Android Fragmentation Visualized

This one data visualization can demonstrate why mobile responsive web design is important: Android Fragmentation Visualized. OpenSource published a number of data visualizations, both static and interactive, that show the tremendous market fragmentation in the market of Android phones and devices. This treemap shows market share by device.

Fragmentation is both a strength and weakness of the Android ecosystem, a headache for developers that also provides the basis for Android’s global reach. Android devices come in all shapes and sizes, with vastly different performance levels and screen sizes. Furthermore, there are many different versions of Android that are concurrently active at any one time, adding another level of fragmentation. What this means is that developing apps that work across the whole range of Android devices can be extremely challenging and time-consuming.

Despite the problems, fragmentation also has a great number of benefits – for both developers and users. The availability of cheap Android phones (rarely running the most recent version) means that they have a much greater global reach than iOS, so app developers have a wider audience to build for. Android is successfully filling the gap left behind by the decline of Nokia’s Symbian – and in this report we look at the different shape of fragmentation in countries from different economic positions, as a way of showing that fragmentation benefits Android much more than it hurts it. Android is now the dominant mobile operating system and this is because of fragmentation, not in spite of it.

Here you can see the same treemap reorganized into brand clusters, still sized by market share:

The hundreds of different Android screen sizes can be seen in this visualization:

In contrast, Apple currently only has FIVE devices and screen sizes for phone and tablets, but uses the same screen resolution on a couple of them:

Found on Business Insider

The Digital Dorm

College is expensive and it is not getting any cheaper. Lucky for us, the advancement in technology and the introduction of apps could actually lower costs! The Digital Dorm infographic from CourseSmart can tell you the details.

College is getting more expensive but going digital helps students keep more money in their pockets in more ways than one. Check out our infographic on how students can save not just money but also time by moving to a digital dorm.

Not only saving money.  The visual story here is also how to save space and clutter in a student’s dorm room, which will help them find that missing homework assignment!

Thanks to Temple for sending in the link!

Tablet Adoption at Work

The State of Tablet Adoption at Work is a new infographic from VentureBeat.com.  It’s interesting that the infographic itself was sponsored by Lenovo and Qualcomm, but included as part of a VentureBeat article.  You can find the original version here at TabletsAtWork.com

Since the debut of Apple’s iPad in Jan. 2010, the integration of tablet devices into our lives and work has progressed rapidly — so fast that it’s sometimes hard to put in perspective how quickly got here.  The exclusively obtained infographic below breaks down how far workforce adoption of tablet technology has come — and where it’s headed. (The graphic was sponsored by Lenovo and Qualcomm.)

I love the clean, professional design look.  I really like the color scheme and the mixed bag of visualization styles; grid of icons, treemap, stacked bar, line chart, etc.

Only a couple of design issues about this one I would improve.

• I’m willing to let 16 tablet icons represent 16.1 Million tablets shipped in 2010 (rounding), but why only 144 tablets shown to represent 147.2 Million?  That was just the designer wanting a clean, square visual that breaks the actual data visualization.
• The line chart showing 134% increase in shipments powered by Android and Windows is way out of scale.  It’s visualizing something close to a 900% increase.
• At the bottom there should be a copyright statement and the URL to the original infographic landing page so people can find the full high-resolution version.

Found on the Inside Flipboard feed in Flipboard for iPad.