In year 2016 it will be sold over 1.4 billion smart phones. Mobile is the new central ecosystem of tech. The smartphone is the single most important product, which will determine the development of the semiconductor market. Smart phone centre of innovation and investment in hardware, software and company creation. The smart phone market is huge. Today, there are well over 2bn smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth. With billions of people buying a device every two years, on average, the phone business dwarfs the PC business, which has an install base of 1.5-1.6bn devices replaced every 4-5 years
Smart phone market is no longer fast gowing market. Expect single-digit worldwide smartphone growth in 2016. According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC ) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker , 2015 will be the first full year of single-digit worldwide smartphone growth. IDC predicts worldwide smartphone shipments will grow 9.8% in 2015 to a total of 1.43 billion units. The main driver has been and will continue to be the success of low-cost smartphones in emerging markets. China has been the focal point of the smartphone market – now China has largely become a replacement market and there is economic slowdown in China.
Apple & Google both won, but it’s complicated – both Apple and Google won, in different ways. Android won the handset market outside of Apple, but it’s not quite clear what that means. Microsoft missed the shift to the new platform so Windows Mobile is on life support.
We will continue to see a globalization of the mobile landscape in 2016, as new China brands shake up the smartphone markets with new designs and business models. Expect continuing growth from China brands like Xiaomi, Lenovo and Huawei. Huawei says it sent in 2015 to more than 100 million smartphones and its now firmly among the world’s three largest suppliers. Samsung is the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, but it looks that it’s production volumes are shrinking because of cheaper Android phones coming from China.
Last year’s CES had a conspicuous lack of killer smartphones, and O’Donnell expects this year to be very challenging for handset vendors – Apple included. It is getting really hard to differentiate from a phone perspective. In the smartphone market changes happen slowly, and for the challengers it is difficult to penetrate the market.
Apple’s position in smart phones is not currently a threat really none. The volumes of the iPhone does not come close to the Android camp in the unit sales figures, but it is clearly not Apple’s target at all – it targets to high-end phones. Apple made record sales in 2015 holiday season, but it is possible that Apple is going to have a tough year in 2016. Some Wall Street analysts predict an end of iPhone sales growth, shrinking iPad sales, and a tough year ahead for Apple. The high cost and the markets getting full are met weigh the Apple iPhone phone sales.Wall Street expects iPhone sales for the fiscal year ending in September will barely budge — and might even decline — from last year. That would be the worst year for iPhone sales since the device was introduced in 2007. If realized, the forecast significantly affect Apple’s value. Despite recent reports of cuts by iPhone suppliers, Apple remains most profitable company in S&P 500. Fortunately for Apple, most of its smartphone competitors are struggling.
Microsoft got the third mobile ecosystem market position, but it’s market share is pretty low: Microsoft’s market share was only 1.7 per cent in the third quarter of 2015. It is very possible that Microsoft will cut Lumia production significantly in 2016. Microsoft’s long-rumored Surface Phone is coming in the second half of next year, reports Windows Central. Windows 10 phones are not dead yet even from other manufacturers as Acer, Alcatel OneTouch just made some new ones. The key feature in the Jade Primo is support for Microsoft’s Continuum feature, allowing you to use the phone like a PC when connected to a larger display – though limited to apps that run on the device’s ARM processor. The idea, claims Acer, is that you can leave your laptop at home, but what’s the demand for PC phones? It is hard to get winning much traction in a market dominated by Android.
Microsoft says the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade will begin early 2016 to select existing Windows 8 and 8.1 phones. Microsoft could not update the smart phones in 2015 despite the fact that the operating system had originally been set to launch alongside the desktop version of the software in July. Microsoft has had a longstanding “chicken and egg” problem: Too few people have Windows phones for developers to care about making apps for the platform, and customers don’t want to buy Windows phones because they don’t have enough apps. Microsoft tries to help his problem With Windows 10, apps that developers write for the PC will also work on Microsoft’s phones. It could have some positive effect, but is no silver bullet. Microsoft’s biggest problem: The 10 most-used apps of the year in the U.S. were all made by three companies — Facebook, Google, and Apple.
It’s only been 15 years since the first camera phone came out. Today smartphones are giving consumers enhanced photo and video capabilities with 8-16 megapixel class. Smartphone cameras are great, or at least close enough to great that you don’t notice the difference. We’ve reached the point where you’ve got to work pretty hard to find a phone with a mediocre camera. Compared to a DSLR, smart phone cameras are lousy because they use tiny sensors, but still the camera in your pocket is crazy good considering the limitations manufacturers work under. The vast majority of top-tier smartphones use Sony sensors for their main cameras. The molded plastic lens elements in many cameras have reached the point where they’re essentially perfect.
For new smart phone camera technologies you could see array of lenses to enable Lytro-like refocusing, create 3-D depth maps, and improve image quality in low light. Some manufacturers are also exploring new areas, such as 3D cameras, massive megapixels (80MB), cameras that can take 360 degree panoramic images and video and cameras that can shoot 1,000 frames a second. 4K Ultra HD for mobile is another move to watch in 2016 as it becomes more common feature. Smartphones have decimated the point-and-shoot camera segment.
Smart phones are increasingly used to shoot videos. Smart phones are already deployed in many newsrooms for mobile journalism video shooting as it is easier (and cheaper) to learn how to film and edit on your phone than it is to use a big camera.(check for example step-by-step guide to shooting iPhone video). Live streaming video from smart phone becomes mainstream. Periscope was one of the first apps to really make live streaming events simple and easy enough that people wanted to do it. Many other apps are following the trend. Facebook begins testing live video streaming for all users.
Smart phones have already replaced many separate technical gadgets already, and this trend will continue. Smartphone have increased screen sizes and have finally become mobile TVs: Smartphones have overtaken the tablets as the most popular mobile device for viewing videos. The most watched content were targeted at teenagers videos and animation series for children.
Mobile display will be more accurate than eye in 2016 in high-end smart phones. Few enjoys a 4K-quality image even in his living room, but by the end of 2016, the same accuracy can be your smartphone. ETSI is preparing for development at ETSI CCM working group (Compound Content Management). Scalable 4K signal requires a very high dynamics (HDR, high dynamic range), as well as the WCG wider color space (Coloc Wider gamut). Such HDR / WCG techniques has only slowly been add to TV broadcasting. One can of course ask whether UltraHD- or 4K image are planting a cell phone make any sense, but they are coming (Sharp already announced that it would launch 4K-level mobile phone).
So device manufacturers need to support user expectations for downloading larger files for apps, movies, photos, videos and other materials, more frequently and more quickly. Networking speed is an area where we will see companies start to push the envelope in 2016, such as new creative strategies for caching, spectrum hopping and managing the Internet of Things.
The quality of LTE modem can make or break your smart phone product. Smartphones consist of two main components: Modems and application processors. Application processor performances of several smartphone brands are widely published, but LTE modem performance measures are much more difficult for the average purchaser to assess. Consumers have generally ignored the importance of connectivity in smartphone purchases, but device performance and positive user experiences are driven by best-in-class connectivity. There are 5 LTE smartphone modem chip makers currently shipping in mobile devices and besides U.S.-based Qualcomm, they include: HiSilicon (China), Intel (U.S.), Leadcore (China), MediaTek (Taiwan), Samsung (Korea), and Spreadtrum (China).
5G will be talked a lot enven though standardization is not ready yet. Just five years after the first 4G smartphone hit the market, the wireless industry is already preparing for 5G: cell phone carriers, smartphone chip makers and the major network equipment companies are working on developing 5G network technology for their customers.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that a smartphone is also a telephone. Nearly half of all phone users today employ their mobile phones as their primary voice connection (a number sure to grow). That the voice features in cell phones also advance. Very early on, the standard for human voice transmission was set as the “voice band” located between 300 Hz and 3.3 kHz (to put this in perspective, the natural frequency span of human voice during speech ranges from about 50 Hz to nearly 10 kHz). These standards were carried over for cellphone audio quality. Now that there are about about as many cellphone subscriptions as there are people on earth, one would think that there really shouldn’t be any more technological excuses for poor voice quality. New standards branded as HD Voice and VoLTE promise the eventual extension of voice transmission frequency range up to 7 kHz. There are also other major challenge preventing great sounding calls – especially noise challenges facing cellphone users. To get good sound quality we need to develop algorithms that isolate the person speaking from all other sources of noise.
Financial Services needs to get over its reluctance and go mobile in 2016, but it might not happen in large scale this year. Compliance concerns have long prevented financial services businesses from adopting mobile capabilities as quickly as other industries. Yvette Jackson of Thomson Reuters argues that technology advancements have made compliance worries of the past now obsolete.
