A Sad Day for Tablet Competition, Plus HP TouchPad Identification.

I do not like to see one company having too great a dominance in any market. I have long thought small touch screen portable PCs are a good idea; and then after years of negligible success Apple launch the iPad, as though it is a new idea, and make them fashionable. I hate Apple trying to stifle competition using alleged paten infringements, and trying to take extort money from using the iPad (to me if you buy hardware you should be able to do what you want with it). Thus I was pleased when HP said it was going to take Apple on; from my limited experience WebOS made sense.

I looked forward to the launch of HPs first touch screen, and a few days ago went to a PC shop to have a play with the HP TouchPad. My impression was that it was not perfect, but it was a good first attempt, and would be a stepping stone to a better machine. I would have bought one, however, Opera browser was/is not yet available for the TouchPad, and whilst I am happy to buy a tablet which helps open up the market, I do not wish to buy a tablet which will be used mainly for portable browsing, and will artificially inflate Apple Safari browser market share (see TouchPad Identification below). All things considered I decided that the TouchPad seemed a perfectly acceptable tablet, that I would buy when Opera became available.

Alas, this is a sad day because HP have decided to scrap their WebOS tablets and phones, but maybe I will be able to buy one cheap, and put a straight forward Linux distro on it!

TouchPad Identification

I recently reviewed the identification of the Blackberry Playbook by counters, and found it to suggest that Apple Safari browser usage was higher than it actually is, due to both browsers being based on the WebKit browser engine. Likewise, the TouchPad uses a WebKit based browser, and almost universally is counted as Safari:

Linux OS and Safari browser

ExtremeTracking
ShinyStats
Sitemeter
W3

BeOs (OS and browser)

BraveNet

Mac OS and Safari browser

OneStat

Default Browser

StatCounter

Browser String:

Mozilla/5.0 (hp-tablet; Linux; hpwOS/3.0.0; U; en-GB) AppleWebKit/534.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) wOSBrowser/233.70 Safari/534.6 TouchPad/1.0

Blackberry PlayBook ID + Are WebKit Browsers Giving Appel Safari an Overstated Market Share?

Yeasterday I popped into a local computer store to have a play with the Blackberry PlayBook. I dis not spend enough time to write a worthwhile review, but by visiting this site I found that very few stats trackers correctly identify the PlayBook (listed Browser / OS):

Correctly Identified:

W3 - Blackberry PlayBook Tablet 1.0 / RIM Tablet

ExTreame Tracking - Blackberry PlayBook / Blackberry PlayBook

Near Miss:

Statcounter: Blackbery / Blackberry OS

ID As Apple Safari:

Shiny Stats - Safari / Various

Onestat - Safari / Macintosh

24Log - Safari / Other

SiteMeter - Safari 1.3 / Macintosh unknown

GoStats - Safari / Unknown

ID As BeOS:

BraveNet - BeOS / BeOS

From the above it is clear that few correctly identify the BlackBerry PlayBook, and most credit the WebKit Browser as being an Apple Safari browser. Surly, this causes Apples browser (and to a lesser expent Apples OS) to be regarded as more popular than it actually is?

PS Will be nice when BeOS actually does start making plenty of hits again!!

For the record the browser string was:

Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 1.0.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/0.0.1 Safari/534.8

Fell Onto My Left Wrist Last Week

Force caused damage at the elbow. Nothing broken, and as the picture shows the swelling has gone now. Have not been driving much! Steve.

Lonliness of a FreeBSD Surfer

Earlier today I surfed onto a site called Pool tot Pool. Noticing an ExtremeTracking button I had a look - I just cannot help it! This tracker ha been running since 25th November 2006, in that time it has had 10,110 hits, yet I am the first person to surf onto the site using FreeBSD, and my visit puts FreeBSD usage to 0.01%.



However, Net Applications give the percentage Internet traffic for FreeBSD as 0.01%, so I suppose satistically, after 10,109 hits, it was time for me to find this site!

Opera 11 Alpha

Today Opera 11 Alpha was released. I decided to see how the different counters recorded Opera 11 Alpha on its first day.

Opera 11 Alpha used on FreeBSD:

Opera/9.80 (X11; FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE i386; U; en) Presto/2.6.37 Version/11.00

No result:

BraveNet - Fails to count Opera 9 / 10 and now 11!
Belstat
GoStats - not working at time of test
W3Counter (Browser ID: Identification Blocked 0)

Opera 9

OneStat
SiteMeter
24Log
ExtremeTracking

Opera 10

Clicky

OPERA 11

ShinyStats
Statcounter
Motigo

Full marks / flexibility to ShinyStats, Statcounter, and Motigo. I'm also sure ExtremeTracking will register Opera 11 before too long.

iPad Identification.

I recently had a play with an iPad in a local shop. Once I got over the problem of it auto-correcting the address from blogspot to bloodsport I was able to see how the different counters recorded my visit:

iPad / Safari:

ExtremeTracking
StatCounter
Shiny

Mac OSX / Safari:

SiteMeter
Brave Net
24Log

iPhone / Safari Mobile:

Clicky

Max OSX / Safari Mobile:

OneStats

Are Apps a Good Thing?

There are thousands of apps. They can do the most amazing things; but are all these apps. a good thing? Especially apps. that allow the use of established web-sites.

I was using my favourite currency conversion site XE.com when I noticed a link for the Android XE.com app. I then realised that there are XE.com apps for the iPhone and Blackberry too.

My reaction was why would you want an app. to convert currencies, you can do it so easily in the Android/Blackberry/iPhone browser? Not owning a mobile phone I tried XE.com on a divice (Nintendo DSi XL), Opera Mini simulator, and Opera Mobile Emulator for Linux. XE.com performed beautifully on all three.

I continued to wonder why bother with an app. I thought that having the app. would make it easy to go back to XE.com again, but then so would bookmaking the site!

I asked my other half why bother with an app. for a job which is easily accomplished in the browser, and she suggested that apps. suited people who were not too conversant with computers. This I can not see because it requires no more technical ability to use a browser than it does to use an app.

I wondered if apps. were to make use easier on a small screen, but I have tried .mobi versions of sites and would generally prefer the full site with extra scrolling, or change to column mode to actually read. I find it infuriating that Wikipedia defaults to the .mobi on the Wii.

So why bother with apps? The web should be open to all, are we not just making bits exclusive to those with the right kit?