Should HP Reconsider The TouchPad?

Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) should re-think its decision to dump its TouchPad tablet since the device could double the value of the PC division HP plans to spin off, technology research firm Canalys said in a statement to clients.

HP stunned markets in August by saying it may shed its PC business — the world’s largest after the $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002 — while at the same time killing webOS-based phones and the TouchPad tablet which was launched only six weeks earlier.

HP slashed the price of its tablet to $99 the weekend after announcing the TouchPad’s demise, igniting an online frenzy and prompting long lines to form at retailers as bargain-hunters chased down a gadget that had thus far failed to excite consumers.

“The TouchPad was overpriced at launch and did not sell. This led HP to draw a premature conclusion that the product category had failed,” Canalys analysts said in a research note.

Canalys said the price cut had helped make TouchPad the hottest brand in HP’s entire portfolio, gathering more interest than anything from HP in more than 10 years.

“The TouchPad has become the ‘must-have’ technology product of 2011. Perhaps no other technology vendor, apart from Apple, has ever created such hype for a technology product,” the research note said.

Read More…

Dell & Baidu To Create Mobile Devices

Dell Inc and China’s top search engine Baidu Inc plan to join forces and develop tablet computers and mobile phones, targeting the Chinese market dominated by Apple Inc and Lenovo.

China is one of the fastest growing markets for tablets and is home to more than 900 million cell phone subscribers, but analysts were skeptical that the partnership would knock Apple from its dominant perch in the market.

“I suspect this is just Dell, who has a lot of problems on the mobile and tablet front, grasping at straws to get any kind of publicity that it can to make its product more attractive,” said Michael Clendenin, managing director of technology consultancy RedTech Advisors.

“Ultimately in China, I still think it is Apple’s game, still for the iPad and iPhone.”

Dell declined to give a timeline for the launch of the devices, but local media reported on Tuesday, quoting sources, that it may be as early as November.

Baidu launched a new mobile application platform last week and offered a glimpse of its upcoming mobile operating system, which it hopes will serve a growing number of users accessing the Internet from smartphones and tablet computers.

Read More….

Analysts Expect Flood of Cheap Tablets This Fall

Analysts are predicting that a whole slew of $200 to $300 tablet computers will hit the market this fall, prompting the essential question: Which device will come out on top?

Several analysts are betting on Amazon.com to be at the top of the pile with an expected $299 Android-based tablet introduced sometime in October. The reason it will do
well is only partly because of the low price, which is below the market-leading iPad 2, starting at $499.

But analysts also expect Amazon to offer content for its 9-in. tablet thats comparable to or even exceeds the content that Apple can offer for the iPad. Amazon will make money on the content it sells, which is expected to more than make up for any loss it incurs in selling the tablet at a price below the cost of making it.

“Amazon has an ecosystem like Apple, with its own app store that offers music, movies and videos, and a bookstore,” said Bob O’Donnell, an analyst at IDC. “Not only would you get a cheaper device [than the iPad], you would get the integrated Amazon experience. That’s what makes Amazon’s tablet the most interesting and where other [Android] tablets will be challenged.”

In effect, Amazon’s approach will be to entice buyers with a much lower price, “but have all the services of Apple,” O’Donnell said.

Other Android tablets with which Amazon would likely compete include a $199 Lenovo IdeaPad A1 tablet announced Thursday, the cheapest 7-in. Android tablet from a top device maker. Another contender is the original Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is being sold on Amazon for $279.99, after having first appeared late in 2010 for $600.

Read More….

RIM Unveils New BlackBerry Torch Phones

Research In Motion on Wednesday unveiled two more powerful versions of its touchscreen BlackBerry Torch, hoping to buy time until it can introduce a radically new software package in its smartphones.

The new smartphones, along with a Bold upgrade unveiled earlier, are part of what the Canadian company called its biggest global launch ever as it seeks to claw back North American market share losses from Apple’s iconic iPhone and a slew of devices running on Google’s Android software.

The three touchscreen phones, running on the new BlackBerry OS 7, each boast an improved screen display and pack a 1.2 GHz processor from Qualcomm, the most powerful ever for a BlackBerry phone. All three devices will launch with carriers globally by the end of August, RIM said.

The browser for the new phones is 40 percent faster than the original Torch, RIM’s last major phone launch which hit shelves almost a year ago.

