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in Q3 of this year, Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones

Q4 earnings call

Q&A Session

Sales of iPod touch were up 100% year over year.

Over 70% for share of U.S. MP3 market.

launching there October 30th with China Unicom

Almost 21 million for the fiscal year sold now in terms of iPhones, so we have momentum. Plus the App Store with 85,000 apps is so far beyond anyone else. We feel good about competing with anyone. I think people are still trying to catch up with the first iPhone, announced 2 years ago. We’ve moved beyond that

We ship the 3G in 80 today, 64 for the iPhone 3GS, I suspect that will be past 80 by the end of the calendar year

customers will only be able to pay for applications using operator billing when the application developer has set the price in USD

Motorola will launch its own app store for its Android based phones

Shop4Apps

This is not the first store that will offer Android applications outside Google’s Android Market

Already several independent stores for Android are available, but Motorola is the first big handset vendor to launch one.

MotoAppstore

Since Android is an open platform, it is possible to install stores besides Google’s Android Market

The problem however is that most of the new independent Android stores are not pre-installed on the device

The Orange Application Shop was launched this week during the Le Web conference in Paris

Samsung Bada applications are coming in the first half of 2010 and will very likely be distributed via the Samsung Application Store

The Nokia Ovi Store is reaching close to 1 million downloads per day

Apple promoted a set of applications in the App Store during Black Friday. This promotion greatly influenced rankings and downloads of the featured applications

Samsung is holding a launch event in London next week December 8, to kick-off Samsung Bada

retaining users can be equally difficult

news apps get re-used more than once per day, at a rate of 11 times per week

Quadrant I is comprised of the most frequently used apps over the longest period of time; categories like News and Reference (e.g., Dictionaries, Thesauruses, Recipes, etc.)

more data on retention by category, as well as frequency of use

Despite growing competition, RIM sold more than 10 million devices in the quarter

with strong growth coming from outside of North America and in the consumer segment.

This technique especially helps novice users quickly grasp how your application works. Folders are a classic software metaphor. People file things in folders in the real world, so they immediately understand the idea of putting data into folders on a computer.

iPhone OS users enjoy a heightened sense of direct manipulation because of the Multi-Touch interface. Using gestures, people feel a greater affinity for, and sense of control over, the objects they see on screen, because they do not use any intermediate device (such as a mouse) to manipulate them.

An iPhone application is better than a person at remembering lists of options, commands, data, and so on. Take advantage of this by presenting choices or options in list form, so users can easily scan them and make a choice. Keeping text input to a minimum frees users from having to spend a lot of time typing and frees your application from having to perform a lot of error checking. Presenting choices to the user, instead of asking for more open-ended input, also allows them to concentrate on accomplishing tasks with your application, instead of remembering how to operate it.

Your application should respond to every user action with some visible change.

Keep actions simple and straightforward so users can easily understand and remember them

Whenever possible, use standard controls and behaviors that users are already familiar with.

appearance has a strong impact on functionality: An application that appears cluttered or illogical is hard to understand and use.

Aesthetic integrity is not a measure of how beautiful your application is. It’s a measure of how well the appearance of your application integrates with its function. For example, a productivity application should keep decorative elements subtle and in the background, while giving prominence to the task by providing standard controls and behaviors.

An immersive application is at the other end of the spectrum, and users expect a beautiful appearance that promises fun and encourages discovery.

appearance still needs to integrate with the task.