Mobile payments are finally taking the momentum in North America, Japan and some European countries in 2016. Every second consumer is expected to smartphone or wearable device purchases to pay in few years. There are now types of mobile payment technologies in use. Some of them will turn to be interim techniques.
Despite many tools available mobile application development is still hard work in 2016. Mobile developer report shows growing back-end challenge: 33.9 per cent spent more than half their development effort on back-end integration. This effort includes creating and debugging APIs, finding documentation for existing APIs, and orchestrating data from multiple sources. iOS and Android dominate as target platforms. The disappointment for Microsoft is that all its hoopla about the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) does not seem to resonate here. What about making money? Only just over 60 per cent of those surveyed are primarily out to make money from apps themselves, with others aiming for goals such as customer loyalty and brand awareness. In-app purchases are the most effective method, followed by advertising and app purchase. Application landscape is changing: Single-function applications no longer meet the everyday life needs on mobile devices.
Web standards are becoming promising for mobile use but they are still far from making mobile apps obsolete in 2016. There’s a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore, leaving broken or vulnerable versions in use long after they’ve been allegedly patched. Apps are also a lot of work for developers. Use the Web and the Web browser can sometimes help in solving some of those problems while creating other different set of problems. For example updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. Also HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site. Currently HTML5 standards are advancing rapidly in the area of mobile Web applications. Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? I don’t think that it will happen immediately, even though many big tech companies are throwing weight behind a browser-based world (backed strongly by Google and Mozilla). So app or web question will still very relevant for mobile developer in 2016.
Google appears to be lining up OpenJDK – an open-source implementation of the Java platform – for future Android builds. Android runs apps written in Java on its Dalvik engine, and lately, its Android Runtime virtual machine. These apps require a Java class library, as well as various Android-specific bits and pieces, to work. Now it seems the next big releases of Android will use not the heavily customized Harmony-derived library but instead OpenJDK’s core libraries.
Android, which is controlled by Google, is one of Facebook’s biggest markets. Facebook has a contingency plan in case the company falls out with Google, according to The Information: a way to deliver app updates without going through the Google Play Store — currently the only way to update apps — and has a way of handling in-app payments. Amazon, which makes Android-based tablets, has a similar system: The app acts as a new store front from which other apps can be downloaded and updated, without Google Play.
There will be fascinating conversation in tech about smartphone apps and the web – what can each do, how discovery works, how they interplay, what Google plans with Chrome, whether the web will take over as the dominant form and so on. Ask the question: Do people want to put your icon on their home screen?
Mobile Internet continues to be important also in 2016. There is place for both Internet pages and apps. The internet makes it possible to get anything you’ve ever heard of but also makes it impossible to have heard of everything. We started with browsing, and that didn’t scale to the internet, and then we moved to search, but search can only give you what you already knew you wanted. In the past, print and retail showed us what there was but also gave us a filter – now both the filter and the demand generation are gone.
There is hunt for a new runtime, and a new discovery layer. Could it be messaging, Facobook or something else? Facebook and Google try to make mobile publishing platforms faster. Facebook has Instant Articles platform that aims to make articles loading fast on mobile devices. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is Google’s plan to make pages appear super-fast for those using mobile devices. Fast-loading pages may also mean fast-loading ads, with advertising platform support for AMP that’s been announced. I expect that first those plaforms will make loading the articles faster than traditinal pages, but over years those systems, if they catch, will be bloated to be slow again.
Maybe in 2016 we should stop talking about ‘mobile’ internet and ‘desktop’ internet - it’s like talking about ‘colour’ TV, as opposed to black and white TV. We have a mental model, left over from feature phones, that ‘mobile’ means limited devices that are only used walking around. Get over it. For 15 years the internet was a monolith: web browser + mouse + keyboard. The smartphone broke that apart, but we haven’t settled on a new model. Mobile’ isn’t about the screen size or keyboard or location or use. Rather, the ecosystem of ARM, iOS and Android, that has bigger scale than ‘Wintel’.
Dick Tracy had it right. Wearable devices are becoming more of any every day item as they proliferate across markets. Wearable market is still immature and growing in 2016. While many new fitness bands, smartwatches, and other wearable devices have entered the market, most have under-whelmed prospects and users. It is quite clear the wearable industry is in its infancy and fraught with growing pains. You can expect the top five vendors will not only shift places, but come in and drop out on a quarterly basis. Wearables grew 197.6% in Q3 2015 when mobile companies shipped a total of 21.0 million wearables worldwide.
Whereas the smartphone is the ultimate convergence product, we are learning that wearables are inherently divergent products. It seems that super-duper smartwatches loaded with full-blown phone/email/camera/voice assistant capabilities together with all other bells and whistles are not necessarily winning recipe like it was for smart phones. Many consumers want instead simplicity, ease of use, and instant actionable feedback. As an embedded developer of wearables, not only do you have the challenge of addressing battery life issues, but also architecting and developing a system that takes full advantage of the underlying hardware. Heartbeat monitoring has become the must-have feature for fitness trackers. China has quickly emerged as the fastest-growing wearables market, attracting companies eager to compete on price and feature sets.
The newest wearable technology, smart watvches and other smart devices corresponding to the voice commands and interpret the data we produce - it learns from its users, and generate as responses in real time appropriate, “micro-moments” tied to experience.
Links to some other mobile predictions articles worth to check out:
16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans
Mobile 2016 Predictions from EE Times
2015 Appcelerator / IDC Mobile Trends Report: Leaders, Laggards and the Data Problem
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Tomi Engdahl says:
The optoelectronics inside activity trackers
http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4442207/The-optoelectronics-inside-activity-trackers-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160630&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160630&elqTrackId=2016db7f1ba14e16865793e202b6bb0b&elq=505ea0e4be9d42c5b47580089b06eb3c&elqaid=32898&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=28728
Today, being physically fit has become a way of life for many. Eating healthy foods, sleeping seven to eight hours a night, and exercising daily are the basic building blocks. And with the use of an activity tracking device, we can monitor our daily progress. We can easily track how many steps we take, how many calories we burn, and how well we sleep with the aid of wearable activity trackers. Wearable sensors collect, process, and display a set of personal data to help monitor and manage more and more aspects of personal health. Wearable devices can measure a wide variety of body functions, including blood pressure, heart rate, and the level of oxygen in our blood. Optoelectronic components play a key role in measuring these attributes.
Heart rate is important in determining and improving your level of personal fitness. Once you know your maximum heart rate, you can calculate your desired target heart rate zone — the level at which your heart is being exercised and conditioned but not overworked. You’ll get the most from your workouts if you’re exercising at the proper exercise intensity. There are two methods used to monitor heart rate: electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG).
Tomi Engdahl says:
3 always-listening gadgets and how to stop them
http://www.komando.com/tips/325537/3-always-listening-gadgets-and-how-to-stop-them
One hallmark of being in “the future” is that we’ll be able to talk to our gadgets and they’ll be able to talk back. Thanks to voice-activated personal assistants, it looks like the future has arrived, and it’s cool, but also a little creepy.
Don’t get us wrong, digital personal assistants like Apple’s Siri are useful tools. You no longer have to type in searches, or scroll through phone numbers, or look through endless websites. Instead, you just ask your virtual personal assistant to help you out, and it does.
iPhones with Siri, the Amazon Echo, and smartphones and tablets with Google Now, are always listening to you.
It’s reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” That’s the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie where Hal 9000 becomes the only companion of Dr. Dave Bowman, who’s traveling to Jupiter. Hal 9000 is a computer, and he’s always there, listening and watching, no matter if Dave does or doesn’t want him to.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Hal 9000 isn’t just creepy; he’s dangerous. Thankfully, today’s always-listening devices aren’t mini Hals.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell stops selling Android devices to focus on Windows
Dell has discontinued Venue tablets with Android, and won’t be pushing out OS upgrades to current customers
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3090466/android/dell-stops-selling-android-devices.html
Dell has stopped selling Android devices as it steps away from slate-style tablets to focus on Windows 2-in-1 devices.
The company isn’t refreshing the Venue line of Android tablets, and will no longer offer the Android-based Wyse Cloud Connect, a thumb-size computer that can turn a display into a PC. Other Android devices were discontinued some time ago.
“The slate tablet market is over-saturated and is experiencing declining demand from consumers, so we’ve decided to discontinue the Android-based Venue tablet line,” a Dell spokesman said in an email.
“We are seeing 2-in-1s rising in popularity since they provide a more optimal blend of PC capabilities with tablet mobility. This is especially true in the commercial space,”
Dell won’t be offering OS upgrades to Android-based Venue tablets already being used by customers.
