Samsung dominates smartphone market, outdoing Apple at their own game

Samsung’s smartphone market share has apparently increased to 28%, leaving behind Apple at 17%. 

This is surprising given Apple’s recent launch of the iPhone 5, no wait, 4.1/4+/4G/S/G (or whatever it’s called). Maybe next quarter’s numbers will show some increase for Apple.

Android sales continue to surge ahead at 500,000 a day worldwide since June, and that ‘growing at 4.4% week after week’ comment still has people speculating at that rate assuming it remains constant, there’s a possibility of hitting 1,000,000 a day any time soon…

Android device activations possibly approaching 1,000,000 a day?

In June this year, Google announced it was seeing 550,000 Android activations a day, and was seeing the rate increate at 4% each week.

Assuming the rate of increase is constant, someone has crunched the numbers and projected at this rate by this month (October), there would be 1,000,000 activations of Android devices EVERY DAY. That’s incredible. No confirmation at this point from Google, but when you think about it, even 550,000 a day is still a mind boggling number (and far ahead of iOS activations at around 300,000 a day).

Want a better Siri than the iPhone 4S’s Siri?

The funny thing about all the fuss with the voice commands on the new iPhone 4S with Siri is that phones have had voice control for a few years now. It just took Apple to make it amazing and cool and open everyone’s eyes to the fact that you don’t need to use a tiny keyboard on a phone to input characters. I had voice actions on a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone back in in 2007/2008. It worked but it wasn’t that impressive. It worked over a bluetooth headset though, so you could say ‘call so-and-so at home’ and it would get the job done. It also had ‘tell me the time’ which I used to use while driving, just because I could. The fact that you had to say it about 4 times before it got what you were saying was another thing.

Android phones have had Google Voice Actions built in since 2008 – see here. Works pretty well for accessing most features, sending texts, sending emails, making calls etc. Not to be left out on the Siri party I found another app in the Market called ‘Voice Actions’ by Pannous. The hilarious thing about this app is that it responds to questions on general knowledge topics and gives you a pretty good answer. Questions like:

  • what’s the distance from the earth to the moon?
  • how long does it take for the moon to orbit the earth?
  • how many degrees fahrenheit are there in 100 degrees centigrade
  • why is the sky blue?

It also has a bunch of other odd features, like asking it ‘what noise does a dog make’ will play barking sounds, as it does for other animals. Asking it to ‘paint a picture of …’ and then listing some objects will show clip art pictures of the objects you mention and you can drag them around the screen. Pretty neat.

So sorry Siri to steal your thunder, but you’re not new, you’re not even that good. Apple’s marketing and ability to promote product features on the other hand is second to none.