Tech Industry

See the guy at the right, he’s a Microsoft “Answer Bar” worker.  But he needs a caption.  Can anyone help him out?

via FakeSteve.

Hint: It may involve Windows XP.

While every handset maker and their dog’s brother is introducing their version of a touchscreen phone as the industry engages in a rearguard action against the Apple juggernaut, not every touchscreen keeps the customer satisfied, it seems.

New data from research firm, Canalysys, suggests the hype around touchscreen devices is driving the industry – everybody wants one, but not everyone’s so happy with the ones they’ve got.

According to the researchers, in Western Europe, 54% of people want their next phone to be a touchscreen device. That’s nice – but, sadly, of those who already have a touchscreen gadget, just 47% say they will stick with touch for their next handset – and it really does depend on which manufacturer produces the one they’ve already got.

For the most part, users of Apple or HTC devices will happily take touchscreen next time they choose a phone, but only 27% of those with Sony Ericsson handsets plan to.

"The results suggest that consumer awareness of touchscreen UIs is very high, driven by the marketing of Apple, Samsung and others," said analyst Pete Cunningham. “It is also apparent that, with experience, a significant proportion of users have not been totally won over by some of these devices,” he added.

“There has always been a question mark over how well touchscreens would work among an SMS-centric audience and the results indicate the transition has not been totally smooth.”

Interestingly, the survey also reverals that, from over 3,000 phone users, 38% would prefer a finger-based touchscreen phone, while 16% want a stylus-based touchscreen phone.

“We are at a critical time in the mobile industry,” commented Canalys VP Mike Welch. “The user awareness and interest is clearly there, and the opportunity to drive a mass change in user interaction, and hence device capabilities and the opening up of new application and service revenue streams, is tantalisingly close. But only if users continue to embrace these new UIs once they have tried them. This is the new arena in which mobile vendors must differentiate themselves, and the user experience battle will spread to other product categories, such as netbooks.”

Apple’s off to a slow start in iPhone sales in China, with carrier partner China Unicom confirming 5,000 sales of the device so far, since it went on sale last week.

Company president Lu Yimin characterised iPhone prices as “not expensive” during today’s Unicom shareholders meeting in Hong Kong. However, the iPhone costs maybe 26 per cent more than similar smartphones in Hong Kong (that also include Wifi), which industry observers fear may depress sales of Apple’s device in the world’s most populous country.

Over 700 million Chinese subscribe to wireless services. It’s estimated Apple may sell 460,000 iPhones each year in China – which Bloomberg reflects is less than the number of grey market iPhones currently sold there.

Despite this, China Unicom chairman, Chairman Chang Xiaobing, said, "We are satisified with iPhone sales so far, and we aim to have an additional 1 million new 3G subscribers each month in the near future.”

China Unicom has signed up over one million 3G subscribers so far. China Mobile and China Telecom will also launch 3G services in the coming months.

In August, Unicom signed a three-year non-exclusive deal to sell Apple’s popular iPhone in China.

Remember all those rumours of Apple planning a subscription-based service for iTunes? The ones that began way back in 2005, when the company hired XBox Live staffer, Julia Miller?

Seems this chatter’s back again, with Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo claiming Apple to have been in talks with TV networks in an attempt to put together a $30 all-you-can-eat TV subscription service.

This service, which may well appeal to companies not yet signed-up to NBC,ABC and Fox’s Hulu service, and which can also be seen as extending the Apple TV model into business currently occupied by satellite and cable TV services, seems set to launch “early next year”, if anyone signs up.

At present, Apple is assessing what degree of support there is for the notion among TV services.  Kafka says no one has yet signed up.

These subscription plans through iTunes wouldn’t be device-specific, though it is likely you’d be able to access content using iTunes clients, including computers, iPhones, iPods and Apple TV devices.

August saw similar reports, this time from Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster, who predicted Apple would introduce subscription services for TV shows way back in August this year.

“Such a product would effectively replace a consumer’s monthly cable bill (~$85/month) and offer access to current and older episodes of select shows on select channels,” said Munster, according to Loop Insight.

Success will depend on Apple being able to offer the breadth of content you get from cable services and broadcasters. It would also depend on shows being made available in a timely fashion.

If the company succeeds in winning support from TV networks, it would enter a market currently served by Netflix, and Hulu; with YouTube also expected to offer full-length TV shows more widely in the coming year.

This means Apple has a chance at securing broadcaster permission for the plan, as they are more prepared to engage with online services now than before. One source told MediaMemo: “I think they might get it right this time”.

Apple may also have a surprise in its plan, in terms of enabling broadcasters to claw back a little of the ads revenue they would otherwise lose in ads-free subscriptions.

Apple has advanced plans for an ads-funded iTunes service.

These plans first came to light in July, when it was revealed that Apple presented a UK Judge-presided tribunal with advanced plans for an ads-funded service.

iTunes VP Eddie Cue told the Tribunal that iTunes would only pay advertising revenue where it is earned “as a result of an advertisement, sponsorship or a click-through link located on a Licensed service … and only where the Licensed Service is offered to the user at a price which has been artificially depressed to reflect such revenue.”

