SEO Werkt!

Modern gadgets may be shiny items of mass appeal, but for one teenage boy in China’s Hunan province, they were too appealing.

Five people were charged by local police and are now on trial for allegedly removing one of the 17-year-old boy’s kidneys, transplanting it into another individual, and giving him cash that he used to buy Apple products.

If there could be a worse part to this tragic story, it’s that the teenager received only about 10 percent of the total amount realized from the sale of his kidney. He used his share of the proceeds, about $3,500 U.S., to buy an iPad and an iPhone.

When his mother asked him where he got the money to buy his expensive new toys, he told her that he had sold his kidney.

iPads and iPhones sell extremely well in China, where Apple actually enjoys higher tablet market share than in the U.S. Recently, a former colleague of mine who works for Intel in Shanghai shared on a Google+ post that Apple products are in high demand not primarily due to their reputed simplicity and reliability but for their social cachet. ”The key reason why Apple has done so well in China – status. Having an Apple product is a status symbol,” they said.

Organ harvesting is illegal in China, and 137 people have recently been charged in a crackdown on the practice. However, since the Chinese Ministry of Health estimates that 1.5 million in China need transplants, and since only 10,000 organs are donated annually, a thriving illegal market for organs exists.

Those illegally donated organs are not always removed or transplanted safely, and unfortunately, the boy is now suffering renal failure and is too weak to appear in court to face the accused organ harvesters. He is reportedly seeking damages of up to 2 million yuan, about $350,000 U.S.

The accused, who split about $32,000, include the surgeon who performed the surgery, a hospital official, and an alleged mastermind who prowled Internet chat rooms to find possible donators.

They face up to 10 years in prison, and four others who participated in minor ways have already been fined.

Image credit: Lightspring/ShutterStock

Filed under: mobile, offBeat, VentureBeat

Amazon has just dropped the price for a Kindle to $269 in a fire-sale “deal of the day.’ Some folks, including us, are taking this as a sign that a new Kindle is on the way.

The usual list price for the Kindle DX, Amazon’s big ol’ 9.7-inch e-ink reader, is $379. Unfortunately, in a world replete with seven-inch e-readers and 10-inch tablets, the Kindle DX was a bit too large to fit in with its own kind and a bit too bare-bones in its feature set and applications to fit in with devices of the same size.

We have also been hearing rumors that Amazon is getting ready to roll out a 10-inch Kindle Fire. Fire is the company’s entry into the world of high-powered, full-featured Android tablets, and it’s been selling like crazy since its launch. With other 10-inch competitors on the market from companies like Samsung, Asus, Sony, and (of course) Apple, it makes total sense for Amazon to kick the Fire’s screen size up a notch.

In fact, the wee, seven-inch model has already played a big role in taking a bite out of Apple’s share of the tablet market. Overall, Android tablets gained 10 percent market share from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011 and now represent 39 percent of the overall tablet market; and Fire, which was first announced just last September already represents 35.7 percent of total Android tablet application sessions.

As revealed in one of Amazon’s recent quarterly earnings calls, the Fire tablet is still Amazon’s best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product, as it’s been since the day it launched.

Filed under: mobile

Apple’s market-leading iPad has great penetration globally at 68% market share. But it’s even bigger in China, where Analysys International says that iPad has almost 73 percent of the tablet market.

IDC’s latest numbers show that Apple owns the global tablet scene — 17 million shipped just in the second quarter of 2012. And selling almost seven out of ten tablets sold worldwide is impressive.

But selling more than seven out of ten in a market where the the cheapest retina iPad costs easily 10 percent of an average worker’s annual salary is unbelievable.

Source: Apple

iPad2 and new iPad sales rising in China

In fact, that’s a 20 percent increase from the first quarter, most likely due to price cuts on earlier models. But going down from 10 percent of an average salary to 7 or 8 percent is not terribly significant.

The Chinese iPad numbers contrast with home-grown Lenovo, which mustered up only just over 8 percent of tablet market share, and near-neighbor Samsung, which actually lost market share in China this quarter, coming down to 3.59 percent.

Perhaps the numbers should not be that shocking. With a middle class already as large as 250 million people, there will soon be almost as many well-off Chinese as there are Americans in total.

And the 33 percent of global iPads sales that are currently recognized in the U.S. could soon be 20 percent or fewer.

Image credit: Aleksandar Mijatovic/ShutterStock

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Apple dominated the Chinese tablet market during the three-month period ending July, capturing nearly 3 out of every 4 purchases despite not being able to sell its latest iPad in the mainland until the final week of the quarter.

The tablet market is still relatively young, with penetration in the fast-forward U.S. market only reaching 47% by 2013, but we are already starting to see some usage patterns emerging, according to comScore. In a survey of 6,000 tablet owners in the U.S., the researchers have found the Kindle Fire has more female than male users while iPad skews to males. It also found that Apple’s tablet has the highest satisfaction ratings of all tablets — although across iPad, Android and Kindle Fire tablets, all rate relatively close to each other, and all of them are higher than the average satisfaction ratings for smartphones.

And when assessing what motivates purchases, brands play second-fiddle to functionality and price, with apps availability, along with cost, scoring as the most important factors considered when a consumer purchases a tablet.

ComScore found that Amazon’s tablet has a customer base that is 56.6% female, the highest imbalance among iPad, Android and Amazon devices. The ‘why’ behind this finding is not addressed but it could have something to do with Amazon itself, being first and foremost a reading and shopping site, skews more to women, as we have also seen with its earlier Kindle E-Reader products. It’s also a funny coincidence that Amazon promotes the products with a woman’s hand (pictured).

