An Apple-lover’s take on the Nexus 7

An Apple-lover’s take on the Nexus 7:


All tablets are not created equal. A fact not lost on this reporter, who, at the age of three, learned to love Apple by using the very first Macintosh. Reared on the Apple doctrine, I now demand excellence in hardware, sleekness in design, and that indescribable feeling of pure joy when touching a device.
For the first time in my life, a company other than Apple has given me all that and more.
Unveiled Wednesday during the keynote address at Google’s I/O developer conference, the $199/$249 Nexus 7 outshines the existing class of Android-powered tablets, the Kindle Fire included, for one simple reason: this is the only non-Apple device that I would ever buy.
An iPad-owner and lover since day one, I’ve come to view my tablet, which mind you I never actually refer to as tablet because I’ve always believed the iPad to be superior to any other, as my most pleasurable device. My iPhone and my MacBook Air are utilitarian. I love them dearly, but I think of those devices as necessities, and I primarily associate them with work. The iPad, however, is my play device. It’s my feel-good, sit-back-and-relax toy.
The Nexus 7, which falls into the same category of device for me, has in less than 48 hours eked out a special place in my heart. I find myself reaching for the 7, as I lovingly call it, over the iPad because, well, it’s just so darn cute. I love the size, the feel of the 7 in my hands, the leather-like quality of the back panel, and the overall style of the device.
Holding the Nexus 7 feels right, browsing is fantastic (thank you Chrome tab sync) and fun, and because its running the new Jelly Bean software, the Nexus feels smart, intuitive, capable, and pretty darn slick. Thanks to Project Butter, the 7 feels nearly as smooth the iPad. No major kinks, blips, or bumps to speak of — at least so far.
I also quite like the arrangement of media on the device. As an iOS user, I was a little disoriented at first, but I quickly became acclimated to the idea of apps on one page, books and magazines on another, movies in their own place, and music on its own screen. This configuration makes it all the more easier to appreciate the content and media recommendations served up by Google in each category, which really do seem to get better with time.
But beyond pleasure, there’s something truly remarkable in just how practical the 7 is. Here’s why: when it comes to my web activities, I’ve gone Google. I’m yoked to Gmail, dependent on Google Calendar, tied to Google Docs (and now Drive), leashed to Chrome, and the list goes in. I can’t tell you how convenient it is to have Google as a seamless, interconnected part of the experience. Sure, this isn’t something that’s unique to the Nexus 7, but it’s lovely nonetheless.
Don’t just take it from me though. I talked to plenty of folks at the conference who were impressed by this little sucker.
“I really like it. I used the hotel Wi-Fi and started watching Transformers. It looked really good,” developer and This Week in Google host Gina Trapani told me yesterday. “It’s small and light. It’s definitely a better Kindle Fire.”
Trapani, much more of a-know-it-all than me when it comes to the Android software side of things, was also impressed with the subtleties that Project Butter and Jelly Bean have brought to the Nexus 7 experience. “My main compliant with the Android experience is that it’s slow and choppy, and not responsive,” she said.
But the Nexus 7, running Jelly Bean, provided a much better experience for Trapani. “It’s very smooth, and very fast,” she said. “I can see giving this to my sister-in-law. She’s in the market for a tablet … I’m going to tell her to get this.”
VentureBeat’s gadget guru Devindra Hardawar is also pretty impressed by the Nexus 7, as are gadget bloggers the web round, some of whom went deep into review mode.
Yes, it’s disheartening and a bit defeating that some of my favorite applications aren’t available for the Nexus 7. HBO Go, where are you? I do have a strong feeling, however, that by releasing a stellar device, Google has just given top iOS developers the nudge they’ve needed to build for Android too.
Let’s get to the meat of the matter. Should you buy the Nexus 7? If you’re in the market for an extremely portable tablet and don’t mind the smaller screen size, than absolutely. This isn’t some second-rate device that you should feel ashamed about toting around. No, hold your head high.
Bonus: what you save in price, you can spend on shoes. Okay, that’s just me. But seriously, I’d purchase the Nexus 7 as my primary tablet in a heartbeat. I’d also recommend it to my friends and family members. In fact, this is the very first non-Apple device that I’ve ever said that about — and that’s saying something.

