1）移动分析公司Flurry最新调查数据显示，18至24岁的年轻用户是最为活跃的手机游戏玩家群体，而年长用户则是最具消费能力的群体（游戏邦注：Flurry调查了2000万名免费游戏用户，该公司服务系统目前覆盖11万款应用）。

freemium games time vs money(from Flurry)

Flurry调查发现，18至24岁用户在免费游戏中投入时间占比32%，但仅为游戏IAP（内置付费功能）创造16%的收益；而年龄在25至34岁的群体则为免费游戏贡献了29%的收益；35至54岁群体在游戏中投入时间仅占比14%，但却为其创造者了28%的收益。

这种调查结果表明，年轻用户更有时间，但手头并不阔绰，而年长群体的情况恰恰与此相反。

2）香港开发商Outblaze（其手机游戏团队现有60名成员，代表作是《Pretty Pet Salon》）日前表示公司游戏目前安装量已达3000万次，每月下载量约500万次，其中有150万来自Android平台，有350万来自iOS移动设备。该公司下载量每月增幅约20%至30%，其iOS产品比例为80%，Android产品占比20%，其发展目标是争取两个平台产品数量均衡发展。

petcuby(from insidemobileapps)

据其首席执行官Yat Siu所称，其Android游戏的ARPU值却反而比iOS游戏高30%，他认为出现这种情况的原因在于，Android Market市场竞争更小，而且存在明显的平台分裂性问题，所以那些为用户量身打造的Android手机游戏更容易脱颖而出，他称Outblaze的成功并没有什么妙方，他们只是更懂得根据手机性能开发游戏（游戏邦注：DeNA旗下的Gameview Studios最近也宣称，其部分Android游戏的ARPU值高于iOS游戏）。

3）PopCap Games最近更新了iPhone版《植物大战僵尸》，添加了9个原PC/Mac版本的迷你小游戏，将其分成3个付费内容包，运行玩家通过游戏中的Crazy Dave’s Store购买这些内容。该公司还新添了一个《Race To China》的新型微游戏，以及一系列的Game Center功能。

plants-vs-zombies-iphone(from gamerant.com)

玩家可通过玩游戏或照料Zen Garden来赚取虚拟货币以兑换这些付费内容，也可以选择支付0.69美元购买一个内容包。

4）德国调研公司research2guidance近日发布报告指出，据其智能手机应用商店监测工具对2011年第二季度的观察结果显示，诺基亚Ovi Store的一款应用日均下载量可能比苹果App Store多160%。

avg daily downloads per app(from research2guidance)

此外，Windows Phone Marketplace和黑莓App World的应用平均下载量也高于App Store，而Android Market应用平均下载量在所有主流应用商店中居于末尾。

如果以App Store为基准，三星乐园、LG World、GetJAr和Palm的App Catalog的每款应用下载量都低于平均水准。

不过这项调查数据并未区分付费和免费应用下载情况，有可能影响对Android Market和App Store的调查结果。

5）独立应用商店GetJar日前宣布推出服务于Android游戏和应用的优惠服务GetJar Gold，免费为GetJar用户提供在其他应用商店需付费购买的产品，但同时又帮助开发者增加收益。GetJar将直接向开发者支付应用下载收益，并寄希望于借助高质量内容的庞大下载量创造更多广告收益。

getjar(from androidear.com)

GetJar Gold服务所提供的产品均为完整的“付费”版本，其中不含任何IAP功能，目前已采用该服务的公司包括Glu Mobile、Rovio和ZeptoLabs，他们将通过GetJar推出限时免费或独家发售活动。

首先加入GetJar Gold协议的游戏是Halfbrick开发的《Age of Zombies》（当前在Android Market售价为3.3美元/1.94英磅），以及Neon Play的《Paper Glider》、手机应用《TuneIn Radio Pro》、《Solo》和《Splashtop Remote Desktop》。