Recall last week when we learned at least one major European carrier has reached some kind of deal to offer mini video projectors to iPhone customers? Well, seems there may be more to this story than we first thought, with a Taiwanese firm involved in creating such pico projectors predicting massive growth next year – really massive growth.

In fact, according to Claude Hsu, president of Taiwan’s Young Optics, shipments of pico projectors for handsets will grow to 10-25 million units in 2012, compared to 20,000-30,000 in 2009.

Even though he says these figures are estimates that’s one heck of an expectation of a sales rise, particularly in comparison to his estimate of the size of the entire pico projector market for 2009 -170,000-180,000 units.

Hsu predicts projector shipments will climb sharply next year as “major handset vendors, such as Samsung Electronics, are expected to step up efforts for the market segment.”

We suspect these major vendors may well include a small Cupertino-based company. We’re just saying, right…

Via: DigiTimes
 

We all knew Seinfeld had a Mac at his house for all of those years on his show.  Then Microsoft paid him $10 million to do a few PC commercials.  But really, when not getting paid to say otherwise, we know he uses a Mac.  This week’s Curb Your Enthusiasm had him at his desk a new 15-inch MacBook Pro.

via TUAW

Adobe and Apple may not yet have inked a deal to bring Flash support to the iPhone, but that hasn’t stopped the Photoshop developer from adding a few next-gen smartphone-focused features to Adobe AIR, which promises a slew of these in its next version upgrade.

Just look at these features and tell us Apple didn’t force industry change when it introduced the MultTouch-savvy iPhone (which now accounts for one-in-forty cellphones sold worldwide, BTW).

As revealed by Adobe AIR application developer, Christian Cantrell, Adobe AIR 2.0 will be the nads when it comes to smartphone and tablet device usage. And the software’s set to ship next year, we’ve learned.

As Apple does already, so the Adobe app will add support for Multi-touch and gesture-based controls – though not both at once (”Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time)”, the developer warns.”

    •    Multi-touch: Touch events are similar to mouse events, but on multi-touch enabled devices, you can track multiple touch points simultaneously.

1. – Multi-touch support:
2. – Windows 7 and beyond.
3. – Requires multi-touch enabled hardware (obviously).

    •    Gestures: Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time). Gestures are the synthesis of multi-touch events into a single event.

1. – Gesture support:
2. – Windows 7 and beyond.
3. – Macs running 10.6 and beyond with multi-touch trackpads.
4. – Type of gestures we support:

• GESTURE_TWO_FINGER_TAP (tapping with two fingers)
• GESTURE_PRESS_AND_TAP (holding one finger down, then tapping with another — convention on some Windows devices for bringing up context menus)
• GESTURE_PAN
• GESTURE_ROTATE
• GESTURE_SWIPE
• GESTURE_ZOOM

Better security, the capacity to open files with selected default apps, native processes to reduce the load of running Air 2.0 apps (basically AIR 2.0 will be smart enough to direct some of its operations to features native on multiple platforms – handy).

There’s dozens of other features likely of interest to developers, including extended support for different sockets, network management, DNS resolution and more.

Accesibility gets a boost too, with the same level of support for such features as already available in Flash.

A beta of AIR 2.0 will be on Adobe Labs late this year. The software should go some way to answering critics who avoid use of AIR because they demand too much memory and aren’t always great performers, with Adobe promising a whole bunch of improvements to boost performance.

Mac users should see multitouch support in those AIR apps they use as these elements are introduced.
 

Way back in 2006 the mobile phone industry looked very different – fast forward to today and new entrant Apple now accounts for 2.5 per cent of global handset sales with its iPhone – not bad for a product which only began to emerge internationally later in 2007.

Strategy Analytics reports Apple’s 7.4 million iPhones shipped internationally worldwide in Q3 2009 gives the Cupertino company a record 2.5 percent marketshare.

“Apple is expanding its distribution networks into all major
regions worldwide and this is driving its volume growth,” the analysts observed.

According to the analysts, this climb in share comes as global mobile handset shipments fell 4 percent year-over-year, to reach 291 million units in Q3 2009. The rate of decline was slower than the previous quarter, as the market edged toward recovery. “We forecast the handset industry to return to positive growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, signaling an end to the recession,” the analysts opined.

Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, "We forecast 300 million handsets to be shipped worldwide in Q4 2009, growing 3% from 294 million units in Q4 2008. We believe this will be the first time the industry has returned to positive growth since Q3 2008, signaling an end to the handset recession after 4 quarters of decline. Consumers and handset vendors are gradually regaining a little confidence."

Apple’s good news follows a ChangeWave Research survey which said from June to September, Apple’s share of the US market jumped from 25 to 30 percent, while competitors RIM and Palm basically stayed unchanged.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world in 2007, he mentioned that Apple had set a goal for itself to reach one percent of the mobile phone market share.

