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Blackberry Plans New Tablet
April 9, 2013 by admin
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BlackBerry plans to roll out a larger tablet and two phone-tablet combos, or phablets, over the next year, according to a leaked road map presentation slide.
The three devices will run the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system, which powers the Z10 smartphone and the upcoming Q10, which features a physical qwerty keyboard, according to the slide, which first appeared over the weekend on Twitter as @BB10Leaks.
BlackBerry officials didn’t comment on the road map. However, in comments to analysts last Thursday, CEO Thorstein Heins said repeatedly that the company will introduce more BlackBerry 10 devices this year, though he didn’t indicate what form factors the products would feature.
The three new devices shown in the slide include a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as a “U10″ phone-tablet, which some call a phablet, and an “R10″ phablet with a physical qwerty keyboard.
The slide indicates that the B10 tablet will ship in the third or fourth quarter, while the two phablets will be released later, with the U10 shipping at the end of the year and the R10 in spring of 2014.
There are no specifications on the slide, but the devices appear to be shown roughly in proportion to one another, with the phablets appearing to be wider than the existing Z10 and Q10 smartphones.
BlackBerry already has a 7-in. tablet called the PlayBook that is more square in shape than the widescreen look of the B10 in the slide. Some analysts and bloggers said it’s possible that BlackBerry is developing a competitor to the various 9-to-11-in. tablets already on the market, including many Android tablets, as well as the 9.7-in. iPad.
“BlackBerry wants to be a full-line competitor, particularly for business users, so they have to have a full line of products to compete head-on with Apple and Android, primarily Samsung,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I would expect any viable competitor to establish a full line of products touching on all the various preferences of the marketplace, which includes smartphones, phablets and tablets.”
Gold couldn’t confirm whether any of the details in the leaked slide were accurate, but he noted that it doesn’t appear to include the mid-priced smartphones that Heins and other executives have hinted that BlackBerry may launch over the next few quarters.
The PlayBook tablet first went on sale in April 2011, running on what BlackBerry then called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX. BlackBerry later said it would merge that tablet operating system into BlackBerry 10. The company also released a major update to the PlayBook tablet operating system in February 2012.
The first release of the PlayBook was criticized for not having native email.
Analysts are not sure that BlackBerry can keep up with production demand for so many new devices that depend on a relatively constrained supply chain for displays and other components. But to boost its global smartphone market share, currently at less than 10%, BlackBerry will need a product lineup with a variety of options.
HP Looks Beyond Windows
Hewlett-Packard has announced the availability of its latest Pavilion laptop with Google’s Chrome OS as the PC maker attempts to improve laptop sales by offering an alternative to the Windows OS.
The Pavilion 14 Chromebook has a 14-inch screen and runs on a dual-core Intel processor. The laptop is roughly 21 millimeters thick, and weighs 1.8 kilograms. It offers just over four hours of battery life, said David Conrad, director for product management at HP’s consumer products group.
The laptop is expected to ship on Monday in the U.S. starting at $329.99. The company did not immediately provide worldwide availability information.
HP wanted to widen its product offerings and the new Chromebook is targeted at those who do most of their computing on the Web, Conrad said.
“It’s really about choice. We have a very wide offering,” Conrad said. “We think the time is right for an additional choice for people to have a gateway to their Google digital lifestyle.”
The laptop has only 16GB of solid-state drive storage, but will offer 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years.
The Chromebook has the same design as HP’s other PC offerings, which mostly run on Windows and have standard-capacity hard drives. But, with a lot of data moving to the cloud, the Chromebook provides a different usage model.
“We see this as another device to be used around the house. It’s easily managed,” Conrad said.
Is Apple Hiding Billions?
February 4, 2013 by admin
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According to Apple’s Q4 corporate filings, the company channeled $11 billion into tax havens in a single quarter. The Sunday Times claims the company is sheltering a total of $94 billion in tax havens. However, Apple’s activities are completely legal and the IRS can’t do anything about it.
