Posted
1 day
ago
by
Irina Sandu
Every week I post an overview on what’s been happening in the mobile (browsing) world and is relevant to Mozilla.
Updated Android version distribution numbers are available
Google’s Motorola acquisition expected to be completed
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soon
Android 5.0, code-named Jelly Bean, rumoured to be released in fall with multiple flagship devices
Baidu to be releasing Yi-based devices
56.1% of smartphone shipments in Q1 featured Android
Samsung confirmed as top mobile phone vendor by shipments in Q1
Updated Android version distribution numbers put Gingerbread at 64% of the market, with API level 9 at 0.5% and level 10 at 63.9%, Froyo (level 8) at 20.8% and Ice Cream Sandwich at almost 5%, with most of it on API level 15.
Google declared that it expects its acquisition of Motorola to be completed soon, before the first half of the year. After having passed regulatory approval in the US and the US, the company is now waiting from go-ahead from the authorities in China. The closing of the deal will likely raise more concerns over competition inside the Android ecosystem.
Details about the upcoming version of Android, version 5.0 code-named Jelly Bean, have emerged.The launch is rumoured to happen before Thanksgiving and to feature more OEMs that will produce the version’s flagship devices. It is to be expected that they will also be featured for sale in Google’s Play Store.
Baidu, China’s incumbent search engine, is set to release a series of new mobile devices based on its Yi mobile platform, a fork of Android, that was announced in September 2011. Dell is reported to be the company’s hardware partner for this venture in a country which recently surpassed the US as the fastest growing market for new Android & iOs activations.
The smartphone platform market was further dominated by Android in Q1 smartphone shipments, where Google’s ecosystem captured 56.1% of the market with 81 million units, up from 36.4% of the market and 36.3 million units in the same period of 2011. Apple’s platform was on the second place with 33 million and 22.9% of the market, also up from 16 million and 16.9% marketshare in Q1 of 2011. Other platforms with significant shares are Symbian with 8.6% of the market, followed by BB OS with 6.9%, Bada with 2.7% and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 which together account for 1.9%.
Q1 results of phone and smartphone shipments are out, confirming Samsung as having taken the lead as the top mobile phone vendor with 86 million units and 20.7% of the market, up from 68 million and 16.1% of the market the previous year. On second place there is Nokia, with 83 million and 19.8% marketshare, which is on a downward trend from its Q1 2011 result of 107 million corresponding to a 25.1% marketshare. Apple takes 3rd place with 33 million and 7.9% of the market, up from 16 million and 3.9%. Further down the top there are ZTE, LG, Huawei, RIM, Motorola, Sony and HTC with significant shares of the market.
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Posted
1 day
ago
by
davidwboswell
“I’m a professional product manager and if you need help I would be delighted to join.” — from message posted on Get Involved page
Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to help
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with product management? Then join us to discuss community building at Mozilla.
Meeting time: Thursday, May 17 at 10:00 AM Pacific
Topics: Localizing Get Involved page and increasing community building skills with Mozilla Brain Builders
Video: David Boswell’s vidyo room (link for guest access is on agenda)
Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 9634#
Room: Get to do Choppa in Mountain View 3rd floor
Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians
Note that the video and audio information has changed from previous meetings.
If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.
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Posted
1 day
ago
by
Lawrence Mandel
I’m pleased to report some user visible progress from the performance and metrics work week. Sign in to the Telemetry dashboard now uses Persona (aka, BrowserID).
No special permission is required. The Telemetry dashboard is open to all.
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Don’t have a Persona account? No problem. Click the sign in button to be prompted to create a free account.
This change is now live. You can try it yourself by visiting the Telemetry dashboard at http://mzl.la/telemetrydash.
Tagged: mozilla, telemetry [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
We actually wanted to enabled Incremental GC on Nightly, but again we had some fallout and it had to be backed out again. Bill thinks it should reland at the end of the week.
We are happy to welcome Benjamin Peterson, who is going to join us
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this summer as an intern working on SpiderMonkey’s ES6 support. Benjamin is an active python contributor. He has already started implementing rest parameters.
Till Schneidereit, (a fellow German, finally!) started picking up some GC related bugs, thank you and feel welcome.
In an effort to reduce the memory usage of average JavaScript applications (MemShrink \o/), we came to the conclusion that it is okay to throw away JIT code compiled by Jäger on every Garbage Collection run. Unfortunately this doesn’t work very well for animation heavy scripts like games, where recompiling would introduce long pauses. Brian fixed that.
Jason showed us how to use the new Debugger API to debug JavaScript code running in Firefox.
David Mandelin and me blogged about the SpiderMonkey API (JSAPI), and what needs to change, C++ yeah!
The DataView object landed, thanks to the work of Steve.
Luke just finished a patch that is going to speed up the handling of some function parameters/variables. Besides blocking more IonMonkey performance improvements, it already showed 10% better scores on the v8 early-boyer benchmark. (Bug 659577)
Jan has been working on chunked compilation which should help IonMonkey with very large scripts. But because this is a very broad change and the Ion team likes to focus on stabilizing, fixing crashes and test failures first, this is going to land after the initial release. Luckily these kind of large scripts are uncommon for normal JavaScript, but they are often found in Emscripten compiled code. JägerMonkey (+TI) which has chunked compilation is still going to help those scripts.
Edit: Republished because of some tumblr problems. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
by
gerv
“thinkinsights” and Google have released some fascinating data about smartphone usage, gathered from detailed consumer surveys.
All the presentation reports (right hand column) have roughly the same format. Why not download the report
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for your country, and the one for Brazil (the launch country for B2G) and see how different things are there compared to where you live?
Compared to the UK, in Brazil:
Far fewer people have smartphones (14% vs 51%)
Smartphones are used less often (40% vs 59% daily)
They are used on-the-go less often (64% vs 86%) – poorer network coverage?
Social networking is proportionately more popular than email
Smartphone gaming is significantly less popular (39% vs 62%)
They use fewer apps, even free ones (14 vs 23 installed)
Almost all smartphone users are urban
Cohabitation is significantly less common (20% vs 11%)
Thoughts: reading between the lines, network coverage is poorer and data-on-the-go is harder to find. We need to make sure B2G phones and apps are solid in absence of a good network connection. Also, the phone will be the only computing device for many users. [Less]
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