Mobile/Insights/2011 Week30

• The beta tablet version of the Dolphin browser, Dolphin for Pad, was released in the Android Market
• Opera anounced a partnership with an Indian mobile game developer and released the June edition of its State of the Mobile Web reports
• The Android Market introduced multiple APK support for a single product, allowing for better device targeting
• Android accounted for 30% of tablet devices sold in Q2 2011, with iOS having a 61% share
• 28% of all mobile phones sold this year will be smartphones, with Nokia being dethroned in Q2 as the top selling smartphone OEM, in favour of Apple or Samsung (final results to become available this week)
• The first device to feature the WP7 Mango update to be the Toshiba Fujitsu IS12T, to be released in Japan in September this year

After announcing it several months ago, Mobotap released the tablet version of the Dolphin browser, in beta, in the Android Market. The browser is called Dolphin for Pad and among the main optimizations are displaying the open tab list on the top of the screen, inclusion of "Back", "Forward" and "Bookmarks" buttons next to the location bar and updated behaviour of the right and left-side menus, which now don't pan the web page along as they open and snap back into place if the user taps somewhere else. The content of the side menus has also changed, to bookmarks on the left and open windows list on the right. Read More

Opera announced a partnership with UTV Indiagames, a mobile game developer and publisher, to offer gaming content on Opera Mini's "Speed Dial" home page to users in India. The browser's users will be able to access directly after startup Indiagames' WAP portal and view and download gaming content. In May this year, Opera made a similar partnership with another Indian mobile content provider, Hungama Digital, to offer a direct link to downloads for music, videos, wallpapers and ringtones. India is a key market for Opera, as it is the 3rd country with the highest number of Opera Mini users. Read More

Opera released the June edition of its monthly State of the Mobile Web reports. This month's release contains an infographic on how much data users can save by using proxy-browsers like Opera Mini versus full-fledged ones on top visited websites like Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia etc. The infographic is followed by advice on how to manage a lower data usage for your phone, while the second part of the report talks about Opera Mini global and country-focused statistics. Overall, Opera Mini users grew with 1.4% from May to June 2011 amounting to 115 million, which also represents a 93.5% growth year-over-year. The 6.2% monthly and 146.1% yearly growth to 67.3 billion page views through the browser shows that page views in Opera Mini are growing faster than the number of users. The top 10 countries in terms of users of the proxy-browser are mostly emerging markets: Russia, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Ukraine, Vietnam, South Africa, China, Mexico, Brazil. Among developed nations, the US is on the 11th place, the UK on the 17th and Poland on the 20th. Read More

The Android Market introduced support for multiple APKs for a single product, which allows better targeting for different platform versions, screen sizes, or texture-compression formats. When developers upload multiple APK files, the Android Market handles them as part of a single product listing that aggregates the app details, ratings and comments across the APKs, providing users with a unified market listing and developers with unified statistics. Read More

Android captured a 30% share in global tablet sales in Q2 of 2011, amounting to 4.6 million devices, reveals a report by Strategy Analytics. Whille iOs still dominated the tablet market with a 61% share and 9.3 million devices, Android's evolution points to a tenfold increase year-over-year. There were 15.1 million tablet devices sold last quarter, with 1.3 million running on other platforms than the 2 major ones: iOs and Android. Read More

More than 420 million smartphones will be sold around the world in 2011, accounting for 28% of total cell phone sales, announces market research firm IMS Research. Among smartphone OEMs, Samsung and Apple are forecast to become the biggest and strongest players, with Nokia and RIM experiencing negative growth year-over-year. Nokia, who recently released its Q2 results, is seeing the most dramatic fall in share of sold phones, down 34% compared to the same period in 2010. For Q2 2011, it is expected that the top of smartphone OEMs in terms of devices shipped will see shifts among the biggest 3 players. After Samsung releases its numbers later this week, it will become clear how the 3 biggest vendors, Nokia, Apple and Samsung, will fall into the top positions. Read More and More

The development of the Mango update for WP7 has been completed and sent to OEMs and carriers for configuration and testing. The first device to feature it will not be a Nokia device, but the Toshiba Fujitsu IS12T, which will be released in Japan probably in September. The "Mango" WP7 release includes multitasking support, IE 9, integration of Facebook and Twitter, unified thread messages for text, FB chat, Live Messenger, more Bing integration (music search) and voice recognition support. Read More and More

Google is testing changes to its search results interface which includes more white space and bigger separation between elements on the page, which points to orientation towards touch-enabled devices such as tablets, where pointing is less accurate than with the mouse. Read More

ComScore's report analyzing traffic generated in May 2011 by iOS and Android devices shows that Apple's platform generates the most traffic across most of the countries analyzed in both the mobile phone and tablet segments. The report looks at North America, Western Europe, Australia, as well as selected countries in South America and Asia. For detailed numbers, please see the release.