Do the Math

These articles originally appeared in the Sept. 2011 issue of Next Gen Mobility

More than a third of people admit to snooping on a loved one's call history or e-mail.

Electronic Snooping: An Inside Job

Turns out Rupert Murdoch’s employees aren’t the only ones keen on working under the radar to get more information about persons of interest. A new study by Retrevo indicates that more than a third of people admit to having secretly checked a loved one's call history or e-mail.

Other key takeaways of the study include the fact that people today are more likely to secretly check the e-mail or history of someone they're dating, than they were a year ago. Twenty-three percent admitted to doing just that in 2010. This year it’s increased to 33 percent.

Women a more likely to be involved in this nefarious practice than are men, according to the study, which says they weigh in at 33 percent and 31 percent, respectively. Chances are also better the snooper is a female when it comes to parents tracking and gathering information via electronic devices related to their children.

The data for this report was derived from an online study conducted for consumer electronics review and shopping site Retrevo by an independent panel in June of 2011. More than 1,000 individuals of various ages, genders, income and U.S.-based locations participated in the study.

          P.B.

Rising Broadband Lifts all Boats

Mobile broadband subscribers surpassed wireline broadband ones last year, at 558 million vs. 500 million respectively, but fixed-line services are not dead.

These numbers and industry assessment come courtesy of Stéphane Téral, Infonetics (News - Alert) Research's principal analyst for mobile and FMC infrastructure.

He says that final evaluation is true in large part due to the Chinese government’s massive fiber program, through which it has mandated all users should eventually have 20mbps connections (most today are in the 2-3mbps range).

Of course, Asia is also a hotbed of wireless usage. Last year, users in the Asia Pacific region made up nearly half of the mobile subscriber pool.

That worldwide pool is forecast to reach 6.4 subscribers by 2015, Infonetics says, and more than 2 billion of those users are expected to be cellular mobile broadband subscribers (a 60 percent increase from 2010).

       P.B.

 Say It Isn’t So

Two questionable reports related to the wireless ecosystem were circulating late this summer. One highly repurposed item suggested that return rates for Android (News - Alert) phones have been as high as 40 percent. Debunking that notion, the Business Insider noted a different report saying that “retailers start complaining and asking for compensations when return rates get higher than 5-7 percent,” so that, and the fact that Android-based handset vendors would rebel, make these astonishingly return rates highly unlikely. Google (News - Alert) didn’t answer NGM’s request asking for clarity on the Android returns stories.

Another highly circulated wireless story pointed to new research indicating that there’s a link between the use of Internet Explorer and a low IQ score. Turns out the study was a hoax – at least that’s the word from a number of mainstream media outlets including the BBC, CNET, CNN and others, many of which reported the news earlier.

The fake study was emailed to reporters in a pithy press release from AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Co. Part of it reads: “From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general…. It is common knowledge, that Internet Explorer Versions to 6.0 to 8.0 are highly incompatible with modern web standards. In order to make websites work properly on these browsers, web developers have to spend a lot of unnecessary effort. This results in an extra financial strain on web projects, and has over the last decade cost millions of man-hours to IT companies.”

       P.B.