Monday's News Digest
Android has 250 million activated devices; every tenth Korean calls Samsung Galaxy S II; threats to the mobile market.
Millions of AndroidAccording to the results of the fourth quarter of 2011, the number of Android devices activated in the world reached 250 million, and the number of downloads exceeded the bar of 11 billion, – said Larry Page, executive director of Google.
These figures have overtaken the quite positive forecast of Andy Rubin, who in November wrote that the number of daily Android activations will reach 700 thousand per day. In fact, it turned out that since November 15, on average, 770 thousand devices on the Google platform were sold per day: at the beginning of November, the number of activated devices was about 200 million units.
Thus, the number of activated Android backgrounds reached the number of iOS devices sold at the end of October.
But in terms of the number of downloads, Android is still lagging behind the Apple platform. As Larry Page also noted, at the end of 2011 there were more than 11 billion downloads in the Android Market. Recall that on December 12, the same indicator for the App Store was 18 billion. However, here we must remember about the presence of a large number of third-party stores on the Android platform, which, quite possibly, take away a solid number of downloads from the official market.
Koreans are fans of Samsung Galaxy S IIOne of the most popular Android-based devices is considered to be Samsung Galaxy S II, the flagship of the South Korean company: in the first seven months of sales alone, the device sold 10 million copies.
Moreover, judging by the latest news, a solid share fell on South Korea itself.
According to official Samsung sources, at the moment only 5 million of these devices have been bought in their native market. In other words, a little more than 10% of the total population of the country (48 million inhabitants) use Samsung Galaxy S II.
According to the Japanese edition of The Nikkei, this is the first smartphone that has managed to achieve such high rates in gadget-obsessed South Korea. The newspaper also reports that one of the four smartphone users uses Samsung Galaxy S II. Samsung’s market share in the South Korean smartphone market is 53%.
What is especially interesting, Samsung decided not to start a lawsuit with Apple in South Korea. Either the company considers itself above this, or it is calm for its native market. And you know, she has every reason to do so.
Threats to modern industry”Free-to-play games cannot be of high quality,” Olivier Comte, Vice president of Namco Bandai’s European branch, said at the Cloud Gaming Europe international conference.
According to him, the creation of high-quality games is incompatible with such a distribution model.
He also noted that the very low prices for iPhone games, as well as the free availability of social games, have greatly changed such a market factor as consumer expectations. The perception of the value of the game has dropped a lot.
