Information Week online has a nice summary graph and article showing what appear to be trends in mobile operating system adoption. Apple’s still dominant with 56%, but that is falling from 70%. Only Android shows growth and that growth is substantial – now at 25%.
Although it’s now clear that Smartphones are a key global browsing tool and that this use will grow explosively, it is not clear if Apple can retain their dominance in this market – perhaps with price drops on the iPhone or other innovations that may bring Apple devices into the price points demanded by many late adopters.
BigDeal.com is a strange website that really begs for more explanation from the founders about their motivation, though I think it can be summed up as a way to try to disguise gambling as shopping.
My first reaction to the site was to be impressed – at first glance BigDeal is along the lines of an “auction” where participants bid on items as a clock ticks down. Adding 30 seconds to the clock for bids near the end of the timeout period seemed to make it more fair, allowing others to participate.
The incredibly low pricing on things like iPads seemed too good to be true and alas as with most things internet … it was not only too good to be true, it almost seems too bad to be legal.
Participation in this auction is the junky part of BigDeal, because *it costs to bid*, and it can cost a lot. Participants purchase “bid tokens” for 0.75 per token. Since auctions can have an unlimited number of bids the low prices the products finally sell for are not very relevant – bidders may have spent even more than the *full price* on the item simply getting in their bids. BigDeal mitigates this disadvantage to some degree by offering some bidders credits on bid tokens to then purchase items for full price, but I think an average item fetches them a remarkable amount in bid revenue – sometimes far more than the full value of the item.
So Big Deal is not so much shopping as it is gambling. Bidding is betting here, and your odds of winding up with a “big deal” … do not appear to be good at all.
Update: Here’s an January article from TechCrunch that addresses the issues very well in my opinion.
PC World has compared the iPad and the new Samsung Galaxy Tab with this great comparison chart.
PC World seems to feel the Galaxy is the first real competitor to Apple’s iPad even though that’s not really true at all – e.g. the Dell Streak.
At fist glance the Galaxy Tab really seems superior with phone capabilities, lighter weight, and two cameras vs the iPad’s zero.
However it’s never clear the the legions of Apple’s enthusiastic customers would stray from the mother brand, and many products have flamed out assuming that unlikely scenario. Still, it seems that Apple’s brilliancies in the iPhone and iPad are starting to be duplicated here, with the EVO phone, and with arguably superior form and function, so the future, as usual, remains uncertain.
Maximum PC has an update on one of the stars of last year’s Consumer Electronics Show – the Lenovo U1 hybrid that offered a combination notebook and tablet computer in one slick shell. Like many who handled this last year at CES we were really impressed, but the planned release in June never materialized and rumors were that Lenova had discontinued the project – perhaps due to price pressure from the Apple iPad which released at far lower cost than most analysts anticipated.
However it now appears that Lenovo’s amazing U1 has been resurrected and will release in China next year. We’ll hope to have more about this during our CES 2011 coverage coming soon.
