IPhone accounts for more than 80 percent of AT&T smartphone sales:

AT&T posted its fourth quarter results for 2011 on Thursday and highlighted smartphone sales in particular, which reached a record high of 9.4 million devices, beating the standing company record by 50 percent. Apple should be very happy with those results, too, since 7.6 million, or 80.9 percent, of those smartphones were iPhones.

So 80% – eighty per cent! - of the smartphones AT&T sold were iPhones. More than 50% of the smartphones Verizon sold were iPhones. Yes, this was a quarter with a fair amount of pent-up demand for iPhones, given the “delay” to the iPhone 4S, but remember that phone buyers tend to have to wait until their contracts run out before buying – something which tends to smooth out the spikes a little.

UPDATE: As the inestimable Richard Gaywood pointed out to me on Twitter, this is conflating two types of figure: 9.4m smartphone sold and 7.6m iPhones activated. You might not think there’s much difference, but there is: activations include second-hand iPhones, hand-me-downs, and so on. That doesn’t meant that Apple didn’t make AT&T very happy bunnies, but it does mean that it’s less than 80%. How much less? No one outside of AT&T really knows.

(Via jkOnTheRun)

Page Rage: Why Twitter Doesn’t Work Better on Android:

A well-placed source tells us that Google’s Android team was supposed to meet with Twitter at CES about how to make Twitter work better on Android. Then, the Search Plus Your World controversy began. Eric Schmidt claimedthat Google couldn’t index Twitter and Facebook properly because those companies don’t allow Twitter to access their data. Twitter openly refuted this: The reality is Google’s bots hit Twitter hundreds of millions of times per day, sending 1,500 queries per second. Google has those Tweets, whether Twitter likes it or not.

The Google brain trust was so irritated with Twitter’s statements that the Android meeting was abruptly called off, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. There’s still no sign of the meeting being rescheduled.

 

I’m not even going to think about quoting “Don’t be evil” here. Nope, no, no.

(The ironic thing is that I actually like Google’s new direction. I think it makes total sense for the company and will probably, in the long run, lead to better products for users. I just wish they’d never gone down the fluffy-bunny-open-hyperama in the first place.)

(Via PandoDaily)

Google, five months ago:

“A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.”

Google, today:

“Google specifically gave permission for Motorola Mobility (MMI) to file a new lawsuit against Apple over its iPhone 4S and iCloud products, according to an analysis of the takeover agreement in which the search giant aims to buy the struggling mobile maker.”

John Gruber on the difference between Android users and iOS users:

The truth is, the average Android user is not the same as an average iPhone user. iPhone users surf the web more, they’re more willing to buy software, they’re more willing to install and use apps. Some of these stats aren’t even close. What I see as the fundamental flaw in the Church of Market Share doctrine is the assumption that users are users. That one platform with, say, 40 percent market share, must be in a stronger position than another platform with, say, 20 percent market share, simply and inherently on the basis that a larger number of users is better, period. What Apple has shown with the Mac, and now with the iPhone and iPad, is that all users are not equivalent.

John’s completely right. To give you a historical example that I’m very familiar with, consider the Mac market back when I first started as a journalist in 1995. Then, Apple was floating along with perhaps 3% of the overall computer market – and yet, in the UK alone, the eco-system surrounding the Mac was large enough to support three (and occasionally four) big, thick magazines with plenty of advertising.

Back then, Mac users were not the same as Windows users: they spent more, and bought more peripherals and software. Big companies spent a lot of money on ads chasing their money. Even Microsoft earned more per-user from its Mac customers than its Windows ones.

The problem back then was that Apple itself wasn’t in a healthy state, but the wider market was huge and profitable for the third parties that made software and hardware.

Gruber:

It is that the consumer is Google’s product. Android is a delivery system to serve the consumer to Google’s target market — the advertisers. So Google’s customer for Android is not the consumer (with the arguable exception of the Nexus phones), but rather the carriers.

He’s right, and he’s wrong. It’s a bit like saying “magazines are the delivery system to serve the consumer to advertisers” – it’s true, in a literal sense, but it makes absolutely no difference to the qualities of the product itself. Why? Because, like magazines, if the product isn’t attractive to consumers, it won’t attract them enough for it to also be a viable “delivery system” for advertisers. The moment you stop thinking that your customer is the consumer, you’ll fail to make a product that works for your real customer (the advertiser).