“For customers who own Android-based Venue products, Dell will continue to support currently active warranty and service contracts until they expire, but we will not be pushing out future OS upgrades,” the spokesman said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Lang / Road to VR:
Google adds WebVR and VR Shell to beta and dev versions of Chrome on Android, potentially allowing all websites to be viewed in VR
Google is Adding a VR Shell to Chrome to Let You Browse the Entire Web in VR
http://www.roadtovr.com/google-is-adding-a-vr-shell-to-chrome-to-let-you-browse-the-entire-web-in-vr/
Google is working to add fully immersive browsing capability to Chrome, allowing users to browse any part of the web in VR, not just those sites that are specially built for VR.
Google has played an active role in helping to define and deploy ‘WebVR‘, a set of standard capabilities that allow for the creation of VR websites which can serve their content directly to VR headsets. But what about accessing the billions of websites already on the web? Today you’d have to take your headset on and off as you go from a WebVR site to a non-WebVR site. Google’s ultimate vision however is to let people stay in VR for all of their web browsing.
https://webvr.info/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kwame Opam / The Verge:
Google reveals Android N will be named Nougat — Google announced on Snapchat today that Android N, the latest version of Android, will now go by Android Nougat. The announcement comes after the company said at I/O last month that users could submit suggestions for the name online.
Android N is now Android Nougat
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/30/12067774/android-n-is-now-android-nougat
Google announced on Snapchat today that Android N, the latest version of Android, will now go by Android Nougat. The announcement comes after the company said at I/O last month that users could submit suggestions for the name online.
Nougat is the latest dessert-themed version of Android, due out later this summer. The release, initially announced in March and currently on its second (and mostly stable) beta, brings new features like an improved notification shade and split-screen multitasking to the mobile OS, while also improving on features like Doze that came with Marshmallow last year. The release also has Daydream, Google’s new VR platform, baked in, though it’ll only be supported by Daydream-ready handsets running the OS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jim Swift / bomble.com:
Senate tells staffers it will no longer issue Blackberry smartphones
In Senate, Blackberry Era Officially Over
http://bomble.com/in-senate-blackberry-era-officially-over/
This is the way the world ends. Not with a clickity keyboard, but with a swipe.
Senate staffers will no longer be issued official Blackberry smartphones.
The reign of the Blackberry lasted a good decade or more in Congress, early on due to the advanced nature of the devices and obsession with email checking. Even when the iPhone and Androids came about, the Blackberry still kept the throne for awhile because typing on those tiny little keys was faster, a mastered skill with which the iPhone could not compete. (This being government, they were slow to adopt other devices and Bring Your Own Device policies.)
Eventually, though, cracks in the dam formed and other devices started eating up Blackberry’s near-exclusive market share. Yet, unlike the rest of the country, which quickly abandoned Blackberry and sent its corporate owner towards the verge of bankruptcy, the devices still endured in zip codes 20510 and 20515. Long battery life, an email heavy focus, and good size (complete with a douchey belt holster) kept this little niche alive in the subterranean halls of the Capitol.
Tomi Engdahl says:
One in 200 enterprise handsets is infected
iOS bad, but not Android bad
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/04/one_in_200_enterprise_handsets_is_infected/
If your enterprise has 200 mobile devices at least one is infected, so says security firm Skycure
The Palto Alto firm has uncovered previous nasty Apple bugs, including the No iOS Zone flaw reported by El Reg last year.
All told about three percent of the locked-down vanilla Cupertino devices are infected, the company says in its latest quarterly threat report
Chief technology officer Yair Amit says while Android devices are twice as likely to be owned than iOS, Apple gear is no immunity from malware.
“Malware absolutely exists on enterprise mobile devices and standardising on iOS doesn’t make you safe,” Amit says.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Myo armband: Wearables design focuses on packaging
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4442290/Myo-armband–Wearables-design-focuses-on-packaging?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20160701&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20160701&elqTrackId=357a8fad086d4ca88fb5dc68d57cca85&elq=c89b1057f2d64cd5b9782767160479fe&elqaid=32923&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=28748
Designing wearable devices can be as much about dealing with packaging issues as it is about leveraging cutting-edge silicon, sensors, and developing “secret sauce” software. Such was the case with Thalmic Labs’ Myo gesture-control armband, which went through at least seven iterations before settling on the current version. Let’s go inside and find out why.
The Myo is one of many new devices for gesture control, a market that Global Industry Analysts expects to top $12.7 billion by 2020. It could be argued that movies like Minority Report may well have inspired many with its portrayal of mid-air computer control, but the attraction of gesture control is magnetic, as we look for different ways to communicate and interface with our machines.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Senate is ditching BlackBerry phones — and BlackBerry is trying to ditch phones
http://www.recode.net/2016/7/3/12088500/senate-blackberry-services-revenue
BlackBerry, erstwhile mobile king, has lost one of its most loyal mobile customers: The U.S. government.
A note went out earlier this week informing Senate staffers that they would no longer be issued BlackBerry handsets, since BlackBerry no longer makes them. (Jim Swift, a D.C. blogger, first flagged the memo.)
And so ends that era for BlackBerry, which managed to hold government handset contracts, despite its sharp sinking popularity, thanks to being seen as the most secure device.
The Canadian company is probably okay with that. It’s trying desperately to convince investors that it can flourish as a software and services company. Its first quarter revenue for that segment, reported last week, rose 21 percent annually to $166 million — jumping its mobile unit ($152 million in sales, a 44 percent drop).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Qualcomm remains the clear leader in LTE modems
Forward Concepts has listed LTE modem chips suppliers last year. Qualcomm is still the clear leader, the company held a total of $ 18.8 billion, with 66 percent of the market. In practice, two out of three LTE modem came from Qualcomm
The smartphone is still by far the largest LTE modems target device
behind Qualcomm’s Mediatek is the second largest supplier of 19 per cent market share. Spreadtrum market share of six percent and Samsung and Haisi share the fourth place in the three percentages.
Marvell, Lead Core, and Intel were successful last year to capture per cent slice of the sale of LTE modems.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4655:qualcomm-edelleen-selva-ykkonen-modeemeissa&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
BlackBerry’s ‘Classic’ Smartphone Is About to Disappear
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/07/05/1953211/blackberrys-classic-smartphone-is-about-to-disappear
The beleaguered tech company continues its shift to software. BlackBerry will stop making its Classic smartphone, 18 months after launching it in an effort to entice users who prefer physical, rather than touch, keyboards, the Canadian technology company said on Tuesday. The Classic was launched early last year
BlackBerry’s ‘Classic’ Smartphone Is About to Disappear
http://fortune.com/2016/07/05/blackberry-classic-smartphone/
The company will no longer manufacture the Classic as it updates its device lineup “to keep innovating and advancing our portfolio,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Huawei: Our fake phone camera pic shame
Chinese giant caught using expensive camera to shoot photo supposedly taken by mobe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/05/huawei_in_phone_camera_shame/
Huawei is under fire after admitting a photo it supposedly took with one of its phones was actually snapped using an expensive digital camera.
The (since deleted) image was posted to Huawei’s Google+ page and was presented as having been taken with the P9, an Android-equipped smartphone that carries a pair of on-board 12Mp Leica cameras. Huawei has made the high-grade camera hardware a key selling point of the P9.
It was soon found, however, that the photos had not been snapped with the P9′s camera, but rather a more expensive digital camera. Android Police discovered that the EXIF data on the image showed it was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, which lists at $2,599 for the body unit (lenses will cost you even more).
When confronted, Huawei was quick to admit its mistake, though the Chinese hardware giant stopped short of admitting it was trying to mislead consumers.
“It has recently been highlighted that an image posted to our social channels was not shot on the Huawei P9.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smartphones lift Samsung Electronics to best profit in over two years
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-results-idUSKCN0ZM2N2
Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Thursday its second-quarter operating profit likely rose 17.4 percent from a year earlier, its highest in more than 2 years as Galaxy S7 smartphone sales propelled mobile earnings.
The mobile division likely was the top earner for the second straight quarter, raising the question of whether the South Korean company can sustain this strong momentum in the face of competition from Apple Inc and cheaper Chinese rivals.
“At this point it appears unlikely that we’ll see stronger competing devices emerging (in the second half),” IBK Asset Management fund manager Kim Hyun-soo said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google is reportedly working on its own Android Wear smartwatches
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/7/6/12109392/google-android-wear-smartwatch-rumor
Google is reportedly working on two Android Wear smartwatches, according to a new report from Android Police. Such a move would mark yet another expansion of Google-made hardware; the company already manufactures laptops (Chromebook Pixel), tablets (Pixel C), streaming devices (Chromecast), and will soon launch its own “intelligent” speaker (Google Home) to compete with Amazon’s Echo.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung unveils world’s first UFS memory cards — the successor to microSD
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/7/7/12115616/samsung-ufs-removable-memory-cards
What comes after microSD cards for removable storage? Samsung has the answer: UFS. The company announced today the world’s first removable UFS (Universal Flash Storage) memory cards, offering storage capacity of either 32, 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes, and performance speeds that simply blow older formats out of the water.
