RIM Cuts 11% Of Workforce

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd plans to slash approximately 11 percent of its workforce to curb costs as it struggles to compete against Apple Inc and Google Inc.

The announcement of 2,000 job cuts on Monday came a month after the Canadian company acknowledged that it would reduce headcount for the first time in a decade.

One analyst said the job cuts were slightly deeper than expected but were key to RIM’s recovery from a slump triggered by product delays and intense competition from Apple’s iPad and iPhone as well as devices powered by Google’s Android software.

RIM’s U.S.-listed stock, already near multi-year lows, was down as much as 2 percent before the market opened. It was trading down 1.8 percent at $27.40 on the Nasdaq
just before the open.

“This is not totally unexpected. I think the size of (the cuts) is a little bit bigger than what they were intimating before,” said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. “I think this is obviously realigning the cost structure to a new growth, or sales, reality.”

RIM said one-time charges from the job cuts were not included in its outlook for the second quarter or for the full year, and it would explain the financial impact of the cuts when it reports second quarter results on September 15.

Read More…

HP To Debut 7-Inch Tablet In August

The 9.7-in. TouchPad debuting on July 1 from Hewlett-Packard (HP) will be quickly followed by a 7-in. tablet from HP in August, according to an anonymous source.

Taiwan Economic News on Friday cited an unnamed subcontractor for Inventec Corp., a PC manufacturing company in Taiwan, for information about the smaller tablet. The story said Inventec has “received big-ticket orders for tablet PCs from HP,” for both the 9.7-in. TouchPad and a 7-in. model launching in August.

The announced TouchPad runs WebOS, but no other details were available on the 7-in. model.

Inventec and HP have so far not commented on this story.

HP has not announced a 7-in. tablet, although that form factor is becoming fairly common alongside tablets with screens close to 10 inches in size.

Read More….

T.I. Blames Nokia For Lower Revenue

Texas Instruments has revised downward its revenue forecast for the second fiscal quarter due to a slackening in demand for its products from Nokia.

TI said its lower revenue projection is directly related to the market performance of Nokia, which has been experiencing its own troubles. The handset maker last week projected lower sales of devices and services due to lower average selling prices and fewer buyers of its phones.

TI is now forecasting revenue of $3.36 billion and $3.50 billion for the second fiscal quarter ending on June 30, down from $3.41 billion to $3.69 billion the company forecast on April 18 when reporting first quarter fiscal results.

“I would say characterizing as the bulk of it being Nokia is probably understating. Probably being closer to say all of the change in our … middle-of-the-range update versus what we were previously [projecting] was associated with that customer,” said Ron Slaymaker, vice president and head of investor relations at TI, during a revenue forecast conference call that was webcast on Wednesday.

Read More….

Mobile App Locates Cheaper Prescriptions

Medco Health Solutions and Verizon Wireless teamed up last month to release a mobile application that aids smartphone users in locating places where they can buy the lowest-cost prescription drugs.

Verizon stated the new Medco Pharmacy mobile app can also identify potentially harmful drug interactions based on Medco members’ medication histories.

Medco, which provides pharmacy services to more than 65 million customers, said its pharmacy mobile app is available for BlackBerry and Android smartphone users. It provides information about out-of-pocket costs for any prescription drug and lower-cost options specific to a person’s prescription drug plan, even if a patient is being treated by several doctors or fills prescriptions at many different pharmacies.

Read more…..

Jobs Returns To Announce Apple’s New Product

Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs returns on Monday to the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone center to unveil what investors hope will be the next source of growth for the world’s most valuable technology company.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave for several months and last took the stage in March to present the iPad 2, will announce the iCloud, a Web-based service that lets consumers stream music they bought to any Apple device, pitting it against rivals Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc.

That expansion into cloud computing is seen as necessary if the company is to stay competitive with increasingly popular open-sourced software, such as Google’s Android operating system, according to analysts and investors.

The iCloud has the potential to make Apple’s iTunes even more powerful, making it tougher for rivals to keep up, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said.

“It looks like Apple will likely offer some base service for free,” Wu said. “Competitors, including RIM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft already have a hard time competing with iTunes as it is, but we believe will likely find it even tougher with iCloud enhancements.”

Read More….

iPhone Gaining on Nokia’s Dominance

Apple’s iPhone is moving closer and closer  to Nokia’s top spot in smartphones globally, according to first-quarter 2011 results reported by IDC on Thursday.

With the iPhone in the second spot, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion dropped to third after finishing second a year ago, IDC said. 99.6 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter, out of 372 million mobile phones overall.

Nokia sold 24.2 million smartphones in the first quarter, holding on to its global smartphone lead despite announcing that it will move from Symbian to Windows Phone as its main smartphone operating system in next few years, IDC said. Nokia “may find itself in danger of ceding market share as the competition ramps up,” IDC said.

