It's funny, in their review of the P800, they call it the Maserati of smartphones. I don't know if they meant that as a compliment or not. I work in the car biz and you would think it was kind of a slight against it. Maseratis are nice to look at but not the most reliable or even user friendly of automobiles.
Maybe the 7135 is the Cadillac of smartphones. Maybe not the trendiest thing but solidly built and full of usefull features and not half bad to look at.
(click the tabs at the bottom to see the various charts...)
The two phones ran neck and neck for most of the first morning. (See "total votes" and "voting rates" charts.) But around 11:30 PT a huge surge of Kyocera voting began. This fell off fairly linearly through the rest of the day, while Sony votes stayed well below Kyo's and didn't vary much - except for a short-term peak around 3 PM PT and another, larger, but even shorter-term peak around 5 PM. Neither of those peaks lasted long enough to affect the totals much. As of 6 PM the Kyo is still ahead by over 500 votes, a better than 60:40 split. Voting rates have fallen off to around 50 per hour for both phones, but the Sony may well pick up a few votes through the North American night due to the "Japan effect" (see below).
The t68i's big brother, S-E's expensive Symbian-powered smartphone, the P-800, is doing better in its contest against the Nokia 3650. There was almost a bit of drama here: The Sony started off in the lead and held it, but the Nokia began to pick up steam in the early afternoon, and had that trend continued the Nokia might have passed the Sony by now. And that almost never seems to happen in these things, not this late in the day.
Just as in the Kyo-T68i battle, though, a big burst of Sony votes came in right around 5 PM PT. Clearly Sony fans are voting for both of their brand's phones. But not evenly... it seems that the expensive, featureful, comparatively bulky P800 (it's actually close in size to a 6035) has more fans than the sleek little T68i. At least in regards to their respective competitors today.
And it seems to me that it can hardly be a coincidence that 5 PM PT corresponds to 10 AM in Tokyo. You don't suppose the word went out at Sony Japan to vote for the home team??? "Hmmmm....."
The Nokia is still just ten percentage points behind and could still pull this one off. I can't help thinking though that that Nokia has a fairly narrow range of appeal. I'll bet that just about everyone who was going to vote for the Nokia has done so already.
I put these up (even though the fight was over at 9 AM this morning - actually it was over at about this time Monday!) because they clearly show the enthusiasm of the Nextel fan base. Notice the huge initial peak in Nextel votes, repeated again at almost the same time on the second day of voting.
(Note that no data was collected from midnight to about 9 AM on April 1, so the slopes of the chart lines for that period probably conceal a lot of missed detail; the second day's peak was probably much sharper than can be seen here. )
My take: These Nextel voters are not casual web browsers who happened on the c|net site and decided to vote; if that were the case their votes would have been fairly evenly distributed over the duration. No, these are Nextel fans who were ready and waiting for the contest to start. Even more so than we've been! They're probably voting not so much for this one phone, but for all Nextel phones and their annoying "chirp-chirp" Direct Connect feature. And they'll be gunning for the Kyocera next, unless the t68i stages an upset.
Also worth noting is that the Kyocera had gathered just a few more votes by 6 PM today than the Nextel had by 6 PM in its first day against the Samsung. But only a few! (1053 to 996) And incidently, when we went against the Treo, by 6 PM we only had 992 votes. So our turnout so far is really pretty much the same today as it was against the Treo.... and that isn't good enough. We'll need to beat all the bushes for votes when we go up against the Nextel.
And finally, going one step farther back into history:
There are the graphs for the Kyo's first round, previously posted here only as a zipped Excel spreadsheet. My analysis is on page 2 of this thread. This shows the same "overnight gaps" in data collection as the Samsung-Nextel fight.
If you want to play with the raw data or work the graphs around a bit, the zip'd spreadsheets are on the same site. Just go here and click on the .zip files to download. They're all fairly small.
9 PM PT UPDATE I've updated the pages for both current contests. This isn't over!!! Hate to say it but the Sony t68i voting rates have been mostly higher than ours since 6 PM, and they are continuing to whittle away at our lead -- from 67:33% down to 60:40% over the last seven hours. We obviously can't sustain those losses forever, esp not if the contest goes 48 hours, as several previous ones have. In fact we can't even sustain them through 9 AM tomorrow morning.