6）Wireless Intelligence最近预测，2011年底全球连接到移动互联网的设备总数将达60.7亿部（游戏邦注：有报告指出2011年10月份全球人口将超过70亿）。

报告显示，在过去16个月之间，亚洲、非洲、巴西和中国增加了将近10亿部移动互联网设备，2010年7月全球移动互联网设备从原来的40亿上升至50亿，历时18个月完成这一过程。

connections(from gigaom)

其他调查结果包括：

*今年底亚太地区的所有联网设备数量将占比50%；

*三分之二的亚太联网设备来自中国和印度，这两者明年的联网设备都将超过10亿部；

*全球前10名移动市场将集中在亚太地区；

*亚洲将在今年底超越美洲，成为全球第二大移动市场，其移动互联网设备将达6.48亿部，总共占比11%；

*东欧移动互联网市场规模将超过西欧；

*预计GSM将在今年第四季度占全球73%的移动互联网市场份额，其次是占比16%的WCDMA/HSPA，再次是占比9%的CDMA。

7）J.D. Power and Associates最新调查表明，目前市场上的移动设备硬件设计仍无法满足用户的要求。

触摸屏设备的用户对自己的手机满意度较高，而实体键盘设备的手机用户则不然。在总分为1000个点数的调查中，触摸屏设备的用户满意度最高，得分为817个点数，而仅有实体键盘的移动设备得分为782个点数，同时带有触摸屏和实体键盘的移动设备得分为785个点数。

iPhone-Touch-Screen(from iphonefacts)

调查指出，实体面积和重量是用户满意度的重要决定因素，重量不超过5盎司的智能手机满意度最高，同一重量的功能性手机也同样较受欢迎；而小巧玲珑而美观的智能手机更是抢手产品。

苹果iPhone已经连续6次成为“用户满意度最高”的智能手机，居于其次的是HTC智能手机。

J.D. Power调查结果表明，最理想的智能手机应该是轻薄型，并且功能强大的产品。但也有观察者认为，这项调查结果对设备制造商来说也并非完全是好事，因为这会导致厂商投用户所好，生产出无差异性的产品，结果大家最后都会流失用户。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）Older Players Generate Four-Fifths of Freemium Gaming Revenue, Flurry Finds

By Kim-Mai Cutler

Younger players from ages 18 to 24 may be the most active gamers in terms of the minutes they spend in apps compared to other age groups. But older players account for the vast majority of revenue, mobile analytics company Flurry found.

The company looked at 20 million users across all of the freemium games it supports. (Flurry has about 110,000 apps in its system.)

The company found that while 18 to 24-year-olds make up 32 percent of the time all players spend in freemium games, they only bring in 16 percent of overall in-app purchase revenue. In contrast, players ages 25 to 34 bring in nearly half of in-app purchase revenue even though they make up 29 percent of the time spent in freemium games. Thirty-five to fifty-four year-olds account for 28 percent of revenue even though they only account for 14 percent of time spent in games.

The logic behind this is pretty simple. Younger players have more time and a lower amount of disposable income. Older players are in the reverse situation as they may have more demanding jobs and families to support.

Freemium games — especially casual games — usually monetize through a system where it takes time to complete tasks like baking a virtual cake or building a virtual building. But players can bypass this time requirement by spending virtual currency. So older players who have less time and more discretionary might be more inclined to spend a little to get farther in the game without waiting.（source:insidemobileapps）

2）Outblaze Gets to 30M Installs, Sees 30% Higher ARPU on Android Than on iOS

By Kim-Mai Cutler

Outblaze, a Hong Kong developer with an unusual strategy of launching as many as two to three games per week, says it has reached about 30 million installs across its titles. When we talked to the company in July, it had one larger hit, Pretty Pet Salon, which was doing well on both Android and iOS.

