Big Ideas This Week – Smartphone Market Grows, Android vs iPhone, Offline Gmail, G+ Tip…

Smartphone Market
This ComScore report out last week (via +Pete Cashmore @Mashable : Android & iPhone Dominate Smartphone Market) gives updated stats on smartphones “82.2 million people in the U.S. owned a smartphone as of July 2011, a full 10% increase from April 2011″ – Take those too young to hold phones and those still using rotary dials and you

have about half of all mobile phone users in the U.S. with a smartphone. The 10% increase means those are newer smartphones people are carrying with them everywhere they go.

Android vs. iPhone
The OS details of the report are interesting too. iOS still has the perceived stronger brand but Google is actually in more people’s hands now. Google leads with 41.8% (up from 36.4% in April) of the 82 million people, Apple follows with 27% market share (up from 26% in April). RIM is in a tailspin dropping 25.7% to 21.7% since April.

Offline Gmail
The Official Gmail Blog finally, finally rolled out offline Gmail this week after over a year without any kind of offline access. Travelers rejoice, you can check emails while on the plane without paying $12 for access. It is an HTML5 implementation that requires a Chrome plugin (not sure about other browsers yet but does anyone use anything but Chrome?!)

Once installed, you’ll have access to your mail. Looks like it’s using the tablet optimized interface. I’m still playing with it and it seems like a huge improvement over the the old Google Gears that was retired. Google Docs and Google Calendar are to follow in the next few weeks. How’s it working for you?

G+ Tips
You noticed the link above to Pete Cashmore’s Google Plus profile. Yes, I’ve finally jumped in to Google Plus (G+ for you Goo-bies) and I love it! G+ seems more like a combination of the follow features of Twitter mixed with the sharing features of Facebook. With Circles, Hangouts, Sparks – there’s a lot to learn. I didn’t jump in right away because it just seemed overwhelming.

I found this simple eight step Google + Setup Guide that made it easy. Now that I’m in, G+ is easy, peasy lemon squeezy. First things I did was turn off all those email notifications and fill out my profile. Check it: https://plus.google.com/100255145208240996351/posts.

Google + is still in limited BETA and Google has not released an API that will allow developers to hook G+ up to your favorite social apps (like Seismic, Tweetdeck or Hootsuite). Until then, try this wicked little Chrome extension (again sorry Firefox and that other browser) called Publish Sync to provide two-way syncs between Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Weibo, Tencent (others being added). It adds checkboxes at the bottom of the native update windows in each of the support networks so you can cross post to all of them. Now we just need a mobile version of this and G+ becomes my primary social network.

Cheers.
b.

By Brent Robinson. Follow him on Twitter!

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