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The vice-like grip of the iOS and Android operating systems is only getting tighter, according to new sales figures published late last week.


New data from Comscore, released on Friday, showed Android leading the way at the end of May 2013 with 52.4 per cent of all US sales, up from 51.7 per cent at the end of February.

iOS share of the US market rose 0.3 per cent to 39.2 percent during same time period.

Despite the launch of BlackBerrys new BB10 operating system and the best selection of Windows Phone 8 devices yet, both of those platforms saw their share fall to 4.8 and 3.0 per cent respectively.

Numbers dont lie

It was a similar story for hardware sales. Apples iPhone led the way with the 32.9 per cent, closely followed by Samsung which enjoyed a sizeable 1.7 per cent jump to 23 per cent of sales.

The next three, HTC, Motorola and LG all endured a fall in sales during the three month period, all of which remain under 10 per cent.

Samsungs continued rise will have been fuelled by the launch of its new flagship Galaxy S4 handset but, worryingly for HTC, its critically acclaimed HTC One release couldnt stem the the drop-off in its share.

There is, of course, hope for those competing operating systems and manufacturers, but until the numbers start going in the other direction, its difficult to be too positive. They have to start gaining at some point, right?

Wireless power today is mostly about convenience; not having to fish out a cable and get it the right way round when you plug it in. But once it becomes ubiquitous, it will change the way devices are designed; they can have smaller batteries or save space by not needing the power port at all.


This year at CES, as well as seeing the latest wireless power products and the next step in wireless charging technology, we also got some good news on getting more users and businesses on board with wireless power - 2014 will definitely be a big year for wireless charging.

There are over 60 different phones that have Qi wireless charging (the inductive charging standard) built in today - and 40 million of them have been sold - and because its a standard, you can put your phone down on any Qi charging surface and it will just start grabbing power.

If your phone doesnt have Qi built in, Incipio introduced a line of wireless charging pads and protective cases at CES that add it (including Lumia models like the Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 1520 that have a connector designed to simplify adding a charging case).

That surface doesnt have to be a pad on your desk either. It could be a light or a mouse mat: silicon valley startup Kudos Tech had prototypes for both, although no dates for putting them into production yet.

You dont have to only charge a phone; IDAPT has added a Qi charging module to its clever Modulo battery system, which lets you connect up to five external 2000mAh batteries to charge your phone or tablet.

Snap on as many batteries as you need to take with you and drop it onto a wireless charger to keep them topped up before you leave.

Or it could be a car cradle (Nokia has a wireless charging cradle already and Tylt was showing off a prototype of its own at CES, with a perpetually sticky surface to hold your phone in place) or a tray built into your car. Both have NFC which can trigger your phone to launch a specific app, like GPS navigation, or pair with the cars Bluetooth automatically when you start charging it.

Car makers like that, John Perzow of the Wireless Power Consortium says, because it will let them take information from your phone – like your personal music collection – and display that on the screen on your dashboard. "They want a path for extending your personal device into the car and shifting some of the load to your phone, but you can only do that if you can charge the device."

The Jeep Cherokee will have a wireless charging shelf in the 2014 model, Toyota will put it in the Avalon and Prius and the German auto consortium that advises Mercedes, Volkswagen, Audi and BMW is recommending Qi, after a three year study on wireless charging.

We even saw an FAA-approved wireless charger for use on planes; expect to see it in private jets first rather than on your next economy flight though.

Making wireless power resonate

So with a standard like Qi and products already in the market, why is wireless charging still not common?
Perzow says that confusion over standards has been slowing adoption. Yes, theres the Qi standard, but there have been plenty of other wireless charging launches that havent been part of Qi. Even Qualcomm has its own wireless charging system for electric cars (it charges the motor, not your smartphone, but still, its something else to confuse people).

The WPC is trying to tackle that by bringing new wireless charging developments into the Qi standard, and we saw some of that at CES.

Today Qi uses near-field coupling, between the coil antenna inside your phone and the one inside the charging mat; you have to either put multiple coils in or rely on people lining up devices in just the right spot.

