A Banner Year for Mobile Devices…
In the last quarter of 2012, people around the world were projected to buy 225 million smartphones — a 40% jump from the last quarter of 2011 — adding up to 700 million sold. This epic uptake of powerful mobile devices, plus tablets, marked the defining trend of the year and spurred the creation of new communications technologies, business models, and wireless policy changes.
This period of extraordinary growth didn’t feature any major new product breakthroughs and included an uncharacteristic stumble by Apple over the flawed mapping app the company introduced in September. The competition between major handset makers spawned continuing court battles that may inhibit technology development. Still, consumers are using more data than ever as they buy new devices and switch to 4G LTE networks, which can have 10 times the capacity of the older 3G networks. And the major carriers are nurturing new data-hungry wireless business models in everything from cars to health care.
Faced with all of this surging data demand, concerns peaked in the U.S. and elsewhere that spectrum might soon run out. To read the rest of the article click to the MIT Technology Review.
Avantica’s mobile app development and testing service continued to grow rapidly in North America in 2012. Riding the twin benefits of Nearshore proximity and the same U.S. timezone (the company’s mobile engineers are in Costa Rica and Peru) and the continued popularity of Agile engineering with U.S. startups and the Software 500 (aligning with Avantica’s deep distributed Agile dev and testing expertise) the company helped its customers develop apps for everything. To learn more click here.