The iPad attracted a 52.9% male audience, while Android tablets appeared to have the most evenly divided user base. In total, tablets as a general category are equally split between male and female owners. In comparison, smartphones seem to attract a slightly more male than female audience, at 51.9% to 48.1%.

When it comes to age, the 25-34 year-old bracket is the most-common for tablet and smartphone owners, regardless of the make; with the 35-44 segment the second most-popular. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise; this age range would hit the sweet spot of having enough disposable income to buy a product that can cost upwards of $199, and being digitally switched on than older users and possibly more sedentary than younger users. Also unsurprisingly, the most common income bracket for both tablet and smartphone owners are those consumers with a household income of over $100,000.

What’s perhaps more surprising is that even the Amazon Kindle, marketed as a price beater with its $199 tag, is largely following the same trend as more expensive tablets. That suggests that either Amazon’s $199 price is still too high for consumers with less money, or that tablets are still largely aimed at a particular kind of user that fits into a specific socioeconomic class — or likely both.

Turning to what gets users to buy tablets, comScore found that on average apps availability and price are just as important as each other to consumers. (That should quiet those who say apps are secondary to the web.) That result varied among different categories — for example the more expensive but app-tastic iPad scored higher for apps than the largely cheaper Android and Kindle Fire tablets. It seems to indicate that if Apple did launch a cheaper device but with most of the same functionality, it could potentially blow all the others out of the water.

Still, today brand name/tablet OS are both a close second. The fact that consumers are so aware of the OS is interesting to me: it seems once more to indicate we are still looking at early adopters here. Interestingly services like music, video and social networking are broken out from apps, and all score lower on their own.

Lastly, in the area of device satisfaction, Apple’s iPad, the most popular tablet in the market today, scored the very highest. But not with as wide a margin as you would assume, given its market share. Apple had an 8.8 on a scale of 1-10, but the Kindle Fire was nearly as good with an 8.7 rating. Interestingly the un-forked Android tablets scored the lowest at 8.2, but that category will contain a very wide range of models. Similarly, the catch-all category of smartphones also showed a comparatively low score of 8.1.

Apple retained the lion’s share of the tablet market in the second quarter of 2012, dominating with a 68.2 percent market share.

One of the strong points in Apple’s quarterly earnings report yesterday was sales of the iPad. Globally, they were up 52% by revenue and 84% by unit sales, respectively to $9 billion and 17 million. In some new figures out today, Strategy Analytics notes that this translates to an increase in overall tablet market share for the company: Apple now controls 68.3% of the market, compared to 62% in Q2 a year ago, in an overall tablet market that saw shipments of 24.9 million units. So much for analyst predictions: here’s one (of several) that had forecast a decline in Apple’s market share.

So why the reversal? It looks like the competition that many had been expecting to give Apple a run for its money has failed to materialize. But while Apple’s market share is the best it’s been in years, Strategy Analytics also cautions that overall the market has also witnessed its slowest growth rate since the first iPad launched in Q2 2010, a result of a slowdown in the global economy, it says.

Microsoft, which will be releasing a new tablet-friendly OS in the form of Windows 8 later this year, has lost nearly 3% market share, according to figures from Strategy Analytics.

Collectively, all of the others (that would be PlayBook, primarily) have lost 3.5%.

And Android, meanwhile, has grown the number of units it has sold to 7.3 million compared to 4.4 million in 2011; but in the wider tablet market, that has only kept its market share level at 29.3%.

“Despite high expectations for companies like Amazon, Samsung, Acer and Asus, the Android community has yet to make a serious dent in Apple’s dominance of the tablet market,” said analyst Neil Mawston. “Unspectacular hardware designs, limited uptake of cellular models and a modest number of tablet-optimized services have been among some of the main reasons for Android’s mixed performance so far.” Whether a more comprehensive global rollout from Amazon, and the launch of more models, will turn that around remains to be seen.

In fact, Apple’s iPad share is not only going up; it’s the best it’s been in years — since Q3 2010, according to Peter King, a director at the analyst firm. The 24.9 million units sold works out to growth of 67% compared to the 14.9 million units shipped a year ago.

Apple’s iPad is expected to continue dominating the tablet market with a share higher than 60 percent, while PC sales are projected to continue their downward trend, according to a new analysis.

Apple is expected to launch a smaller iPad to deal with a flurry of rivals that are trying to eat away at its market share in tablets with lower prices and smaller devices.

The new Apple tablet will have a 7.85-inch screen and it will sell for significantly less than the $499 iPad, which has a 9.7-inch retina display, according to the New York Times, which cited unnamed sources. Apple declined to comment on the report to the Times.

The device is meant to compete with the latest rivals, which includes Google’s Nexus 7, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and the upcoming Microsoft Surface tablet coming out later this year. All of that new competition is aimed at dividing the monolithic tablet market into smaller segments. The New York Times had few details on the tablet, which the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have dubbed the mini iPad in the past.

Apple currently sells its second-generation iPad for $399, but it has no offering at the $199 price that Google and Amazon have targeted. It will be interesting to see if consumers will prefer the smaller-screen devices, which are too large to fit in pants pockets, but are not a bad size for women’s purses. The strategy to diversify the product line-up is like the effort to defend the iPod’s market via a variety of devices from the tiny iPod Shuffle to the full-size iPod Touch.

Apple currently has about 60 percent to 70 percent of the tablet market.

[Photo credit: Apple]

Filed under: mobile

The tablet market is just heating up, but chances are if you were an early adopter you’ve already upgraded at least once. Even if not, plenty of people have purchased a tablet only to realize they don’t have a really good use for one. So, what’s that old touch screen good for anyway? Let’s take a look at some of the more clever uses. More »