What does an average smartphone user do? Here’s an infographic from techcrunch that answers the question from an iPhone perspective: albeit from the tail end of 2010.
Three things stand out for me:
It would be interesting to see the Android view, so if anyone has seen the data, let me know.
I find myself in the middle of a ‘device testing’ debate. Around one fifth of the Mobile Operator community have historically committed to large test teams, test centres and test budgets. Over the years these budgets, teams and centres have diminished – whilst the pressure on the teams has increased. Now, smartphone complexity (and the step change increase in test cases) is forcing Mobile Operators to think carefully about their diminishing and traditional commitment to testing and there are three clear options.
Business as usual.
Firstly, continue with the current paradigm – but test more efficiently. Proponents suggest that automated device testing can relieve the test team burden – but sceptics suggest smartphones have made this approach unscalable. OS & application complexity and update cycle speed mean that Test teams can’t write (and manage) the test cases fast enough – even if they co-opt the support of the friendly engineering resources at Anite, Rhode & Schwarz and Anritsu.
Latest results on smartphone market share: Android now upto 52.5% market share of the quarters smartphone shipments which is just over 60 million units... and 13.5% of all mobile device shipments for the quarter.
Read More Post a comment (0)Android's progress; table, bar & line chart shows shipments and share from Q4 - 2008 to Q2 - 2011. Latest quarter uses Gartner update.
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Android shipments just keep on going. Canalys reports (2Q-2011) that Android shipped 51.9mu (48% market share) which is good news – right?
Well… attached to the success is a downside. According to WDS reports* Android owners will contact technical support 1.3 times a year, and the average handle time (AHT) for the Tech Support Desk is 11 minutes 12 seconds. So every 1mu units shipped, will generate 243,750 hrs of tech support cost. That’s (@£30/hr) £7.3 million per 1 million devices. And it looks like Android’s on target to ship close to 200 million units this year… or £1.5bn of support calls; depending on how you’re looking at it.
*need to register for WDS reports
Smartphone testing may not be as sexy as the angry birds application, but as we say in England, Beauty is in the eyes of the beer-holder.
Savage Minds recently submitted its entry form to the Cambridge Wireless discovering start-ups competition.
If selected – you should be able to see our submission appear alongside other worthy candidiates. We have our fingers crossed and hopefully, a five minute pitch to prepare for early December.
Part 1: There’s a problem with smartphone testing.
Smartphone product teams that are responsible for bringing new devices to market, face a different sized problem to feature phone development teams. It’s not just a bigger ‘test’ problem – it’s an unbounded ‘test’ problem. A problem with no limits. And that makes it difficult problem to contain; after-all, how many resources should we apply to an unbounded problem? It’s a recurrent throbbing headache – it’s a Product Management migraine.
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Creative Commons
- the friendly robot was drawn by Martin Pickles, although the © remains with Savage Minds
- almost all the other icons were drawn by Aleksandra Wolska who can be contacted through his website. Aleksandra’s drawings are licensed under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, creative commons t’s & c’s for which we are eternally grateful
- the only exception is the apple logo which was originally drawn by M Fayaz who can be found here