The Media Guru

Mauritian Summer Time finally over!

Mar 28, 2009

These last 5 months must have been very hard on Mauritians, who typically loathe change. & I'm sure most will rejoice as from tomorrow... because summer time will finally be over!
The aim behind the introduction of Daylight Saving Time was to reduce energy consumption. So how far was this successful?

iPhone OS 3.0

Mar 22, 2009

Last Tuesday, Apple previewed the new features & improvements that'll be available on the iPhone 3.0 OS when it launches in June.

The Way Backward

Mar 15, 2009

Last Thursday, we celebrated the 41 years of Mauritius' Independence. Mauritius has progressed by leaps and bounds since 1968, building a model economy... often at the expense of the environment! Once again, we are being confronted with a choice...

Updated Google Maps for Mauritius

Mar 14, 2009

Great news! Google have updated their maps for Mauritius!

Pwned by a Bolt

Mar 13, 2009

Yes, I was pwned by a lightning strike.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Mar 9, 2009

You want to be a millionaire? Here’s how…

Mauritius OS/Browser stats by StatCounter

Mar 6, 2009

I received a mail in the morning from StatCounter announcing their new GlobalStats site, having Internet stats or demographics of all countries of the world, including Mauritius. Perhaps, this might be the only publicly available Internet stats for Mauritius.
Given that StatCounter is used over thousands of blogs & websites, it can be considered to be pretty accurate. Internet World Stats reported 340,000 Internet users in Mauritius in Mar 2008.

Operating Systems

Windows is by far the main OS at 95% with mostly XP at 79.09% & Vista 16.03%.
I'm quite disappointed that there are more Mac users than Linux users which is at a dismaying 0.98%.
0.98% of 340k... is only 3332 users!

XP's usage has been decreasing steadily to be replaced by... Vista. Will XP users move massively to Windows 7 when it's released?

Browsers

Firefox beats IE!!! *Youpie* But only slightly, with Firefox having 47.32% & IE 45%.

Firefox usage increased in July & August & ever since it's been in a neck and neck competition with IE.
Also note that when Chrome was released, it was only the tech-savvy Firefox users that tried it.

Browser Versions

Firefox 3 wins hands-down here (35.37%), although I'm disappointed at the number of PCs still using IE6 (19.18%) & Firefox 2 (10.86%).
The high number of "Others" (4.94%) consists mainly of Chrome & social browsers like Flock.

It's clear that the media hype surrounding the release of Firefox 3 paid off in making IE6 users aware of an alternative dimension.
IE7 has had a fairly consistent marketshare & so has IE8 (which can't be attributed to recent enthusiasm with Windows 7).

Search Engines

Google is king, no point denying that with 80.07%.

Mobile OSes

Nokia FTW!! As we all know, Mauritians have a clear preference for Nokia devices, more precisely Symbian S60 smartphones which has 61.12%. The Other OSes (20.52%) consists mainly of Nokia S40, Samsung, LG & SE devices. iPhoneOS (iPhone & iPod) has 15.83%, that's pretty impressive. But the funniest thing is that there are more PSPs than WinMo devices!

From the above graph, it seems it was mostly S60 users who switched to iPhone, when it was available officially at Orange.

Mobile Browsers

Opera is the most popular here at 46.54%, especially with its optimized Opera Mini browser, indispensable at the excessive mobile Internet charges.
It's followed by Nokia browser at 27.85%, & Safari mobile at 15.83% combined. Netfront is a browser for S60 while Openwave is a…. mobile gateway!?