Posted by Wei Shao in Mobile Marketing | 0 comments
The iPad, Mobile Computing, and Mobile analytics
When the iPad was announced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on 27th January in San Francisco, it felt as though the new era of computing had arrived. The iPad is keyboard free, mouse free, has an enjoyable User Interface, a longer battery life, and is easy to carry. Finally, it is time for mobile computing!
Some people would like to see the iPad as a ‘big screen iTouch’ rather than as a computer or a laptop. While they’re correct in some ways, the iPad is both super sized and supercharged. It now allows you to watch videos, play games, and surf the internet anywhere with an innovative touch screen interface and it lasts for up to 10 hours between charges. What mobile phone or laptop can do that? The answer is none!
Launching To the UK Market
The Apple just announced the price of the iPad for the UK market. You can get the WIFI only version from £429 and the WIFI+3G version from £529. Preorders opened on the 10th of May and it will officially launch on the 28th. The 3G price plan has been released by the network providers as well. It varies between them but the most expensive plans will cost £25 for 5 or 10GB of data use per month.
The iPad and the future of mobile computing
HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), power consumption, and bandwidth are the main limitations of mobile computing today. In 2007, the release of the iPhone leveraged the HCI technologies to a new level. In 2008, Google announced an open-source mobile platform which worked in a similar way. As a result, the HCI limitation is having less and less of an impact on the mobile computing market today. This ‘super charged iTouch’ with 3G will give mobile computing a completely new look.
Since it truly is an enlarged iTouch, the iPad can do whatever the iTouch does: it plays games, videos, music, and lets you access the internet through WIFI and 3G. However, the 1GHz A4 processor and the big screen bring many features that iTouch can’t do.
The iPad could become the ultimate mobile gaming machine. If you ask any gamer about what they want in their gaming console, I bet you will get two answers: blazing process speed and a bigger screen. And that’s two ways to describe the iPad. Since it also has an impressive 10 hours of battery life and the fun-factor that the iTouch naturally has, you can believe that the gaming on iPad will be more successful than any other mobile gaming machines.
The iBook is another killer feature. The book size screen makes it easy for the iPad to become a perfect E-reader. The application makes it very easy to find a book you like, read the previews, buy it and download it to your device. The sensible UI and internet connection bring a more enjoyable reading experience: you can flip pages as in a book, you can change the font size, you can touch any word to look it up in Wikipedia or the dictionary, and you can even highlight interesting text.
Does this matter for web analytics?
Only $416 million was spent on mobile advertising in 2009 and more than 75% of websites don’t do mobile analytics. But with more and more people using this lighter, faster, and more enjoyable device instead of a laptop to do daily jobs, more and more money will be spent on the mobile market. As a result, more and more mobile advertising and marketing will be needed. Michael Chang, CEO of mobile ad platform Greystripe said:
” We saw demand go up 100% (quarter over quarter) after the Apple’s iAd platform announcement”
If someone asked me whether mobile computing matters for web analytics, I would definitely answer YES. And I believe that web analytics will be very different in the future, when where a visitor is accessing information becomes increasingly important and adds potentially significant context to any analysis we conduct. For example, a visitor coming to your site from home will have different needs and goals than one in the street or in their car. When an increasing number of visits are mobile visits by iPad users or those on other mobile devices, our collective approach for analytics needs to change.
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