iPhone Narrows Gap With Android

Apple’s iPhone gained major ground among recent buyers in its battle against smartphones running Google’s Android, but still lagged behind its OS rival, pollster Nielsen said today.

In a December 2011 survey of U.S. consumers who had purchased a smartphone in the previous three months, 44.5% chose an iPhone, a jump of nearly 20 percentage points from the 25.1% that Nielsen measured in October.

That represents a 77% increase in the iPhone’s numbers.

But Android maintained the lead in the recent-buyers game with a 46.9% share, down from October’s 61.6%.

A majority of the new iPhone owners — 57% to be exact — bought an iPhone 4S, the newest model in Apple’s line-up, said Nielsen. The iPhone 4S debuted in the U.S. on Oct. 14, 2011.

Nielsen said the iPhone 4S had an “enormous” impact on Apple’s huge jump in share among new smartphone purchasers.

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RIM Hopes Apps Will Help Sales

Research In Motion is highlighting the native and Android apps available on its struggling PlayBook at the Consumer Electronics Show as it gets ready to launch the first major overhaul of the tablet’s software in February.

The company is showing the PlayBook OS 2.0 in its booth, demonstrating the Android apps that will finally be available to users of the tablet. RIM said in March last year that it would release a player that would let users of the tablets run apps designed for Android, and that capability will finally be available with PlayBook OS 2.0.

Popular games such as Cut the Rope and Plants vs. Zombies will be available in the store, said Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations and ecosystem development. The apps appear and work like any other app; users don’t have to launch a separate player to run them.

Not just any Android app will be accessible to users, and that’s by design, Saunders said. “We don’t want to enable an open marketplace the way the Android Market is,” he said. Android developers must use a software package to make their apps compatible with the PlayBook, and then they must submit it to RIM’s standard app curation process. The company hopes to weed out the malware and pirated apps that often appear in the Android Market, he said.

When PlayBook OS 2.0 becomes available, “some number of thousands” of Android apps will be available in the market, Saunders said. The company has been working with some of the aggregator marketplaces to port apps and attending Android meetups to encourage developers to make their apps available to PlayBook users, Saunders said.

RIM is taking pains to attract as many developers as possible by supporting as many languages and frameworks as possible. “One thing we’re focused on is providing a rich palette of tools developers can use,” Saunders said. RIM has developed ports for a number of frameworks and languages to make it easy for developers to use whatever tools.

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Motorola, Lenovo To Offer Intel-Smartphones

Intel announced multi-year deals with Motorola Mobility and Lenovo to create smartphones and tablets, and said the first Google Android phones using the top chipmaker’s processors would go on sale this year.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said Lenovo would launch a smartphone for the Chinese market using Intel’s newest chip in the second quarter of the year, while Motorola will release its phone in the second half.

The agreements with the U.S. and Chinese consumer electronics makers help shore up Intel’s boldest foray into the mobile arena. The company is hoping its new “Medfield” chip conserves enough power to compete with rival smartphones using ARM Holdings’ more energy-efficient architecture.

The world’s largest chip maker is also making a concerted push for the likes of Hewlett Packard to go big on super-slim, Apple Macbook Air-like laptops called Ultrabooks, which it hopes will preserve its dominance of the PC market as tablets like the iPad draw consumers away.

“It is a multi-year, multi-product strategy that will bring both phones and tablets to the (U.S.) marketplace starting with a phone in the second half of 2012,” Dave Whalen, a vice president in the Intel Architecture Group, said of the agreement with Motorola.

“You’re going to see us working very closely with them on technologies,” Whalen told Reuters in an interview.

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Apache Finally Goes To The Cloud

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Hadoop 1.0.

The open source software project has reached the milestone of its first full release after six years of development. Hadoop is a software framework for reliable, scalable and distributed computing under a free licence. Apache describes it as “a foundation of cloud computing”.

“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop.

“Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security,” he added.

Apache Hadoop allows for the distributed processing of large data sets, often Petabytes, across clusters of computers using a simple programming model.

The Hadoop framework is used by some big name organisations including Amazon, Ebay, IBM, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo.

Yahoo has significantly contributed to the project and hosts the largest Hadoop production environment with more than 42,000 nodes.

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Windows 8 To Have Simple Recovery

Microsoft has detailed the options that will be available to recover a crashed PC running Windows 8.

Users will be offered two alternatives when presented with a Windows crash, with options to either refresh or reset their lost machine.

The changes are detailed in a blog post from the firm where the refresh option was described as a way of retaining some work while restoring core OS functions. The other is a full face wipe.

