Android leads mobile OS market in US: Report

ARTICLE BY GOWTHAM

According to a report by research firm Nielsen, Android is the leading mobile operating software in the US with 39% market share. The second position is occupied by iOS that powers iPhone. It has a market share of 28% whileBlackBerry OS is at third position with 20% share.

Nielsen says data collected for June shows that among the smartphone makers using Android,HTC has the leading position with 14% market share, followed by Motorola at 11% and Samsungat 8%. Windows Phone 7 has a market share of 9%.

In terms of handset makers, Apple, which is the only company making iPhone, leads with 28% market share. RIM, the maker of BlackBerry phones, and HTC are in second position with each one holding 20% market share.

Nokia, which is still the market leader in worldwide smartphone market, holds just 2% market share in the US. Hewlett Packard, which is trying to gain foothold in the market with WebOS, too holds 2% share.

Due to competition among smartphone manufacturers, prices of Android handsets have come down sharply, leading to a phenomenal growth in their sales. A few weeks ago, Google had claimed that it was activating 5.5 lakh Android phones every day.

Google aims to speed up the internet

ARTICLE BY GOWTHAM

NEW DELHI: Google has unveiled Page Speed, a service that will allow it to load web pages faster for end users. According to Ram Ramani, the lead engineer on the Google's Bangalore team that worked on the project, websites using Page Speed will see a speed improvement of 25% to 60%.

"To use the service, you (webmasters) need to sign up and point the site's DNS entry to Google," Ramani wrote in a post on Google's official blog. "Page Speed fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times."

Though Google is offering the service free of charge to a select number of webmasters initially, it will charge a fee once it launches the service. According to Ramani, the Web giant is working to speed up site load times for the last two years and the latest project is another step towards enabling faster browsing. Google claims that the optimization will happen in the real time.

With the importance of the web growing, many companies are aiming to deliver better Web browsing experience. In recent years, all browser makers have put in a lot of efforts to speed up page rendering. Opera Mini, a browser for portable devices, uses its own servers to compress data before serving it on smartphones and tablets. Opera claims this optimization helps it offer a superior and faster Web browsing to experience to mobile users.

Companies like Amazon and Akamai, meanwhile, offer services like content delivery network (CDN) that can speed up data distribution. Many websites rely on these services. According to reports, Page Speed will make of both website optimization as well as a CDN.

Apple is richer than US govt

ARTICLE BY GOWTHAM

NEW YORK: As of today, Apple boss Steve Jobs is richer than Uncle Sam.

While the world's most powerful government has just $73.76 billion in its reserves, the world's top technology company has a neat cash pile of $75.87 billion.

The US Treasury Department warned that it has now only this much operating budget as Republicans and Democrats fight over raising the nation's debt ceiling. With only that much reserve at its disposal, the Obama White House has warned the Republicans that the US government won't be able to meet its obligations as of Aug 2.

Facing a government default, Obama can definitely turn to Steve Jobs to give him a very brief breathing space. The failure by the Republicans and Democrats to come to a compromise to raise the current $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by Aug 2 could lead to a hike in interest rates. The already battered dollar may also plunge further.

With its market capitalisation of $363.25 billion, Apple is the second largest company on the planet after American oil giant Exxon Mobil. The Cupertino-based Apple started rising suddenly in 2007 when it entered the smartphone market with the launch of its first version of the iPhone.

Within three years, Apple went on to overhaul BlackBerry company Research In Motion (RIM) which invented the smartphone and dominated the market. But its fortunes skyrocketed last year with the launch of the iPad tablet which has sold in millions. In fact, the iPhone and the iPad have made Apple the czar of mobile computing technology as rivals play up catch-up.

The stock of the company, which doesn't pay dividends, has now touched $400. After Apple, another non-financial company sitting on a huge cash reserve is Microsoft whose own pile is about $40 billion.