But since co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis has already promised “superphones” next year using the QNX-based operating system running RIM’s PlayBook tablet
computer, analysts are looking beyond the launch.

“This is a necessary product refresh in advance of the big bang that we hope and expect will happen with QNX-based phones,” said CCS Insight vice-president of research John Jackson.

Read More….

HP Exec Claims Evidence Was Falsified

HP has been accused of producing “false and fabricated” evidence against a former sales executive who the firm claims stole confidential information.

Adrian Jones, who was a sales executive at HP, left the firm to join Oracle in February 2011. HP claims that Jones nabbed a load of confidential information between 10 and 11 February using a removable hard drive. Jones told the court that the hard drive was used by HP for backup and was never in his possession, saying that HP and its outside counsel have confirmed these facts.

Jones’ current employer Oracle said that the accusations leveled at its employee are simply not true, with Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle telling Bloomberg, “The central allegation in HP’s employment lawsuit against Adrian Jones has turned out to be complete fiction…. If they did it knowingly then HP and their lawyers should be sanctioned. If they did it mistakenly then they simply owe Mr Jones an apology.”

HP is said to have probed Jones’ relationship with a female subordinate, for whom Jones allegedly arranged a 94 per cent pay rise and expensed travel that had no business purpose.

Jones’ case mirrors that of former HP CEO Mark Hurd who left the company after similar expense discrepances were brought to light. Hurd, a close friend of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, then joined Oracle as co-president within weeks of leaving his post at HP.

HP and Oracle have been going at it hammer and tongs in a largely public row over Oracle’s decision to dump support for Intel’s Itanium architecture. The two companies are in various other legal battles as well, with HP claiming that Oracle had gone from being a partner to a “bitter antagonist”. We assume the next lawsuit will claim that Oracle stole HP’s lunch money and beat it up behind the bike shed, or perhaps the other way around.

Read More….

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…

Nokia Had Horrible Quarter

Nokia has just posted very disturbing quarterly results this morning. The European smartphone giant outlook appears to be getting worse and CEO Stephen Elop has acknowledged that things will not turn around overnight.

Elop is reporting that Nokia’s operating profit is down 44 percent since Q1 and sales of mobile devices are down 23 percent consecutively. While the overall sales of mobile phones and smartphones are down, along with average selling prices.

Elop labelled the results as “clearly disappointing” and went on to say that competitive pressures are continuing. He tried to paint a somewhat more positive outlook for the rest of the year, thanks to Nokia’s clear strategy and several major product launches.

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….

The Netbook Lives On

Tablets may be the hottest mobile devices on display at this year’s Computex. But netbooks still have a presence at the trade show, and vendors are coming out with several new models that will hit the market this year. Their low cost will continue to drive sales, analysts said.

PC maker Asus, a pioneer of the netbook concept, unveiled two new models at Computex. The Asus Eee PC 1025 C and 1025 CE are Windows netbooks that will launch worldwide in the fourth quarter of this year. Priced at $299, the devices are built with an “instant on” feature that allow users to resume Windows in two seconds from sleep mode.

The other Asus netbook that has caught some attention is the Eee PC X101, which runs Intel’s MeeGo mobile operating system. The device will launch worldwide in July and cost $199. Asus will also be releasing a Windows 7 version of the netbook that will cost between $240 and $250.

Asus’ rival Acer is also showing a low-cost netbook priced at $199. The Aspire One Happy has both Windows and Android 2.3 installed. Users can toggle between operating systems by rebooting the system. Acer launched a version of the device worldwide last month.

Read More….

Skype Gives Asterisk The Boot

The Internet is buzzing with news that Skype is in the process of giving Asterisk the boot by no longer offering Skype for Asterisk starting in July.  Skype for Asterisk is proprietary software that was developed by Digium with Skype’s approval. The software was unique in that it allowed Asterisk based systems to join Skype’s VoIP Network. We assume this will not negatively impact current users for the next couple of years.

We wonder if Microsoft had a hand in killing this deal with Asterisk since they have a competing product.  One could also assume that Skype wanted to develop a native application and not use Asterisk for SIP implementations. I guess we will need the executives at Skype to fill us in on the details one day.

Read More….

« Previous Page — Next Page »