The UFS cards have sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second — five times faster than the best microSD cards. That means reading a 5 gigabyte, full HD movie in roughly 10 seconds, says Samsung, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which manages the same feat in around 50 seconds.
Write speeds are also significantly improved, with rates of up to 170 MB/s. That’s nearly double the performance of the very fastest microSDs (this SanDisk Extreme Pro card, for example, has write speeds of up to 100 MB/s), but seven or eight times faster than the cards recommended to non-professionals.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jerry Beilinson / Consumer Reports:
Samsung Galaxy S7 Active Fails Consumer Reports Water-Resistance Test
Samsung Galaxy S7 Active Fails Consumer Reports Water-Resistance Test
The phone is supposed to survive 30 minutes in 5 feet of water. In our testing, it didn’t.
http://www.consumerreports.org/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-s7-active-fails-consumer-reports-water-resistance-test/
Commercials for the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge showed hip-hop’s Lil Wayne pouring Champagne over the phone and dunking it in a fish tank. The Active version of the S7, which is available to AT&T customers for $800 and up, is being marketed as equally water-resistant. While Consumer Reports generally doesn’t evaluate phones for this feature, we do perform an immersion test when a manufacturer claims that its product is water-resistant. When we recently evaluated the Galaxy S7 Active, it failed this test.
Since the phone didn’t operate as claimed, it doesn’t make our list of recommended models—even though it performs extremely well in other tests.
Companies that label their devices “water-resistant” can cite a variety of benchmarks. In this case, Samsung says its phone follows an engineering standard called IP68 that covers both dust- and water-resistance, and that the phone is designed to survive immersion in five feet of water for 30 minutes. That’s the spec we used in testing the Galaxy S7 Active.
Samsung says it has received “very few complaints” about this issue, and that in all cases, the phones were covered under warranty.
“The Samsung Galaxy S7 active device is one of the most rugged phones to date and is highly resistant to scratches and IP68 certified,” the company said in a written statement. “There may be an off-chance that a defective device is not as watertight as it should be.” The company says it is investigating the issue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Hackaday: Does Apple Know Jack About Headphones?
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/15/ask-hackaday-does-apple-know-jack-about-headphones/
If you’ve watched the tech news these last few months, you probably have noticed the rumors that Apple is expected to dump the headphone jack on the upcoming iPhone 7. They’re not alone either. On the Android side, Motorola has announced the Moto Z will not have a jack. Chinese manufacturer LeEco has introduced several new phones sans phone jack. So what does this mean for all of us?
This isn’t the first time a cell phone company has tried to design out the headphone jack. Anyone remember HTC’s extUSB, which was used on the Android G1? Nokia tried it with their POP Port. Sony Ericsson’s attempt was the FastPort. Samsung tried a dizzying array of multi-pin connectors. HP/Palm used a magnetic adapter on their Veer. Apple themselves tried to reinvent the headphone jack by recessing it in the original iPhone, breaking compatibility with most of the offerings on the market. All of these manufacturers eventually went with the tried and true ⅛” headphone jack. Many of these connectors were switched over during an odd time in history where Bluetooth was overtaking wired “hands-free kits”, and phones were gaining the ability to play mp3 files.
The humble phone jack may well be the oldest electrical connector still in common use. The original ¼” (6.35mm) jacks were developed back in 1878. They were used as patch connections in manual telephone switchboards.
The ⅛” (3.5mm) miniature jack and the 3/32” (2.5mm) sub-miniature versions appeared in the 1960’s on transistor radios. In 1979, the Sony Walkman made the stereo ⅛” phone jack a common consumer standard.
As connectors go, they’re not half bad. Phone jacks are orientation agnostic, and can rotate without breaking connection. They have become an issue in phones though. Thinner and thinner phones have created lower profile sockets. With less plastic in the socket body, these jacks become more prone to breakage – especially when subjected to heavy use.
So if phone companies are going away from the classic ⅛” phone jack, what options do we have?
USB Type-C: USB-C allows for digital audio at 44 or 96 kHz using a headphone mounted DAC. The connector also allows for analog stereo audio through the sideband pins.
Lightning: Apple’s Lightning supports digital audio at 48 kHz, but does not support analog audio.
Bluetooth: These days every phone has the option of Bluetooth audio, however Bluetooth has a reputation for terrible audio quality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft concedes that it won’t have Windows 10 installed on 1B devices by mid-2018, as previously projected — Microsoft isn’t going to make its self-imposed deadline of having Windows 10 installed on 1 billion devices by mid-2018, company officials have conceded.
Microsoft: Windows 10 won’t hit 1 billion devices by mid-2018
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-windows-10-wont-hit-1-billion-devices-by-mid-2018/
Microsoft isn’t going to make its self-imposed deadline of having Windows 10 installed on 1 billion devices by mid-2018, company officials have conceded.
A little over a year ago, with much fanfare, Microsoft execs drew a line in the sand, predicting that Windows 10 would be installed on 1 billion devices by mid-2018.
But Microsoft officials conceded today, July 15, that they likely won’t make that deadline.
My ZDNet colleague Ed Bott noted at the end of a blog post Friday that Microsoft officials still think they can hit the 1 billion Windows 10 market, but that “it’s unlikely to happen by 2018 as originally projected”.
“Windows 10 is off to the hottest start in history with over 350m monthly active devices, with record customer satisfaction and engagement.”
Microsoft Windows and Devices chief Terry Myerson made the original claim at Build 2015, noting the 1 billion would encompass all kinds of devices that would run Windows 10 in some variant, including desktops, PCs, laptops, tablets, Windows Phones, Xbox One gaming consoles, Surface Hub conferencing systems, HoloLens augmented reality glasses, and various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Officials said at that time the majority of those 1 billion devices would be PCs and tablets.
But Windows Phones running Windows 10 Mobile were also expected to help Microsoft reach that total by mid-2018. Since April 2015, the bottom has fallen out of the Windows Phone market, with Microsoft officials conceding that Windows Phone isn’t much of a focus for Microsoft in calendar 2016.
After one year, 10 lessons learned for Windows 10
http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-one-year-10-lessons-learned-for-windows-10/
It’s been a busy year in Redmond, with Windows 10 delivering three major releases to 350 million active users. Here’s a look back at some major milestones and stumbles along the way, and new predictions about when Windows 10 will hit its ambitious goal of a billion devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Encrypted comms company Silent Circle closes $50M Series C — Encrypted comms company Silent Circle, which also makes a security-focused Android smartphone called the Blackphone, has announced it’s closed a $50 million Series C round of financing, led by Santander Bank.
Encrypted comms company Silent Circle closes $50M Series C
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/15/encrypted-comms-company-silent-circle-closes-50m-series-c/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vlad Savov / The Verge:
Kantar: Samsung’s Galaxy S7 outsold Apple’s iPhone 6s in the US between March and May 2016 — The iPhone showed its first decline in sales numbers earlier this year, which has today been reiterated by the latest US mobile market data from Kantar Worldpanel.
Samsung’s Galaxy S7 is outselling Apple’s iPhone 6S in the US
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/7/13/12171604/galaxy-s7-iphone-6s-plus-sales-data-stats
The iPhone showed its first decline in sales numbers earlier this year, which has today been reiterated by the latest US mobile market data from Kantar Worldpanel. It finds Apple’s flagship smartphone family lagging behind Samsung’s latest, with 16 percent of American consumers buying a Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge and 14.6 percent buying an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus. Now, granted, it’s not a fair fight, owing to Samsung’s S7 and S7 Edge being the newer handsets by half a year, but it’s one that Apple has typically been winning anyway. Not so in 2016.