Comparing the "voting rates" graphs for kyo vs. sony, and for nokia vs. sony, makes the "sony block voting" effect very clear! Somehow a bunch of Sony supporters all decided to vote for both of their phones just before 10 AM PT, and again around 5 PM PT... Here's hoping the Sony voting drops off to nothing in a couple of hours as the workers on the Pacific Rim go home. Of course the folks at Ericsson will just be getting into work around then...
Anyone know anyone at Kyo who could arrange a little "block voting" for our side?
You da man jeh! I'll check out the graphs tomorrow when i'm at a computer (this is from my 7135 ). Hopefully in the morning it will be time to start thinking about how to take down the Nextel!
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2 AM update... the bad news hasn't gotten any better. Kyo voting rates have dropped to almost zero! (This is far worse than we did against the Treo.)
Meanwhile Sony voters have maintained a practically straight-line climb (check out the "total votes" chart). If anything they've had a recent slight upturn.
Our lead is down to just 53:47%!!
At this rate they'll easily pass us in a few more hours.
Maybe we need a branch of this thread back in the Kyo 7135 forum?
Maybe the notice on the home page needs to be stronger? Something like "we're going to lose if more of you don't vote!"
Whateva... I'm going to sleep, but this time, data collection will continue through my night!
Originally posted by mojojomo catching up... we're up 1% to 46%. but we're not even near the 2500 votes we had against the treo.
No use, they're dropping us down 2% to 44% and we only have 1 1/2 hours left. We desperately need more voters. Request votes from Samsung, Treo, and Nokia. I think Sony is cheating. They got over 300 votes within 10 minutes wheras we only have just a bit over 100.
Ok Jeh... I'm counting on you to figure this one out: I think there is something fishy going on here (but maybe legit). Sony went from having a 290+/- lead to over 700 votes ahead in about 25 minutes (or less!).
What do you all think that means? I think it's direct intervention by Sony themselves (well, their employees), much more so than "fans" or users of the T68i in particular.
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Where's all the 2000+ voters we had last time? I know if they're still here and adding Treo's voters, we can easily get over 3000 votes. Sound off to everyone you know to vote for us.
(I think Sony's cheating!!! They're getting about 1000 votes in the last hour)
Ok... I'm not very happy about this (don't worry... I'll get over it pretty quickly... this isn't the end of the world). I use the same Internet as everybody else in the world, and I seriously don't think that there is a "user group" in existance that has the ability to generate as many votes by true enthusiasts as have been made in the past 60-90 minutes. I don't think it is just a coincidence that the 7135 had a solid (and growing) lead past midnight EST last night, and then suddenly that many fans/users of the T68i decided to support it after waiting 12-14 hours to even act like they cared at all.
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I've updated the graphs and spreadsheets. I don't know what's going on, but here's how I read things. Note that there was a gap in data collection from 8:25 to 9:30 AM (since corrected).
(Data collection is now done by a Perl script that simply asks for an update of the "instant poll results", parses out the meaningful stuff from the HTML, and appends it to a CSV file. It then takes maybe ten mouse clicks to import the new data into Excel every few hours. Now if I knew something about VBA I could automate that too.. mwahaha...
Soon after my 2 AM post there was a HUGE burst for the S-E. While we were all asleep they were getting vote rates of over 15 per minute! This was with a 15-minute collection interval. Yep, 250 votes in fifteen minutes. It then dropped back to normal levels, but that 250 votes put the Sony in the lead right there.
I noticed that before I went to sleep, and I decided to set my data collector to run at a five minute interval (previously fifteen). This shows a lot more "jaggyness" in the graphs and makes some of them very cluttered... but if there were any more sharp spikes like that, I wanted to find them, I didn't want them averaged out over longer intervals.
Sony resumed its normal steady drone of votes (not many, but more than ours) from about 3 AM to 7:15. But a little after 5 AM, Kyo fans must have awakened, saw the bad news, and started voting again. (Well, we hope not "again," but you know what I mean.)
