Has The iPhone Peaked in The U.S.?

Apple’s vice like grip in the US smartphone market is falling off as sales of the overpriced gadgets slump.

Research outfit Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said the 2.3 per cent drop in US sales had been covered by rises in China, Japan and Australia.

But the fact that Apple’s home ground is the US and that it has become increasingly dependent on its iPhone, this statistic does not bode well, particularly as the company depends on continual growth to maintain its share price the whole lot is starting become unstuck.

For the second quarter of 2015, iPhone sales grew by 2.1 percent from the same quarter last year across Europe’s five biggest markets, namely the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Growth was strongest in the UK at 5.5 percent and weakest in Italy at only 0.1 percent. Beyond Europe, iPhone sales surged by 9.1 per cent  in Australia, 7.3 percent in China and 2.7 percent in Japan.

It is worthwhile pointing that the European growth outside the UK, Australia and China is more indicative of a flat market rather than actual growth.

A possible reason for the fall in the US is better competition from Android where Apple’s Android rivals provided a tougher fight.

Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, said in a press release. “In the U.S., as we forecasted last month, Android’s growth continued in the quarter ending June 30, with both Samsung and LG increasing their share sequentially. Forty-three percent of all Android buyers mentioned a ‘good deal on the price of the phone’ as the main purchase driver for their new device.”

“Android in the U.S. is undergoing its strongest consolidation yet, with Samsung and LG now accounting for 78 percent of all Android sales,” Milanesi added. “LG is the real success story of the quarter. Not only did it double its share of the US smartphone market once again, but it was also able, for the first time, to acquire more first-time smartphone buyers than Samsung.”

Screen size was the main driver for Android buyers across Europe, according to Dominic Sunnebo, business unit director at Kantar. Samsung and LG both sell big-screen “phablet” phones. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 sports a 5.7-inch screen, while LG’s G4 packs in a 5.5-inch screen.

Though the iPhone 6 Plus also uses a 5.5-inch display, iOS buyers are driven by a wider range of factors, Sunnebo said, including “phone reliability and durability, as well as the quality of the materials.”

Of course if you are member of Tame Apple Press you will forget to report the news and say the opposite and claim that the iPhone’s wonderful sales are a problem.

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HP Has Two More Tablets In Route

HP is about to put out two tablets later this year.

The names are expected to be the HP Pro Slate 10 EE G1 and HP Pro Tablet 10 EE G1 and they were found on the world wide wibble by Notebook Italia,.

Both tablets are powered by an Intel quad-core Bay Trail Atom Z3735F processor. Accompanying the processor package is 2GB of RAM, as well as 32GB of internal storage. Both the Pro Slate and Pro Tablet come with 10.1-inch displays, as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.

The Pro Slate sticks with Android, while the Pro Tablet opts for Windows 8.1. The tablets mean they will each come with a stylus, but it would appear that the stylus is just a stand in for your finger, rather than doing anything useful.

Pro Slate will set you back $400.00 and Pro Tablet cost $499.

HP has yet to officially announce either device.

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HTTP2 Procotol Nears Completion

When it comes to amping up traffic over the Internet, sometimes too much of a good thing may not be such a good thing at all.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is putting the final touches on HTTP/2, the second version of the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). The working group has issued a last call draft, urging interested parties to voice concerns before it becomes a full Internet specification.

Not everyone is completely satisfied with the protocol however.

“There is a lot of good in this proposed standard, but I have some deep reservations about some bad and ugly aspects of the protocol,” wrote Greg Wilkins, lead developer of the open source Jetty server software, noting his concerns in a blog item posted Monday.

Others, however, praise HTTP/2 and say it is long overdue.

“A lot of our users are experimenting with the protocol,” said Owen Garrett, head of products for server software provider NGINX. “The feedback is that generally, they have seen big performance benefits.”

First created by Web originator Tim Berners-Lee and associates, HTTP quite literally powers today’s Web, providing the language for a browser to request a Web page from a server.

Version 2.0 of HTTP, based largely on the SPDY protocol developed by Google, promises to be a better fit for how people use the Web.

“The challenge with HTTP is that it is a fairly simple protocol, and it can be quite laborious to download all the resources required to render a Web page. SPDY addresses this issue,” Garrett said.

While the first generation of Web sites were largely simple and relatively small, static documents, the Web today is used as a platform for delivering applications and bandwidth intensive real-time multimedia content.