This year’s Galaxy S7 generation builds on the solid foundation of last year’s S6 and is undoubtedly the best new flagship we’ve seen since Apple’s last update. Samsung’s consistent improvement in camera quality and user experience is evidently paying off, but it’s also worth noting how early the Korean company was able to release its 2016 flagship.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adam Banks / Ars Technica UK:
Apple’s Swift Playgrounds for iPad is designed for kids but still requires coding, doesn’t generate standalone apps
Apple’s Swift Playgrounds can help you learn to code, but it’s no HyperCard
The programming sandbox, seen through the eyes of devs, slightly misses the mark
http://arstechnica.co.uk/apple/2016/07/apple-swift-playgrounds-not-hypercard/
For all Apple’s obsessive secrecy, even its senior managers acknowledge with an on-stage wink that much of what they announce these days has already been predicted. In the run-up to WWDC, I saw developers on Twitter wishlisting “Xcode for iPad”—a way to write apps on an iOS device rather than in the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) that Apple makes available exclusively for the Mac. One suggestion was that this could be an iOS version of Playgrounds, the interactive test builder that Apple added to Xcode when launching its new programming language, Swift, in 2014.
Sure enough, 45 minutes into the 2016 WWDC keynote, Tim Cook—not an SVP, but Tim himself!—unveiled Swift Playgrounds for iPad, “a new way to learn to code.” Because I’d been thinking about it, I had my tweet ready: “I personally think a way to learn Swift is not what the iPad needs—it needs a 21st Century HyperCard. But let’s see.”
HyperCard’s legacy
Further Reading
The macOS Sierra developer preview: Different name, same ol‘ Mac
Siri ushers in a range of updates that refine but don’t transform the Mac.
What’s HyperCard? Back in the ’90s, it was how you got stuff done on a Mac when there wasn’t already an application to use. There still isn’t a word to describe it except “HyperCard.” Arguably, HyperCard was mostly a database with a form designer, a stateless data repository, and scripting. Rather than standalone sequences of commands that you could run on the system like macros, HyperTalk scripts were code snippets attached to objects and triggered by events. It was a very modern approach and, just as significantly, it didn’t feel like code.
Some people will tell you HyperCard’s HyperTalk was object-oriented; others call it procedural.
HyperCard “stacks” became a popular medium for creating and sharing homemade software; for some a rapid application development (RAD) tool, for others a visual authoring environment.
The point is not that HyperCard itself was so successful, but that HyperCard was was so enabling. HyperCard succeeded precisely because it didn’t try to teach anyone to be a programmer, and instead it put the raw capability of the computer in the hands of people who didn’t have time to become programmers.
HyperCard, “like a software erector set,” would crystallise computing into building blocks that any user could snap together to implement the functionality and user interface they had in mind.
Learning curve
I asked Apple developers and educators around the UK what they thought of Swift Playgrounds for iPad. None yet had time to try it out in depth
“a valuable tool for grasping the basics of Swift and seeing the output of each line of code” and thought the iPad version looked “colourful and a brilliant take on gamifying learning.”
Giles Hill, a teacher and education technology adviser in the south west of England, wasn’t surprised that Apple had released an iPad tool, “firstly to promote the Swift language generally, secondly because they know that coding in schools is a big deal at the moment.” But he felt “it probably should have been there a year or so ago.”
welcomed Playgrounds as “a tool to teach kids computer programming, rather than Swift per se.” Still, he agreed that expectations should be managed. “Children have absolutely no idea how hard it is to ‘make an app’ to the standard they are used to from the App Store,” he told Ars. “This is a live issue in Computer Science education. Children come in expecting to build the next Minecraft. It’s akin to walking into a physics class and expecting to build a supercollider.”
So would Playgrounds help or hinder efforts to make coding more accessible? “Depends on the learner,”
Swift Playgrounds “books” allow teachers to prepare projects where sections of code are hidden or non-editable and “cut scenes” walk students through a programming process step by step, avoiding the “blank screen” barrier.
Language barriers
Swift itself is a new language designed on rigorous computer science principles to satisfy the highest echelons of professional developers. It doesn’t obviously lend itself to introductory tuition
Many commercial developers now start with Python, for example, which already has a friendly and comprehensive iPad IDE called Pythonista.
“It doesn’t have the active help or touch-driven editing that Playgrounds has,” said Speirs, who currently teaches with Pythonista. “In terms of power, they’re equivalent. Playgrounds has a lower floor, but their ceilings are about the same.”
Hill, who helps primary teachers get kids into coding via simplified environments such as Scratch, worries that “the typed code approach (rather than simple drag and drop blocks) is going to make it prohibitive to all but the most interested children.” He thinks “sustained interest will come from those who have at least chosen to study computing at GCSE.”
Playgrounds “makes a lot of sense as an educational tool—I’d have loved this sort of thing when I started coding.”
Cramer also sees the Apple platform as a limitation. “You’d need to start out on an iPad and then move on to a Mac. If a child [has access to] an iPad, I would more or less assume they would, sometime in the future, also be able to get access to a Mac [to move on to Xcode]. The problem lies more with those who can’t access any of this. How can they learn these skills? Something like a Web application that can be accessed in the browser would be more versatile and inclusive.”
Lost in translation
Perhaps the biggest restriction of Swift Playgrounds is that it can’t produce finished apps. “It’s possible kids would be put off not being able to make a ‘real app’,” Hill said, although he admitted “this could be the first step towards that.” Bishop agreed that like many other learning tools, Swift Playgrounds was “simplified, limited in scope, and won’t satisfy the need that all learners have at some stage to create a real product.” Although projects can be exported to Xcode on the Mac, this requires a whole new set of skills. “They’ll need more lessons as soon as they enter Xcode,” he warned.
“As it stands, it could be a great little tool to explore learning to code and [make] tiny experimental apps, but beyond that it doesn’t look like a rapid prototyping tool,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aaron Souppouris / Engadget:
Sources: Google is working on a headset with a display that will offer AR features and does not require a phone or computer to power it
Google is still working on a standalone headset
Daydream isn’t the only reality Google has cooking
https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/16/google-mixed-virtual-reality-headset/
Tomi Engdahl says:
SoftBank Bought ARM
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/18/softbank-bought-arm/
$32 billion USD doesn’t buy as much as it used to. Unless you convert it into British Pounds, battered by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, and make an offer for ARM Holdings. In that case, it will buy you our favorite fabless chip-design company.
The company putting up 32 Really Big Ones is Japan’s SoftBank, a diversified technology conglomerate. SoftBank is most visible as a mobile phone operator in Japan, but their business strategy lately has been latching on to emerging technology and making very good investments. (With the notable exception of purchasing the US’s Sprint Telecom, which they say is turning around.) Recently, they’ve focused on wireless and IoT. And now, they’re going to buy ARM.
We suspect that this won’t mean much for ARM in the long term. SoftBank isn’t a semiconductor firm, they just want a piece of the action. With the Japanese economy relatively stagnant, a strong Yen and a weak Pound, ARM became a bargain.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BlackBerry Unveils Security-focused DTEK50 Android Smartphone
http://www.securityweek.com/blackberry-unveils-security-focused-dtek50-android-smartphone
The consumerist nature of BYOD has been a problem for BlackBerry. As employee power has grown, BlackBerry has been squeezed by the cachet of Apple and the economy of Android. Users largely rejected its tiny manual keypad, preferring the larger screen and larger screen-based keypad of its competitors. Its reputation for security has not been enough.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Make a Smart(ish) Watch From An Old Cell Phone
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/19/make-a-smartish-watch-from-an-old-cell-phone/
Looking for a fun junk box hack? Have one of those old Nokia phones that (in contrast to your current smartphone) just won’t give up the ghost? Tinkernut has a nice hack for you: making a smart watch from an old cell phone. Specifically, this project details how to make a smart watch that displays time, date, incoming calls and texts from a Nokia 1100 cell phone display and a few other bits.
http://www.tinkernut.com/portfolio/make-smartwatch-old-cell-phone-part-1/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
IDC: Smartphone shipments flat for second quarter in a row; Samsung widens lead over Apple in Q2 2016
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/idc-smartphone-shipments-flat-for-second-quarter-in-a-row-samsung-widens-lead-over-apple-in-q2-2016/
Smartphone vendors shipped a total of 343.3 million smartphones worldwide last quarter. This figure is up just 0.3 percent from the 342.4 million units in Q2 2015. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s because the previous quarter growth was just 0.2 percent. This isn’t just a one-off anymore: Smartphones have hit a plateau.
And also like the previous quarter, Samsung continues to dominate. In Q2 2016, the South Korean company shipped more smartphones than any other vendor, and once again out-shipped the next two smartphone makers — Apple and Huawei — combined.
Samsung’s market share increased 1.1 percentage points (from 21.3 percent to 22.4 percent), and it shipped 4 million more smartphones (77.0 million).
