Usability Key to Smartphone Market

Well that’s the view from Nokia’s Chief Financial Officer Timo Ihamuotila.
Nokia aim to boost its presence and share of the smartphone market by improving the usability of its devices.
This comes on the back of the news that Nokia posted a consensus-beating fourth quarter profit on strong smartphone sales, showing a switch in power in the [...]

Making Users Buy Online – The Importance of Building Online Trust

By Martin Rosenmejer,
User Experience Research Consultant
at fhios.
With online sales rising to 9.8% of the total retail sales in the UK in 2008* and 12.6% of businesses selling online (Office of National Statistics), the role of company websites is still enhancing often becoming a central part of the offered customer experience.
In order to make people purchasing [...]

Mobile advertising on the up!

Data gathered by BuzzCity over the year shows that mobile advertising grew by 41% in 2009 compared to 2008 with some countries seeing growth of 300% or more such as:

Turkey
Germany
Saudi Arabia
Mexico

Indonesia, India, USA and South Africa continue to dominate with 33 countries now delivering monthly traffic exceeding 10 million impressions.
The top five most [...]

fhios mobile handset review – HTC Touch2

By Jenefer Yeung
Senior User Experience Consultant
at fhios.

As a touchscreen phone the HTC Touch2 has kept physical keys to clearly indicate:

‘Call’ (fig. 1)
‘End call’ (fig. 2)
‘Power on’ (fig. 1)
‘Power off’ (fig. 2)

This is particularly helpful to those who are less familiar with using a touchscreen phone and helps them to visually [...]

Mobile Application Review – Sky Sports Live Football Centre

By Dan Marley
Senior Research Consultant
at fhios.
What is it?
Sky Sports Live Football Score Centre BskyB

Purpose?
Provide up to date scores and match information as well as general football news updates.
Download?
Free. Does not require Wi Fi connectivity
Overview
This application has received good reviews on the application store, with many stating that it contains a high level of [...]

Global smartphone handset use: Apple vrs Nokia

Apple and Nokia dominate global smartphone handset sales in different regions, according to a new report.
Mobile ad network AdMob has released its December 2009 “AdMob Mobile Metrics Report“, looking at regional changes in manufacturer and smartphone Operating System (OS) share.

The report found that Apple and the iPhone OS leads in Western Europe, North [...]

Top Search Properties Worldwide

Google Sites ranked as the top search property worldwide with 87.8 billion searches in December, or 66.8 percent of the global search market. Google Sites achieved a 58-percent increase in search query volume over the past year.

Yahoo! Sites ranked second globally with 9.4 billion searches (up 13 percent), followed by Chinese search engine [...]

Top Search Markets Worldwide

The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year.

This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The [...]

Mobile Application Review – Amazon

By Dan Marley
Senior Research Consultant
at fhios.
What is it?
Amazon

Purpose?
Provide users with the ability to search for and purchase products from the Amazon website via the application.
Download?
Free. Does not require Wi-Fi connectivity
Overview
This application has received good reviews on the application store and generally is seen to have few faults.
So what does it do?
This application aims [...]

Are tablets the best remedy?

By Dr. Alex Dewitt,
Senior Research Consultant
at fhios.
There has been a great deal of talk about tablet devices recently, with numerous rumours that Apple will release a touch device midway in size between an iPone and an MacBook. But how necessary will these devices be in our lives?
Before the iPhone was released there seemed to be [...]