BlueStacks recently published an infographic illustrating the main characteristics of the typical user profile of Android. Although the results cannot be considered as scientific, they provide interesting insights to contextualize the average user of Android.

Concerning the triple User, Platform, Environment, typically applied to define context information, from this infographic, some of the main characteristics of an Android user can be highlighted:

• User: 37% reported to wear glasses; 62% reported to use Android to play, and 38% to work; 13% reported to have more than 50 applications on their phone, 33% have only free applications on their phone
• Platform: 9% reported to own an Android tablet, but not an Android phone
• Environment: 36% reported to be Americans, 28% Asians and 27% Europeans

The average monthly data usage of an Android user is 582 Mb. Furthermore, the graphic also reports more specific information about the users, such as clothing style, and biometric data.

The infographic, generated by BlueStacks, was originally published at: http://bluestacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/mr-android-big-new.jpg in December 2011. The data used were obtained as a courtesy of Nielsen research in collaboration with Facebook users that are fans of BlueStacks App Player for PC.

Vision Mobile has just published a technical report entitled  ”Mobile Platforms: The Clash of Ecosystems”. In this report the most important mobile platforms are presented and trending topics, ranging from technical to marketing domains, are discussed.

Here we will briefly highlight some of interesting points of the report, however the complete document is freely available online.

• Smartphones represent a growing proportion of device sales in global markets. Although there is a wide variation: smartphones shipment penetration varies from nearly 65% in USA and over 50% in Europe to 17% in Latin America and 18% in Africa / Middle East, smartphones are taking a growing proportion of device sales in more cost-sensitive markets all over the world.
• App stores (e.g. Apple App Store and Google Android Market) control ecosystems and not profit from content: app stores have become the main distribution channel between developers and consumers in recent years. App stores are not only able to reach more consumers, but also to accelerate the applications delivery and payment.
• HTML5 has potential to work as a cross-platform technology for smartphones: HTML5 along with the recently launched CSS3 and more efficient JavaScript engines, has the potential to greatly increase the functionality of web applications requiring fewer lines of code
• App innovations chosen by users pushes mobile operators around value-added services, core messaging, and voice services: more and more people are able to start to write mobile applications, and communication applications pushes telecom services
• Consistency is key for the success of an application platform: applications must run on all implementations of the platform. A software platform, in contrast, needs flexibility, allowing it to fit the requirements of a wide range of product variants and reach supply-side economies of scale
• The user interfaces and applications, and not the hardware features, are driving the handset sales
• Application platforms (e.g. iOS and Android) are able to attract huge financial investments of developers, investors and brands

The smartphone OS market leadership is currently divided between Apple iOS and Google Android. iOS and Android triumph not only because of technological sophistication, but also because of the strength of their application ecosystems. They exemplify successful application platforms because they were carefully designed to connect both: users and developers. Apple is pointed as the staple for smartphone device specifications, user experience, ecosystem, browser capabilities and content. Android, on the other hand, comes from a company experienced in connecting online users and advertisers.

“For end-users, the new applications add value to the platform. And for developers, the platform gains value with each and every new end-user.”

Gartner says Android to command nearly half of Worldwide Smartphone Operating System market by year-end 2012.

Worldwide smartphone sales will reach 468 million units in 2011, a 57.7 percent increase from 2010, according to Gartner Inc. By the end of 2011, Android will move to become the most popular operating system (OS) worldwide and will build on its strength to account for 49 percent of the smartphone market by 2012.

Sales of open OS devices will account for 26 percent of all mobile handset device sales in 2011, and are expected to surpass the 1 billion mark by 2015, when they will account for 47 percent of the total mobile device market.

“By 2015, 67 percent of all open OS devices will have an average selling price of $300 or below, proving that smartphones have been finally truly democratized,” said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

“As vendors delivering Android-based devices continue to fight for market share, price will decrease to further benefit consumers”, Ms. Cozza said. “Android’s position at the high end of the market will remain strong, but its greatest volume opportunity in the longer term will be in the mid- to low-cost smartphones, above all in emerging markets.

This content was extracted from Gartner Inc. The original article can be accessed at: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1622614

jQuery has long been a popular JavaScript library for creating rich interactive websites and web apps. However, since it was designed primarily for desktop browsers, it doesn’t have many features specifically designed for building mobile web apps.

jQuery Mobile is a new project that addresses this shortfall. It’s a framework built on top of jQuery that provides a range of user interface elements and features for you to use in your mobile apps. The first alpha version of the framework was released in October, 2010.

In the article “JQuery Mobile: What can it do for you” the key features and benefits of jQuery Mobile are presented and illustrated with examples of how this framework can help the implementation of top-quality mobile apps. The content includes page structure, transitions, buttons, dialogs, formatting, forms, lists, theming, and events.

This article explores the jQuery Mobile library, and remarks how it can save a lot of time and effort in the development of mobile web apps. Although it’s currently in the first version, and a bit rough round the edges, it’s perfectly possible to start creating apps.

According to Dianne Hackborn, Android 3.0 has important goals in order to facilitate the implementation of scalable applications concerning different screen sizes. For example:

• Since the beginning, Android’s UI framework has been designed around the use of layout managers, allowing UIs to be described in a way that will adjust to the space available. A common example is a ListView whose height changes depending on the size of the screen, which varies a bit between QVGA, HVGA, and WVGA aspect ratios.
• Android 1.6 introduced a new concept of screen densities, making it easy for apps to scale between different screen resolutions when the screen is about the same physical size. Developers immediately started using this facility when higher-resolution screens were introduced, first on Droid and then on other phones.
• Android 1.6 also made screen sizes accessible to developers, classifying them into buckets: “small” for QVGA aspect ratios, “normal” for HVGA and WVGA aspect ratios, and “large” for larger screens. Developers can use the resource system to select between different layouts based on the screen size.

The combination of layout managers and resource selection based on screen size goes a long way towards helping developers build scalable UIs for the variety of Android devices we want to enable. As a result, many existing handset applications Just Work under Honeycomb on full-size tablets, without special compatibility modes, with no changes required. However, as we move up into tablet-oriented UIs with 10-inch screens, many applications also benefit from a more radical UI adjustment than resources can easily provide by themselves.

Fragmentation for all!

For developers starting work on tablet-oriented applications designed for Android 3.0, the new Fragment API is useful for many design situations that arise from the larger screen. Reasonable use of fragments should also make it easier to adjust the resulting application’s UI to new devices in the future as needed — for phones, TVs, or wherever Android appears.

However, the immediate need for many developers today is probably to design applications that they can provide for existing phones while also presenting an improved user interface on tablets. With Fragment only being available in Android 3.0, their shorter-term utility is greatly diminished.

To address this, Android team plans to have the same fragment APIs (and the new LoaderManager as well) available as a static library for use with older versions of Android; they are trying to go right back to 1.6. In fact, if you compare the other code examples to those in the Android 3.0 SDK, they are slightly different. The goal is to make these APIs nearly identical, so you can start using them now and, at whatever point in the future you switch to Android 3.0 as your minimum version, move to the platform’s native implementation with few changes in your app.

They don’t have a firm date for when this library will be available, but it should be relatively soon. In the meantime, you can start developing with fragments on Android 3.0 to see how they work, and most of that effort should be transferable.

This content is adapted from Android Developers website. The original article and further information can be reached at: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/android-30-fragments-api.html