Now its 60-person mobile games unit is doing about 5 million downloads a month, with 1.5 million of those installs coming from Android and 3.5 million from iOS. Both are growing at roughly 20 to 30 percent month-over-month. Right now, the company’s titles are 80 percent on iOS and 20 percent on Android, but the goal is to get them to 50-50.

Android however is producing an average revenue per user that’s 30 percent higher than on iOS. Yat Siu, the company’s chief executive, attributes this to the intense amount of quality testing the company does. Because Android Market is relatively less competitive and there are many more devices that have to be compatible with a game, any titles that actually function on a user’s Android phone stand out and consumers gravitate to them.

“We don’t have a superb, magic formula,” he said. “We are just more compatible with devices.”

“People say Android monetizes poorly, but I’m honestly just not seeing what they’re seeing,” he said, echoing comments from DeNA’s Gameview Studios, which also recently said it was seeing 30 percent higher ARPU on certain games on Google’s platform.（source:insidemobileapps）

3）Plants Vs. Zombies for iPhone gets in-app payments and new mini-games

by Stuart Dredge

PC/Mac content ported over, but players won’t be forced to pay for it.

PopCap Games has updated Plants Vs. Zombies for iPhone with nine mini-games taken from the original PC and Mac versions of the game. Players can pay to play them, but they don’t have to.

Let us explain: the nine mini-games are grouped into three packs, which can be accessed through the Crazy Dave’s Store within the game.

Players can buy the packs with virtual coins earned while playing the main game or from tending its Zen Garden. However, players wanting to get them straight away can opt to buy the packs for £0.69 each.

PopCap has also added a new micro-game called Race To China, and a series of new Game Center achievements to keep experienced players on their toes.

The extra content will be welcomed by the sizeable Plants Vs. Zombies fanbase, and PopCap seems to be approaching the issue of in-app purchases sensitively, ensuring that players don’t feel forced to pay if they’re happy to spend the time earning virtual coins instead.（source:mobile-ent）

4）Unstructured data suggests the average number of downloads per app on Ovi Store is 2.5 times more than an app on App Store

Probably because there’s 90 percent fewer apps available

by Jon Jordan

Comparison between app stores are great for headlines but not always so significant when you dig into the meat of the analysis.

The latest report from German outfit research2guidance seems to fall into that category.

Taken from its Smartphone App Market Monitor V.3 (priced at €1,290), it states that during Q2 2011 – if you averaged out the total downloads across the total number of apps – an app on the Nokia Ovi Store would have had 160 percent more downloads than an app on Apple’s App Store

Using this methodology, apps on Windows Phone Marketplace and BlackBerry App World also gained a higher average than those on the App Store, while apps on the Android Market had a slightly smaller amount of downloads.

Stores such as Samsung App, LG World, GetJar and Palm’s App Catalog had significantly lower average per app download numbers.

Is the Pope a catholic?

Of course, this trend is hardly a surprise as Apple’s App Store and Android Market have many times more apps available than Ovi Store and Windows Phone Marketplace, which would depress their average, while Samsung, LG, and Palm’s stores have smaller install bases of devices from which to generate downloads.

There’s also the issue that the data doesn’t split downloads between free or paid, which would likely impact Android Market and Apple’s App Store in particular, let alone consider different types of average such as median or mode. （source:pocketgamer）

5）GetJar launches GetJar Gold, a free channel for premium Android content, with Halfbrick’s Age of Zombies

by Jon Jordan

As outgoing marketing director Patrick Mork suggested when we last spoke to him, free app store GetJar has just announced a premium channel for Android games and apps.

Called GetJar Gold, it’s a means by which Android content, which is only available for a fee on other app stores, can be given away from free to GetJar consumers – without any registration – while developers gain revenue for each download.

This works as GetJar will pay the developers directly, hopefully through the increased advertising revenue that can be generated by the expected large download volumes such high quality content will attract.

The games themselves will be the full ‘paid’ versions, without in-app advertising.

