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Blackberry Makes A Comeback
February 5, 2013 by admin
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Research In Motion has hinted that it will unveil two new handsets early next month to accompany the release of its BlackBerry 10 operating system.
RIM is expected to unveil the phones at an event in New York City on Wednesday and will begin promoting BlackBerry 10 to consumers the following Sunday, Feb. 3, when it will air a TV commercial during the Super Bowl.
The sporting event attracts one of the largest TV audiences of the year in America, and companies pay millions of dollars for a 30-second advertising spot, underscoring how important it is for RIM that its new BlackBerry platform will be a hit. The same commercial will also air in Canada, RIM’s home country.
In announcing its publicity plans Friday, RIM also hinted at when the phones will be available to consumers. It said the TV spot “kicks off a week of worldwide launch activity for RIM’s BlackBerry 10 platform, along with the first two devices to run on the new platform.”
If the commercial marks the start of a weeklong buildup to the launch, that would put the North American release of the phones at roughly the start of the second week in February.
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.
Will Microsoft Buy A Slice of Dell?
Microsoft Corp is in talks to invest between $1 billion and $3 billion of financing in a buyout of Dell Inc, CNBC cited unidentified sources as saying on Tuesday.
Private equity outfit Silver Lake Partners is working to finalize a bidding group to take the world’s No. 3 PC maker private, and has started discussions with potential equity partners, sources familiar with the matter have said.
Dell also has formed a special committee to take a close look at any potential deal on the table, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. If successful, it would be one of the largest corporate buyouts since before the global financial crisis.
Microsoft, which accelerated its foray into computer hardware in 2012 with the launch of the Surface tablet, will provide the capital in the form of mezzanine financing according to CNBC, which is a hybrid of debt and equity.
Windows Phone Is Making Gains
January 29, 2013 by admin
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Microsoft’s Windows Phone mobile operating system is slowly increasing its market share in the UK, while Apple edges closer to archival Samsung.
That’s according to the latest numbers from research firm Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, which show that Microsoft’s Windows Phone has increased its UK market share from 2.2 percent to 5.9 percent in the past 12 months. The mobile operating system is doing even better in countries such as Italy, where it boasts a 13.9 percent market share.
Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel Comtech said, “At the end of 2012 the global OS picture shows Android on top, but clearly the rate of growth it experienced over the past year is beginning to slow as easy wins from first time smartphone buyers begin to reduce.
“It has been far slower than Microsoft would have liked, but Windows Phone is now starting to gain respectable shares in a number of key European countries.”
“However, its performance in the Chinese and US markets remains underwhelming. As the two largest smartphone markets in the world these remain key challenges for Microsoft to overcome during 2013.”
Kantar Worldpanel Comtech has also revealed that Apple is edging closer to rival Samsung, with each firm clinging to 32 percent and 35 percent of the smartphone market, respectively. Given that Samsung had a much healthier lead this time last year, these numbers seem to suggest that Apple’s iPhone 5 has sold better than rumors had indicated. However, all will be revealed during Apple’s quarterly earnings call tomorrow.
Apple and Samsung could soon have a third challenger on their hands, though, as research also shows that Nokia’s sales are improving in the UK smartphone market. Sales of the firm’s smartphones have increased 50 percent year-on-year, putting the firm’s market share at 5.2 percent.
Intel Makes Changes To Haswell
Intel has started dividing its mobile market segments into processors lines, where the Y processor line goes up to 11.5W TDP, U line covers chips in the 15W to 25W range, while the M line covers 37W, 47W as well as 57W TDP space, with two to four cores and graphics up to GT2.
The high performance H processor line is yet another BGA package processor line that also aims for 37W, 47W and 57W TDPs, with quad-core processors and up to GT3 graphics with on-package cache memory.
Intel expects that high performing gaming and workstation PCs will go use these processors and they fit some thick clamshell designs, no Ultrabooks with 57W unless you would want to use one for welding.
Intel currently doesn’t detail the processor number and the number of SKUs but it is obvious that they will end up with quad-core Core i7 branding for QC1+ and QC2+ market segments.
Ericcson Transfers Patents
January 21, 2013 by admin
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Ericsson has agreed to transfer 1,922 patents and 263 patent applications to Unwired Planet in exchange for a share in ongoing revenue that they will generate.
The transfer includes 753 U.S. patents related to 2G, 3G and LTE technologies, Unwired Planet said Thursday. Four months ago, the company owned just 200 U.S. and foreign patents, and around 75 pending patent applications.
“Our patent portfolio now extends to all layers of the telecom handset and infrastructure stack,” said Unwired Planet’s CEO Mike Mulica during a conference call. The patents cover application stores, location-based services, mobile search and mobile advertising as well as network protocols, antennas and many more topics, Mulica said.
The portfolio will continue to grow, as Ericsson has also committed to transfer a further 100 patents each year from 2014 through 2018.
Mulica said the company wants everyone who uses the patented technologies to pay a license fee. “We will use litigation when necessary,” he said.
Is NFC Catching On?
January 10, 2013 by admin
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Near Field Communication (NFC) is steadily gaining adoption in the U.S. for sharing data and music among smartphones, but the technology faces years of slow growth as a replacement for physical wallets.
