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T Mobile Sees Growth
January 20, 2014 by admin
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T-Mobile US has reported a fourth-quarter boost in customer growth and offered to pay customers to ditch rival service providers, escalating already intense competition in the U.S. wireless market.
The company, the No. 4 U.S. mobile operator, promised payments of up to $350 per line to consumers who break their contract with any of its bigger rivals and switch to T-Mobile.
The offer came just days after AT&T Inc promised a $200 credit to T-Mobile customers who switch. While AT&T also offered up to $250 for switching customers who trade in their phone, T-Mobile said it would pay up to $300 for trade-ins.
The companies have been targeting each other because they use the same network technology, making it easy for consumers to bring their phone when they switch, but some on Wall Street are concerned they will cause an industry-wide price war.
T-Mobile said it hoped that whole families as well as individuals would switch to its service in response to the new cash offer, which is aimed at covering early contract termination fees typically charged by wireless operators.
John Legere, the outspoken chief executive of T-Mobile, said he hoped the offer would end the “industry scam” of family plans, which tie entire families into long-term contracts.
Legere joked that AT&T’s recent offer would actually play to T-Mobile’s advantage because it would allow AT&T customers to try a different service with less financial risk than before.
“If it doesn’t work they’ll pay you to come back,” Legere said in announcing the offer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
T-Mobile, which is 67 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom, managed to turn the corner on four years of customers losses in 2013 by criticizing its rivals and promoting its service plans as being more flexible and consumer friendly.
It said it added 1.645 million net customers in the fourth quarter, up from 1.023 million in the quarter before, marking its third quarter of customer growth for 2013.
The fourth-quarter additions included 869,000 valuable post-paid customers, which was up 13 percent from the third quarter, according to the company.
It said customer defections, known in the industry as churn, stayed at third-quarter levels of 1.7 percent and compared with 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Did Qualcomm Snub Intel?
Earlier this year Intel made a lot of noise about leasing its foundries to third parties, but at least one big played does not appear to be interested.
Speaking at a tech conference, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said his company is not interested in using Intel fabs and that it will continue to cooperate with established foundries like TSMC.
Jacobs argued that Intel is great at building huge volumes of equally huge cores, but TSMC is a tad more flexible. He pointed out that foundries like TSMC can run build multiple different products simultaneously, controlling the process using software.
“Intel is famous, has been known for having a copy-exact model, so they need very large volumes of a particular chip to run through that,” Jacobs said, reports ITProPortal.
However, Jacobs did point out that he was glad to hear Intel is joining the foundry space and that it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Did Intel Have an IPad In Y2K?
Intel apparently built an IPAD ten years before Steve Jobs though of the tablet and the name. It was in the days when sticking an I in front of anything meant it was Intel rather than Apple and the Intel Pad, or IPAD for short, could browse the Internet, play music and videos, and even act as a digital picture frame.
Intel scrapped the IPAD before consumers could get their hands on it as its move into Tablets was seen as one of the outfit’s biggest blunders. According to CNET in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Intel wanted to diversify its operations beyond the PC. The IPAD came from one of several small teams within its research arm tasked with exploring new business opportunities. The IPAD, which included a touch screen and stylus, would not run entirely on its own but connected to a computer to browse the Internet through an Intel wireless technology.
Intel thought that “mobility” meant moving around your home or business and the IPAD was to be a portable device you could take around your house. The reason that they never thought of connecting it to the phone network was because Intel wanted to tie it all back to its core PC chip business. After several years of development on the Intel Web Tablet, then-CEO Craig Barrett unveiled the device at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2001. The company planned to sell the tablet to consumers later that year.
Sadly though it miffed Intel’s PC partners, which didn’t want a product that could potentially compete with them and Intel caved in and cancelled the project.
Intel’s Cherry Trail Forthcoming
The next generation desktop and mobile Atom is Cherry Trail in 14nm and the first parts are expected in late 2014. Intel has been working hard to accelerate the introduction of Atom parts based on the new architecture and in 2014 it will finally ship Broadwell notebook chips and Cherry Trail Atoms in the same year, both using the new 14nm node.
The Cherry View is a notebook SoC version of a chip based on new Airmont core, while Cherry Trail is the part meant for tablets. The phone version is based on Moorefield architecture and they are all expected to show up in late 2014, most likely very late Q3 2014.