Photo credits: Jennifer Van Grove and Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Filed under: mobile

Ultrabook sales up in first half of 2012, Windows 8 waits patiently

Ultrabook sales up in first half of 2012, Windows 8 waits patiently:

We've seen so much Ultrabook news recently we're beginning to think they're catching on. Market research firm the NPD Group has stepped in to confirm our suspicions, reporting a 39 percent jump in sales of premium Windows laptops (900 bucks and up) during the first five months of this year, compared with the same period in 2011. Despite a three percent drop in sales of $700-plus Windows notebooks, the Ultrabook share of this bracket increased steadily to nearly 11 percent. The analysts predict sales of these lower-end models will pick up as back-to-school purchases sooth the post-summer blues, with a general boost to the whole Ultrabook market expected when Windows 8 arrives. One thing the figures don't tell us is what impact these sales are having on the revenue of Apple's skinny flagship, but we'd sure like to know. If numbers are your thing, the PR is past the break.
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Ultrabook sales up in first half of 2012, Windows 8 waits patiently originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jun 2012 07:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tablets, smartphones, social, and search: what 100M purchases can teach you about online shopping

Tablets, smartphones, social, and search: what 100M purchases can teach you about online shopping:

What can 100 million online shopping experiences teach you about e-commerce in 2012? Apparently quite a bit.

Monetate may not be a household name, but the company has its fingers in 20 percent of U.S. e-commerce traffic. With customers such as Best Buy, Comcast, Brooks Brothers, and Anthropologie, Monetate has its pulse on what works and what doesn’t work when selling online.
Today the web testing, merchandising, and targeting company is releasing the results of its latest market survey: Ecommerce Quarterly for the first quarter of 2012. VentureBeat spoke to Blair Lyon, vice president of marketing, and Rob Yoegel, content marketing director.
“Because Monetate influences more than 20% of  U.S. e-commerce traffic, we have the opportunity to sample that data in an anonymous and random way,” said Lyon. “So we can see key trends in the marketplace.”

Tablet traffic up

The first trend won’t be a big shock to VentureBeat readers: a major surge in tablet traffic. And, some interesting data around conversion of surfers into customers.

Source: Monetate

E-commerce site traffic: the amazing difference one quarter can make

“We’ve seen this huge surge around tablets,” Lyon said. “But not only is the traffic rate going up, the conversion rate is going up too … and sometimes exceeds desktop conversion rates.
Mobile traffic from smartphones is up too, but the conversion rate is still relatively low. The important point for Lyon is that “tablet is not mobile and mobile is not tablet.” In fact, the two are very different: different use cases, different times, and different conversion rates.

That’s something for retailers to think about, said Yoegel:
“Retailers in general will treat people on tablet and smartphones as the same user, and our data is showing that they shouldn’t.”
In fact, tablet visitors are much more like desktop visitors than smartphone users. While smartphone users might be checking a product on the go, or price shopping on the internet while looking at an in-store display, tablet visitors are more likely to be in a buying mode — by a factor of almost three.
Tablet users also view almost as many pages on a site as desktop users, about 11-12, while smartphone visitors view only about seven pages per session.

Social commerce traffic way up

The Monetate study also investigated the impact of social commerce, comparing traffic from social networking sites to traffic from search engines such as Google.
Traffic from social networks increased between the last quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, and was up 77 percent over a year’s period. And while Facebook drives 60 percent of social commerce visits, Pinterest came from nowhere to over a quarter of all visits.

Twitter and StumbleUpon took up most of the remaining traffic, with LinkedIn driving under one percent.
Search traffic also grew, but not as fast: up almost 25 percent.

