Acer Gets into the Android Game

May 30th, 2010

Acer expects to start offering the Stream in the second half of 2010; however, pricing and potential carrier partners have not been announced.

Computer maker Acer is looking to expand its product portfolio, today officially announcing the Acer Stream, an Android 2.1 smartphone with a 3.7-inch WVGA display, a five megapixel camera, and a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor for running apps and tapping into all manner of entertainment media.

On the surface the Stream seems similarly specced to phones like the Google Nexus One and the HTC Droid INcredible; however, the Stream will focus heavily on media, offering broad video format support, an HDMI output for pushing content to a bigger screen, plus the phone will act as a DLNA streamer via Wi-Fi.

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Android Surpasses The iPhone In The United States

May 20th, 2010

While the iPhone is still an entirely different beast worldwide, Apple and Google’s main fronts are in the United States, and a shift has occurred (and, thankfully, we’re not talking about plates within the earth’s crust): Android has taken over the iPhone’s US install base (as was predicted by an AdMob mobile metrics report that gave us a similar preview). NPD Group is reporting that – in Q1 2010 – Android has become the second-most installed smartphone OS in the United States with 28% market share – coming just beneath RIM’s Blackberry OS (enjoying 36% of the  market share).

iPhone OS, on the other hand, currently sits at 21% in third place. I’d imagine that the US smartphone market is very important for all of the vendors, and Android’s proving that it can hold its own against the iPhone and – soon – possibly Blackberry. Executive director of industry analysis for NPD Group, Ross Rubin, says:

“As in the past, carrier distribution and promotion have played a crucial role in determining smartphone market share. In order to compete with the iPhone, Verizon Wireless has expanded its buy-one-get-one offer beyond RIM devices to now include all of their smartphones.”

With RIM, Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia all set to release new versions of their OS, Palm hoping to make a comeback with HP pulling their strings, and new operating systems seemingly popping up every day, the smartphone war will only get crazier from here and – as Phandroids – it’s great to see that Android has more than just a fighting chance.

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New Apple hire confirms iPhone5 as ‘iWallet’ ?

August 20th, 2010

If you’ve been wondering what to expect from iPhone 5, the next-generation, beyond an all-new and improved antenna, then let me share a few ideas with you – your iPhone will be your wallet, your house keys, your identity, the centre of your mobile existence. At least, that’s how it appears on news of Apple’shiring of near field communications (NFC) expert Benjamin Vigier.

[This story is from the new Apple Holic blog at Computerworld. Subscribe via RSS to make sure you don't miss a beat. Or link up via Twitter on the all-new feed.]

In one of my early blogs here I talked about Apple’s move into exploring NFC technologies. The company has filed many related patents for uses of such technologies within its devices, and its subsequent hiring of relative NFC industry veteran Vigier means plans are moving forward fast.

Most recently Vigier was product manager for mobile wallet, payment and NFC at mobile payments specialists mFoundry. He has stints at a French mobile network and flash memory maker, Sandisk, to his name. This chap knows his stuff.

He is the man behind both the PayPal Mobile service and Starbucks’ barcode-based mobile payments service, according to Near Field Communications World.

Patenting the future

Apple already has NFC-based patents for an airline ticketing and boarding pass application, a concert, entertainment and sports ticketing application, and a slew of mobile payments services.

The company also has patents under specific service names, including iPay, iBuy and iCoupons, Products+ and Grab & Go (the latter a file transfer patent).

A June 2009 Apple patent revealed it has developed a method for building an NFC antenna into a touch screen. (Delivering effective tools for NFC technologies may also be behind Apple’s decision to develop external antenna technologies.)

iMusic everywhere

The company has also patented an NFC-enabled iPod, games controller, TV and iPhone.

I can imagine that latter patent, if tied to location-based services and iTunes music streaming, could actually enable a user to hear their choice of music from whatever output device they happened to be near — in their den, their bedroom, in the car, on their iPhone/iPod, in their office and (possibly) discretely in the background on public transport.

(Though in that latter case the opportunity will be to feed each commuter’s musical tastes into a recommendation engine in order to output tracks most likely to be enjoyed by everybody in the carriage. And that will likely end up outputting thousands of tracks by U2 and Dido, in which case silence probably is golden.)

Alongside its patents, Apple this year reportedly was looking to acquire contactless/near field communications tech firm, VIVOtech, a provider of “Contactless/near field communications (NFC) payment software, NFC smart posters, contactless readers/writers, and over the air card provisioning, promotion, and transaction management infrastructure software,” according to its own company description.