The TDP should go down compared to Bay Trail platform as the new 14nm needs less voltage to hit the same speed and should produce less heat at the same time. With the 14nm shrink Intel’s new Atoms will be able to get more fanless design wins.
The significance of 14nm products for mobile phones and tablets will be in the fact that ARM alliance lead by Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and a few other players will be struggling to get 20nm designs out of the door in 2014, and Intel can already get to a 14nm.
However, Intel still has to integrate LTE inside its mobile phone SoCs, which has traditionally been proven to be a tough task. At this time only Qualcomm has on-die LTE and its LTE enabled SoCs are under the bonnet of almost every significant ARM based high-end phone out there.
Only time will tell how successful Intel’s mobile push will be. Even with these 14nm parts, once they show up roughly a year from now, it might be really tough for Intel to get some high-volume design wins in the phone space, despite the transition to 14nm.
Will Intel’s Tablet Gamble Work?
Earlier this year Intel caused quite a stir when CEO Brian Krzanich announced the company’s ultimate goal is to make $99 tablets a reality. So far Intel has failed to gain much market share in the tablet space, dominated by cheaper ARM application processors and Android.
However, Bay Trail-T has a good chance to turn things around. The new chip can easily take on high-end ARM parts and in most cases, wipe the floor with them. Since it’s an x86 part, it can also be used in Windows 8.1 tablets. However, the price was a problem. Intel’s official Bay Trail-T prices range from $32 to $37, making the chips significantly more expensive than mid-range and low-end ARM parts. However, many vendors are said to be getting discounts and paying a bit less, in the $20 to $30 range.
Things may be about to change. According to Digitimes, Intel is planning to spend up to $1 billion on tablet chip subsides. The cash should sweeten the deal for vendors willing to give Intel SoCs a go. Since we are talking about relatively low average selling prices, Intel could use the cash to practically halve the prices and offer Bay Trail-T parts for as little as $10. This would make them competitive overnight, as high-end ARM SoCs like the Exynos 5 and Tegra 4 are estimated to cost well over $20.
Intel has a long tradition of overspending on marketing. A few years ago it showed Ultrabook vendors with $300 million worth of market development funding and it has a huge Core marketing program. Intel recently announced that it would start treating Atom and Core equally, hence the move would make sense. Since Core lifecycles are getting longer, Intel could simply shift some of the funding to Atom products, namely tablet parts like Bay Trail-T.
The only problem? Well the report comes from Digitimes and the site’s hit and miss track record has been on the “miss” side lately, so take it with a grain of salt.
Is SAP Searching In The Clouds?
Esoteric business software maker, which no one is really certain what it does, SAP is debating whether to accelerate moving more of its business to the cloud.
The move would be a change in strategy which might initially have only a small impact on its sales. Co-chief executive Jim Hagemann-Snabe said the change would generate more sales by 2017 particularly in markets like the US where there is a big push onto the cloud.
Talking to a Morgan Stanley investor conference this morning, Hagemann-Snabe said that this would have impact on the 2015 level, I don’t expect enormous impact but it would have some impact because you are delaying some revenues. In the long term however it makes a lot of sense, which is not the sort of thing people expect from SAP.
Is Intel Expanding?
Even if it means that it will be the first to make ARM’s 64-bit chips, Intel said that it wants to expand its contract foundry work. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said he would expand his company’s small contract manufacturing business, paving the way for more chipmakers to tap into the world’s most advanced process technology.
Krzanich told analysts that he planned to step up the company’s foundry work, effectively giving Intel’s process technology to its rivals. He said that company’s who can use Intel’s leading edge and build computing capabilities that are better than anyone else’s, are good candidates for foundry service. Krzanich added that the slumping personal computer industry, Intel’s core market, was showing signs of bottoming out.
Intel also unveiled two upcoming mobile chips from its Atom line designed interchange features to create different versions of the component. A high-end version of the new chip, code named Broxton, and is due out in mid-2015. SoFIA, a low-end chip was shown as an example of Intel’s pragmatism and willingness to change how it does business. Krzanich said that in the interest of speed, SoFIA would be manufactured outside of Intel, with the goal of bringing it to market next year.
Intel will move production of SoFIA chips to its own 14 nanometer manufacturing lines, Krzanich added.