But search converts much better

The difference comes in conversion rates: social traffic converts significantly worse than search traffic.
First, about half of it bounces as visitors leave without viewing any other pages on the shopping site. Only about three percent add a product to a shopping cart, and less than half of a percent actually buy something.
However, search traffic, particularly from Google, only bounces a quarter of the time, and converts surfers into customers as a 2.44 percent rate.
Lyon attributes this to differing objectives:
“I think the social user is looking at it more from an interest point of view versus a buying point of view,” he told VentureBeat. “Whereas search is targeted.”
One other question I asked Monetate: in the wake of the recent news that Orbitz was steering customers with Mac computers to pricier hotels than PC surfers … are we going to see this behavior in every retailer? In other words, will online shopping start to look like flights, where it sometimes seems that no two people ever pay the same price?
“Everyone is talking about it,” admitted Lyon. “Everyone is trying to figure it out. But it’s all about testing different ways to find out what is the right threshold.”
More highlights from the Monetate report:

Image credit: Keyboard/ShutterStock

Filed under: enterprise, mobile, search, social, VentureBeat

What mobile designers can learn from the Army’s $5B camouflage snafu

What mobile designers can learn from the Army’s $5B camouflage snafu:

“Design is the new battleground” is the tagline for VentureBeat’s upcoming mobile tech conference, MobileBeat.
That phrase is meant to capture the importance of design to mobile devices, apps, websites, and more.
But for the U.S. Army, design has met the battleground in a much more literal way. As The Daily reported on June 24, the Army has thrown in the towel on its new camouflage program.
The Army’s Universal Camouflage Pattern, or UCP, debuted in 2004 at a cost of $5 billion, and it was meant to be a universal design that would help ensure soldiers would have useful camouflage in a wide variety of environments. It’s a sort of grayish pattern with a pixelated, blocky look to it. Imagine an 8-bit version of more traditional camo, and you’re pretty close. If Mario ever went to war in an urban dystopia, this is what he’d wear.
It had solid motivations. Soldiers deployed to Iraq found that they lacked a consistent set of camouflaged gear. They might be wearing desert camo fatigues but a dark green vest on top of that. The contrasting colors messed up the gear’s capability to do its job of making the soldiers hard to see. Clearly, the Army needed to standardize on something and then make a whole lot of clothing based on the same design.
The problem is that UCP didn’t work. At all.
“Essentially, the Army designed a universal uniform that universally failed in every environment,” The Daily quotes an Army specialist who served two tours of duty in Iraq as saying. “The only time I have ever seen it work well was in a gravel pit.”
So how did a design that worked so poorly ever get approved? Top-down cluelessness, for starters. The office in charge of equipping soldiers pushed the camo design team to select a winning pattern before tests were fully done. That office also ordered the team to make a pixelated version of that pattern, apparently because a similar pattern had worked well for the Marine Corps.
The result: Camouflage that only works well in a gravel pit, and a waste of $5 billion.
It’s easy to draw parallels with mobile design, where the stakes are much lower but the temptation to make mistakes in the name of expediency are just as high. Here are the lessons I draw from the Army’s camouflage debacle:
1. There’s no such thing as universal design.
Don’t be a copycat. Never mind patent and trademark law — it’s entirely possible that your competitor has a completely different set of customers, with different needs. Apple’s iPad has dominated the tablet market for several years, and Android tablets only started to make a dent in Apple’s market share with the debut of Amazon’s Kindle, which is smaller, more media-focused, and above all, cheaper.
2. Let the designers do their jobs.
Steve Jobs was a design genius with an almost unerring sense of what designs would work. Your CEO probably isn’t. Give your design team enough scope to do their jobs right.
3. Don’t skimp on testing.
The Army could have saved itself a lot of grief if it didn’t shortcut the field testing for its new designs. You, too, can do extensive user testing to see what works, how quickly customers can find their way around your product, and whether or not that “brilliant” design actually works in the real world.
We probably won’t spend much time talking about Army fatigues at MobileBeat 2012, but we will have a lot more to say about mobile design. With speakers including Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, Google Mobile chief Jason Spero, fuseproject founder and designer Yves Behar, and Path CEO Dave Morin, it’s going to be a great event.
Photo credit: U.S. Army/Flickr
Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible — visually and experientially. , July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Filed under: mobile