But Apple’s tax avoidance strategy is not limited to the US. The company is avoided an estimated £550 million in tax in Britain back in 2011. A different analysis suggests a £550 million tax bill. Let’s not forget Kate Middleton is about to have a baby, and babies tend to cost money, so shame on you Apple.
American politicians, from both sides of the political spectrum, like to have their photos taken next to anything Apple. The company is often viewed as an American success story, as it managed to reinvent itself and come back from the brink to become the world’s second most valuable company.
AP Goes With Twitter
January 14, 2013 by admin
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The Associated Press began using its official Twitter account as an advertising platform on Monday, as the news organization looks for new ways to generate revenue.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd was the first sponsor on the @ap account for breaking news, which is followed by 1.5 million Twitter users. The South Korean electronics maker’s initial “SPONSORED TWEET” promoted its events at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
AP did not disclose financial details of the arrangement.
Twitter, which sells ads directly to make money from the social media’s monthly base of 200 million users, will not receive any proceeds from the AP-Samsung deal.
The AP called the initiative part of a new business strategy and stressed that sponsored tweets will clearly be labeled to differentiate them from news tweets.
The ads provide AP a new income source as news organizations from newspapers to television face severe revenue declines in the face of high production costs.
While the AP was founded in 1846 by U.S. newspapers as a breaking news conduit, only 22 percent of its revenue comes from member fees. Photo licensing, advertising on its news application AP Mobile and YouTube channel are other revenue streams.
Samsung Goes Eight Cores
It was only a matter of time before someone got the cunning idea to build an eight-core ARM chip and Samsung seems to have taken up the challenge.
The Korean giant will detail its first eight-core SoC at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The 28nm part features two stitched quad-core clusters, based on A7 and A15 cores, hence the name – big.little.
The A7 cluster runs at up to 1.2GHz, while the A15 cluster can hit 1.8GHz, and it packs 2MB of L2 cache. It sounds like an intriguing concept, a bit like Nvidia’s companion core taken to the next level. The “little” cluster is tuned for energy efficiency, while the beefy A15 cluster should deliver unparalleled performance.
But what about real life applications? Eight cores sound like overkill for smartphones and even high end tablets, so it is unclear whether the big.little chip will find its way into actual products anytime soon.
Is Windows 8 In High Demand?
Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Monday demand for the company’s new Windows 8 operating system, that went on sale last Friday, was running at a higher rate than its last release, Windows 7.
“We’re seeing preliminary demand well above where we were with Windows 7, which is gratifying,” Ballmer said at an event launching new Windows phones.
Windows 7 is the best-selling version of Windows so far, selling more than 670 million licenses in three years since release in 2009.
“Over the weekend we saw an incredible response around the globe to Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface,” said Ballmer, referring to Microsoft’s first own-brand tablet, designed to challenge Apple Inc’s iPad. He did not give out any sales figures.
On Friday, there were moderate lines at Microsoft’s 60 or so stores across the United States for the Surface.
Ballmer was in San Francisco speaking at an event showcasing phones running its new Windows Phone 8 software, which go on sale this weekend.
Microsoft has struggled to make headway in the smartphone market, holding just 3.5 percent of the worldwide market, compared to 68 percent for Google Inc’s Android devices and 17 percent for Apple’s iPhone, according to tech research firm IDC.
The company highlighted how the new phones make use of Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service, enabling users to sync and transfer music, documents and photos between PCs, tablets and the Xbox game console. Microsoft added that it now has 120,000 apps in its online store for phones, still far fewer than the number available for iPhone and Android users.
Tech CEOs Ready For Tablet Wars
The biggest names in consumer technology, smacked by a string of disappointing quarterly results this month, are gearing up for what appears to be the fiercest holiday battle in years.