And we had a great upturn going until about 7:15 am, when Sony voters hit us AGAIN, 50 votes/minute at one point! The net for that spike was 667 votes in 20 minutes! Naturally, that took care of our upturn.
We're still behind by a bunch, 875 votes. Interestingly that is just a little less than the number Sony collected in those two spikes. If those two spikes hadn't happened we'd be running dead even.
Speaking of "running dead even", take a look at what's been happening between the Nokia and the S-E P800!
Again, a gap in data collection, this time between about 8 and 9:30 AM, but there is still some very interesting stuff here...
The second most intersting thing is that the 2:45 AM spike in votes for the Sony T68i, was mirrored by a spike for the Sony P800... only much larger. And unlike in our fight, Nokia voters almost mirrored their competitor's votes.
And THE most interesting thingis that the same thing happened again! At exactly the same time that there was a big turnout in Sony T68i votes, there was a similar spike in votes for the P800! Again, twice as large though.
Nokia voters came back with a spike of their own at around 10 AM, but that one was almost matched by Sony votes. Again, though, the Sony voters voted for both Sonys. They did seem to vote for the P800 first and the T68i second.
Since then vote rates have fallen way off for both, but they're still well-matched, and they are inching along at 51:49 favoring the Sony.
I just find the correspondence between the changes in vote rates for these two phones to be amazingly close. This is particularly visible on the "voting rates (log) graph.
OK here is how it is happening the dumb site will let you vote as much as you want......I just racked up several hundred votes for the 7135 over a few minutes...Just click the phone and rapid click the vote button and watch the ballot box begin to buldge
Originally posted by cweaver OK here is how it is happening the dumb site will let you vote as much as you want......I just racked up several hundred votes for the 7135 over a few minutes...Just click the phone and rapid click the vote button and watch the ballot box begin to buldge
:angel
I think that while you were clicking away there was a SE voter in a parallel universe doing the exact same thing
I would have to think that CNET isn't so oblivious to this that they won't go back and run queries against the votes and adjust for some factors. We already know that they don't show the final voting numbers, except in terms of %. I would be curious to know how they look at it.
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What does it all mean? I don't know, but here are some theories.
How are the Nokia and Sony P-800 getting so many votes? (More than 22 thousand votes total so far!) Well, one, both phones are used worldwide. (As is the T68i.) As someone at the howardForums pointed out, no one outside of the US will have any reason to have heard of the Kyocera; it's CDMA-only. Well, maybe in Korea.
Where did the 3 AM spike for the come from? Uh... the thought crossed my mind that maybe I did it. At about 2 AM I posted a "smartphone solidarity" plea over on the P800 forum at HowardForums.com. The first big anti-Kyo spike happened at 2:30.
Hmm, but that wouldn't have caused a matching spike twice as high for the P800, nor the following much larger ones after 7 AM, and it certainly wouldn't explain the way the Nokia voters have been matching the P800, almost vote-for-vote.
I think there are some voting scripts out there. I think the spikes showed the first tests, and then someone realized that they were too conspicuous that way. Maybe they're monitoring the vote totals (the same way my data collection scripts are) and emitting votes in response.
Come to think of it, that would explain why my little collector script started failing often (destination site not responding) this morning. Maybe the "poll results" sites aren't coming back sometimes because they're being hit hard by automatic voters. (Me, I'm normally only trying every five minutes.)
2 PM Update: Yes, there's some sort of script battle happening. Evidence - there's one voting for OUR side now. No way did we just happen to get 530 votes in five minutes, or the T68i an almost exactly matching 580 votes in the same five minutes! heavy sigh
When this contest is over (if we can call this travesty a "contest" anymore) c|net is going to have to invalidate these results and put in a more effective anti-cheating system. Or who knows... maybe they will be able to identify the bogus votes on both sides.
Edit: Oh, you posted while I was typing. Can you really vote over 100 times per minute?
). Hopefully in the morning it will be time to start thinking about how to take down the Nextel! 
:angel
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