The latest Qi mats give you a little more freedom of movement but to be able to put devices down anywhere on the surface and to be able to fit the charging pad underneath a thick surface like a table or a kitchen worksurface requires the next technology to be included in the Qi standard, magnetic resonance.

Resonant charging lets you put the phone off to one side of the charging spot or have something else in the way and still get charge.

We saw a new charger from Convenient Power that has resonant charging thats fully backwards compatible with Qi, so we were able to stack two notebooks on the charger and put a Nokia Lumia on top of them and have it charge. Bolt the pad under a table and you can charge through the surface.

Convenient Power also showed us a five-device charger that automatically detects the power requirements of the phones and tablets you put on it and delivers the right charge, and again you dont need to worry about lining them up neatly.

New Zealand wireless power experts PowerByProxi also creates resonant chargers, although it will licence its designs to other companies rather than selling them directly like Convenient Power. Phones will need to have a new charging antenna but theyll still charge on older Qi pads.

The big advantage of the PowerByProxi system is that it puts devices in charge of setting the power level they need, and it can send different power levels to different devices. That means your almost-flat tablet can get lots of power instead of just the trickle of power needed to top up your almost-fully-charged phone
Getting new developments into a backwardly compatible standard like this is vital if we want to see wireless charging on offer at Starbucks and every hotel the way wireless networking is – something that would really make wireless power ubiquitous and something Perzow is working on.

"Infrastructure has been stalled because its a very conservative market. A hotel wants maximum usability and long life before theyre going to put this on every night stand. There needs to be an experience that adds value beyond charging," he says.

The new chargers that can be bolted under tables without having to chisel out a slot will help, as will more freedom of positioning. "You just put the phone down on the charger; you dont have to get the placement just right."

And so will management software that shows which devices are sitting on a table, charging, and whether the power is getting through to them properly. Making wireless power easy to fit, easy to support and easy to use could be what we need to see it everywhere in the next couple of years.

Computers used to be all about expandability. Essentially you owned a box that could be tailored to your needs as your requirements evolved. A popular upgrade path was storage, adding new hard drives as your files grew in size and number. But with Apples touchscreen revolution, everything changed.


The iPhone, iPad and iPod touch are more like appliances than traditional computers - theyre sealed boxes that forever remain as they were the moment you purchased them. You can no more extend their storage capabilities than you can add a new compartment to your fridge-freezer.

A quick look at Apples modern hardware suggests its entire line-up is heading in the same direction, but iOS devices are more restricted than Apples desktops and notebooks. After all, if you need more storage for a MacBook Air, you at least have the option of offloading large documents to an external hard drive (and, of course, then sensibly backing up that data along with the internal drives, either locally or to an online service such as CrashPlan).

But iOS devices arent designed that way. They dont have a USB port or a user-accessible file structure. The intention is that you store everything on the device itself (well, almost everything - services like iTunes Match enable you to grab your music from the cloud).

Therefore, an important tip when it comes to better iOS device storage and management comes at the moment of purchase: buy the model with the most storage that you can afford, unless youre absolutely convinced you wont need it.

Even then, reconsider; be mindful that as technology evolves, demands for storage increase. Retina screens require larger applications, and iOS cameras can shoot HD video, which requires a huge amount of space.

Also, demands on iOS devices are increasing purely on the basis of what they can now do. People frequently shoot and edit video, work with photography, read magazines and compose music on iPads and iPhones. All these things require lots of storage.

If your device gets really full, it alerts you. Also, things stop working. You wont be able to install new apps or shoot video new footage. You may find that updating apps becomes problematic, because the device doesnt have enough space to download, unpack and install updates before deleting older versions.

We offer advice for dealing with such a situation, along with managing iOS storage in general. Note that this isnt intended as a start-to-finish walkthrough, more a series of ideas that can be utilised to free up space.
As ever, we should stress the importance of back-ups before making major changes to iOS devices. Even if youre backing up to iCloud, make the occasional local back-up (select your device in iTunes and click Back Up Now on the Summary page).

