| rss2email.ru |
 |  TheAppleBlogNews, reviews, walkthroughs, and real-life application of Apple products http://theappleblog.com рекомендовать друзьям >> |
- Is There a Correlation Between Mac Fans & Apple Stores?
Is there a method to the madness that Apple uses when choosing cities for retail locations? After reading an Experian Simmons report that ranks designated market areas by the number of Apple customers in each, I suspect as much.
Using data collected with its Experian's Micromarketer Generation3 analytics tool, Experian Simmons created an index that calculates a consumer propensity to own or use Apple products. A geographic market with an index score of 100 indicates the middle ground; higher scores reflect an area where consumers are more likely to use Apple wares while those with lower indices are less likely to do so. As the numbers make clear, markets with the highest scores generally have a greater number of Apple retail locations.
Source: Experian Simmons
Some notable markets from the report:
- San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose, Calif. — With the highest index of 149, consumers in this area are nearly 50 percent more likely to buy and use Apple products than the average U.S. consumer and as such, is home to 12 retail locations. Given that this is where Apple’s headquarters is located, this makes perfect sense.
- Boston — 31.3 percent of the Boston adult population uses Apple, earning it a spot just behind Apple’s home turf with an index of 145. Number of Apple retail locations: 11
- New York City — Nearly one in three adults uses an Apple product — nearly 4.9 million people — truly justifying the Big Apple name. An index of 141 might be worth many Apple Stores, but the four in New York are spread out to attract the most traffic in densely populated areas.
- Bluefield – Beckley – Oak Hill, W. Va. — With the lowest index score of 41, residents here won’t find an Apple Store within the state. Instead, they’d have to travel over 200 miles to either North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia or Pennsylvania for the Apple retail experience.
One could easily take a chicken-and-egg approach to the data and argue that perhaps there are more Apple customers in certain areas because there are more retail locations to begin with. I don’t think that’s the case, though. Customers from any market can simply purchase Apple products online — but folks in West Virginia don’t seem to be doing so.
I have little doubt that adding a retail location helps Apple’s sales, but I’m inclined to believe that the company puts more of its stores in markets where it already has a captive audience. And Apple stores are also service centers for Apple products — adding stores where you don’t have products to service may not be the best strategy for growth. Instead of repeating the mistake made by many retailers by building a store and hoping for audience, Apple builds the audience which helps support the store.
Переслать - iBooks and the iBookstore: A Walkthrough
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad several weeks ago, one of the key announcements was that the new tablet device would feature an e-reader that would compete directly with the Amazon Kindle and would also have a built-in electronic bookstore. I have spent the last week with a new iPad using the iBooks app and shopping in the iBookstore to see how it works. In my short experience with the iPad, I can say that I like iBooks but I am not sure if this app will be the revolution in publishing that iTunes was for the music industry.
iBooks
The Library
iBooks is an e-reader app for the iPad that you use to manage and read electronic books. You are first greeted by a wood-grained bookshelf where thumbnail images of the covers of your e-books reside. You can also use a list view where you can sort the books by title, author, category or the sorting used on the bookshelf.
These sorting options are the source of my first complaint. Sorting is not available in the bookshelf view. Instead, books are arranged by the order in which they were added to your library. The lack of sorting and search options makes the bookshelf view very limited, even though it is visually appealing.
Reading
Tapping a cover opens up the book to either the first page or the previous spot where you were reading. Pages appear side by side in landscape view or a single page at a time in portrait view. You switch pages by swiping left or right, or simply tapping on the edge of the page. The controls will fade after a moment to let you concentrate on the material, but reappear quickly with a tap to the middle of the page. You can adjust the font size and the font face as well as the brightness of the screen by using the controls at the top right of the screen.
Turning pages by grabbing the corner and pulling your finger across reveals a pleasant attention to detail. You can just make out the faint impression of the reverse side of the page as it flips over. However, this is really just eye candy because tapping at the edge of the screen with your thumbs is much easier when holding the iPad as a book. The little animation that flips the page over with the tap is nice and fast and improves the experience
Searching & Bookmarking
While I have some emotional attachment to books (I love the smell of new bindings and leather covers), there are some real advantages to electronic books that just cannot be matched with paper. You can search the e-book by word or phrase by tapping and holding over a word to select it and then choosing from the options in the pop-up dialog, which includes an option to look up the word in the built-in dictionary.