Apple’s series of patents, its rumored interest in Vivotech and its move to recruit Vigier confirm the huge interest the company is taking in these technologies.

Married now to its iAd service and moving to widen its available range of cloud-based services it becomes pretty clear Apple seeks to get to the very top of innovation in the mobile industry.

Security guard

With Remote Wipe and the development of touch-based fingerprint recognition technology for the iPhone (below), Apple is looking to develop rock hard security protection for people’s iPhones.

“The abstract for the July 2nd filing states that a device, such as an iPhone perhaps, could “store user input signatures, including fingerprint signatures. The user input signatures can, in turn, be associated with user-selectable commands. When a user provides user input (including fingerprints) to the electronic device that matches one of the stored user input signatures, the device can initiate the associated user-selectable command.” Source

Technologies like these will be essential if Apple is to deliver the kind of NFC-based personalized services the iPhone will be capable of.

Once these security considerations are met, Apple will begin to introduce and develop solutions based on NFC.

Speed demon

The next-gen iPhone is likely to see an Apple-developed processor based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 — or its follow-up, code-named ‘Eagle’. Faster and even more power efficient than the chip at the heart of the iPhone 5 (and iPad and in future the iPod touch), this chip features multiple cores with a top speed of up to 2GHz.

With this kind of on-chip horsepower combined with a focus on low power demands, Apple has the building blocks it needs to implement new electrical sensors in future devices.

That’s even before you end up with this gadget.

One day your phone will be your wallet. Is this a vision of a triumphant future, or a step into a plutocratic technology-driven hell? Let me know.

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Microsoft is to develop its own games for the Windows Phone 7

August 17th, 2010

The folks over at Microsoft have already proved they like to have everything under their control and therefore the news of a new mobile gaming division being created comes as no surprise to some people. While we wait for the new Windows Phone 7, which is expected to arrive this Fall, other details have to be put in place and one of these details is securing support for the upcoming mobile device. This means offering constant fixes, upgrades, customization and last but not least continuous “game supply”.

News regarding Microsoft’s high hopes with the Windows Phone 7 started intensifying this June and that’s when we presented some technical specs. One other piece of the puzzle fell in place when Microsoft posted on its site a job offer in the new Microsoft Game Studios – Mobile Gaming Division, making the decision public. The development of their own games has several different impacts, amongst which the ability to provide users with games, even if third-party developers will stop doing so. One other obvious reason would be the huge income that such mobile apps can bring, if managed correctly, the best example being the iPhone and iTunes.

Although the Windows Phone 7 wasn’t designed mainly for gaming purposes, this possibility hasn’t completely been ruled out by Microsoft, fact proved by the ability to access your Xbox 360 Live accountdirectly off your phone. The hardware specs ensure the fact that even good to very good games will be able to be played on the gadget, thus bringing lots of different customers closer to Microsoft’s newest addition.

There is yet no exact release date for the Windows Phone 7. All that we know is it will first hit stores in the US and only a couple of months later come to Europe. It’s pretty unusual for Microsoft to be able to keep secrets to well, but this time no official comment on this matter has been made and we don’t know the price of this device either. As there is no official confirmation of this division really being created, we shouldn’t get our hopes too high just yet. Still if it is true, with the experience gained from their Xbox gaming console, Microsoft have everything needed to ensure a new success with their mobile gaming division.

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The numbers can’t lie: Mobile devices overtaking PCs

August 13th, 2010

Here it comes: Mobile will soon outsell PCs.

Tim Bray last week attempted to conceptualize the market change that is happening in computing in a post called the Great Game.  In a nutshell, what we are seeing in smartphones is bigger than anything that has come before it.  Much bigger than the PC.  And it is coming so fast that we don’t realize what’s happening.

The Numbers Are Really Big · Insane, I mean. The billion-plus phones sold per year. The number of active subscriptions, which is greater than half of the human population. The number of new Android devices that check in with Google every day. The line-ups outside Apple stores for every new iOS device. The hundreds of thousands of apps. The ridiculous number of new ones that flow into Android Market every day. Everywhere I look, I see something astounding.

Based on their respective numbers, the companies below represent the biggest OS vendors in both the smartphone and desktop space on earth. What’s interesting is that, with the explosion of iOS devices and Android over the past year and the relative stagnation of the desktop market, mobile OS shipments are approaching that of desktop OSes.  In fact, smartphones may be surpassing desktop OS shipments right now.  I’m going to attempt to prove that below.

