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Europe was
initially slow to back Google’s Android operating system, but the continent
now accounts for some of Android’s fastest growth and continuing domination,
according to a new report from Kantar
Worldpanel ComTech.

Android use in Europe rose to 67.1 percent, in the 12 weeks
ending Aug. 5, up from just less than 47 percent a year ago, the firm reported
Sept. 3. In the United States during the same period, Android support fell from
60.4 percent to 55.9 percent, while support for Apple’s iOS rose—despite
reports that rumors of an upcoming iPhone 5 have slowed sales—from 26.8 percent
a year ago to 35.2 percent. In Europe, iOS support fell from 19.6 percent to
14.6 percent.

In Spain, a country deeply afflicted by the Eurozone crisis,
Android phones have reached a high of 86.8 percent market share, up more than
29 percentage points from a year ago, while iOS support fell from 8 to 2.9
percent, the lowest in Europe.

Even in the more stable Germany, Android backing was at 72.2
percent, up from 50 percent a year ago, while it France it rose from 47.5
percent to 61.9 percent, in Italy from 30.7 percent to 58.6 percent, and in
Great Britain from 48.3 percent to 62.4 percent.

Great Britain was the only country of the five in which iOS
shares, as they did in the United States, rose during the last 12 weeks,
compared to the same period a year ago.

Also helping to spur the platform’s growth, said the report,
are the increasing display sizes on the smartphones running the OS. Of the
Android devices sold in the last 12 weeks, reports the firm, 29 percent have a
display size greater than 4.5 inches—and these screen sizes are directly
impacting how the devices are used.

“It is interesting to look at the impact a larger screen
size has on how consumers use their smartphones, particularly as the line
between tablets and smartphones becomes more blurred" Dominic Sunnebo,
global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, said in a
statement. "Consumers who own a smartphone with a larger screen tend to be
much more engaged with their device across a whole array of functions."

For example, amongst owners of devices with displays
smaller than 3 inches, WiFi was accessed by fewer than 60 percent, compared to
the more than 80 percent penetration by devices with displays between 4.5 and
4.9 inches. Internet usage penetration was nearly 100 percent for users with
devices with display of 5 inches or greater, while it fell to 80 percent for
those devices with displays between 3 and 3.9 inches and below 70 percent for
those devices with sub-3-inch displays.  

When the display was 3 inches, fewer than 20 percent of
users watched a video, though 65 percent of those with screen sizes of 5 inches
or larger did.

"Bigger screens don’t just lead to an improved
consumer experience, they also play a key part in customer retention,"
said Dominic. "ComTech data shows that the more engaged consumers are with
their device, the more likely they are to stay loyal to an OS/brand when they
upgrade.”

Apple,
Nokia and Motorola are among the companies expected to introduce new
smartphones this month, and no doubt their offerings with reflect such
findings. Apple
is expected to introduce a new iPhone with a display measuring 4-plus
inches on the diagonal—a notable bump from all of its
previous designs—while Nokia, according to the rumors, will show off a device
with a 4.5-inch display.

Samsung has sold more than 10 million units of its Galaxy S
III smartphone, which features a 4.8-inch display, and also 10 million-plus
Galaxy Note devices, which feature a 5.3-inch display. On Aug. 29, at a trade
show in Berlin, it pushed the display envelope further, introducing the Galaxy
Note II, a device it refers to as a smartphone with a 5.5-inch display.

Earlier this year, research firm IDC
reported that 2012 will represent the peak of Android’s popularity.

What remains to be seen,
said Ramon Llamas, an IDC senior research analyst, is how the different
operating systems "will define and shape the user experience beyond what
we see today in order to attract new customers and encourage replacements.”

Samsung announced Aug. 6 that the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet it introduced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, is now available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Korea, and will gradually roll out to other markets later this month. Checks early in the day, however, have found it to be still missing from AT&T and Best Buy Websites.