Apple met that goal in 2008, hitting 1.1 percent of the 1.21 billion mobile phone shipments, according to ABI Research.

Additional Strategy Analytics findings include:

Samsung shipped 60.2 million handsets worldwide and captured a record 21 percent marketshare in Q3 2009. Samsung now sits alongside Nokia and Motorola as the only three vendors to have passed the 20 percent threshold during the past decade;

LG Electronics shipped 31.6 million handsets worldwide during Q3 2009, for 11 percent marketshare. The South Korean vendors Samsung and LG captured almost one-third of the entire global handset market between them.
 

We all know Apple’s cooking something up – feverish market speculation, high-level meetings with publishers for eBook discussions, increased r&d spend all reinforce the notion the company has something up its sleeve – we all think it’s some form of tablet.

Now this speculation seems set to climb even higher with a source telling Business Insider that Apple engineers have been engaged in frequent trips from Cupertino to China.

“A source tells us a system integration engineer friend of his at Apple has been ramping up his travels back and forth between China lately, broadcasting word of his travels over the Internet,” the report claims.

What makes this even more interesting is that engineers are currently booked to head to China across the Holiday season, meeting with Apple’s manufacturers out there, presumably Foxconn, who we were earlier told has been contracted to produce 300,000 of the still unannounced tablet-type devices (dubbed ‘Slate’ according to the NYT) each and every month.

Meanwhile, fresh news from Australia lends a little more light on Apple’s plans to position its new device as some form of eBook reader on steroids: "It seems they’re trying to preload it with content deals, rather than just create an elegant general-purpose device," Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, told NewsFactor.

"If you got some really impressive experience, it would certainly accelerate the transition from print to digital,” he observed, saying Apple’s solution plus those such as Kindle could, “generate enough enthusiasm to advance the transition."

If previous reports are true, Apple intends wooing publishers by offering them a much better deal than Amazon: While the latter firm demands 70 percent of revenues raised through eBooks, Apple wants just 30 percent.

His voice now reminds us of/makes this seem like an Apple ad…which it sort of is.  Might want to watch this quick, it might not be up for long.

We like this story – here’s a picture of the Apple tablet – no, not that Apple tablet, but the unreleased tablet that never made the light of day and was internally developed by the company way back c.1990.

We didn’t find this little gem – that honour goes to TechCrunch, but here’s the story:

“The Pen Mac was a fully functional Mac computer (it even played the Mac startup chime) with a pen based touch screen. The screen itself was identical to the Mac Portable, but with the addition of pen touch. And of course the case was a lot smaller than the Mac Portable. The Pen Mac was supposedly not much more than one inch thick. Users could plug in a keyboard and mouse or easier input.”

Seems the man in the picture, Glam CEO Samir Arora, was involved in the product design, but these systems were eventually shelved in favour of the Newton handheld.

Interesting, huh? In the words of a famous song, “History Repeating”.

Though this Pen Mac makes a MacBook look thin (which they are) – see here.
 

Apple’s iPhone is biting at the heels of current consumer smartphone favourite, RIM’s BlackBerry, with more consumers than ever now favouring the Apple phone.

ChangeWave Research director, Paul Carton, dropped us a line today to let us know the findings of ChangeWave’s latest Consumer Smart Phone survey, titled, “Apple Soars Behind iPhone 3GS Momentum”.

The September 14-21 survey offers a look at the impact of the new Apple and Palm offerings – along with an update on Research In Motion and overall smartphone industry trends going forward.

The survey of 4,255 consumers shows strong growth continues in the smart phone market, with 39% of respondents now reporting they own a smart phone – up 2-pts since June and nearly double the level of two years ago.

“Looking ahead,” ChangeWave informs, “while the current survey shows a slight dip in consumer buying plans for the next 90 days, that’s to be expected in the aftermath of the huge iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre product launches back in June.”

Interstingly, 11.6% of consumer surveyed now say they plan on buying a smart phone in the next 90 days – 3-pts less than in June but still one of the highest percentages ever recorded in a ChangeWave survey.

With 40% share, RIM remains the current market share leader among consumers, but has fallen 1-point since the previous survey and is at its lowest level in two years.

Apple – which now has 30% share – has “seen a huge market share jump since the previous survey,” ChangeWave tells us. “Not only has the iPhone 3GS release enabled them to gain 5-pts overall – for the first time it has also placed them within striking distance of the number one spot in the consumer market.”

Palm (7%) remains far behind in third place, but we note that this is the first survey in nearly two years where its share hasn’t fallen – and that’s a clearly encouraging sign.

There’s more: Apple remains the leader in terms of planned buying going forward — 36% of those who plan to purchase a smart phone in the next 90 days say they’ll get an iPhone.

More important, the iPhone continues to maintain the highest customer satisfaction rating in the industry among major cell phone manufacturers — with 74% of owners reporting they’re Very Satisfied with their iPhone.