Apple shipped 18.7 million iPhones in the first quarter, IDC said, a new record for a single quarter, “and inched closer to market leader Nokia, with fewer than 6 million units separating the two companies,” IDC noted.

Apple also had triple-digit growth in the U.S., with the Verizon Wireless CDMA iPhone 4, and in greater China.

RIM, while down from second place where it was a year ago, remained in third place from the fourth quarter of 2010. The majority of RIM’s shipments are older, lower-cost devices, IDC noted, a trend that will continue in the second quarter.

Samsung finished fourth in smartphones for the first quarter, with 10.8 million smartphones shipped, while HTC finished fifth, with 8.9 million shipped.

Samsung grew the most of any vendor for the first quarter — 350% year-over-year. Samsung has a multiple-OS strategy and sells mostly Android smartphones, including Galaxy S phones, as well as Windows Phone 7 and Wave devices.

Read More….

Verizon May Not Carry The PlayBook

Verizon Wireless is still evaluating whether or not it will carry the PlayBook tablet computer from Research In Motion, the biggest U.S. mobile operator stated on Wednesday.

While BlackBerry maker RIM had said it expected Verizon Wireless to be one of its distribution partners for PlayBook, the company said it has yet to make such a determination.

“We’re still evaluating the BlackBerry Playbook and have not made a determination as to whether we’re going to distribute it,” Verizon Wireless Spokeswoman Brenda Raney said.

The comment came the day after PlayBook debuted at North American electronics retailers.

Read More…

RIM’s PlayBook Gets Harsh Reviews

RIM’s PlayBook tablet didn’t fare so well with influential technology reviewers who called the iPad competitor a rushed job that won’t even provide RIM’s wildly popular email service unless it’s hooked up to a BlackBerry.

The overwhelmingly bad initial response to a device the company hopes will get it attached to the tablet computing explosion overshadowed a splashy coming-out party in New York Thursday evening, where co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis played up the gadget’s attractiveness with corporate users.

There was little mention of the blistering reviews only hours before.

“RIM has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do email. It must be skating season in hell,” New York Times’ David Pogue wrote in a review published on Thursday.

Research In Motion built its reputation on a BlackBerry email service that it says is so secure that it can’t bow to government requests to tap messages, winning high-profile customers in business, defense and politics before branching out to a wider consumer market.

But the PlayBook, which hits North American store shelves on Tuesday, offers that secure service only in tandem with a BlackBerry. RIM says secure email and other key services will come later, not at launch.

Read More…

Is Twitter Finally Getting A Competitor?

Twitter your days alone at the top of the micro-blogging mountain may soon be ending. UberMedia, which owns major third-party mobile applications for the Twitter platform, is said to be building a service that will compete directly against Twitter. If it’s true, the move would come on the heels of Twitter briefly suspending the company’s apps for alleged use policy violations.

Citing unnamed sources, CNN.com reported today that UberMedia is looking to attract users to its own microblogging service by addressing common complaints about Twitter, such as its rules on message lengths as well as how the service can be confusing to new users.

UberMedia declined to comment on whether its programmers are building a new microblogging service. However, in an emailed statement to Computerworld, company marketing chief Steve Chadima said, “Our foremost desire is to continue to innovate on the Twitter platform and bring more users and usage to Twitter.”

UberMedia owns UberTwitter, which is for the BlackBerry platform; Twidroyd, for Android devices; and UberCurrent, which can be used on iPhones and iPads. The company also has been in the news in recent months because it’s moving to acquire popular Twitter client TweetDeck.

TweetDeck competes directly with Twitter’s Web and mobile clients.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said he wouldn’t be surprised if UberMedia were to go after some of Twitter’s business, but the company would have an uphill climb.

HTC Profits Rise, Lead By Android Popularity

Taiwan smartphone maker HTC Corp said first-quarter profit almost tripled, beating forecasts, driven by strong demand for its mobile devices, especially those running on Google’s Android operating system.

The company, which has just overtaken industry giant Nokia in terms of market capitalization, said on Friday that first-quarter net profit was $511 million.

“That its first quarter would be above expectations was well foreseen, Q1 seasonality was better than expected,” said Bonnie Chang, an analyst at Yuanta Securities in Hong Kong.

“For the second quarter everyone is expecting revenue sequential growth in the high teens to 20 percent, shipments will be strong and average selling prices are holding up pretty well.”

Growing demand for phones running on Google’s Android platform will help the smartphone market grow in 2011, boosting companies such as HTC and Samsung Electronics who are betting on the platform.

The smartphone market is likely to grow 58 percent this year and 35 percent the next, according to research firm Gartner.

Read More….

« Previous Page — Next Page »