Investors and consumers have already largely written off flaccid quarterly numbers from tech behemoths like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon. What counts is the next 60 days, when the biggest names in technology do battle at a near-unprecedented scale and pace.
Just last Thursday, Amazon compared its Kindle Fire with Apple’s new iPad mini, point by point, in its earnings release, an unusual forum to name rivals. Apple CEO Tim Cook compared Microsoft’s Surface tablet to an over-engineered car that can fly and float. And Microsoft went for the iPad, saying its Surface boasted twice its storage.
All three tablets will vie for the shrinking consumer dollar these holidays. By tech standards, it’s getting ugly.
“The tablet space is where the growth is. That’s why they are all fighting over it. PC shipments are down and some tablet buyers may never buy another PC,” said Michael Allenson, strategic consulting director in the Technology and Telecom Research Group at Maritz Research.
RIM Says Subscriber Base Grew
October 2, 2012 by admin
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Research in Motion offered investors a glimmer of hope on Tuesday, announcing a surprise jump in subscriber numbers that sent its shares up 5 percent, even as the embattled BlackBerry maker worked hard to drum up enthusiasm for its new BB10 devices.
Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, once a pioneer in the smartphone arena, has rapidly lost market share in North America to Apple’s snazzier iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices.
RIM is now attempting to reinvent itself through the launch of new line of totally revamped smartphones that will run on the new BlackBerry 10, or BB10, operating system. In an attempt to create a buzz around the new devices, RIM gave developers at a gathering Tuesday in San Jose, California, a sneak peek at the smartphone and its features.
At the event, the company also announced that its BlackBerry subscriber base has risen to 80 million from the 78 million it reported earlier this year, surprising many on Wall Street and sparking a jump in the company’s beleaguered share price.
In recent months, RIM has been completely focused on the launch its new line of revamped devices. In the meantime, its aging line-up of smartphones in the market have struggled to compete against the recently launched iPhone 5 and a slew of new Android devices. Most analysts had expected RIM to begin losing subscribers in the recently ended quarter, for the first time in its history.
RIM, Microsoft Sign Patent Licensing Deal
September 25, 2012 by admin
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Research In Motion’s shares jumped on Tuesday after it inked a patent licensing deal with Microsoft Corp to use one of the technology company’s file storage systems.
Microsoft said the patent being licensed by RIM greatly expands the size of files that flash memory devices can handle and increases the speed at which those files can be accessed. The technology also provides the ability to seamlessly transfer data between a variety of different devices.
“This is potentially money out of RIM’s coffers for the right to use the ex-FAT patent in its technology. But what it does for investors and others is provide a glimpse into what the BlackBerry 10 devices can do,” said Kevin Restivo, a mobile device analyst at global research firm IDC.
RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone market slip away to Apple Inc, Samsung and other competitors, and the company’s fate may depend on the success of its new line of devices, the BlackBerry 10, which is set to hit the market early in 2013.
RIM hopes the BlackBerry 10 will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple’s iPhone and others that run on Google Inc’s Android operating system.
“I think there is some anticipation and speculation around the devices that RIM will launch as a result of the announcement today,” Restivo said.
Samsung Goes HSA
It seems that the IFA 2012 show in Berlin was a good show for AMD as well, or to be precise, it was good for the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation founded by AMD, ARM, Texas Instruments, Imagination and Mediatek. Samsung has joined up alongside six new members.
The HSA Foundation was created back in June at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit as a foundation that will deliver new user experiences through advances in computing architectures in order to improve power efficiency, performance, programmability, portability across computing devices and general support of software across a broad spectrum of devices in order to remove the need for code rewriting for various different platforms.
Senior Manager of Technology Marketing at AMD, Sasa Marinkovic, noted on the AMD blog that there is no doubt that the HSA Foundation is off to a good start and in addition to Samsung, they are more than happy to welcome six additional companies including Apical, Arteris, MulticoreWare, Sonics, Symbio and Vivante.