HTTP/2 speeds basic HTTP in a number of ways. HTTP/2 allows servers to send all the different elements of a requested Web page at once, eliminating the serial sets of messages that have to be sent back and forth under plain HTTP.

HTTP/2 also allows the server and the browser to compress HTTP, which cuts the amount of data that needs to be communicated between the two.

As a result, HTTP/2 “is really useful for organization with sophisticated Web sites, particularly when its users are distributed globally or using slower networks — mobile users for instance,” Garrett said.

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HP Increases SlateBook Pricing

Hewlett-Packard’s SlateBook 14 laptop with Google’s Android OS has started shipping on schedule, but it’s priced at $429, which is $30 more than the company had said it would cost.

The laptop, which has a 14-inch screen and Android 4.3, was announced in June. At the time, HP said it would be priced at $399.

It is available on HP’s website.

The SlateBook 14 was introduced after customers told HP they wanted laptops with Android. The laptop has an interface similar to that on Android tablets and can adjust mobile apps to run on the larger touchscreen. Users will also be able to sync laptop data with mobile devices and vice versa.

The laptop is also for those who rely on the Web for most of their computing, much like Chromebooks. It has a few advantages over Chromebooks, with support for key Android apps such as Skype. Android also boasts better wireless printing support than Chromebooks.

The laptop weighs 1.68 kilograms and offers nine hours of battery life, according to specifications on HP’s website.

It has a quad-core Tegra 4 processor, 2GB of DRAM and 16GB of storage. Connectivity features include 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. It also has a webcam, USB 3.0 port and a micro-SD slot for expandable storage.

It could be a strong multimedia laptop with a 1920 x 1080 pixel screen and an integrated graphics processor that can handle 4K video. TVs can be connected to the laptop through an HDMI port.

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Tizen Announces New Partners

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.

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New USB Chip Developed

Silicon Motion says it has begun shipping samples of a new USB 3.0 controller chip for flash drives that could boost performance by up to 50%.

The company said the new SM3267 integrated controller is expected to deliver up to 160MB/s read, and 60MB/s write speeds through a single channel; that would be a 30% to 50% performance improvement over today’s USB 3.0 flash drive technology.

Even though the USB 3.0 specification has the capability to support 4.8Gbps throughput speeds, the speed of a USB 3.0-enabled flash drive is dictated by the speed of the accessing flash devices in the drive. Today, most consumer-USB 3.0 flash drives support about 100MB/s read speeds.

We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, said in a statement.

The new integrated chip will also be able to run at lower voltages, from 5 volts to 1.2 volts, enabling a 25% to 30% lower USB flash drive device temperature compared with other USB 3.0 flash controller products in the market, Silicon Motion said.

The new IC will support the vast majority of NAND flash technology, including new triple-level cell (TLC), multi-level cell (MLC), high speed Toggle, and ONFI DDR NAND manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Micron and Intel.

The new chip has already passed both USB-IF compliance testing and WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) tests for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The new IC is available in a Chip-on-Board (COB) and in a 48-pin QFN green package.

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Visa Digital Wallet Coming

Visa Inc, the world’s largest credit and debit card processing network, is designing a digital wallet that people can use to pay for things on the Internet or with their phones instead of with traditional plastic cards.

The network said on Wednesday it is collaborating with several large U.S. and international banks to create the wallet. Its partners include US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services, Regions Financial, BB&T Corp, Toronto Dominion’s TD Bank and the U.S. arm of Barclays PLC.

The “digital wallet” will store the banks’ customers’ credit and debit card account information, both for Visa cards as well as other cards. People can use the wallet to pay for things online or in stores, Visa said.

The network will also have to convince merchants to put a new “one-click” button on their websites, so that potential customers can use their Visa digital wallets to buy things by clicking the button instead of by manually entering all of their account information every time they want to make an online purchase.

Banks, mobile phone operators and networks like Visa are all trying to gain territory in the small, but high-potential market for U.S. mobile payments. Last week Isis, a separate mobile payments venture run by three of the top four U.S. carriers, said it had modified its initial goals and was now open to working with Visa and MasterCard as it introduces its own mobile wallet.

Jim McCarthy, Visa’s head of global products, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that mobile payments in the United States “will more easily take off” from people using their smartphones’ browsers to buy things online.

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