Every quarter, Samsung owns about a fifth of the market, though sometimes its share is closer to one-quarter
It appears that lesser-known Chinese brands Oppo and Vivo, which pushed out previous fourth and fifth place players Lenovo and Xiaomi, are here to stay. As China’s smartphone market matures, competition will continue to be fierce. And as these players look to the worldwide stage, cheap devices will get even more attractive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ina Fried / Recode:
Microsoft launches Pix, a free camera app for the iPhone that uses AI to enhance photos
Microsoft thinks it can do a better iPhone camera app than Apple
Born in the company’s research labs, Microsoft Pix focuses on taking better pictures of people.
http://www.recode.net/2016/7/27/12278592/microsoft-pix-challenges-iphone-camera
Don’t look now, but Microsoft is becoming a serious player in the world of iPhone apps.
It has already brought over Office and subsumed well-regarded email app Acompli and calendar app Sunrise into a revamped Outlook for iPhone. Now, Microsoft is looking to offer up a rival to the built-in camera app.
Microsoft Pix, a free app from Microsoft Research, focuses first and foremost on delivering better pictures of people. It does this by continuously taking pictures when the app is open and using an algorithm to choose the best shot or shots from among 10 images (seven just before the camera button is pressed and three after).
“If you see it happen and you aren’t already taking pictures, it’s too late, you missed the shot,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Surprise! Microsoft found 2,850 more jobs to cut as it continues its retreat from the phone business.
The company has now shed nearly all of the Nokia mobile phone business that it acquired in April 2014.
http://www.recode.net/2016/7/28/12319010/microsoft-cutting-more-phone-jobs
Microsoft is cutting an additional 2,850 jobs as it further curtails its smartphone efforts and restructures its sales force.
About 900 of those workers have already been notified, Microsoft said.
The new cuts, which were disclosed in the company’s annual report on Thursday, come on top of the 1,850 layoffs announced in May as the company retreated even further from the phone business.
At this point, Microsoft has essentially shed nearly all of the Nokia mobile phone business that it acquired back in April 2014 for $7.2 billion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Filing: Microsoft to layoff 2,850 staff from mobile and sales divisions as it completes Nokia cuts, which started in 2015 — MIcrosoft is cutting 2,850 more jobs beyond the 1,850 that the company announced would be eliminated earlier this year. The new cuts will hit phone hardware and sales.
Microsoft to cut 2,850 more jobs, including some in Microsoft sales
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-cut-2850-more-jobs-including-some-in-microsoft-sales/
MIcrosoft is cutting 2,850 more jobs beyond the 1,850 that the company announced would be eliminated earlier this year. The new cuts will hit phone hardware and sales.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon Russell / TechCrunch:
Sony posts $205M profit as downsized mobile business stops bleeding cash — Sony posted a slim ¥21.2 billion ($205 million) profit for its Q1 2016. That’s down on the ¥82.4 billion profit it carded this time last year, but in general the quarter was a mixed bag of positives
Sony posts $205M profit as downsized mobile business stops bleeding cash
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/28/sony-posts-205m-profit-as-downsized-mobile-business-stops-bleeding-cash/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
Google says links in mobile search results will soon take you to AMP version of page, if available, not the traditional HTML page — Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” more commonly known as AMP, are meant to be a reboot of the mobile web.
Google’s Instant Articles competitor is about to take over mobile search
The web is fragmenting again
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/2/12349524/google-amp-instant-articles-search-results-mobile-web-fragmentation
Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” more commonly known as AMP, are meant to be a reboot of the mobile web. Designed to fix mobile webpages that suck because they’re too slow, they have been available in a specialized carousel at the top of search results since February. When you click on an AMP link, you get a stripped-down, faster version of the article you wanted — often delivered directly from Google’s own caching servers.
Now, Google has announced that it plans to expand the delivery of AMP links beyond that carousel to all mobile search results. So when you search for a story and an article from an AMP publisher shows up in search results, clicking on that blue link will take you to the AMP version of the story instead of the traditional website.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook starts testing MSQRD selfie filters in Canada and Brazil, opening to your camera instead of a status update prompt on top of your feed — Snapchat opens to the camera by default to spur content creation, and now Facebook is trying the same starting with an Olympics-themed test in Brazil and Canada.
Facebook tests MSQRD selfie filters and opening your camera atop feed
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/05/facebook-camerafeed/
Snapchat opens to the camera by default to spur content creation, and now Facebook is trying the same starting with an Olympics-themed test in Brazil and Canada. Instead of just the “What are you doing?” text status update prompt, users will see an open camera window as Facebook executes on Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to put “video at the heart of all of our apps.”
The new feature also sports the first official integration of Facebook’s acquisition MSQRD’s animated selfie filters, which are similar to Snapchat’s selfie Lenses. Using MSQRD’s object recognition tech, users can swipe to apply different Olympics face paint like Brazilian flags and “Go Canada!” that match the contours of their face.
“The way that people share has changed a lot” Facebook Product Manager Sachin Monga tells me. “12 years ago, most of what was shared was text”
“If you look at what people are sharing, now it’s mostly photos, and soon it will be mostly videos. ”
Here, Facebook is trying to combat the reported decline in original content sharing. According to figures attained by The Information, original content sharing like status updates, photos, and home-made videos, was down 15% year over year on Facebook as of February.
Opening the News Feed to the camera will encourage Facebook’s 1.1 billion daily users to take and share more photos and videos. And thanks the MSQRD filters, people can jazz up their face so they feel less self-conscious or basic about sharing selfies.
Eventually, Facebook wants to build even more “magical augmented reality” into its camera, Monga says. Facebook already had graphic filters called “Profile frames” and the ability to add drawings, text, and doodles to your photo uploads. You also could save animated selfies from MSQRD and upload them to Facebook.
Tomi Engdahl says:
An Olympic gymnast could have avoided his $5,000 cell bill for playing Pokémon in Rio
Don’t get hit with Olympic-size overage charges.
http://www.recode.net/2016/8/4/12377898/japanese-gymnast–5000-cellphone-billpokemon
We all know Pokémon Go can be addicting. Well, it was apparently so addicting for Japanese gymnast Kohei Uchimura that he has already racked up a 50,000 yen (nearly $5,000) cellphone bill traveling in Rio.
For the novices out there, here are three recommendations: One, of course, is to swap out one’s home country SIM card for a local option. That’s the cheapest, but it involves some effort and means forgoing your traditional phone number.
Second, you can rent a hotspot from companies like Xcom Global and use your phone in airplane mode. Xcom, for example, offers unlimited 3G roaming for about $8 per day.
Third, some carriers have their own options for people traveling abroad.
For U.S. travelers, T-Mobile offers free, unlimited roaming in many countries though speeds are typically capped at decidedly un-Olympic 2G speeds. However, T-Mobile is giving customers unlimited high-speed data in Brazil for the month of August.
Uchimura did eventually get his bill reduced by his carrier to $30 per day for flat-rate usage
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Peek Inside Andy Rubin’s Playground
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/start-ups/a-peek-inside-andy-rubins-playground
Playground Global, an effort to make it easier for Silicon Valley hardware startups to make their ideas real, came on the scene in 2015. A group of investors including Hewlett-Packard, Google, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Seagate, and others—and led by Andy Rubin of Danger and Android fame—backed the effort with at least US $48 million. The mission: create a hardware “studio.” It’s something more than an incubator or an accelerator, in that it allows inventors to focus on their gadgets and takes away as many of the barriers to doing that as possible .
http://blog.playground.global/open-software-makes-hardware/
Fifteen years ago, my company, Danger, spent $240 million to develop a production-ready smartphone. Today, a similar effort would cost just over $3 million.
That’s within budget for an A-round startup, and it’s one of the reasons the pendulum of innovation is shifting from software back to hardware or, more specifically, hardware that uses software to do interesting things.
Historically, teams I’ve worked with have spent an enormous amount of time and energy building the software stacks that enabled their hardware ideas.
From operating systems to cloud services, these software stacks were often coded from scratch specifically to power the devices coming from companies such as General Magic, WebTV, Danger, etc.
Inevitably—software schedules being what they are—the hardware was often ready before the software, and the product would have to wait at the factory until the software was ready to be flashed into ROM. Only then could we ship the final product to customers.
Open source software solves some of these complexities and unknowns
The sea change began when open software went mainstream. Gone are the days when proprietary software was re-invented each time an OEM built a new product. These days, software developers can take many core functions from vast libraries of established open-source code and combine it with their magical ideas to create something entirely new. And they can focus the majority of their time and talent on the magical new thing.
Open software is battle-tested.
Now, Android is powering over 1.4 billion devices, which means Linux is powering many, many more—the scale is astounding. You’d be hard pressed today to find a digital consumer product that doesn’t include some piece of open-source software.
Many things about hardware are still, for lack of a better word, hard.