While Samsung hasn’t yet shared pricing information, the company said that the device will come in three connectivity options: WiFi only, WiFi and 3G Evolved High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA+), and later this year, a WiFi and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) version.

Building on the success of Samsung’s popular Galaxy lineup of smartphones, tablets and in-between “phablets,” the Note 10.1 is a large-scale model of the Galaxy Note phablet, with its 5.3-inch display and S Pen—a stylus that redefines what a stylus can be and sets the newest Note apart from Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet.

“History has shown that taking notes, capturing ideas immediately and sketching to realize them is the most personal and natural way to be more productive and creative,” JK Shin, president of Samsung’s IT and Mobile Communications Division, said in a statement. “The advanced technology and features included in Galaxy Note 10.1 give users the power to produce, create and customize communications.”

The Note 10.1 measures 10.32 by 7.1 by 0.35 inches and weighs (or, the WiFi-only version, anyway) 21 ounces. Its 10.12-inch display has a resolution of 1280 by 800, the processor is a 1.4GHz Samsung Exynos, and there’s 2GB of RAM on board plus a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and autofocus on the back and a 1.9MP model up-front.

But particularly distinguishing this tablet are its multi-screen features, as Samsung calls them. They include the ability to view applications side-by-side and, with the S Pen, make use of both screens, whether annotating, cutting and pasting between them, editing photos, or simply watching a video on one while otherwise occupied.

The S Pen offers users a variety of templates with which to work. There’s a Learning Hub for educational materials—now available in the United Kingdom, Korea, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, China and Singapore, with more markets in the works. There’s also a Touch version of Adobe’s Photoshop application.

The S Pen is embedded in the Note, and when removed launches a series of complementary apps—S Note, S Planner, Crayon physics, Photoshop Touch and Polaris Office, though users can choose what they’d like to launch and not launch.

The new Note also cribs a few features from the Galaxy S III. Its Smart Stay gives it the ability to track a user’s eye and not let the display dim if it sees the user is looking at it; another, AllShare Play, enables users to swap content with other tablets, laptops and HDTVs running on the same network.

While Samsung smartphones have outsold Apple iPhones, Apple’s iPad still dominates the tablet market and has received a strong response from the education sector, among a number of other vertical markets. Samsung is, no doubt, hoping that the S Pen’s capabilities make the Galaxy Note 10.1 particularly appealing to professionals.

In a video highlighting the device’s capabilities, Samsung shows the devices in the hands of folks, ranging from a fashion designer to an architect, marketing guru and a student. Handwritten text in the margin of a textbook may stay that way, as the user grabs an equation from another page to underscore a point, while another user turns her notes and diagrams into printed text and firmer lines and the marketer drags and drops, rearranges page layouts and makes notes for colleagues.

Notably, these professionals are hypothetical and their hands animated. While their tasks are compelling, the Galaxy Note 10.1’s success may, in part, depend on whether in real life such cutting and pasting and zipping and annotating can be executed with as much speed.

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AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson took the stage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo., July 17, speaking candidly and in some detail with interviewer Stephanie Mehta.

Compared to the interview Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a few months back, telling his All Things D interviewers, as he took his seat, “Never have I seen the things I can’t talk about today,” Stephenson was downright open. While he didn’t spill any beans about the upcoming iPhone—nor was he asked to—he did delve into several topics that make for interesting reading, or viewing. Most notably:

He’s happy about Yahoo’s choice of Marissa Mayer for CEO.

Or really, he’s just looking forward to having somebody finally occupy the position for the long term, since Yahoo is a critical partner to AT&T, contributing its email client and portal for all AT&T’s broadband services.

“I mean, [Yahoo is] the guts of a lot of our broadband and our mobile Internet business. So, you have this kind of turmoil in a very important part of your ecosystem, it’s a little maddening,” said Stephenson. “ … So, I’m excited that they’ve picked somebody. They’ve picked a veteran in the industry, somebody with a track record. I’ve never met her, but her reputation is just terrific.”

