A recent survey of 482 iPhone 4S owners found that 87% used Siri monthly, while a third used it daily to make calls, send SMS messages, and make web searches. 26% dictate e-mails to their iPhone 4S daily, but another 30% have never used Siri to send an e-mail. The most popular uses overall, according to Parks Associates, was making phone calls and sending SMS messages, but a whole 32% said they had never used Siri to schedule meetings, and 35% had never used it to schedule a meeting; even those who did did so with the lowest daily frequency out of any group. Satisfaction rate with Siri sat at 55%, while 9% were dissatisfied, and everyone else was somewhere in between. While the study indicates that most users aren't bothering with Siri's other notable features, like geofenced reminders, audio e-mail playback, and setting alarms, 37% said they would like to see some voice-activated TV remote control action (though that was counter-acted by another 20% against it).

Siri is still technically in beta so Apple can collect enough voice data to improve the service, so it's reasonable to expect the satisfaction rate to climb over time. Although that also means we might see additional features coming down the pipe, will anyone actually use them?

Let's face it, Siri is definitely cool, but for a lot of people, talking to your phone as if it were a real person, even if Apple has gone out of their way to give it a Pixar personality, is still a fairly foreign idea, and it's hard not to feel a bit of a crazy when using Siri in public.

If you're new to Apple's virtual personal assistant, here are a bunch of Siri tips to help get you started. If you've been using Siri for a while, how often do you use it? Are there any feature additions in particular that you'd like to see?

Source: WSJ

ChangeWave recently surveyed 1,604 IT personnel with buying power in their company, and of those planning on getting tablets in the next quarter, 84% are siding with the iPad. To properly set the context, however, only 22% of the surveyed companies said that they were in the market to buy tablets for their employees. We already knew that businesses were big on iOS tablets, but that figure is actually up from 77% in November - clearly the new iPad is spiking interest in businesses as well as consumers. Even BlackBerry, the traditional leader in enterprise, only demanded 3% of corporate tablet demand. Samsung's took second place, albeit far behind apple with 8% demand.

Is anyone really surprised by results like this? Although it continues to highlight Apple's vice grip on the tablet market, there's still plenty of room for the tablet market itself to grow. An IT folks out there on the verge of rolling out iPads to the workforce? Have any of y'all already pulled the trigger?

Source: ChangeWave

Strategy Analytics has crunched most of the fourth quarter results announced this week (including Apple's), and figures the iPhone maker is now the top smartphone manufacturer, but only by a sliver. In Q4 2011, Apple claimed 23.9% of global smartphone market share, and Samsung trailed only slightly, with 23.5%. That's just counting Q4, too; for the whole year, Samsung beat out Apple by a single percentage point.

Beyond smartphones, in the world of mobiles at large, Apple was relatively far behind. iPhones constituted 8.3% of the world's handsets, while Nokia still clung the top spot with 25.5%, followed by Samsung with 21.3% global market share. Although that shows the iPhone still has a long ways to go, it did boast the best growth out of the three; during the same quarter last year, Apple only constituted 4.0% of the global market.

The folks at Strategy Analytics stepped in for a few comments. Associate Director Alex Spektor said "Apple’s growth was fueled by intense demand for its refreshed iPhone 4S, as well as the availability of three generations of iPhones at a variety of price points at operators like AT&T in the United States," but there's a lot of promise internationally, too. Tom Kang, another director, said "China is becoming a key market for Apple this year, and we expect Apple’s share to grow rapidly in 2012, despite countless copycat rivals.” Nokia's having a rough time holding onto their top spot, despite generally positive reviews of their first Windows Phones. According to Executive Director Neil Mawston,  “Nokia’s global handset shipments declined 8 percent annually to 113.5 million units in Q4 2011. Volumes were buoyed by the sales of Nokia’s low-end dual-SIM models in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, but were a little soft overall, as initial shipments of Microsoft Lumia phones could not offset declining Symbian sales."

It's rarely a surprise to see Apple doing well in terms of sales, but they'll have to keep working hard in order to stay ahead of Samsung. We're seeing lots of different Android phones coming out of Samsung to address different price points, and though Spektor's right that there are older iPhones still on the market, they lack the forward-compatibility of many Android handsets.

It's worth noting that according to Strategy Analytics, the overall smartphone market grew 63.1% in 2011, versus 71.4% growth in 2010. Do you guys think smartphone momentum is starting to plateau, or is this just a slight bump in the road?

Source: Strategy Analytics via Apple Insider

Many big-name companies are switching to the iPhone, and though BlackBerry is the biggest competition in the enterprise arena, iOS is doing a great job of cutting Android out of the picture. According to the latest data from Good Technology,  the iPhone 4S was just as popular new device among businesses as it was among consumers in the last quarter, commanding 31% of enterprise activations. The iPhone 4 has had a bit of a head start, but even then, only accounted for 17.6%, followed by the iPad 2 with 14.9% share. The top Android phone was the Samsung Galaxy S II, which only accounted for 1.7% of Good's business customers. The data spanned October 1 through to December 31, and included thousands of companies that had at least 5 activated devices.