Numbers compiled from sources at bottom

Canalys numbers: Even without Android, the Smartphone market grew almost 50% year over year

Canalys also charts smartphones by OS and gets similar total numbers for the second quarter of 2010 (62.5 million units) as IDC.  But for Android, Calalys tally  just over 10 million devices.  We know from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent remarks that the company is now activating 200,000 units a day or over 18 million a quarter for the third quarter  Apple (AAPL) too, has set astronomical expectations for its iPhone, projecting that it will sell over 11 million for the quarter. And Apple is usually very conservative on its estimates. Even if everyone else in the smartphone world remains flat, that’s an additional 10 million devices in the current quarter. And that is being conservative.

Speaking of Apple, IDC’s numbers don’t count iPads and iPod touch devices as either smartphones or PCs.  While the gadgets often can replace the functionality of a netbook, iPads/iPods have a smartphone’s DNA (ARM Processors/mobile OS).  Counting them as such adds close to 10 million additional devices to the ’smartphone’ tally in the quarter.

Apple is expected to launch some new iPods this quarter and Samsung, Dell (DELL) and an army of low-cost device manufacturers are making small Android devices that aren’t meant to function like a phone.  The flood of these devices will start during this quarter.

If you add those up, that puts an additional 20+ million ’smartphones’, or should I say ‘mobile devices”, to the tallies from IDC and it means that we are reaching that tipping point right now:

Smartphones, or Mobile devices, will soon become the dominant computing platform for humanity and supplant the PC which has reigned since Apple ignited the Personal Computer revolution in the late 1970’s.  Apple CEO said as much at the AllThingsD conference earlier this year.  He compared PCs to trucks that not everyone would need.  Tablets and smartphones would be in everyones hands.  But, I don’t even think Jobs saw it coming this quickly.

Just a few years after the launch of the iPhone, it is Game Over for PCs.

  • Mac Sales based on last Quarter’s numbers
  • BlackBerry sales based on July 30th IDC numbers
  • iOS devices: Apple quarter earnings report.  iPods: 9.41 million (~1/2 iOS) + iPhones: 8.4 million+ iPads: 3.27 million
  • Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave 200,000 Android figure
  • Symbian numbers (August 4th)
  • Windows 7 sales based on 25 million in last 29 days, 175 million since launch. (July 23rd)

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Tablet rivalry: For now, Android vs. Apple

June 7th, 2010

This year’s center-stage rivalry in tablet computers is shaping up as Apple versus Android, according to analysts

Even Dell, despite having deep roots in Windows, has chosen to come out initially with an Android-based device, the Streak. “Dell is deeply committed to Android,” said Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies. “There will be a lot of experimentation by them, but at this point, they are going full-bore with Android.”

A research note this week from analyst Charles King at Pund-IT gushed about the Streak, whose smaller screen size places it somewhere between the larger iPad and a smartphone. The device comes with “3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth wireless support, integrated GPS, [and a] 5-[megapixel] camera,” along with “integrated Google Maps and turn-by-turn navigation, easy integration of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube social-media apps, [and] Android app/market access,” he wrote. “This is an impressive package by most measures, but what is most notable is that…the Streak is actually a study in iPad contrasts: a significantly smaller display, integrated camera, immediate support for voice calling and eventually for video chat, easily upgradable memory and accessible battery and, last but not least, support for Adobe Flash.”

The rise of the tablet happened almost overnight, after the April release of Apple’s iPad, which, as Steve Jobs boasted recently, has been selling at a clip of “one every three seconds.” So, the burning question for analysts and consumers alike is, which technology will compete most effectively with that of the iPad, which runs on Apple’s iPhone OS?

Answer: Google’s Android. Windows may yet power popular tablets, but for now, that seems less certain than Android, analysts say. “Windows is still quite heavy, in terms of its power consumption,” Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI Research, said in reference to its tendency to overtax the minimalist silicon in tablets.

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HuarongRoad is coming!

April 27th, 2010

History of the game:

Huarong Road was not a puzzle but a weapon in ancient China, it was used for War exercises. But now, it’s a Puzzle for smart people, just like an IQ test.

There are seventeen levels in the Puzzle, the most representative one was passed by a computer in 1964, using 81 steps. So far, this is the best result ever achieved in the world.

More and more people are trying to finish the game with fewer steps. Come on, Join us!

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