are carrying the mobile phone switch on experience up to PCs.