App downloads jumped by 60% over the Holidays

Christmas was a good week for all of us, but a great week for apps with analytics firm Flurry reporting a 60% leap in app downloads on the previous week.  The figures which cover smartphones and tablets for just iOS and Android operating systems estimated that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas day with 242 million app downloads.  Over the whole Christmas period they estimated that some 1.2 billion apps were downloaded to devices with 20 million new devices activated.

The report said that “the last week of 2011 was the largest week for device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history.”

This shouldn’t come as any major surprise to people though as many people would have received new tablets and smartphones for Christmas, but also that app stores had a great many cheap deals on over the holiday period.  Even so, these numbers are huge and very clearly indicate that our hunger for smartphones and tablets isn’t going away any time soon.

When you factor in the number of people who would have picked up cheap Blackberry Playbook tablets over the holiday period we can expect activations to be much higher.

Flurry, which gets its data directly from Apple and Google said…

Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more common-place.   While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent.

It’s very likely that they are correct and that 1 billion app downloads a week worldwide will not just quickly become the norm, but that the number by the end of 2012 will in fact be considerably higher.

Factor in the launch of ARM-powered Windows 8 tablets, now probably scheduled for early 2013, and that number will rise exponentially as people try out Metro apps for the new operating system.  It is a reasonable predication though that by the time this happens the weekly app download figures for iOS and Android will have exceeded 2 billion a week.

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© Mike Halsey MVP for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2012. | Permalink |
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Post tags: android, app, apps, download, ios

Speed Up Dropbox Download Speeds

Sometimes, or maybe even all the time, when you synchronize or download files from your Dropbox online storage you may notice that file transfer rates are lower than they should be. That’s not an issue if you do not need access to the files that are downloaded fast as you can just keep Dropbox running as a background process until the data is transferred.

If it is an important file you may want to tweak your Dropbox settings to see if it changes the download speed to the better. Dropbox is by default set to unlimited download rates. If you are experiencing download rates in the 5KB/sec to 20KB/s range and have a Internet connection capable of handling a multiple of that, then you may want to try the following configuration change to see if it changes your Dropbox download speed.

Open the Dropbox configuration. You do that with a right-click on the Dropbox icon in the system tray and the selection of Preferences from the context menu.

Switch to the Bandwidth tab there. Dropbox lists the settings for the download and upload rate in the menu. The download rate is by default set to “Don’t limit”, the upload rate to “Limit automatically”.

The trick here now, as reported by the Italian blog Computer Acquisti is to configure a custom download rate instead.

The author of the original article suggests to enter a rate that’s between 50% to 75% of the Internet connection’s bandwidth. Users with a high download rate, say 20 Mbit or more can alternatively add fix values, e.g. 1000 kB/s

Users who report less than optimal upload speeds may do the same for the Dropbox upload rate to speed up uploads to Dropbox this way.

You can also try and switch the proxy settings from Auto-detect to No proxy (if you do not use one) under Proxies.

Please note that Dropbox won’t necessarily use all of the bandwidth assigned to the download tasks. Users may see an increase over the initial lower download rate however. You may also want to consider throttling your upload speed rate in the case that it gets maxed out constantly when transferring files to the Dropbox server. This may have an influence on the download rate.

Dropbox recommends doing a speed test to an east coast server in the US to simulate download and upload speed to their servers.

Are you using Dropbox? If so, what is your downloading and uploading experience?

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: download, dropbox, dropbox tips, file synchronization, upload

Firefox Delete Download Button

If you are using the built-in Firefox download manager to download files from the Internet and have configured the browser to remember the browsing history, you may have noticed the absence of a delete button in the download window. While it is possible to remove individual files from the listing by selecting them first and pressing ESC or by right-clicking and selecting Remove from list, there is not an option to delete the file from the computer’s hard drive at the same time.

You can resolve that issue either by selecting to open the containing folder to delete the file from there manually, or install the Deletebutton extension for the Firefox web browser.

Unlike previous download manager enhancements like Download Manager Tweak or the Firefox Download Manager extension, Deletebutton only adds a delete button to the download window of the Internet browser.

All you need to do now to delete files is to select one or multiple files in the downloads window and click the Delete file button afterwards. And just like any good file deletion tool it displays a confirmation prompt before the selected files get deleted on the system.

It feels a bit strange that the Recycle Bin on Windows is bypassed by the extension. Files that you delete this way are automatically removed from the system without option for restoring them later from the recycle bin.

It is not clear if this is a bug or a feature of the extension. Firefox users who want deleted files to be listed in the recycle bin should install one of the add-ons mentioned above instead which offer that functionality. Some users on the other hand might like that particular feature.

Firefox users who just want the ability to delete files permanently from the download window can install Downloadbutton from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: delete files, download, Firefox, firefox add-ons