Just like magazines, in order for it to be attractive to consumers, Google has to forget that Android is a delivery system for advertisers. Just as magazines developed the “Chinese wall” system that kept advertising and editorial apart, so Google has to have a Chinese wall between the people who develop Android and advertising. Google, like Apple, has to solely focus on the needs of consumers.

I’ve recently been using a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9, one of the newest generation of Android tablets running Honeycomb (an Ice Cream Sandwich update is in the pipeline. Even though it’s not significantly cheaper than the 10.1in Tab, I got it because of the different form factor: it’s significantly lighter and easier to carry around than the iPad I already use, and makes a nice contrast to the bigger tablets.

However, it also illustrates the issues with using an interface which is designed for larger screens on a smaller touch screen. Some of the applications which are designed specifically for Honeycomb have controls and buttons which are perfect for touching on a 10.1in screen, but which are just a shade too small to accurately hit on something a couple of inches smaller.

This is a point that Harry McCracken makes very well in his post on how it must be possible to build a good 7in tablet. As Harry puts it:

No, the reason that a 7″ iPad seems unlikely in the short term is because it would only have a shot at greatness if it had an interface and apps designed with a 7″ display in mind. A 7″ tablet isn’t just a big smartphone, and it’s not a tinier 9.7″ tablet. Building a 7″ iPad by essentially making the iPhone’s pixels larger or the iPad’s pixels smaller would be the wrong way to go about it.

Part of the problem that Android tablets face is that the free-form nature of Android development means that any vendor can decide on sizes and simply hack its own version of the operating system on to the tablet. If Android applications then don’t fit properly, it’s not the vendor’s problem. It’s just the user’s

Here’s an early Christmas present for me and for quite a few of my friends and colleagues: Scrivener, the marvellous long-form writing tool for Mac, is coming to iPad and iPhone:

It’s still early days, though – we are about to embark on the design process proper, and all we can say in terms of a release date is that our iPad and iPhone versions will be out some time in 2012

There’s a link to share your ideas about what should be in it too. I know from my perspective the thing I’d like to see are integration with iCloud on both the iOS and Mac side, so that I could seamlessly carry on working on a project no matter where I was.

El Drunko Angryo:

This here is pre­cisely why I say that the pun­di­tards pon­tif­i­cat­ing about how Apple needs to “fix” tele­vi­sion have no fuck­ing clue how the other 99% actu­ally use the fuck­ing thing. The last thing most peo­ple want when sit­ting down to watch the boob tube is a bunch of googaws shit­ting up the sides of the screen and dis­tract­ing from the con­tent. Most peo­ple are unhappy with the crap the net­works already lit­ter the screen with. Fuck, imag­ine try­ing to watch a game on ESPN on one of these mon­strosi­ties. It would be like a Russian Nesting Doll of point­less shit sur­round­ing the action. Fuck, if you want a sec­ondary screen to pull info up on while you’re watch­ing shit, Apple’s got you cov­ered hom­bre.

The whole notion of “internet on a TV” proceeds from the utterly failed idea that what people want is more stuff on the big screen. Only people who live on their own could think this. Suppose I’m watching TV with someone and they want to chat to their friends on Facebook about it, while I (who know that Facebook is Satan) want to Tweet. Who gets to put what on screen? 

People pick up and use second screens because it allows them to do something private and personal while still watching TV socially in a room. Putting the internet stuff on the big screen breaks that. 

Jim Dalrymple:

Technology companies these days are scared to death to make a product that varies too far from Apple does because they fear being left behind. Some companies even go so far as to say that Apple’s inventions were inevitable — if that’s the case why weren’t they done before?

Indeed. Everything looks obvious in hindsight. And it’s fear that makes companies copy, rather than laziness or stupidity. It’s not that companies like Samsung are bad (I love Samsung TVs, for example), it’s simply that when you’re playing catch-up, sometimes the best first step simply to stay in the game is to copy what other people are doing, and rely on customers who want options. In the long run, it will hurt you: but when a company launches a product that creates or redefines an entire category, it’s better to stay in the game with a me-too product in the short term.

Daring Fireball on the Windows Store Revenue Split:

Another big difference from Apple. I wonder though, with the various antitrust agreements Microsoft has made around the world, whether they could even consider an Apple-style “if you use our store, all transactions must go through us” policy.

John’s on to something. Although Microsoft isn’t subject to the same kind of heavyweight formal consent decree that IBM once had, it’s experience with going through anti-trust issues in the past means it has to be particularly careful about what it does and how it does it.