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Spotting iPads in the wild. (percentmobile.com)
5 points by akaalias on March 8, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



I've heckled countless people for saying what I'm about to say, so please know that I ask the following question in all sincerity:

How is this Hacker News?

What intellectual curiosity does this satisfy?


Hi mcantor,

I thought the iPad map to be of interest here at HN, because it gives proof that the devices are in active use although not yet in the market.

Maybe not hugely surprising, but at least factual from our base of data, you can see that there is traffic coming in from SF, NYC and even India on different types of networks.

We (Being a co-founder of PercentMobile) regularly start seeing devices that are being used on the networks, of which some aren't even officially acknowledged to be in existence. (Obviously, the iPad has been confirmed at this point)

I think sharing this kind of data is a good idea, in hope that it creates and feeds curiosity and awareness of the mobile ecosystem. How intellectually valuable it is for everyone, I am not able to answer. I don't know.

What would you like to know (if anything) about the mobile ecosystem? What kind of perspectives on what's currently happening on the mobile web would be nurturing your intellectual curiosity?


Hmmm... okay, I'll buy that! Thank you for providing such a thorough explanation of your interest in this site.


The iPad is a genuinely new web user-agent. It will have an impact, possibly major, on the way the web is consumed. It's about to embark on its initial adoption curve. These early usage patterns should be interesting to hackers, especially web devs.


I was expecting to find a listing a which sites were being visited by iPads. (In addition to where the iPad requests came from.) Am I missing something?


Hi, yeah, I agree, it was my first impression, too.

It would be interesting, but for some sites we can't disclose the destination domain. What we could do however is to show which _type_ of site was visited.




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