Majority of U.S. Mobile Users Rely on Smartphones, Rather than Feature phones, to Access Mobile Web

Smartphones now have surpassed feature phones as the devices U.S. mobile users rely on to access the mobile Internet, Nielsen reports.

Games, Music, Social Networking, News and Maps Top Smartphone Downloads

About 21 percent of American wireless subscribers had a smartphone in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 19 percent in the previous quarter and significantly higher than the 14 percent at the end of 2008.

About 14 percent of mobile subscribers have downloaded an app in the last 30 days. Games, music and social networking apps seem to be high on the list for both smartphone and feature phone users.

News and map applications get much higher use by smartphone users.
link

New BlackBerry Consumer Phone

MultiMedia Intelligence projects worldwide unit shipments of multimedia feature-rich mobile phones will exceed 300 million units in 2008, outnumbering shipments of TV sets.

Multimedia phones have at least 1 megapixal image capture, MP3 audio, video playback, Java, USB, Bluetooth, 16-bit screen color, QVGA resolution, WAP and MMS. Revenue from these handsets will be over $76 billion.

Numbers that large are a reason why Research in Motion will be launching new consumer-focused devices in the first quarter next year. The 9000 series is described by Carmi Levy, an analyst at AR Communications Inc. , as "the future of the BlackBerry franchise," a complete breakaway from the device's business roots. Instead, the new series targets the consumer space served by the Pearl and Curve models.

"The 9000 is supposed to be a touch-screen device, very similar in form factor to the iPhone," Levy says. "Which means that it is not an enterprise-friendly device."

The 9000 series will break from the traditional half-screen, half-keyboard look of the BlackBerry. The handsets will also incorporate an upgraded multimedia system, along with the standard push email capabilities.

Levy speculates that RIM will introduce the 9000 series in the first quarter of next year.

Among the updates will be "a Curve with WiFi," according to Levy. These devices may have other updates like GPS location tracking and higher resolution on-board cameras as well.

Heavy Text on iPhone? Not so Accurate

You probably would have guessed this would be the case: User Centric, Inc., a Chicago-based usability consultancy, says iPhone owners can enter text just as rapidly as a BlackBerry user can, but the error rate for iPhone users is higher, and significantly higher for longer messages.

While iPhone owners made an average of 5.6 errors/message on their own phone, hard-key QWERTY owners made an average of 2.1 errors/message on their own phone. Nor does it appear experience makes that much difference. Though User Centric found that experienced iPhone users could type faster, they made as many mistakes as users who never had touched an iPhone before.

Participants who had previously not used either a hard-key QWERTY phone or an iPhone also were significantly faster at entering text messages on the hard-key QWERTY test phone than on the iPhone. These participants also made significantly fewer errors on the hard-key QWERTY than on the iPhone.

Numeric phone owners made an average of 5.4 errors/message on the iPhone, 1.2 errors/message on the QWERTY test phone, and 1.4 errors/message on their own phone.

The study involved data from 60 participants who were asked to enter specific text messages and complete several mobile device tasks. Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners who owned their phones for at least one month. Twenty more participants were owners of traditional hard-key QWERTY phones and another twenty were owners of numeric phones who used the “multi-tap” method of text entry.

Each participant entered six fixed-length text messages on their own phone.
Non-iPhone owners also did six messages each on the iPhone and a phone of the “opposite” type.

The opposite phone for numeric phone owners was a Blackberry and for hard-key QWERTY phone owners it was a numeric Samsung E300 phone. Some participants did additional tasks, including a contact search and add contacts, as time allowed.

iPhone owners entered six text messages on their own phone. They also typed two pangrams – a sentence that includes every letter in the English language at least once – and one corpus – a set of characters that represents the exact letter frequencies of the English language. These tasks were included to ensure that participants experienced the various phone keyboards in a thorough manner. iPhone owners also completed tasks involving text correction, contacts, and visual voicemail

Non-iPhone owners entered a total of 18 text messages – six each on their own phone (hard-key QWERTY or numeric phone), the iPhone, and the “opposite” phone (numeric test phone for QWERTY phone owners, hard-key QWERTY test phone for numeric owners). These participants also entered two pangrams and one corpus on their own phone and completed the contact list tasks if time was remaining.