AT&T will support Facetime over 3G, just not any time soon.

To an audience member’s question about whether AT&T will support FaceTime over 3G but charge extra for it, Stephenson answered: “We’re working with Apple right now just to get the technology stabilized and so forth. So, it’s too early to talk about pricing.”

Changing data pricing models isn’t easy, but the industry has “gradually and finally gotten the pricing model right.”

“The industry came out with pricing data at $30 all you can eat, and this was pre-iPhone era. The iPhone came along and radically changed the industry,” said Stephenson. “So, the industry has grappled with getting the pricing model turned. And in this industry that doesn’t happen quickly. … I’m not going to argue with you that we did it right, but once you kind of step into that, getting the consumers to go along with you and change the pricing model is not an easy chore.”

A day later, AT&T announced it will begin offering Mobile Share plans in late August. Like Verizon’s Share Everything plans, the new AT&T plans focus on a data allotment instead of a single device.

The government really is trying to get more spectrum to the carriers. It just needs to try even harder.

“The government is doing a lot—probably not enough, but the government is doing a lot,” said Stephenson, adding that the government has identified a block of spectrum that it will soon auction.

That spectrum is 50MHz, he went on to explain; for context, AT&T is “going through about 10MHz of spectrum a year,” and in the next three to four years has “line of sight to exhausting the spectrum” that it currently holds.

“We can’t operate at traditional government speeds on approving this spectrum and getting it to the marketplace. We had spectrum transactions last year that took 12 months to 18 months to get done. That’s not going to cut it,” he went on. “We’re operating at Internet speed here. The government is going to have to step up.”

Though, “in their defense,” he added, “the FCC in the last four or five months has approved some transactions in three, four-month time [frames].”

Government isn’t the main problem—“speculators” are holding things up for America.

While the U.S. government has identified 50MHz of spectrum that it plans to auction off, in Germany, France and Japan, they’ve identified or auctioned “300, 400, 500MHz of spectrum that they’re bringing to those marketplaces,” said Stephenson.

Where is the equivalent American spectrum? It’s held by speculators—companies or people that are sitting on it, waiting for the price to go up. Stephenson said he found himself playing golf with just such a fellow.

“He and I agreed we ought to sit down and talk about this. We paid $2.5 billion for his fallow spectrum. They were sitting on it, speculating on it. There’s a lot of these companies out there doing these kinds of things.”

Expect to see “spectrum sharing” as one solution to the spectrum crunch.

“There will be things like spectrum sharing where the government may have spectrum that they’re not willing to get rid of but they only need it at certain times of the day or certain times of the year,” Stephenson said. “Well, can people step into that spectrum and utilize it when it’s fallow and not being used by the government? Significant technology innovation is going to be required to utilize that. We’re working on that. The whole industry is working on that. That’s a much longer-term solution.”

Sears drove the idea of 1-800 calling.

Discussing some content providers’ willingness to foot the bill for users’ surfing, Stephenson told the story:

“Go back, 30, 40 years, who drove the 1-800 voice model? It was Sears. Why? They wanted the customer not to be apprehensive to come to them, so they said, ‘Look, we’ll pay for the long-distance business, the long-distance traffic, if you get the customer to us.’ So, we developed these services, allowed the customer to call without paying for it. Sears picked up the tab. And what happened? It drove the cost of long distance down dramatically.”

Pack your earplugs—in-flight voice calling will eventually be a reality.

It will be voice over IP (VOIP), which is a low-bandwidth data requirement, so it ought to be a no-brainer, said Stephenson. The issue for now is the coverage model and the pricing models improving, and the providers, whether satellite guys or not, figuring it out.

VOIP calling, he added, “ought to be [a service] you could price and could be a good runner on an airplane. I don’t think we’re going to be there in the next 12 months on an experience that many of us would find acceptable, but it seems to me inevitable that there will be voice on airplanes.”

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