Global mobile split between Apple's iOS and Symbian - Apple Insider

Global mobile split between Apple's iOS and Symbian

By Daniel Eran Dilger

Published: 02:00 PM EST

December began with an blizzard, dumping heavy and dense piles of StatCounter web analytics about mobile users, each offering an apparently contradictory look at which vendors were ahead in the race to blanket the world with mobile devices.

StatCounter's headlines

An initial report on StatCounter's data suggested an American comeback by RIM's BlackBerry, shored up by data that showed RIM grabbing the lead in the US with 34.3 percent of all web traffic from smartphone users, just two years after Apple trounced RIM with three times its presence in US web stats.

Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets explained in a note that RIM's sudden assent in browser stats was "likely on uptake of the release of new BlackBerry [OS] 6 devices (with their improved [Web Kit] browser." He added, "alternatively, it may also reflect how Apple and Android users are doing more apps than browsing on their devices."

Reports of data culled from web analytics firms like StatCounter only take into account web traffic, and aren't able to monitor how phones are being used. They can also offer misleading slices of accurate data that are nearly meaningless to the market because they overrate the importance of a headline-grabbing detail while ignoring surrounding facts of greater significance.

iOS with the iPod touch

Pingdom, a vendor of network server monitoring tools, has supplied its own take on StatCounter's figures with a global look at mobile OS usage. While the first StatCounter report presented data only on smartphones, Pingdom included stats for the iPod touch (but not the iPad) in its iOS figures.

Apple's market position with iPhone is supported by iPod touch sales; long before the company could line up distribution deals for the iPhone with carriers globally, the iPod touch was bundled with other phones by those carriers, introducing their users to the iOS and likely tilting their next phone purchase in favor of the iPhone.

Other mobile device makers also offer iPod touch-like devices, but none have become very popular. Smartphone stats that ignore the iPod touch don't provide a realistic view of the mobile market, and in particular the demand for software specific to a given mobile platform.

For example, while sales of all phones from all manufacturers using some version of Android have overtaken the iPhone in the US, they haven't eclipsed the unified market for all iOS devices, which helps to explain (in part) why Android Market isn't leading in mobile software sales, or attracting the same interest from developers and marketers.

Think globally

Additionally, the US is only one part of the global market for mobile devices. Apple has rapidly rolled out both device sales and its App Store to more countries than Android Market, BlackBerry App World, and Microsoft's previous Windows Marketplace for Mobile or its fledgling Windows Phone 7 app store.

This has enabled Apple to take the market share lead in mobile devices away from Symbian in a variety of key markets. Pingdom's stats show the iOS has taken the lead across North America, Australia, and even Symbian's home turf of Europe.

Symbian still leads in Asia, Africa and South America, and not just because cheaper feature phones are selling in massive volume to third world countries. The figures are based on web share, so the mobile devices portrayed in the numbers must at least have a web browser. Entry level Symbian devices do sell for considerably less than full fledged smartphones however.

Beyond Nokia's first place position, Apple is in second place globally, with RIM's BlackBerry in third and Android in fourth place. The report notes that "BlackBerry?s strongest region is North America, but it is still behind iOS there. Android might be growing fast, but it?s still far from dominating any part of the world."

In global numbers, HP's Palm webOS "hardly made a dent," while the report stated that "WinCE is pretty much universally dead. Windows Mobile reaches a couple of percent in a few countries, but that?s about it. We?ll see what happens with Microsoft?s Windows Phone 7."

By nation

Symbian's global lead comes without much presence in the US at all; only 1.36 percent of web traffic in the US comes from Symbian phones. However, Symbian is the leading mobile OS for 100 other countries, and accounts for half or more of the mobile web traffic in 75 of them. Symbian's top ten nations where it is the most popular are Chad, Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Oman, Jordan, Egypt, Somalia, Mozambique and Paraguay; Symbian phones account for 84 to 94 percent of all mobile web traffic in these countries.

Apple's iOS leads in 30 countries, and in 21 of these it accounts for half or more of the country's mobile web traffic. Its top ten countries are Canada, Cuba, Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, France, Singapore, Denmark and Sweden; iOS devices account for between 62 and 84 percent of all mobile traffic in these countries. Japan and Belgium are nearly tied with Sweden, with iOS taking a 61 percent share of all web traffic in those two nations.

In the US, Apple accounts for just over 35 of all mobile web traffic with the iOS, as it competes directly with RIM's BlackBerry and Android. RIM's share of web traffic is 32 percent, lower than the iOS because these numbers include iPod touch.