The Good data also broke down smartphone activity by sector, which showed that 35% of all mobile activations in the last quarter were in financial services, followed by business and professional services at 16.2%. The iPhone 4S specifically managed to be fairly popular in the business and professional services market, snagging 25.7% of all corporate iPhone 4S activations. Unfortunately, Good didn't have any metrics on BlackBerry activations, but seeing as they're essentially the alternative to RIM's enterprise server software, I would wager their BlackBerry activation data would be lower than average anyway.

While Android smartphones were still pulling in more interest than iPads, it was a pretty close race, and combined with the massive popularity of iPhone activations, iOS is firmly planting itself in businesses. I'd love to see some more large-scale studies comparing iOS penetration in enterprise compared to BlackBerry, especially internationally, since RIM claims much of their popularity abroad. Data from November (PDF) suggests iPhone is leading BlackBerry in businesses, but there haven't been a lot of other studies backing up that research.

How many iPhones are you guys seeing around the office? Is it a common sight, or does BlackBerry still reign supreme? Maybe Android has started to make some inroads...?

Source: Good

This week I'm taking a look at iStudiez. A new school year is upon us and as I begin the journey of own Master's degree I thought taking a look at one of the leading school and course management apps in the App Store was in order.

iStudiez is a very comprehensive course management application for the iPhone. This app literally does it all from cataloging semesters, courses and instructors to tasks and grades. So where do we begin? Let's break the app down by section. So, first lets take a look at the Today section.

At the bottom of iStudiez you have four icons. The first icon is the Today icon. From here you get a summary of information you need to get done today. You have the option of turning on events from your iOS calendar, or feel free to leave it off. It displays all day events as well as regular times events. Simply tap on the event to get more information.

Next you have the Calendar icon. This is exactly as it sounds, a calendar for your courses and assignments. There is a toggle button up at the top of the screen that switches you from Schedule to viewing just your Assignments. This approach is quite nice as it allows you to see when your assignments are due and compare it with what your doing that day, week, etc to help you manage your time more efficiently. You can also add an assignment from here directly. Tap the plus icon located in the top right corner. Add the course, assignment name and details, due date and priority as well as push notification reminder and any partners you are working with to compete the assignment. Your partner information is pulled directly from your contacts list.

The next icon is your Assignments section. This is the place to view anything about what assignments you have, grades and completed courses. This section is divided into two areas; Current and Completed. Current lists your assignments by either Due Date, Course or Priority. Simply tap the choice you want and iStudiez will display and sort the results of your choosing. The completed section shows your completed course date and and course with your grade for that class.

The last section is the Planner icon. This area allows you to configure your Semesters, Holidays and Instructors. Your semesters can be be given a date range, nothing too exciting there. Next you can add your course and give it a color to help it stand out in the crowd. You can set your class as a regular class, single class or an exam. When you do this you also have the ability to set up that specific class's schedule. You can pick the days of the week, its repeat schedule, instructor and location. You can enter the name, date and location for your exams as well. You can also enter in all of your instructor data from name, title, phone and email to office hours. You even get a comprehensive list of the classes that professor teaches based on what you have entered in your courses. Yes, tapping the phone number will launch the Phone app and email will compose and email; very convenient!

You have awesome control on how all of this data gets displayed in iStudiez. You can customize default phrases on your calendar such as "No classes today" and change that to "It's a beach day!" for example. You can determine what information your calendar can specifically show. Turn off iOS calendar events if you want. Add a course color to differentiate between classes , assignments in the calendar; you have complete control. For me, a particularly useful option that is off by default is displaying week number.

There is not much else to say other than if you have an iOS device, buy this app immediately. It's universal you can run it on an iOS device and the price is beyond reasonable at $2.99; the developer could easily charge more than that simply for the value in time savings that this app will give you.

[$2.99- iTunes Link]

Pros

• Robust course management app
• Integrates your iOS calendar with specific iStudiez data
• Universal app, BONUS!!!
• Helpful back-up via email feature
• A Lite version is available to try out

Cons

• Cannot sync data between iPhone/iPad or other iDevices (a sync solution is in the works)

According to a study, Motorola recently surpassed Apple in brand loyalty among men 18 years old and up since the release of the Droid on the Verizon network. The study by YouGov's BrandIndex scale ranges from -100 to 100 and is based on weekday interviews with 2,000 interviews per day from a panel of 250,000 people.

This past week Apple has dropped from a November peak high of 48.1 to 22 and Motorola is staying strong with 29.3 with an error margin of +/- 2 percent. The real loser in all of this? Research and Motion and their BlackBerry smartphones as they have dropped to a lonely 9 in the study.

All of this may have started from the much talked about Verizon map and Droid commercials. It would seem that the first round of the Verizon vs AT&T battle has gone in favor of Big Red and Motorola. It should be interesting to see if the latest iPhone commercials will be able to swing things back into Apple's favor.

[Via AppleInsider]

The iPhone is twice as reliable as the Blackberry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds.

This is big news for users that are looking for a reliable device that don't have the patience for the potential troubles other devices can have in the Enterprise (well, even non-Enterprise environment for that matter). The study is broken into a few different subgroups including:

• Malfunction rate after 12 months
• Malfunction rates since purchase
• Probability of problems based on type (battery, call quality, etc)
• Distribution of malfunction per 100 incidents

All in all, this is excellent news for the iPhone and Apple, congratulations! Read the full report after the jump!  

Reliability Study: iPhone Vs. Blackberry Vs. Treo - Get more Information Technology>