But a maturing hardware supply chain is reducing the number of components a startup needs to build from scratch. At Danger, we built custom LCDs, as well as our own operating system and RF front-ends to enable our phones to run on different carriers’ networks. Today, Sharp or JDI will sell you a display, MediaTek or Qualcomm will supply you with SoC that include all the peripheral devices needed to build a phone. Want an operating system? You can use Android for free.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
NPD: sales of portable power packs for mobile devices doubled between July 10 and July 23 compared to same period a year ago, likely due to Pokémon Go
Pokémon Go drives a surge in smartphone backup battery sales
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/05/pokemon-go-drives-a-surge-in-smartphone-backup-battery-sales/
Early on in the Pokémon Go hype cycle, there were signs that players were driving a significant uptick in sales of backup batteries, like the Mophie units you may be familiar with that offer USB connections for topping up mobile devices while you’re away from an outlet. Now, research from analytics firm NPD Group goes beyond early anecdotal evidence to show that in fact, unit sales across the portable power pack segment saw a 101 percent spike in the two weeks spanning July 10 and July 23, as compared to the same period last year.
Overall demand for mobile batteries has been high in general this year – NPD days sales are up 35 percent year-over-year on a 12-month measure as of June 2016.
Go sessions rapidly reducing charge means more cycles, which means less time until you need to get the battery swapped out or buy a new phone
But enough fun-policing: The bottom line is that a mobile game with the consumer reach of Pokemon Go can have significant impact on the broader ecosystem
Tomi Engdahl says:
Choosing a mobile-storage interface: eMMC or UFS
http://www.edn.com/design/integrated-circuit-design/4442378/Choosing-a-mobile-storage-interface–eMMC-or-UFS?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160721&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160721&elqTrackId=135d38a13b5c45a992bf03d9d01fd7e6&elq=8ed98b30d3b64a41bae350c66d9bcd98&elqaid=33142&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=28971
It is easy to forget just how rapidly the mobile landscape has evolved. Consider that just twelve short years ago, the Motorola Razr was released. With a 0.3-megapixel camera, a 176×220 screen, and five megabytes of embedded storage, this sleek feature phone was a global sensation, with 110 million devices sold worldwide.
Fast forward to the present day, and it is an entirely different landscape. Smartphones now boast up to 41-megapixel cameras. Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) screens sport resolutions of 2160×3840 pixels, and storage capacities run into the hundreds of gigabytes.
There has been a paradigm shift in how we consume digital information, with a convergence of technologies making mobile our primary compute platform.
From computer-aided design and 4K video editing to console-level gaming, users now expect their mobile devices to handle the most complex of tasks, as if they were sitting in front of an enterprise-grade workstation.
The demands being placed on mobile devices have presented something of a challenge for storage OEMs. As operating systems, applications and user expectations grow in complexity, data transfer bandwidth is being stretched to the breaking point. A range of new standards are now beginning to hit the market, which pave the way for the next generation of high-performance mobile storage.
eMMC (embedded MultiMediaCard) has become the de facto standard across the mobile landscape for embedded mobile storage.
Utilized in everything from smartphones and tablets to sat-navs and cameras, eMMC remains the dominant force in the world of embedded mobile storage, while Secure Digital (SD) has become the leading standard in the removable storage arena.
eMMC standard has progressed in parallel with other mobile technologies, with each iteration bringing successive performance enhancements
eMMC is bound by an 8-bit parallel interface, and the scaling of the interface performance for new, demanding mobile and mobile-influenced applications is now nearing its limits.
Enter Universal Flash Storage (UFS).
In 2010, JEDEC collaborated with the MIPI Alliance, and in 2012, the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) standard was published.
At a high-level, UFS moves away from a parallel interface to differential-signaling serial interface, removing the performance and manufacturing/routing barriers inherent to eMMC.
UFS also utilizes Command Queue (CQ), similar to eMMC 5.1, allowing it to harness the multi-tasking features of mobile operating systems and multi-core CPUs. This feature allows multiple read and write commands to be executed by the UFS device in parallel, significantly increasing command processing speeds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sensor hub works with Android 6.0 Marshmallow
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4442468/Sensor-hub-works-with-Android-6-0-Marshmallow?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160804&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160804&elqTrackId=127b6699f88a49a7b55d9fcf263fe167&elq=62208d8ecdd94191905d68606125f7ac&elqaid=33323&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=29130
Bosch Sensortec’s sensor hub software library provides a ready-to-deploy solution for smart phones, tablets, and other devices running the Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS. The updated software library offers full data fusion of sensors with three, six, and nine axes, as well as integrated designs that combine sensor hubs with individual sensors.
In power-saving mode, with all sensors enabled, the Bosch Sensortec offering reduces power demand down to 0.1 mW. In full operating mode, with all 29 motion sensors, 7 environmental sensors, Android M specified virtual sensors, and always-on, wakeup, and non-wakeup features running, power consumption still remains low at approximately 10 mW.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Moto 360: Premature obsolescence out of design necessity?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/brians-brain/4442420/The-Moto-360–Premature-obsolescence-out-of-design-necessity-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_consumerelectronics_20160727&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_consumerelectronics_20160727&elqTrackId=cbac7560b76943ad9c82e79cf49fbe3e&elq=9520a555d1544e8d874143e8f2ded6fa&elqaid=33189&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=29018
I’ve had a first-generation Moto 360 smart watch since last April, although I’ve only been using it steadily since I switched from iPhones to Android smartphones beginning last November. Its initial pairing partner, my Android-based second-generation Nexus 7, was effective for testing but impractical for day-to-day use, since I don’t carry the tablet with me everywhere and the Moto 360 provides limited-at-best standalone utility (you can still use it to tell time, but that’s about it). And my iPhones were inferior alternatives, due in no small part to Apple’s “walled garden” restrictions on third-party access to applications and their data.
Conversely, at least until recently, I’ve been quite pleased with my first-generation Moto X as a Moto 360 companion. The smart watch has received several over-the-air firmware updates, as has the client program running on the paired smartphone. And each time, not only has the Moto 360 gained a few more skills (in spite of its lack of a speaker or built-in cellular data transceiver, both features supported in newer models and the primary focuses of Google’s upgrades), the overall experience has garnered improved overall stability.
It’s possible that renegade software either on the watch itself or the connected smartphone is to blame; this wouldn’t be the first time in recent memory, after all, that excessive CPU utilization resulted in premature battery expiration (and if a future software update fixes the issue, I’ll be sure to report back the happy result).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is Pokémon Go the Tipping Point for AR?
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=281070&cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20160726.tst004c
Pokémon Go blasted on the scene seemingly out of nowhere. In less than three weeks the augmented reality (AR) game became the biggest game ever, surpassing Candy Crush with more than 20 million North American users per day. With Pokémon Go, AR may have finally reached sufficient velocity for takeoff.
Go out to any of your town’s landmarks and you’ll see young adults at all times of day and night holding their smartphones two feet from their face with one hand. They’re not texting. Pokémon Go is expected to soon surpass Twitter and Google Maps as a most-used app. Just wait till it’s released in Japan.
The game was developed by Google spinoff, Niantic, using Nintendo’s Pokémon characters. Niantic had been running the AR game Ingress as a niche play for years. Both companies saw their stock prices spike since the launch. The lure of the game is that you interact with Pokémon characters in real environments using a smartphone cameras and GPS technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LCD-display period ends mobile phones
Liquid crystal display, or LCD has dominated the mobile phone display technology for 15 years. Now LCD’s management comes to an end. IHS Research Institute predicts that in 2020, organic LED or OLED technology will become the most popular smartphone display technology.
IHS points out that manufacturing OLED screens are still LCD screens challenging. However, they have many advantages, why is growing in popularity: they are thinner and lighter, and the color reproduction is better.
The organic panel can also be bent, so it allows for a variety of curved displays, and later even of roller display solutions development.
AMOLED displays for smart phones according to IHS will grow to 36 per cent in 2020.
In that way it passes both the amorphous silicon base of the thin-film transistors are based on TFT LCD monitors that are based on the background LPTS-TFT displays.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4802:lcd-nayton-aika-kannykoissa-paattyy&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
If you buy a new high-end smartphone next year, it will likely be underpinned by a brand new wireless technology. ABI Research predicts that using the frequency of 60 GHz WiGig-circuits the delivery amount will increase next year already 160 million chipset.
In 2012, the WiGig circuits are already sold in one and a half billion, half of which smartphones. ABI projected image well, or how WiGig also called 802.11ad is increasing rapidly in all mobile devices.
WiGig is sort of the current WiFi extension to new spectrum. On the other hand millimeter wave applications are slightly different, so there is also a change in the functionality of the equipment.