BlackBerry commands a slight lead when it is only compared against the iPhone, as noted above. RIM doesn't sell an iPod touch-like product, but is planning to enter the non-phone tablet market to compete against the iPad (these stats do not include iPad use however).

BlackBerry is the leading mobile OS in four countries (all in Central and South America), and is tied with iOS in a fifth (the UK). The only nation where BlackBerry enjoys more than half of all web traffic is the Dominican Republic.

Pingdom points out that "interesting enough, considering RIM is a Canadian company, it isn?t all that strong in its native Canada, where it accounts for a mere 3.6% of the country?s mobile web traffic." It also notes that RIM has a stronger presence in the UK than in the US.

Android has a 23 percent share of US traffic, and only leads in one country: South Korea. That's where Samsung has been selling its Galaxy S. There are no other countries where Android makes up more than half of the nation's web traffic.

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A Life Between - New York Times

Part of this is of course because she is a Republican who served under a deeply unpopular president. After the N.A.A.C.P. dutifully honored her with a President’s Image Award in 2002, the black Columbia historian Manning Marable dismissed Rice as a “leading race traitor” and the award as “accommodation” to an antiblack corporate establishment. Around the same time, black audiences chuckled approvingly when Amiri Baraka read the line “Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza,” from his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.”

Yet there is more to it than that. Rice’s public self-presentation is distinctly impersonal. Unethnic, for one, but shading into outright ineffability. One grapples for an adjective to describe her personality, even after reading her autobiography, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People.”

She would have us believe that her dazzling journey, from growing up in segregated Birmingham to helping to lead the world, can be credited to attentive parents, the “extraordinary, ordinary” folk of the title. Yet it becomes clear that Rice has always been a wunderkind singleton. As a result, one detects a touch of the perfunctory in the family aspect of her tale, as well as a disinclination toward serious introspection.

Rice’s parents, both educators, provided a fine environment for germination. Rice grew up in the parallel universe that middle-­class black parents in the segregated South built for their children, a world of socials, bowling and bonnets, with black children from “rough” neighborhoods kept at a distance. Her recollection of her parents all aflutter trying to teach her about the birds and the bees plays like something out of “Father Knows Best.”

As a young piano student, Rice liked to imagine herself as Mozart’s wife, and in 1968, when she was 13 years old, she spent afternoons mimicking ice-skating moves to Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. No one in this era was tarring any of this as “white,” and parents insisted that blacks had to be twice as good as whites to succeed. Rice notes, “This was declared as a matter of fact, not a point for debate.”

All of this was ordinary for middle-class blacks in that time and place. What wasn’t ordinary was Rice’s coming out of a political science course at the University of Denver so entranced with Russian history that she decided to become a Soviet specialist. It does not discount black people’s wide range of interests to say that in the early ’70s, Soviet affairs was an unusual career choice for a black woman raised in Jim Crow Birmingham. Members of this first generation of black academics much more commonly sought to explore the black past and present.

You would never know this from Rice’s breezy account of this period in her life. She sometimes sounds like a white debutante from somewhere in Connecticut, as if black people from the Deep South always named their cars after the protagonist of their favorite Russian opera (hers was “Boris Godunov,” for the record). We learn little about Rice’s inner life as she sails to one triumph after another, as a Stanford fellowship becomes a tenure-track assistant professorship, the Council on Foreign Relations sends her to Washington and next thing she knows she’s working at the National Security Council, getting appointed provost of Stanford, and fielding calls from George Bush père, who wants her to meet his son for some foreign policy brush-up.

The rest we know. Yet we will need biographers to give us more than Rice does about her actual work and the reasons for its rapturous reception. Her book comes close only in furnishing scattered childhood evidence of a furiously disciplined, even insular, individual. Rice reminds us that she liked the Temptations and Led Zeppelin and admits a tendency to procrastination (one she has apparently indulged only rarely over the past 30 years). However, this is also someone who as a girl encouraged her father to rat out local kids who were having an unchaperoned party; refused to settle for the kiddie plate in restaurants; and as a teenager adhered enthusiastically to a schedule that had her up at 4:30 for skating practice, followed by school at 7, piano lessons and more skating afterward, and bedtime by 9:30. Plenty of her peers, even the above-average ones with self-sacrificing parents, would have considered this schedule unthinkable.