As it turns out, subjects preferred hard keys for texting. “Not only was their performance better,” says Jen Allen, User Centric user experience specialist, “their rankings and ratings of the phones indicated that they preferred a hard-key QWERTY phone for texting.”

Participants rated the hard-key QWERTY phone highest out of all three phones for ease of text messaging. The hard-key QWERTY phone was also most frequently ranked first out of the three phones by the numeric and QWERTY users. Overall, the hard-key QWERTY phone was ranked first in text messaging by 85 percent of users.

The iPhone was ranked second by 60 percent of these users. None of the hard-key QWERTY phone owners ranked the iPhone first for text messaging and only three numeric phone owners ranked the iPhone first.

In general, hit rates for all keys on the iPhone keyboard were consistently 90 percent or higher. The average hit rate was about 95 percent.

But participants repeatedly pressed certain keys when they intended instead to press other adjacent keys. Several iPhone keys had high error rates: Q (66 percent), P (27 percent), J (22 percent), X (21 percent), and Z (15 percent). In contrast, the median false alarm rate across the iPhone entire keyboard was 5.48 percent.

iPhone keys with the highest false alarm rates were those in close proximity to the five most frequently used letters in the English language: E, T, A, O, and I.

In addition to the high false alarm letters listed above, other false alarm letters included W (10 percent), R (6.5 percent), Y (8.7 percent), and S (6.0 percent), which are also adjacent to high-frequency letters.

B (8.2 percent) also had a high false alarm rate, potentially because of its location near the letter N (which is the sixth most frequent letter, User Centric says.

On the hard-key QWERTY keyboard, the hit rates for all keys were above 97 percent, except for V (96 percent). Additionally, the false alarm rates for keys on this keyboard were below three percent, with the exception of Q (8 percent).

Performance on the keyboard was much better than on the iPhone keyboard. The letters with higher false alarm rates were similar on both keyboards, involving many of the 5 least frequently used letters in the English language, such as Q, Z, V, and B.

Also, the Q and P keys were problematic for users of both keyboards, suggesting that the issue for these keys arises from their location near the top edges of the keyboards.

Participants made different types of errors on the iPhone and the hard-key QWERTY phones.

The majority of errors made on the iPhone involved substituting a nearby letter for the intended letter. However, on the QWERTY phone, participants made more insertion and omission errors than substitution errors.

Also, many of the substitution errors that were made on the QWERTY keyboards involved swapping the order of the correct letters in the words, such as typing “stomr” instead of “storm”.

Compared to hard-key QWERTY devices, the iPhone may fall short for consumers who use on their mobile device heavily for email and text messaging, says User Centric.

The iPhone was clearly associated with higher text entry error rates than a hard-key QWERTY phone.

The finding that iPhone owners made more texting errors on iPhones than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts (on their own QWERTY phones) suggests that the iPhone may have a higher fundamental error rate. The iPhone’s predictive and corrective text features do alleviate some of the errors users make while texting, but it does not catch them all.

The touch screen obviously is an elegant interface for some tasks. It just doesn't appear to be the best interface for all tasks. Mutlitap and touch screen will work fine for many people. Others will find QWERTY keyboards the only way to go.

Skype Phone Coming

One mobile device trend is the creation of "cross over" devices that meld feature phones big on media with "work" phones optimized for email. But there's another trend: creation of new devices that are optimized for one particular application or use mode. Add the new Skype phone to that bucket.

Skype plans to introduce the phone in the countries where mobile carrier "3" operates. 3 is the mobile venture of Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. and operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Sweden and United Kingdom.

The whole point here is to optimize the phone for Skype, making it as easy as possible to use on a mobile device. If BlackBerry is "email in your pocket," and iPhone is "Web and music in your pocket," then the new device is "Skype in your pocket."

Microsoft iPhone Competitor?

Since every other manufacturer of handhelds has been scrambling to create new devices that can compete with Apple's iPhone, it is only logical that Microsoft will do so as well. SoMindy Mount, corporate vice president and CFO for Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, says it's not "unreasonable" to think that Microsoft will integrate photo, music, and touchscreen features into a Windows Mobile product in the future.

Microsoft's idea with Windows Mobile has been to move everyday business capabilities, such as accessing e-mail, from the PC to the mobile device. However, "Being able to do pictures and music is something that consumers are going to want, so it's a natural thing for us to want in our product road map," she says.