Local backups are also useful when it comes to dealing with app data, because you can later use iExplorer to fish out settings and other documents from such a backup, even if those things have long been removed from your device. Also ensure before making any major changes in terms of deleting content that you dont only have said content on your iOS device.

For music, sync your device with iTunes to transfer tracks to your Mac (although you can grab previous purchases from iTunes, if necessary). For photos and movies, transfer them across by attaching your device to your Mac via USB, launching iPhoto, selecting the device and clicking the Import button.

How to manage iOS device storage

1. Check device capacity in iTunes

Although iOS devices no longer require iTunes, Apples desktop app remains useful from a device management standpoint. Connect your device (via USB or over Wi-Fi) and select it from the Devices button. Across the bottom of the window, you see a chart detailing whats taking up room: audio, photos, apps, books and other.

If storage is an issue, you could free some up. For example, if youve lots of music or photos on your device, select the relevant tab, uncheck the sync box and then sync your device. The relevant media is removed. You can then perform updates and manage your apps, perhaps free up more space, and later restore your media by resyncing it.

Occasionally, you might find the other section becomes massive. In our experience, this is usually down to you having a lot of in-app data (see Step 3) or failed app updates, which can happen on trying to update without enough free space. Resyncing should help; if not, a restore from a local backup.

2. Discover app sizes 

Apps can be massive. Sizes are shown in iTunes and the App Store, but thats the size of the compressed download. Once installed, an apps size can balloon.

In iTunes, check app sizes by clicking on the Apps tab and selecting Sort by Size from the pop-up menu at the top of the apps list. Peruse the list, and if there are apps or games you no longer use, consider deleting them. You can do so by clicking Remove in iTunes; when youve done so for all apps youd like to delete, click Sync.

Alternatively, tap-hold an app on your device to make all the icons jiggle and, for each, tap the cross icon and then Delete to remove it.

3. Examine app data

Open the Settings app on your device and in the General category, select Usage. You see available and used storage and a list of apps. These are ordered by the total amount of space they require, including app data.

Newsstand and similar apps tend to be storage-hungry. Their containers might be small, but the actual magazines rarely are. If you want to see how much space an apps data is using, tap the app in the list and look at the Documents & Data figure.

If youve several such apps taking up loads of room you need, consider deleting data. For example, if you subscribe to magazines, delete old issues from within each app. You can usually redownload issues later if you need to. If you fancy taking a speedy option and dont have a capped broadband connection, deleting a Newsstand app takes all its data with it. You can then download a fresh copy from the App Store and the latest issue.

Magazine and book apps arent the only storage culprits, note. Dropbox can (optionally) store documents locally (by flagging them as favourites) and some video apps have download capability, so check those too.

4. Back-up app content

Should you no longer use a game or creative app, but think you might one day return to it, download its data to your Mac using the free version of iExplorer (macroplant.com/iexplorer).

Connect your device to your Mac via USB, select Apps from iExplorers sidebar and select the app in question. Select the Documents and Library folders, Ctrl-click and select Export to Folder. (Alternatively drag them to a Finder folder.)

The contents of these folders can later be sideloaded into a fresh install of the app, meaning you wont lose your progress in a game that doesnt support iCloud, or could get saved compositions from a music-app back to your device with a minimum of fuss.

5. Use last-chance folders

If you tend to frequently download new apps, chances are some fall out of favour, but you might not necessarily know which. Create date-based folders (07-2013, say) and place apps within that you dont think you use any more. If you find yourself using one, rescue it from the folder. Otherwise, delete the folders contents after a few months, first backing up app data as necessary.

(Note: if you dont download apps to iTunes on your Mac, sync with it before deleting the apps, so youve a back-up you can later install to your device. You can of course redownload apps from the App Store, but only if they are still made available to you.)

This is a fairly ruthless app-management method, but its useful for keeping installs current and ensuring you have space.

If you just cant be without your phone or tablet, even when youre in bed, a pair of Canadian inventors have created a pillow that doubles up as a charger.