WiGig technology enables the gigabit wireless transmission speeds of equipment. In practice, the technology will replace the physical, for example, between the USB and HDMI cords. The limits defined by the walls of the premises WiGig brings high-speed data links
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4807:tama-nopea-tekniikka-tulee-alypuhelimeesi-ensi-vuonna&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: new iPhones to be unveiled next month with haptic feedback on the home button, no headphone jack, and a dual-camera system on the larger model — Apple shifts from two-year redesign cycle for latest models — New camera on larger phone sharpens low-light photographs
New iPhone to Have Dual Camera but No Headphone Jack
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-08/new-iphone-said-to-have-dual-camera-pressure-sensitive-button
Apple shifts from two-year redesign cycle for latest models
New camera on larger phone sharpens low-light photographs
Apple Inc. is preparing to unveil successors to the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus as early as next month with more advanced photography capabilities and upgraded hardware in a design similar to that of last year’s models, according to people familiar with the matter.
The standout features will be a dual-camera system on the larger iPhone, a re-engineered home button that responds to pressure with a vibrating sensation rather than a true physical click and the removal of the devices’ headphone jack, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified discussing unannounced features. Apple declined to comment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BBC:
Iran becomes first country to ban and block access to Pokémon Go, following a years-old religious ruling issued against an earlier Pokémon card game — Authorities in Iran have banned the Pokemon Go app because of unspecified “security concerns”.
Pokemon Go banned by Iranian authorities over ‘security’
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36989526
Authorities in Iran have banned the Pokemon Go app because of unspecified “security concerns”.
The decision was taken by the High Council of Virtual Spaces, the official body overseeing online activity.
Iran follows a number of other countries in expressing its worries over security related to the game.
But it becomes the first country to issue a ban of Pokemon Go, that challenges players to visit real-world locations to catch cartoon monsters.
Indonesia has banned police officers from playing the game while on duty, and a French player was arrested last month after straying on to a military base while trying to catch Pokemon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OLEDs to beat LCDs in smartphones by 2020, says IHS Markit
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330275&
Although liquid-crystal display (LCD) has dominated mobile phone displays for more than 15 years, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology is expected to become the leading smartphone display technology in 2020, according to IHS Markit’s recent figures.
AMOLED displays with a low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) backplane will account for more than one-third (36 percent) of all smartphone displays shipped in 2020, becoming the most-used display technology in smartphone displays, surpassing a-Si (amorphous silicon) thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD and LTPS TFT LCD displays.
“While OLED is currently more difficult to manufacture, uses more complicated materials and chemical processes, and requires a keen focus on yield-rate management, it is an increasingly attractive technology for smartphone brands,” notes David Hsieh, senior director at IHS Markit.
“OLED displays are not only thinner and lighter than LCD displays, but they also boast better colour performance and enable flexible display form factors that can lead to more innovative design.”
Samsung Electronics has already adopted OLED displays in its smartphone models, and there is also increasing demand from Chinese Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, Meizu and other smartphone brands. Apple is also now widely expected to use OLED displays in its upcoming iPhone models.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Murata’s Playbook: Smartphones, Auto, Battery
Q&A with Murata executive vice president
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330271&
Forget all those storied but stodgy consumer electronics companies like Sony and Panasonic. And today’s embattled Japanese semiconductor vendors… Renesas, Socionext? Forget about them, too.
Murata has become one of the world’s biggest suppliers of wireless modules for smartphones. Designed into Apple and Samsung phones, Murata’s communication modules – whose size and power are optimized to fit, snug and cool in very slim smartphones – command an estimated 50 percent of the global smartphone market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raymond M. Soneira / DisplayMate:
Galaxy Note7 has “the most innovative and high performance” smartphone display tested to date; with 518 PPI, it reaches limit of perceptible sharpness
Galaxy Note7 OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out
http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_Note7_ShootOut_1.htm
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon Russell / TechCrunch:
Qualcomm signs patent licensing deals with Oppo and Vivo, China’s top two fastest-growing phone makers
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/09/qualcomm-nets-patent-deals-with-chinas-top-two-fastest-growing-phone-makers/
Qualcomm’s busy year in China continues with news that it has agreed to patent licensing deals with two of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone companies: Oppo and Vivo.
U.S. chip firm Qualcomm was hit with a near-$1 billion fine for anti-trust violations in 2015, and since then it has gone on a licensing spree to link deals with Chinese OEMs en masse. Today, it added Vivo to the list after it announced a similar arrangement with Oppo last week.
According to IDC, Oppo sat fourth in the mobile industry with 6.6 percent of global smartphone sales in Q2 2016 after shipping 22.6 million units. Vivo ranked fifth with 16.4 million units shipped, or 4.8 percent marketshare.
Together, these new deals mark more than half a dozen new agreements in China since December last year. Other recent Qualcomm licensees in the country include Hisense, Yulong and Lenovo. In total, Qualcomm claims to have deals with more than 200 Chinese companies, that number doesn’t only include OEMs.
Beyond securing deals, Qualcomm is also laying down the law with those in China who won’t comply.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New iPhone to Have Dual Camera but No Headphone Jack
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-08/new-iphone-said-to-have-dual-camera-pressure-sensitive-button
Apple Inc. is preparing to unveil successors to the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus as early as next month with more advanced photography capabilities and upgraded hardware in a design similar to that of last year’s models, according to people familiar with the matter.
The standout features will be a dual-camera system on the larger iPhone, a re-engineered home button that responds to pressure with a vibrating sensation rather than a true physical click and the removal of the devices’ headphone jack
While iPhone demand has waned in recent quarters, partly due to the lull between product launches, the device continues to be the major source of Apple’s revenue. The new models will be critical to the holiday quarter, and Apple is counting on the phones to prop up sales ahead of an expected iPhone overhaul in 2017, the device’s 10th anniversary.
Press Release
TrendForce Says Next iPhone Features Minor Upgrades and Will Be Critical to Apple’s Turnaround Efforts
Read more at http://press.trendforce.com/press/20160601-2506.html#YdFhbIDkEks0UIwm.99
Tomi Engdahl says:
Deep Learning To Be In Smartphones Soon, Say CEVA, Rockchip
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330287&
China’s leading fabless semiconductor company Rockchip has licensed CEVA’s XM4 imaging and vision DSP to enhance the imaging and computer vision capabilities of its’ SoC product lines.
Rockchip will leverage the CEVA-XM4 for a range of advanced imaging and vision features at low power consumption among which include low-light enhancement, digital video stabilization, object detection and tracking, and 3D depth sensing. In addition, the CEVA-XM4 will enable Rockchip to use the latest deep learning technologies, utilizing CEVA’s comprehensive Deep Neural Network (CDNN2) software framework.
By offloading these performance-intensive tasks from the CPUs and GPUs, the highly-efficient DSP dramatically reduces the power consumption of the overall system, while providing complete flexibility.
Deep learning features soon to integrate smartphones, say partners CEVA and Rockchip
http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/deep-learning-features-soon-integrate-smartphones-say-partners-ceva-and-rockchip
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eva Dou / Wall Street Journal:
Oppo and Vivo, both owned by BBK Electronics Co., surge to second and third place in China’s smartphone market, aided by old-school brick-and-mortar stores
For China’s Hottest Phone Maker, the Old Ways Work
Upstart brands Oppo and Vivo surge in popularity in China—aided by old-school brick-and-mortar stores
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/for-chinas-hottest-phone-maker-the-old-ways-work-1470812857-lMyQjAxMTI2MDE3MDAxNTAwWj
“The ads are all over town, with the Oppo catchphrase, ‘Charge your phone for five minutes, talk for two hours,’” said Mr. Li, a 25-year-old factory worker in this central Chinese city.
On billboards and bus stops, and on TV and social media, the two smartphone brands—which share an owner—are engaged in the kind of advertising blitz rarely seen in China’s mobile sector.
As sales of Apple Inc. ’s pricier iPhone falter here, both upstart brands are surging in popularity—aided by old-school brick-and-mortar stores and relentless advertising. Oppo and Vivo are No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, in China’s smartphone market, based on second-quarter shipments to vendors, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. The brands trail Huawei Technologies Co.
“Apple is fighting for the middle class in China, where buyers are getting more sophisticated and looking toward value, not just the brand,”
Of the two brands, Oppo has more directly targeted the consumer who would buy an iPhone.
Those opponents include Huawei, which built its base by selling its phones through mobile-service providers, and Xiaomi Corp., which pioneered direct sales to consumers on the internet.
Oppo and Vivo instead set up retail stores with exclusive distribution deals.
‘Our strategy is like how you play the Chinese board game Go.’
—Lu Luma, Oppo’s technology-planning director
Oppo has doubled its market share in China over the past year to 14%, according to Strategy Analytics.