Full-text search is a little slow in longer books, but fast enough that the few seconds wait is not unbearable. The search dialog provides additional options to look for the word or phrase with Google or Wikipedia.
Selections can be saved to Bookmarks that are saved and then made accessible from the Table of Contents view. They appear on the page with yellow highlighting as if you had used a pen to mark the word of passage.
Eyestrain
One concern about the iPad as a reading device is that the bright, LED-backlit, IPS LCD screen may induce more eyestrain than the reflective e-ink display used in the Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers. While there are no clinical studies yet that have measured increased eyestrain with LCD displays compared to e-ink screens, anecdotal evidence suggests that many people prefer e-ink. One reason suggested by ophthalmologists interviewed in the LA Times, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal may be that screen brightness is the primary cause of discomfort on LCD screens. Having a brightness control available in the app, in addition to the auto-adjusting feature that responds to changes in ambient light, is a nice step towards providing comfort for extended reading.
Once you move outside, the glare on the glossy iPad screen makes reading difficult and I suspect that glare causes additional eyestrain just from trying to focus your eyes past the distracting mirror images on the glass.
In my own reading, I found that stretches of up to an hour were perfectly comfortable, including time this last weekend driving through twisty mountain roads, as long as I positioned the iPad out of direct sunlight. I read a lot of books in my (precious little) spare time and I think I still prefer the heft, feel, and look of paper books for many uses. I imagine that different people will have a different reaction, but you should not be scared of the iPad for reading.
iBookstore
The iBookstore is reached by clicking on the “Store” button inside the iBooks app. The five major publishers announced at the iPad debut in January are selling titles alongside thousands of free books from the Gutenberg Project. Prices vary widely for the paid content. I saw everything from $6.99 to $14.99 in a quick scan.
Searching for titles or authors will helpfully suggest possible matches as you type, but browsing is a bit frustrating due to the limited options. You can browse the featured, new and bestselling books, the top 25 New York Times Bestsellers, and the top 50 paid and free books in the iBookstore. You can also browse the categories to see the top sellers in that section.
Browsing by category is frustrating. There are only 21 categories and no sub-categories to drill down and explore. The iBookstore will only display the top 50 paid and free books. Some categories do not list free books and then show the top 60 paid books as a small concession.
As the number of titles grows in the store, I really want Apple to add some additional options for discovering content. In addition, I found that the selection is a bit limited at this time. Several titles that I have been wanting to read, which are available in the Kindle store, were not listed in the iBookstore.
Revolutionary?
I do not think that iBooks will revolutionize the book publishing industry, at least not in its current form. Printed books are still great for reading at the beach (sun and sand are not iPad friendly) and can be lent out, shared or donated after you are done with them.
The advantages of e-books (searching, bookmarking) are really apparent with reference books like software programming titles. Some technical publishers like O’Reilly have made at least part of their catalog available in ePub, but through their own online store, not the iBookstore. Textbooks are the other area where e-books would be fantastic. Kids today routinely carry 30-40 pound backpacks and the iPad would probably put a few chiropractors out of business if that load could be replaced by a 1.5 pound device with all the required texts loaded on it.
iBooks will be a decent success partly for novelty and partly for the fact that the demographic that is buying the iPad is more likely to look past the limitations of e-books and appreciate the convenience.
The real revolution will come when textbooks with visually complex layouts like sidebars, graphs, charts, footnotes, are made available. I suspect that it will not happen in the current ePub format though.
Переслать - Opera Mini on the iPhone: Nice Toy, Could it Ever Be More?
I couldn’t wait to try out the new Opera Mini browser for the iPhone, so I didn’t. I downloaded it via my iTunes UK account (it was released there much earlier than over here) and set about running it through its paces. This is what I found.First of all, let me be clear: Opera Mini will never replace mobile Safari on the iPhone. Not, at least, until Apple makes available to users the ability to switch which apps open by default when performing certain actions. As long as Safari is the default web browser across the platform, Opera Mini really can’t be much more than a well-executed novelty.
