For years, tech influencers and bloggers have been accused of being blindly in love with Apple. These men and women live to gush about Apple products and bash Microsoft and others in the process. This headline on msnbc.com stopped me cold: Windows 8 Does What Apple Doesn’t. PC is still what most computer companies want to sell, especially the ones that are crazy jealous of Apple’s products (and profits). Nielsen released new research this week based on a survey of nearly 2,000 people worldwide that shows just how far we’ve come. Talk about an about-face. MORE >>

According to Nielsen , as of the 3rd quarter of ’10 – 28% of mobile phones are smartphones with 41% of recent acquirers moving in that direction. 50 percent of Android owners are under the age of 35 – Apple has the most smartphone users under the age of 44. Marketing Trends Traditional Marketing mobile apps nielsen professional tradesmen smartphoneProfessional tradesman, for the most part, do more field work so they have a mobile office. And let’s face it, most manufacturer’s biggest challenge is how do I connect with them? So what does that mean? MORE >>

In August of 2010, Nielsen claimed shipments of Android beat iOS for the first time, representing 27 percent of the market against 23 for Apple. Of course, in contrast to the calculator rattling at all these firms, in addition to IDC , Gartner and the box counters of old who are taking turns counting newer and smaller boxes, you've got the Apple faithful who are going to do a great job arguing that Apple isn't in the market share race after all, that more people pay more dollars per iPhone than other platforms, and that developers make more money on their platform. MORE >>

Teens current text messaging behavior: Nielsen’s Q2 2010 teen survey (ages 13-17) demonstrates that while text messaging behavior is still growing among all age groups, text messaging among teens, especially teen females is reaching new levels (female teens send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month versus  an average of 2,539 texts per males). According to Nielsen, teens mobile usage has increased substantially versus Q2 last year, from 14 MB to 62 MB. A recent comScore report (September 2010) found that 58.7 million people in the U.S. increase). representing 23.2 MORE >>

Yahoo News ran a fascinating news item titled, Nielsen shows how people use TV differently , recently. Those TVs are used for DVDs, Netflix or Apple TV instead. According to the article: "Because of the changes, Nielsen is considering redefining what it considers a television household to include people who get service through Netflix or similar services instead of the traditional TV signals, Turrill said. During the first three months of 2012, the average consumer spent about 2 percent less time watching traditional TV than the previous year, Nielsen said. MORE >>