UIEvolution

Our November Issue of Mobile Connect focuses on Tablets. The UIE design team delves into the importance of the user experience and how tablet design has evolved and developed a new niche of multimedia exploration.

This month’s feature article on “The Importance of Doing Things Right” is written by the head of Quality Assurance at UIEvolution. Also included are featured devices, a data point on tablet shopping activities, and an overview of our newly released Mobile Connect Magazine App.

You can download this app on iTunes or the Android Market and read Mobile Connect on your tablet.

The focus of the September issue of Mobile Connect is ecosystems. In the progressive technology world, businesses must focus on more than simply a product. Our feature story examines “a new business model” from a CEO adapting to the capricious marketplace.

In the cover story, Tara Peters and Jim Bogar explain how Quick Response codes work, creative applications for using QR codes, and how mobile scanning can influence marketing strategy. ENJOY!

Scan this QR code on your phone to take the PDF with you on your mobile device. 

The August Issue of Mobile Connect focuses on tablets. We break down Google’s “Honeycomb” operating system designed specifically for tablet use, and explore the new scenes of tablet application: soon you will see the tech-gear for rent in sports stadiums, on airplanes, and in luxury hotel rooms.

We provide the top 12 smartphones and tablets currently available for purchase and layout a timeline of what happened this month, and what events are quickly approaching.

The focus of the July issue of Mobile Connect is smartphones. Smartphone OS fragmentation has made it challenging to deploy native apps across all devices. Because of that, companies and developers are considering relying on mobile web as an alternate strategy to developing native apps.

The cover story this month is “Native App or Mobile Web”. Travis Beaven, COO of UIE, discusses the ongoing debate between Native Applications and Mobile Web, the dream of “write once, run everywhere”, and the important factors to consider when developing a mobile strategy.

With iPad 2 sales continuing to stack up, the International Data Corp (IDC) raised its estimates for 2011 tablet shipments from 50.4 million units to 53.5 million units.

This coincides with our first issue of Mobile Connect, suggesting that 2011 will be “The Year of the Tablet“

The focus of our June issue of Mobile Connect is connected screens. Consumers expect to be able to create their own rich experience on any screen, including their computer, smartphone, tablet, television, and connected car head unit.

Our feature article asks whether televisions will be the next connected screen and discusses why the new Smart TV model will finally usher in the long promised era of interactive television.

Enjoy! – UIE Mobile Connect Team

2011 was expected to be “The Year of the Tablet.”  CES seemed to confirm that belief in January, as over 100 new tablets were unveiled as challengers to Apple’s iPad.

Motorola’s powerful Xoom led the way among Android tablets, boasting a 10.1” display powered by a dual core 1 GHz processor running Honeycomb, the first version of Android designed specifically for tablets.  RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook was also a favorite, packing 4G power and HTML5 support into a 7” format.

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Quoted on UIE’s site last year:  “By 2011, phone shipments with touch screens are forecasted to reach 178 million users.” New projections for 2011 raise the number to 450 million units, and this number is in sales, not shipped products. The International Data Corporation (IDC) stated in a recent press release that, “the smartphone market will grow more than four times faster than the overall mobile phone market” this year. With a 49% increase in the use of smartphones, which operating system will come out on top?

Android is predicted to take a firm hold on the market, with nearly 40% of the market share, only to increase over the next five years.  This move overtakes the Symbian OS operating system’s past performance used by Nokia. Blackberry and Apple’s iOS fall in line behind Android and Symbian for now, but with Nokia announcing a switch to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone OS, the future of the smartphone market may take a turn. Senior research analyst with the IDC, Ramon Llamas, states, “up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share while other operating systems have brought forth new and appealing experiences. The new alliance brings together Nokia’s hardware capabilities and Windows Phone’s differentiated platform. We expect the first devices to launch in 2012” and by 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to come in second worldwide after the Andriod operating system.

With the introduction of The Daily by Newscorp, I believe that we are beginning to see some of the first real media and content  (non-gaming) investments into the made exclusively for mobile space.  With 100’s of million of Tablets and Smartphones set to enter the market in the next few years, I think that the market will see other media companies willing to take larger risks to create new experiences for these devices.

Here are the 4 things that I think make this application important: See the Full Post »

Bloomberg reports that Android increased its market share in tablets in the fourth quarter to 22% of overall global sales.  While it is a distant second to Apple’s iPad at 77%, the market share was an increase from 2.3% in the third quarter.

This shows that new Android tablets from Samsung, Motorola, and Acer have hit the market and had some immediate success.  Also given the volume of new announced devices at CES and the price points that should be lower than iPad, its probable that by next year at this time Android will be the leader in both the tablet and Smartphone markets.