I did however say well executed. Using Opera Mini is definitely a pleasurable experience. From the snappy loading times that come from having the pages pre-rendered on Opera’s servers and pushed out to the phone at lightning speeds, to the pop-up tab drawer that gives you a quick glance at what you’ve got open without having to scroll through pages, viewing them one at a time as you do with Mobile Safari, Opera Mini is designed from the ground up with the aim of improving web browsing on the iPhone in mind.
There are other great features you won’t find in Safari as well. Like the speed dial home screen, which, if you’re not familiar with Opera, resembles what Chrome looks like by default when it first boots up. You can assign sites you visit frequently to appear in the speed dial view, so it’s like having instant access to your bookmarks. You can also sync your speed dial, bookmarks and installed search engines from the desktop version of Opera.
Very handy things like the ability to save pages for offline reading and a find in page function also make Opera Mini shine on the iPhone platform, but still, it’s the rare occasion these days when I’m firing up a browser on my device unprompted by another app. Generally speaking, Safari opens on my iPhone because a link in a Twitter or Facebook app has caused it to do so.
If you are still going to install and use Opera, and I recommend that you do, if only to prove to Apple that its users would very much appreciate browser choice on the platform, there are some neat things you can do by accessing the advanced settings. To do this, simply type “config:” into your Opera address bar. This will bring you to a Power-User settings page, where you can tweak options like whether or not Opera will automatically fit text to your screen, change the loading timeout, and set the minimum length for phone number detection.
Use it, enjoy it, and rate it highly in the App Store, but if you’re like me, Opera Mini won’t be much more than a show piece until Apple allows users to change their default browser, which, I’m guessing, will be never.
Picture 1 of 3
Переслать - iPad Enters the Market Share Scene: Report
Web metrics firm Net Applications has been tracking the iPad since its launch, and after 10 days the trend is clear.
The iPad will soon account for one twentieth of one percent of the overall OS market. If that sounds infinitesimal, it is, and yet according to Net Applications the iPad now roughly equals the BlackBerry in market share.
However, it’s important to remember that Net Applications data is drawn from some 160 million visitors per month to a worldwide network of sites, rather than counting unit sales. That means it’s not market share so much as web share, which explains how the iPad caught the BlackBerry so quickly. Despite having sold tens of millions of more units, browsing the web on a BlackBerry is painful experience, while the iPad makes it sublime. Nonetheless, since the future is browsing the web on mobile devices, web share numbers today could very well be the market share of tomorrow.
For analysts and bloggers pondering what, exactly, the iPad is for, the above chart pretty much answers the question. It’s a new way to browse the web. With only 500,000 units sold, the iPad is already showing up against its rival siblings the iPod touch and iPhone, which have sold some 35 million and 50 million units respectively. Keep in mind too that both handheld devices are available worldwide, while the iPad will not see international release until May. Since Net Applications uses a worldwide network of web sites to determine market share, it’s quite possible that by the end of June the iPad may surpass the iPod touch in share.
Looking at estimated mobile device numbers for April, which tend to change very little from month to month, the iPad is indeed on par with the BlackBerry, and quickly closing on Android and moribund Windows Mobile. While that’s impressive for a new device sold only in the U.S., the combined iPhone OS share of the market is even more so. It will be around 37 percent, meaning by June at the latest expect iPhone OS to surpass the ubiquitous Java ME as the most used mobile OS, at least according to Net Applications.
Looking past the numbers, for those who purchased an iPad it appears your investment is safe. Just weeks after launch, the iPad is already solidifying its position as viable platform. For those who don’t own an iPad, expect Google and Microsoft to be scrambling to get a viable competitor in the marketplace as soon as possible. It looks like the tablet is here to stay at last.
Related GigaOM Pro Research: What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
Переслать
| ||||||
| реклама |
| rss2email.ru | отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=6893&u=24004&r=311667163 управление подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp |
