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Smartphone apps and the people who use them
An estimated 73.3 million people in the United States own smartphones, or about 31 percent of mobile users, according to eMarketer.
So how many of them are downloading apps?
According to Ask.com and Harris Interactive, 69 percent have downloaded an app. About three quarters of men have downloaded an app while 62 percent of women said they have downloaded an app.
In another recent survey, this one by American Express, 60 percent of smartphone users who download applications only do so if they're free. Young professionals -- age 30 and under, with a college degree and earning at least $50,000 -- were more willing pay for for an app, with one in five spending up to $3 per app.
Men, more so than women, were also willing to pay for an app, spending $13 a month downloading music, movie and game apps. Women only shelled out $5 a month.
On the other hand, it found that women downloaded triple the number of games than men per month. Men preferred music apps.
| January 12 2011 at 10:03 PM
Just in time for resolutions, new fitness apps
As the holidays wind down and Americans wake up from their collective food coma, they're likely to find themselves a few pounds heavier than they were before cookie-party season began. And if losing weight makes its way on to your list of New Year's resolutions, dozens of smartphone apps will compete for your attention -- and money.
Among the New Year's more prominent fitness app developers is Nike, which recently released Nike Training Club. Geared toward women -- or anyone interested in performing pre-packaged workouts with names like "Slim Chance" and "The Heartthrob" -- Nike Training Club offers more than 60 workouts and 90 drills for a variety of fitness levels. A beginner's workout might include a light jog and some modified push-ups; advanced level workouts include jump rope, push-ups and the ever-unpleasant mountain climbers. Videos of women performing the exercises correctly help you keep your form in check.
One smart feature lets you can tie your workout to a playlist or album already on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app also tracks your progress and offers you rewards as you go, including Foursquare-like badges, smoothie recipes, and new workouts featuring "audio motivation" from tennis player Maria Sharapova. Best of all: the whole thing is free.
If you enjoy coaching every step of the way -- and don't mind being instructed by a disembodied robot voice that may remind you of the Terminator -- you may want to check out Workout Trainer, by the online fitness-tracking company Skimble. Workout Trainer offers coached workouts (and session tracking) for a wide variety of activities, including running, yoga and rock climbing. Social features let you see what your friends are doing with the app. One downside: the app regularly nags you to upgrade to a paid version -- $5 for three months, or $10 for a year -- or to spend $1 for audio coaching from a real (but recorded) human voice, instead of the Terminator.
Nike and Skimble are just the latest to go after the smartphone-using fitness crowd: there are 882 healthcare and fitness titles in the App Store at the moment. Even separating out the apps devoted purely to medical health and care, that still leaves hundreds of apps designed to get you up and moving.
Popular entries include Livestrong's Calorie Tracker, FitnessClass, Fitness Free HD and Training Peaks. (Your humble blogger is partial to iFitness, which comes in both iPhone and iPad versions and offers videos of dozens of exercises in addition to a food tracker, weight monitor, BMI calculator and other features.)
| December 27 2010 at 02:25 PM
Autodesk helps you build that new Lego castle
For generations of children, Christmas morning has meant waking up to a brand-new play-set from Lego. But for parents, the joy of watching a child opening the gift can quickly turn to frustration -- how the heck do you put this thing together?
In the case of the Lego Harry Potter Hogwarts castle, the answer is a 196-page instruction manual. Follow the guidelines step by step, and you'll discover how to turn 1,290 Legos into a rough facsimile of Hogwarts -- unless you or your child lose interest halfway through. Or burst into tears and run away.
AutoDesk employees saw the kid-on-Christmas-morning problem and thought its software could help. The company makes a free iPad app, Autodesk Inventor Publisher Mobile Viewer, that displays animated, three-dimensional versions of instruction manuals. People already use it to build escalators and other complicated machines, the engineers figured. So why not Legos?
"If you look on YouTube, there are thousands of Lego 3D instructional videos that people have done in other applications -- but they're static," said Carl White, a director of digital design products at Autodesk. "I hit 'play' and it shows me how they go together. But I can't actually use the object in three-dimensional space. This is the next evolution of that."
After downloading the mobile viewer app, visit this site to get the Harry Potter instructions on your iPad. Then use the app to see the castle get built brick by brick. The app lets you rotate the castle in three dimensions to make sure you're building it correctly.
"As high as 75 percent of returns are based on the fact that people can't get the instructions right," said White said.
He says animated 3D instructions are the wave of the future -- and that, with any luck, Christmas-morning toy-building tears could be a thing of the past.
Here's a video of how it works.
| December 25 2010 at 09:00 AM
News and views from the digital frontier.
By Marcus Chan (moderator), Benny Evangelista, Casey Newton, James Temple, Read Bios
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