Intel Buys KNO Software
Intel has acquired educational software developer Kno to add to its Education division.
Speaking in the company blog, Intel Sales and Marketing Group VP John Galvin explained that in a world where kids are being bombarded by technology, Intel Education has a mission to support the rollout of technology in the classroom.
Galvin said, “The Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments.”
This acquisition brings Intel’s global digital content library to over 225,000 [higher education] and K-12 titles from 74 education publishers. “We’re looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno’s rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success,” Galvin added.
Intel Education has been working for the past decade with over 10 million teachers that it has assisted to integrate technology with education.
In the UK alone there have been tremendous strides in educational software over the past 30 years, dating back to the government pledge to provide a computer in every school, which led to the creation of the BBC Microcomputer designed specifically for that purpose.
Today, not only is ICT a dedicated lesson in its own right, but it forms one of the key skills that educators are expected to incorporate into all lesson plans, putting it on a par with English and Maths, showing just how far we’ve come from making Venn diagrams with ascii art.
Intel’s Bay Trail M Is On The Way
Intel launched its Bay Trail-M ultra low voltage processors for netbooks and mobile devices over the weekend. According to CPU World the new mobile CPUs, branded this time as Celeron and Pentium, can manage twice the CPU performance, and up to three times faster graphics.
They do all that while using the same amount of juice as their “Cedar Trail” predecessors. Most chips have higher clock speeds than N2805, N2810 and N2910 SKUs and come with Burst Performance technology. They can operate at a higher maximum operating temperature which makes them easier to cool. Finally, in addition to 4 N28xx/N29xx Celerons Intel also released Pentium N2920.
Then there are new dual-core Bay Trail-M microprocessors like the Celeron N2806, N2815 and N2820 which can operate at frequencies from 1.6 GHz to 2.13 GHz, when going downhill had the wind is behind them. They also have the maximum burst speed ranging from 2 GHz to 2.39 GHz. The processors come with 1 MB L2 cache, Ivy Bridge graphics clocked at 311 MHz and up to 756 MHz, and support for DDR3L-1066 memory. The N2806 has 4.5 Watt TDP while the N2815 and N2820 have 7.5 Watt TDP. All of the Celeron N28xx processors are priced at $132.
Two new quad-core microprocessors are Celeron N2920 and Pentium N3520. The CPUs have 2 MB L2 cache, and run at 1.86 GHz and 2.17 GHz respectively, with burst frequencies reaching 2 GHz and 2.42 GHz. Both parts integrate Ivy Bridge graphics, that can be clocked as high as 854 MHz. The Celeron can deal with DDR3L-1066 memory, and the Pentium supports 1333 MHz memory data rate. They fit into 7.5 Watt power envelope. The official prices of Celeron N2920 and Pentium N3520 are $132 and $180.
Tizen Announces New Partners
November 25, 2013 by admin
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Samsung and Intel announced on Tuesday that the open source Tizen operating system now has 36 partners, including eBay, Trend Micro and Panasonic.
The full list of new partners was announced at the Tizen Developer Summit, and includes a mix of firms from different sectors. Among the 36 backers are eBay, Nokia’s Here mapping service, Konami, McAfee, Panasonic, Sharp and The Weather Channel, giving us some insights as to what software applications are likely to appear on the Linux based operating system.
Trevor Cornwell, founder and CEO of Appbackr, one of Tizen’s newly added partners, said that his firm found the operating system appealing due to its open nature, perhaps hinting that it is more open than Google’s Android mobile operating system.
He said, “The Tizen OS promises to be the most open and comprehensive software platform available for those companies wishing to target the consumers of connected devices.
“The Association’s commitment to support HTML5 applications, combined with their vision that extends beyond the smartphone and tablet ecosystem to a wider array of other connected device segments, makes it attractive to all types of companies. We look forward to collaborating with the Tizen Association to ensure that all stakeholders can contribute to the development of a platform for this growing market opportunity.”
It’s still unclear when Samsung’s first Tizen powered smartphone will make it to market, but online speculation suggests we’ll be seeing the firm’s debut Android challenging smartphone at some point in 2014.
Further speculation suggests that Samsung’s first Tizen phone will be an updated version of the Galaxy S4, possibly to reduce its reliance on Android.