Monday, March 25, 2013

TechEye

TechEye

Link to TechEye - Latest technology headlines

Most first-batch Galaxy S4s to feature Qualcomm chip

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 05:52 AM PDT

Samsung might have a bit of explaining to do after it emerged that the vast majority of its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphones could be shipped with Qualcomm chips, at least initially.

Even before Samsung announced the phone earlier this month, it was clear that it would have to use a Qualcomm chip with onboard LTE to be competitive in some markets, such as North America. The Snapdragon 600 is a good chip and it was also selected by HTC to power its latest flagship, the HTC One.

However, Samsung's PR juggernaut focused on its own Exynos 5 Octa chip, which is understandable. The chip features ARM's big.LITTLE design, with four A15 cores and four frugal A7 cores to keep power consumption down. The bad news? It doesn't have LTE. The really bad news? Samsung couldn't build enough of them in time for the S4 launch and now it seems that as many as 70 percent of first-batch Galaxy S4 handsets will ship with a Snapdragon inside.

That first batch is 10 million units, reports Korean tech site ET News.

Samsung's LSI division was supposed to churn out the overhyped Octa chips and it failed to ramp up production fast enough. It doesn't come as much of a surprise. Samsung's 28nm process came online late last year and apparently the Octa is just now entering mass production.

In addition, Samsung took a rather risky approach. It tried to transition to a new manufacturing process and change the core architecture in one go, which is tantamount to begging for something to go wrong.

That's why Intel doesn't do it and that's why Nvidia's Tegra 4 was delayed by more than a quarter. Both Samsung and Nvidia decided to take a chance and both seem to have botched it quite badly. Still, one can hardly blame them for choosing the risky approach. Had it worked, Samsung would have had a killer chip on its hands just in time for the S4, while Nvidia would have had the first A15 quad-core SoC a couple of months ago. 

HTC promises louder marketing

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 05:31 AM PDT

It's no secret that HTC is in a world of trouble and its failure to stick to the HTC One launch schedule is making life for the Taiwanese phone maker even worse.

Now, though, HTC plans to turn a page and adopt a new, much more aggressive marketing strategy. HTC's marketing chief Benjamin Ho said the company will be making some big changes. First off it will ditch its "Quietly Brilliant" slogan in favour of something a little louder.

"We have a lot of innovations but we haven't been loud enough," Ho said.

That is an understatement.

HTC has failed to get its message across, plain and simple. Its 2012 lineup was excellent, but nobody except the tech community bothered reading the reviews. The approach simply wasn't consumer-focused enough. For years, HTC's target audience were Windows Mobile and Android enthusiasts rather than mainstream consumers. The approach backfired badly, culminating in a massive slump in sales and revenue late last year.

According to the Wall Street Journal, HTC is now gearing up to pull out all the stops and connect with consumers who had never even heard of Windows Mobile. Ho declared HTC will increase its digital marketing budget by 250 percent this year and boost traditional media marketing by 100 percent.

Ho also confirmed that a component shortage was to blame for the HTC One delay.

The phone uses an innovative camera, which is apparently so "innovative" that the supplier couldn't ramp up production fast enough. 

Crunch time for Michael Dell

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 05:06 AM PDT

Michael Dell could today find out if he gets to keep hold of his company.

The founder, who in February made a bid to take the firm private, has put his fate in the hands of a Dell board special committee, which is expected today to announce how it will proceed with the future of the company.

The decision will be made following Friday's deadline for rival offers to the founder's bid.

Michael Dell, along with private equity firm Silver Lake Group, said they'd be willing to buy the company for $13.65 a share, putting the value of the business at $24.4 billion. If he gets his way, Dell will acquire increased control over the company.

There has been some speculation as to where Dell will go next: PC sales in general are floundering but its services and related enterprise businesses are doing rather well. IBM exerted financial foresight when it span off its consumer business to Lenovo, however, HP was slammed for a similar approach when Leo Apotheker briefly held the CEO position. The direction of Dell is up for debate.

However, the BBC reports have said that the bid has been met with offers from private equity group Blackstone, which has proposed between $13.65 and $15 a share, as well as billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who has put in a bid of $15 a share.