“We’ve built two new features in Windows 8 that can help you get your PCs back to a ‘good state’ when they’re not working their best, or back to the ‘factory state’ when you’re about to give them to someone else or decommission them,” explains Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky in the introductory blog post.

“The strength of this approach is that you start over from a truly clean state, but you still get to keep the things you care about. With that as the basis of the solution, our goal was to make the process much more streamlined, less time-consuming, and more accessible to a broad set of customers.”

Broadly, the two options work as follows. Fully resetting your PC will remove all personal data, apps, and settings from the PC and reinstall Windows, while just refreshing will keep all personal data, Metro style apps, important settings on the PC and reinstall Windows.

The reset option includes features for erasing old data more thoroughly. This involves choosing the “Thorough” option and should help protect more sensitive users, or firms storing official or compliance related information, from having their data exposed through third party refreshes.

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Windows Phone 7 Roadmap Leaked?

A purported Microsoft slide showing the 2012 Windows Phone roadmap seems to indicate that we could see the next major update by mid-2012.

The Tango update is scheduled for the second quarter of 2012, but it won’t be aimed at high-end phones. Instead, Tango is supposed to bring Windows Phone to dirt cheap devices, or “products with the best prices” as Microsoft calls them. This seems to indicate that it will be even better at resource management than Mango, which is already far ahead of iOS and Android in terms of its OS footprint.

The big new, of course, is Apollo. The new OS is scheduled to appear in Q4 and it should enable Microsoft to offer competitive superphones. Currently Windows Phone devices max out at WVGA resolutions and single-core Qualcomm chips. Apollo could change all this and pave the way for dual-core designs with high resolution screens, probably 720p.

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Windows 8 Tablet Being Developed By ASUS

Chinese newspapers have indentified Asustek as one of five international PC brands that will work with Microsoft on the “Windows on ARM” (WOA) architecture.

Microsoft is to release its first operating system that supports chips from Arm next year. Only five PC brands have been invited by Microsoft to join WOA, a development project that shows its aggressiveness in tapping the burgeoning tablet PC market. Asustek is the latest announcement. So far Samsung, Toshiba, HP and Lenovo have been identified as working with Microsoft to develop notebooks and tablets that run on WOA architecture.

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Is Samsung Flip Flopping?

Samsung is apparently rethinking its decision not to bring Android 4 to the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab.

Earlier the company stated that neither device could be updated due to the size of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. The news created a bit of an issue with users sharpening scythes, pitchforks and lighting torches to go on a lynching. Now word on the street is that the company is considering backing down on its decision due to “strong customer demand.”

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Is Qualcomm A Threat To Intel?

Intel tried to do gaming graphics cards and it failed, but when it comes to CPUs for desktop and notebooks, it is currently dominating the market. Even the graphics used in Intel’s latest integrated CPUs these days are quite decent for multimedia and even some basic gaming.

Still, Intel is now shifting its focus and it sees Qualcomm as its main competitor in years to come. We heard this from high ranked sources from within Intel who believe that Qualcomm is the only ARM company that has it all, and Intel wants to take it on.

Intel is carefully watching Nvidia and Texas Instruments, again two strong ARM players, but it still thinks Qualcomm has better time to market, more customers and a much stronger portfolio.

Intel should start shipping Medfield just in time for Windows 8, and in case you’ve missed it, Medfield is a SoC (System on Chip) platform that should find its place to a few tablets and probably even some phones next year. Since Intel is trying to speed development up and put as much pressure on ARM players as possible, its next generation SoC will also come before the end of 2012, and it will use the advanced 22nm process, something we won’t see in ARM chips next year.

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Galaxy Nexus 4G LTE Finally On Sale

Verizon Wireless finally announced that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone running Android 4.0 on its 4G LTE network will be available on Thursday in stores and online for $299.99 with a two-year agreement.

The announcement, which came late Wednesday, arrived after days of speculation that the phone was being delayed over a dispute between the carrier and Google over the Google Wallet application, which doesn’t work on Verizon’s version.

During the period many expected Verizon to release the Galaxy Nexus, problems with the carrier’s LTE network arose for nearly two days, pushing LTE users to Verizon’s slower 3G service.

But Verizon never admitted there was any delay in releasing the device and pointed out that it had never given an official release date until Wednesday.

Verizon will carry a 4G LTE version that supports download speeds of up to 12Mbps. Online sales were set to start at 1 a.m. ET Thursday.

The new device has many features putting it at the top of the market for competing smartphones, including one of the highest prices: $299.99. Many rivals are priced at $200 or $250 on other U.S. carriers.

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