Linkbait 32
From the last month or so, with a few older articles.
- Older, but still important. Tomi Ahonen reports that Samsung is losing quite a bit of smartphone sales market share, mostly because of competition from cheap Chinese vendors in the developing world.
- Speaking about Tomi, he also found numbers on smartphone unique owner installed base — in other words, the number of smartphone owners per 100 people in a country. He trusts the numbers for the developed world, but suspects the Indian and Chinese stats, in particular, only come from metropolitan areas where smartphone ownership is a lot higher than in rural areas.
- Opera reports that mobile internet users in India continue to move from feature phones (and not basic, as the headline says) to Androids. It offers some stats about this movement, but it should be remembered that the only way for Opera to get these stats is by measuring Opera Mini usage. Thus, consumers who move from a feature phone with Opera Mini to an Android without Opera Mini are not counted, and the total number may be higher.
Despite that flaw, it’s good to have some numbers on the Indian market.
- LG is working on a webOS smart watch. Since I continue to doubt if browsers can be installed on smart watches with the current state of the hardware, the webOS stuff will likely be about writing apps in HTML5. That’s cool in itself, but I doubt it’s going to draw a lot of developers — also because the next move LG (or any big Asian company) would make to reach out to web developers would be the first.
- Interesting Scientia Mobile report on smartphone usage in western countries relative to Asia. They’re tweaking the definitions of smartphones and feature phones (about time!)
Data gathered from hits on WURFL, the device database system that helps you combat device bugs. Some conclusions:
- Tablet usage in the West is over triple that found in Asia.
- Apple market share 39% in the West; 13% in the East
- While Apple dominates the Western markets, Android tablet manufacturers, as a group, hold a lead over Apple in Asia. Nevertheless, Apple’s 31% share of Asia shows a strong presence.
Much more good stuff in here. Go read it.
- Cyanogen, the independent provider of Android ROMs, will team up with Indian device vendor Micromax to create a new generation of affordable Android phones. This is important for web developers because Cyanogen uses Chromium, and not Android WebKit, as its default browser.
- Tim Kadlec ran some tests and figured out the parsing and execution time for jQuery 2.1.1 on a variety of mobile and other browsers. The variations are huge; from a median 725 milliseconds on a BlackBerry OS6 to 5 on a modern MacBook Air.
He concludes that the hardware has the most impact on parsing and execution time, and since a new trend is shaping up where cheap (hence hardware-challenged) phones are being spread through the developing world, this may become a problem in the future. Sure, those phones run modern browsers, but if they don’t have the hardware to back them up, performance is going to be meh anyway.
- Steve Souders studies what happens when an onload event handler is added to a page in a script that’s called onload. And before you say this is a weird use case, third-party scripts (ads!) do this. And it impacts performance negatively.
- Due to the recent addition of touch events to IE11, Jacob Rossi studies how the three series of events (mouse, touch, and pointer) can cooperate, and where their strong and weak points are.
- You’ve probably seen this: Yoav Weiss discusses the history and current state of affairs in responsive images.
- Christopher Aue demystifies
vertical-align. And yes, this is complicated.
- Max Firtman takes a good look at iOS8 and tells us what changed, what stayed the same, and what broke. The most important one is of course the fake DPR of 3 on the iPhone 6+.
- In Chromium 37 the event coordinates of touch events are now floating-point instead of integers. This change may make sense, as explained on the page, though only with a DPR higher than 1.
- Older, but still very interesting: John Gruber’s conjectures on the iPhone 6 sizes. Meanwhile we know the answer, but this article was an eye-opener for me. In particular, it turns out that native iOS development has a concept called points, and if you calculate the number of points that fit on an iOS screen you arrive at exactly the ideal viewport. Thus, native and web are more alike than I thought.
John’s iPhone 6+ measurements were off, because he didn’t anticipate Apple shrinking the display by 13%. Despite that, it’s a great bit of detective work.
- Freddie DeBoer takes exception to the idea that
the internet as this open space where only talent matters and where everyone has a chance to impact the discussion
Commenters are the bane of civil discussion. That’s a sad truth bloggers found out about a while ago, but the myth of comments being good on principle should be laid to rest.
- Hong Kong protesters, knowing that internet and mobile networks are controlled by the state and may be closed down at any moment, opt for another way of staying in touch. Essentially, every phone becomes a Bluetooth node, passing on messages until they reach the intended recipient. Due to this decntralized nature, the network is not able to pass private messages: each contributor could read each message that passes through his phone.
- A word from our sponsors: Looking for a conference dedicated to web design? Look no further than dsgnday; 11th of November, Amsterdam.