In this way, GetJar Gold formalises and extends the current situation whereby GetJar has been making deals with companies such as Glu Mobile, Rovio and ZeptoLabs to release their Android games, free and/or exclusively for a period.

The initiative also works as part of GetJar’s wider expansion plans so in the short term will likely be funded by its VC warchest. It raised $25 million in February.

Giving away gold

The first content to be made available is Halfbrick’s Age of Zombies (currently priced at $3.30/£1.94 on the Android Market) and Neon Play’s Paper Glider plus apps TuneIn Radio Pro, Solo and Splashtop Remote Desktop.（source:pocketgamer）

6）6B mobile connections by the end of 2011. Wow!

By Om Malik

Tweet inShare40The total number of global mobile connections are going to go past the six billion mark by the end of 2011 according to a forecast from Wireless Intelligence, the research arm of the trade group, GSMA. Wireless Intelligence is forecasting about 6.07 billion connections at the close of the year. Just for context the global population will nudge past seven billion people by the end of October 2011.

Thanks to booming demand in Asia and Africa along with Brazil and China, nearly 1 billion connections were added in last 16 months alone. We had hit the 5 billion mobile connections mark in July 2010, 18 months after we went past the 4 billion mark. We should expect these numbers to rise sharply. As my colleague, Kevin Tofel pointed out

As more devices become connected through the Internet of things, the overall connection numbers should rise accordingly. E-book readers such as the Kindle, automobiles, upcoming and current tablets, not to mention cameras, are all getting connected.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the report.

* The Asia-Pacific region will rise to account for 50 percent of all connections by year-end.

* Two-thirds of the Asia-Pacific total relates to China and India. Both countries are projected to have over billion connections each next year.

* Six of the world’s top ten largest mobile markets will be in Asia-Pacific.

* By the end of this year, Africa will overtake the Americas as the second-largest regional market with 648 million connections or 11 percent of the total.

* Eastern Europe will become bigger than Western Europe in terms of connections.

*GSM is expected to account for 73 percent of global connections in the fourth quarter, followed by WCDMA/HSPA (16 percent) and CDMA (9 percent)（source:gigaom）

7）J.D. Power Report Weighs In On Smartphone Design Vs. Performance

Chris Velazco

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,… → Learn More

Sometimes it seems like phone manufacturers are locked in a race to deliver the fastest, most feature-packed phones, but sheer power does not a great phone make. According to a recent report from J.D. Power and Associates, the specifics of a device’s design goes a long way in determining how satisfied its users are.

Users of devices with touch screens, for example, are more likely to be satisfied with their phones than users who only have physical keyboards. While I wouldn’t try to convince a dyed-in-the-wool BlackBerry aficionado of that, the scores are pretty conclusive: on a 1,000 point scale, purely touch screen devices rated the highest in satisfaction (817 points), versus devices with just a physical keyboard (782), and devices with a mix of both (785).

Physical size and weight are also key determinants of satisfaction: smartphones whose weight comes in at or under 5 ounces receive the highest satisfaction ratings, and that trend even carries over into feature phones. Satisfaction scores also peak when a smartphone is nice and skinny, with phones at or below the .45-inch level topping the charts.

Apple claims the “Highest in Customer Satisfaction” crown in the smartphone category for the sixth consecutive time, which makes sense considering their zeal for design. In fairness though, it helps that they only really ever run with one new smartphone design at a time. HTC’s second place finish, on the other hand, means the Taiwan-based company can manage to hold their myriad smartphone offerings to a strict standard of performance and design.

While useful in some respects, J.D. Power’s results don’t really break any new ground. Going by their criteria, the “ideal” smartphone would be thin, light, and powerful: in short, what every manufacturer is aiming for anyway. Research like this can almost be dangerous to manufacturers, as it paints a picture of a specific kind of phone that people will theoretically be most pleased with. Differentiation and quality are the ways to thrive in this industry, and if everyone suddenly decides to make the same kind of device, only the consumers lose.（source:techcrunch）