The announcement from the special committee of Dell's board may, however, mean that the matter remains static - with predictions that they may only be able to say which of the offers is reasonably likely to lead to a bid greater than Dell's.

FAA under pressure to let flyers keep electronics on

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 04:30 AM PDT

We would cautiously put forward that accidentally leaving your phone on doesn't frequently make planes fall from the sky, but now the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is reportedly considering letting passengers keep their electronics on.

Turning off electronics is generally more of an inconvenience to airline staff who are bound by their jobs to prod stubborn passengers, but the FAA may save them the trouble by the end of the year. According to a group that works with the FAA, rules may be relaxed on reading devices only - so you'll still have to switch your phone off.

A member of this group and an FAA deepthroat, under anonymity, told the New York Times that the agency is "under tremendous pressure" to either allow passengers to use reading devices or at least to scientifically explain why they can't.

Bookish frequent flyers are increasingly using electronics for reading, like the Kindle or the iPad, because they're often lighter than a book and can store plenty of them on a single device. Although they can't compete with the old fashioned charm of a well thumbed paperback, you can't play non-literary anti-classics like Fruit Ninja on a bestseller.

The industry working group tasked with a solution includes Boeing, the Association of Flight Attendants, the Federal Communicatiosn Commission, and aircraft makers - tellingly it also has on its roster the Consumer Electronics Association and Amazon.

According to a summary document from the group, seen by the New York Times, as well as letting passengers read prod-free, it also wants to stop flight attendants from having to be the "social police".

It's hoped the existing regulations will be replaced by a concise, single new approach.

As the NY Times points out, as the wearable electronics trend looks to be on the up-and-up, flight attendants won't be keen to tell passengers to turn off their glasses or shut down their watch.

Apple buys indoor mapping start-up

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 04:09 AM PDT

In what the Wall Street Journal dubbed a 'map war', Apple has bought a Silicon Valley startup called WifiSLAM which suggests the company wants a hand building indoor mapping for iPhone users.

Google already offers indoor mapping for some busy hot spots like shopping centres and airports but at the moment this is an Android exclusive. As part of its vendetta against Google, Apple scrapped built in Google Maps on its latest iPhone. That would seem to be the reason Apple picked up WifiSLAM - a start-up which is trying to get around the problem of precise user location indoors when GPS comes up short. 

As discussed in our chat with Bosch Sensortec, much of the hardware technology is already out there for indoor mapping and now the question is mostly one of software. At the moment, the necessary infrastructure for accurate mapping isn't in place in many areas where it would be useful, but it is just a matter of time.

An Apple spokesperson confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that Cupertino had bought the company, although no further details were provided. However, an analyst from Opus Research said that for retailers, indoor mapping could help make the most of consumer footfall, as well as for in store merchandising. This could be a boon for retailers struggling to seduce consumer interest, at least here in the UK - provided potential customers make the trip to the high street or shopping centre in the first place.

While we can't speak of WifiSLAM, Apple's recent record in mapping without Google hasn't exactly been exemplary, with the most recent OS on the iPhone 5 recommending drivers take shortcuts off the nearest bridge. At the moment, it needs all the non-Google help it can get.

Gates offers $100,000 prize to rubber industry

Posted: 25 Mar 2013 03:25 AM PDT

Part time tech evangelist and full time philanthropist Bill Gates is offering a $100,000 prize through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to anyone who can come up with a condom design for the 21st century.

The foundation could also secure up to $1 million of additional funding for a promising next-gen condom design. Basic condom design hasn’t changed much in half a century, so the foundation reckons it is time for a new one. Condoms are used by an estimated 750 million people across the world, and the figure probably doesn’t include tens of millions of liars and adulterers.

The foundation pointed out that “from the male perspective” condoms tend to decrease sexual pleasure, so one of the features high on its list is some way to increase sensation to get men to wear them more often. Female condoms have similar drawbacks and they are also quite a bit more expensive than their male counterparts, Mashable reports.

We do see a bit of a problem here. We all know Microsoft’s operating systems are renowned for their ahem, reliability, so a condom with the lifespan of a Russian dissident in Britain doesn’t sound like a very good idea at all. 
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)