Market Share in the 2nd quarter of 2012:

Android - 104.8 million units
Apple - 26.0 million units
Blackberry - 7.4 million units
Symbian(nokia) - 6.8 Million units
Windows - 5.4 Million units
Linux - 3.5 million units
Others - 0.1 million units

When you’re on the go, it can be difficult to recall all of the places you’ve searched on your desktop browser at home. To make Google Maps more useful and comprehensive, we added a few improvements to better sync your maps experience across all of your devices. Today, with the latest release of Google Maps for Android, we’re making it faster and easier for you to get the information you’ve searched for on your browser, right on your Android phone.

Just make sure you’re signed in to Google Maps and your web history is enabled to get a number of new benefits including search and directions history. When you start to type a place or directions into the search box on your Android device, you’ll see suggestions for directions and locations that you’ve previously searched for – making it easier to quickly find directions on the go.


Desktop and Mobile search synchronisation.

You can also see your mapping search history, as well as your directions history, on your Android phone by going to the “Search” or “Directions” tab under My Places. This way, places and businesses you have already searched for will show up in your suggestions to save you time when you’re out and about.



Access your search history under My Places.

Also, as in previous versions of Google Maps for Android, when you chose to set locations such as “home” and “work", you can quickly access directions to these places by simply typing “home” or “work” in the search field on your mobile device.


Searching for work automatically suggests your work address.

We’re always working to make your Google Maps experience more comprehensive, accurate and useful across all devices. To learn more about these features you can visit our site.

But there's also another segment of the market, of which I consider myself a part. That segment thinks that there's still a lot of work to be done in mobile devices; still a lot of innovation to come. And that's not innovation for the sake of innovation. I mean real innovation in the way we use our phones, in the flexibility of those operating systems, in how those devices become an extension of ourselves. For that segment, I think the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 fall short. There's a lot more work to be done, but right now Apple seems to be in a holding pattern, too comfortable or too scared to take real chances.

Don't get me wrong, iOS is a beautiful and well-structured mobile operating system — but it's begun to show its age. It feels less useful to me today than it did a couple of years ago, especially in the face of increasingly sophisticated competition. I always have this sense now in iOS of not knowing where I am, what my status is — constantly having to load things and reload them. It feels tiring.

Maybe you'll call me an Android fanboy for saying this, or maybe it's because much of my business utilizes Google apps and its communication tools, but it didn't take me very long with the iPhone 5 to start thinking about getting back to the Galaxy Nexus and Jelly Bean (Android 4.1). For what I do, I think it's a more effective, more elegant, and more powerful OS right now. What it may lack in polish and consistency, it makes up for in power and flexibility.