NFC will take a minimum of three more years to grab hold as a technology that enables so-called mobile wallets as a replacement for credit cards and cash in the U.S., according to a consensus of five analysts. And by “grab hold,” these analysts mean being used by only 10% of mobile phone users to make digital purchases.
Gartner analyst Avivah Litan predicts that NFC payments will hit the 10% threshold in 2015, compared to the process of SMS (texting) payments that is expected to represent 50% of mobile payment volume globally in that same year. “We’re still on the edge when it comes to NFC innovation,” Litan says. “It will take a decade before it’s mainstream across the globe.”
Dozens of new smartphones that run Android, BlackBerry and Windows, and that include an NFC chip, launched last year. But Apple notably did not put NFC in its new iPhone 5 when the phone launched in September. That move “surely had a significant detrimental impact on industry adoption of NFC,” Litan says, given Apple’s influence in the mobile market.
Apple justified the move by saying that consumers already could use its Passbook app, which shows barcodes on the display, instead of NFC. The barcodes contain information that can be scanned by optical readers to let users board planes and redeem movie tickets — tasks that Apple notes are “the kinds of things consumers need today.”
Some have criticized Apple for omitting NFC from the iPhone 5, which has led to a widespread reassessment of NFC’s immediate future, especially in the U.S.
Intel’s Haswell Goes 13W
Intel’s Haswell Y-series processors as we said a few weeks ago have yet launch. The current plan is to launch two Ivy SKUs in Q1 2013, both dual-cores, and later in 2013 Intel plans to replace them with Haswell Y series parts, with even lower TDP.
The faster one is called Core i7 3689Y and has two cores and two threads, as well as a base clock of 1.5GHz. With the help of Intel Turbo Boost 2.0, the top single-core turbo clock is an impressive 2.6GHz, while the maximum dual-core turbo clock stops at 2.4GHz, which is still impressive. This core comes with Intel HD graphics 4000 clocked between 350MHz and 860MHz with turbo.
This new core supports both DDR3 and DDR3L at 1600MHz, has 4MB of cache and impressively low 13W TDP. We have explained that SDP stands for Standard Dissipation Power and Intel expect it to be at 7W for this part.
The runner up is called Core i5 3439Y and has the same two cores and two threads with 1.5GHz base clock, but the single core turbo clock stops at 2.3GHz, while the dual-core top clock is 2.10GHz. The graphics speed, TDP and memory support remain the same, but there is a difference in cache size. Core i5 3439Y comes with 3MB instead of 4MB for Core i7 Y series 3689Y part.
Raspberry Pi Gets A Store
Raspberry Pi Foundation has opened a store to enable users to easily download applications that run on the credit-card sized computer.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation said it partnered with Indiecity and Velocix to create a store for applications that run on the Raspberry Pi computer. The Foundation said that the store itself is an application that runs under its Raspbian Linux distribution and at launch has 23 applications available for download.
The Raspberry Pi Store contains games such as Freeciv alongside applications such as Libreoffice and Asterisk. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said its store accepts compiled binaries, Python code, images, audio and video.
The Raspberry Pi Store will allow developers to charge for applications, with the Foundation saying that it hopes to see a mix of hobbyist and commercial software. The Foundation also asked users that download applications to review them in order to improve the results put out by its recommendations system.
While the Raspberry Pi was initially intended to help teach people how to program, the device has gained wider popularity due to the fact that its hardware can run many typical PC desktop applications. The Foundation’s Raspberry Pi Store will make it easier for users to find and install applications on the device, which can only be a good thing for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Linux adoption.
AMD Offers More Radeon Chips
AMD has announced four Radeon HD 8000M series GPU chips sporting its latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
AMD’s GCN architecture made its first appearance in the firm’s ultra high-end mobile chips, however next month’s CES show will see the firm show off laptops featuring four Radeon HD 8000M series chips. The firm’s four Radeon HD 8000M chips are pitched at the mainstream and gaming laptop markets, though the company said that Asus already has a laptop announced that will use the chips in an ‘ultrathin’ design.
AMD’s Radeon HD 8000M series sees the firm split three chips with the same number of stream processors and memory clock speeds that scale up to 1.25GHz but differentiated by their core speeds. The firm’s Radeon HD 8500M, Radeon HD 8600M and Radeon HD 8700M all have 384 stream processors but are clocked up to 650MHz, 775MHz and between 650MHz and 850MHz, respectively.
Topping AMD’s present range is the Radeon HD 8800M, which has 640 stream processors and is clocked at between 650MHz and 700MHz, while its GDDR5 memory is also clocked at 1.25GHz. All of the firm’s chips, by virtue of being based on the GCN architecture, support DirectX 11.1.
AMD said it will launch three more chips in the Radeon HD 8000M series in the second quarter of 2013. According to the firm’s roadmap, two of those chips will sit above the Radeon HD 8800M in terms of performance while the third will straddle somewhere between the Radeon HD 8600M and Radeon HD 8700M.
AMD was tight-lipped on the power figures for its chips, saying that full details of its Radeon HD 8000M series chips will appear at CES, where its partners will tip up with laptops sporting the chips.