Google has today given iOS users a taste of one of my favourite parts about Android. The Google Search application has been updated in the iTunes App Store, giving iPhones and iPads the ability to utilize the power of Google Now.
Google Now is basically Google’s pre-emptive search tool, with the power to also act as your personal assistant for things you didn’t know that you want to know – if that makes sense. Google Now will pick up on recent searches and understand what you’re trying to learn, discover or find and tailor a custom experience for that. It also has the power (if expressively granted by yourself) to preemptively warn you if your upcoming flight is delayed or …

Research has grounded today from firm Telsyte, that has analysed the difference in numbers of Android vs iOS running phones in Australia. And, well, the numbers are likely to put a smile on your dial.

It appears as though Android has finally toppled iOS in Australia, bringing Apple fans to their knees – kind of. The numbers suggest that of the 10 million smartphones in Australia (almost one for every two people!) 44% are running Android and 43% are running iOS. As TheAge points out, it’s a huge increase from the 6% that Android held back in 2010.

Foad Fadaghi, Telsyte analyst said:

Lower prices, faster product cycles and carrier support has helped Android become the leading platform.

There’s no …

So, we all love Android and we know it. The question is – how much does the rest of the world love Android?

A few months back we heard that the numbers had jumped from around 57.5% (from last year) to about 62% of the world’s market share. Now, however, the mighty little green man has managed to climb up another 13 percentage points and take control of three quarters of all smartphones around the globe – pretty great numbers. Dive into these wonderful numbers:

The numbers show some really incredible figures – in fact, astounding numbers. To think that Android is so very dominant right now is amazing and a great tribute for the guys and gals over at …

More numbers keep flying in for this years OEMs with profit reports, market share reports and other little goodies here and there. While Samusng appears to be killing the rest of the OEMs in terms of smartphone shipments and profits, this may not be the case for tablets.

Strategy Analytics has crunched some numbers and come up with the following.

While it is quite clear that Apple are leading the way, Peter King, Director at Strategy Analytics was decidedly disappointed in Apple’s shipments. While they jumped from 11.1 million to 14 million year over year, this wasn’t a great enough increase. This is compared to Android’s jump from 5 million to 10.2 million shipments, indicating that Apple’s improvement was minor …

On Friday Telstra made an interesting status update. It appears as though the Telstra 24×7 app has been downloaded 250,000 times on Android and iOS devices, which is really quite a remarkable number.

But you know what’s not so remarkable? It appears that the Telstra 24×7 app has been downloaded many more on iOS devices than it has been on Android. After seeing this status update I decided to check how many times Android users have downloaded the app on Google Play.

It turns out that the Telstra 24×7 app for Android has accumulated 10,000-50,000 downloads, meaning that the iOS version must have the remaining 200,000+. After Telstra has seemingly been going more and more Android, it seems strange …

The latest posted statistics from app tracking company Flurry indicate that (iOS and Android) smartphones is the fastest adopted technology in history. Flurry gathers its statistics from over 200,000 different iOS and Android apps, running on an estimated 640 million devices worldwide.

According to their numbers, penetration of these devices has increased 10 times faster than PCs during the ‘80s, 2 times times faster than the Internet during the ‘90s and 3 times faster than social networks more recently.

Among their results is this figure, which shows the countries with the highest penetration of iOS and Android smartphones in people between the ages of 15 and 64.

Significantly, Australia, with 79% penetration, has the highest penetration of any country with …

Editors Note: While the below piece is not specifically about Android, it draws interesting comparisons between Android and the iPhone. It is an interesting take on the iPhone and how Apple market/produce the iPhone to compete with other vendors. 

With the highly anticipated release of the iPhone 5 many consumers are holding off resigning contracts with their telco providers. This comes down the fact that consumers are banking on the iPhone 5 taking the smartphone game to the next level. Having worked in the mobile phone industry since the beginning of the smartphone era I believe that the next generation iPhone will not offer any hardware that is not currently available already in other devices. The iPhone 5 will simply …

It’s almost that time of the year again – the new iPhone is about to be announced. What does that mean for Android? It means a whole bunch of poor iPhone users’ contracts are ending and (assuming that they have seen the light) will be switching to our favourite operating system as they re-sign contracts. We are often asked what apps a new comer needs to make the switch to Android, so I asked the Android Australia team for recommendations and in turn put together the following list of essential apps.

Android has grown quarter by quarter by a 15% point increase, jumping up to 68.1% of the total smartphone market share. This is a huge milestone for our favourite OS and really puts it ahead of the lowly iOS figures. Apple’s closed-source OS dropped from a stable 23% to 16.9% over the same time period.

Who’s to thank, though? It appears as though Samsung’s incredible sales over the last few months are what have really pushed Android to this extreme height. We recently reported that Samsung has claimed nearly $6 billion in profit for Q2 2012 and sold over 10 million Galaxy S IIIs. Wow, just wow.

What’s really quite astounding is that just one year ago Symbian commanded 16.9% …

This is something really quite cool. Google have today updated Google Search on mobiles to allow you to search via handwriting!

To enable the feature, just visit google.com from your mobile web browser. Visit the search settings tab and enable ‘Handwriting’ – boom, presto – you’re done.

Handwriting allows you to simply write anywhere on the page and it will automatically be placed into the search field. It seems pretty useful for when you’re spelling out long or strange names that your keyboard’s auto-correct would generally change. Or, if you’re just trying to show your friends how awesome Google really is.

If you can’t fit all the writing in, Google will automatically predict what you were going to say – …

One of our favourite apps – ever – is now out of beta. Google’s Chrome browser has finally shed the beta tag with its latest update, making it a more-polished and overall usable browser. If there’s one thing you can trust Google to do well, it’s to bring things out of beta at just the right time. And that’s just what they’ve done.

This is a big day for Chrome

Google Chrome for Android is now not only out of beta but is also the default browser on the new Nexus 7 tablet. We can also safely assume that from here on in it will be the default browser on all Jelly Bean devices, replacing the ill-fated Android ‘Browser.’

Oh, …

Biggie up to Samsung this week for the release of Samsung Easy Phone Sync for iOS. This nifty new app is available free with the purchase of any Samsung Android device and will help navigate the final frontier – the gap between iOS and Android.

In an effort to lure customers away from Apple’s iPhone, the app has been released, which once installed onto the iPhone, will interface with a desktop app on the users computer (PC or Mac) to transfer files, photos, contacts and other user data to the computer and then to the new Samsung phone.

Here is the Samsung press release:

SAMSUNG CUSTOMERS NOW ABLE TO TRANSFER CONTENT FROM IOS TO ANDROID FOR FREE

Exclusive licensing agreement

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