This singularity presumably helps explain the Republicanism that all but a sliver of her black generation rejected. Her explanation is that she’d rather be ignored by Republicans than patronized by Democrats, but this suggests an ironic, back-door motivation that does not correspond to her general politics, upon which she would find little disagreement from Michael (as well as Shelby) Steele. “There are no excuses and there is no place for victims,” she says she was taught. She rejects the idea that one needs mentors who “look like you,” as well as the term “African-­American.”

Yet Rice is not deracialized in the way some suppose. It would be hard to be, growing up in Birmingham in the ’50s. She knew the girls who died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and reminds us that to blacks of that era, the immediate response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination was terror that a Southerner was now in the White House.

Despite reports to the contrary, she favors affirmative action, albeit in the sense of outreach rather than so-called diversity quotas (although her comments here reveal a level of ambivalence about aspects of implementation). At Stanford in the 1990s, she helped found the Centers for a New Generation, a youth-education program in depressed East Palo Alto; and she acknowledges that her own rise at Stanford, early in her academic career, was facilitated by the university’s affirmative-action efforts.

We learn these things as facts, but over all, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” is oddly detached for an autobiography. People like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maya Angelou are fully present in their childhood recollections of similar circumstances in a way that Rice never is; she often seems to be watching rather than writing about herself. Those interested in her romantic life, for instance, will have to be satisfied with elliptical glimpses. (She didn’t marry her main college sweetheart, the Denver Broncos wide receiver Rick Upchurch, because he mysteriously “had too many irons in the fire.”)

In general, her political aperçus rarely go deeper than this: “But the war left the Iraqi dictator in power, able to threaten his neighbors and oppress his people. That would be a problem for another day.” Nor is this “Memoir of Family” an insider’s report on Rice’s life after 2000, to which she devotes a single page: the last one.

If there is a lesson from Rice’s book, it is that the civil rights revolution made it possible for an extremely talented black person (a woman, no less) to embrace a race-neutral subject and ride it into service as secretary of state, all the while thinking of herself largely as just a person. That the story is not exactly exciting can perhaps be taken as confirmation of how considerably times have changed.

John McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor for The New Republic and City Journal.

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Indian Court Orders Holy Site Divided Between Hindus, Muslims - Voice of America

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Photo: AFPIndian security personnel stand guard as an elderly man walks past on September 29, 2010 in Ayodhya, on the eve of a court ruling that divided a long-contested holy site in the city between Hindus and Muslims (AFP).

Share ThisDiggFacebookStumbleUponYahoo! Buzzdel.icio.usRelated ArticlesIndia Braces For Verdict In Charged Religious Property Dispute

Indian judges have ruled Hindus and Muslims will divide the site at the heart of a religious property dispute.  Their verdict has been awaited for decades and is seen as a symbolic watershed in India's broader history of Hindu-Muslim tension.

Indian leaders are calling for peace and unity after a high court in the state of Uttar Pradesh issued what some are calling a victory for both Hindus and Muslims.

The court ruled a long-disputed holy site in the city of Ayodhya is to be divided between the two faith groups, with two thirds of the property to be administered by Hindus, and one third to be in the possession of Muslims.

Hindu groups successfully convinced judges about the importance of the site to members of their faith, who believe the area is the birthplace of the Hindu god Lord Rama, one of their most revered deities.  An Islamic mosque stood on the spot for hundreds of years before a Hindu mob destroyed it in 1992.  That sparked violence around the country that killed more than 2,000 people, mainly Muslims.

A lawyer representing Muslim plaintiffs in the case, Zafaryab Jilanni, says the verdict is a step towards unity.  He said the judgment indicates that Muslims and Hindus must coexist in India.

A lawyer for Hindu litigants, Ravi Shankar Prasad, called for Muslims and Hindus to view the verdict positively. "I would appeal to them in all humility, please accept this verdict ... it will lead to new amity, new brotherhood and a resurgent India," he said.

Hindu-Muslim resentment historically has been one of the greatest strains on India's social fabric.  As the verdict approached, the government dispatched nearly 200,000 security personnel to prevent renewed violence.  Major Indian media outlets agreed to a range of mandatory and voluntary restraints on coverage to avoid inciting emotion.  The mass distribution of mobile text messages also was curtailed.

Several parties on both sides of the dispute have said they will appeal the decision to the Indian Supreme Court.  That is expected to further delay the Ayodhya case, which has been in the court system for 60 years.

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