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New Atom Architecture In The Making
Word on the street is that Intel is in the process of developing an entirely new Atom architecture based on its 3D transistor technology they announced last week. This new architecture should enable more power efficiency on the chip.
The new processor is being called Silvermont and the Atom will encompass a system-on-chip design, similar to Intel’s Z760 Atom or ARM’s processors. Silvermont is being designed on Intel’s 22nm process and harness the power of Intel’s 3D transistor technology that has yet to be tested.
Visa Digital Wallet Coming
May 15, 2011 by admin
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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.
EBS Coming To Your Smartphone
May 14, 2011 by admin
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In the event of local and/or nationwide disasters, wireless carriers will soon begin alerting the public by sending emergency SMS text messages to mobile phones.
AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have all agreed to a participate in this new Emergency Broadcast System alert method. It will initially be rolled out in New York and Washington, D.C., later this year, and nationwide next year, in April at the earliest.
The emergency text messages will cover public safety threats, Amber Alerts for missing children, and messages from the president, the New York Times reports. Messages will be free for customers, who can opt out of them all except the presidential messages.
We don’t expect the alerts to be frequent,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told the Times. “They will be reserved for when they are truly needed, for tornadoes or for disasters like 9/11.”
Genachowski said the emergency texts will look different from ordinary messages, making them more difficult for hackers to infiltrate or fake. They’ll probably appear directly on the screen, along with a special vibration or other signal. No word on how closely they’ll resemble the tone and color bars of the current Emergency Broadcast System for televisions, or whether users can expect “this is a test” messages on a regular basis.
iPhone Gaining on Nokia’s Dominance
May 11, 2011 by admin
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Apple’s iPhone is moving closer and closer to Nokia’s top spot in smartphones globally, according to first-quarter 2011 results reported by IDC on Thursday.
With the iPhone in the second spot, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion dropped to third after finishing second a year ago, IDC said. 99.6 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter, out of 372 million mobile phones overall.
Nokia sold 24.2 million smartphones in the first quarter, holding on to its global smartphone lead despite announcing that it will move from Symbian to Windows Phone as its main smartphone operating system in next few years, IDC said. Nokia “may find itself in danger of ceding market share as the competition ramps up,” IDC said.
Apple shipped 18.7 million iPhones in the first quarter, IDC said, a new record for a single quarter, “and inched closer to market leader Nokia, with fewer than 6 million units separating the two companies,” IDC noted.
Apple also had triple-digit growth in the U.S., with the Verizon Wireless CDMA iPhone 4, and in greater China.
RIM, while down from second place where it was a year ago, remained in third place from the fourth quarter of 2010. The majority of RIM’s shipments are older, lower-cost devices, IDC noted, a trend that will continue in the second quarter.
Samsung finished fourth in smartphones for the first quarter, with 10.8 million smartphones shipped, while HTC finished fifth, with 8.9 million shipped.
Samsung grew the most of any vendor for the first quarter — 350% year-over-year. Samsung has a multiple-OS strategy and sells mostly Android smartphones, including Galaxy S phones, as well as Windows Phone 7 and Wave devices.
Tablet Users Are Dropping Laptops
According to Neilsen people who have owned laptops and now use tablets as a PC device are ditching them like hotcakes. Under the study conducted around 77 percent of tablet owners are now using their device in the same capacity as they used their laptop computers. This strange because there are many applications or functions that a tablet is not able to process or handle.
One third of the tablet owners also admitted that they find themselves using their desktops even less since they acquired a tablet PC. Furthermore, thirty percent of those surveyed who own both a laptop and desktop who owned a laptop find themselves using their tablet more. A small percentage (2) of those Neilsen interviewed said they had stopped using their laptop computer altogether.
Motorola Xoom Sales Better Than Expected
May 2, 2011 by admin
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Motorola Mobility shipped 250,000 Xoom tablets in the first month the device was released, the company said on Thursday as part of their first-quarter earnings report.
The tablet, the first to run Google’s Android Honeycomb OS, went on sale in February. Within weeks, several analysts said early sales numbers were disappointing. By early April, one analyst estimated that Motorola had sold a total of 100,000 of the tablets.
Shipping a quarter of a million in a month isn’t quite the same as Apple first iPad shipment, but the number appears to be better than most had expected.
For the full year, Motorola is expecting to sell 1.5 million to 2 million tablets, it said. It plans to introduce new tablets, including some with new form factors, this year, executives said during a conference call to discuss first-quarter results.
During the quarter, Motorola Mobility also began selling the Atrix, a phone that can be docked into a device with a full keyboard and monitor. Some analysts have also said sales of the Atrix are unimpressive.
The company did not release Atrix sales numbers separately. It said it shipped 9.3 million mobile devices, including 4.1 million smartphones, during the quarter.
Motorola expects to record an operating profit for the full year, but faces challenges ahead. It has delayed the launch of the Bionic, its first LTE device, and on Thursday said the delay is related to a software problem. That same problem is also pushing back the launch of LTE on the Xoom, which was initially expected for the first half. Both the LTE Xoom and the Bionic are now expected to come in “summer,” which in North America could be as late as September.
Panasonic May Boot 40,000 People
May 1, 2011 by admin
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Analysts are speculating that Panasonic is planning to cut approximately 40,000 jobs over a couple of years.
Reuters is stating that Panasonic is being forced to take such drastic measures in its restructuring plans in its struggle to cut operating costs. That said Panasonic is facing stiff competition from other Asian consumer electronics companies in Korea and China and has seen its profits dwindle over the year.
Intel Developing Thunderbolt Technology
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A new interconnect technology being developed by Intel could be ready for market by 2015 and will be able to move data between computers at up to five times the speed of its recently launched Thunderbolt technology, an Intel researcher said earlier this week.
The new technology uses silicon photonics, which combines silicon components with optical networking, to transfer data at up to 50 gigabits per second over distances of up to 100 meters, said Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Intel expects the technology to be ready for use in PCs, tablets, smartphones, televisions and other products by 2015, Demain said. As well as being faster than today’s interconnect technologies, it’s expected to lower costs because the components will be built using existing silicon manufacturing processes.
The technology could possibly be used in TVs and set-top boxes to carry video streams at much higher definition than those available today. Image resolution is likely to quadruple by the middle of the decade, when successors to 1080p have arrived, and that will mean more data has to be pushed to the TV.
It should also enable faster data transfers between smartphones, tablets, PCs and peripherals such as external storage drives.
The technology still has a way to go, but Intel showed its progress at the event in New York Wednesday. It showed what it said were working prototypes of the silicon chips used to transmit and receive the laser signals.
Tegra 3 Smartphones Being Developed By Motorola
April 27, 2011 by admin
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Many sources around the Internet are a buzz with news that Motorola is apparently developing a couple of smartphones using Nvidia’s Tegra 3 SoC processor.
One of the smart is being called the Bullet which features a 4.3-inch touchscreen, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage with a 12MP camera. The other phone is code named the Jet and is basically rhe same as the Bullet with a 4-inch screen and keyboard. The pair of phones are expected to debut in early 2012.
Samsung Sues Apple
April 25, 2011 by admin
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In the uber competitive world of mobile device development suing is fast becoming a sport engaged in by all of the titans of technology. Add another lawsuit to the pile as Samsung Electronics hits Apple with lawsuits in three countries alleging infringement of patents on smartphone technologies. Last week Apple sued Samsung for allegedly copying the designs of Apple’s iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone in its Galaxy smartphone and Galaxy Tab tablet PC.
On Thursday, the South Korean electronics maker sued Apple in Seoul alleging five patent infringements, in Tokyo over two alleged infringements and in Manheim, Germany, over three.
“Samsung is responding actively to the legal action taken against us in order to protect our intellectual property and to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communications business,” the company said in a statement.
According to Samsung, the lawsuits say Apple infringed on patents concerning reducing data transmission errors in WCDMA (Wideband CDMA) mobile networks, tethering mobile phones to PCs so the PC can use the phone’s wireless data connection, and reducing power consumption when transmitting data over HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) networks.
Apple’s lawsuit filed on April 15 in the U.S. says Samsung copied external design features on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The lawsuit further alleges that Samsung designed application icons for that come close to icons on Apple’s devices.