Hasta La Gadget!

So far, the tablet market has yet to produce a tablet running any operating system that has offered stiff competition to Apple and its dominating iPad. Apple may have introduced the stiffest competition to its own iPad with the new iPad mini. There are plenty of Android-powered tablet on the market, and some such as the Kindle Fire HD are selling very well.

Apple is predicted to have a giant year for iPad sales in 2012 and 2013. An analyst named Michael Walkley from Canacord Genuity recently announced that he was predicting Apple would sell 101.6 million iPads in 2013. Compare that with Amazon and its popular Kindle Fire HD tablet, and it’s clear the iPad still leads the market. Walkley is predicting that Amazon will sell 10.7 million tablets with Samsung selling 8.3 million tablets.

The same analyst is predicting that Samsung will take a significant lead in smartphone sales over Apple. That lead is thanks in part to incredibly popular devices such as the Galaxy S III. Walkley still expects Apple to sell more than 193 million iPhones. Samsung is predicted to sell as many as 303 million Android smartphones this year.

Walkley is predicting big sales for the iPad mini during the holiday shopping season, even though it’s significantly more expensive than competing Android offerings. The analyst is also predicting that the iPad mini will significantly expand Apple’s addressable market for tablets internationally with strong sales throughout fiscal 2013 as Apple ramps up international distribution.

Walkley said, “With the impressive refresh of the 4th generation Retina iPad and launch of the iPad Mini earlier this week, we anticipate very strong holiday quarter iPad sales. In fact, with Apple’s decisions to price the iPad Mini at a $170 discount to similar 4th generation iPad SKUs and competitively priced versus lower priced competing products from Google and other Android OEMs, we anticipate strong sales of the iPad Mini, especially as gifts during the holiday quarter. Further, we believe the iPad Mini significantly expands Apple’s tablet addressable market internationally and should lead to strong sales throughout F2013 as international distribution increases.”

[via Macgasm]

Analyst predicts massive iPad sales is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

MetroPCS might be the smaller of the two parties in the proposed merger with T-Mobile, but it certainly knows how to coin a profit in difficult times. The carrier recorded a massive $193 million net profit this quarter, $44 million more than it made in Q2, despite losing 312,000 subscribers in the three month period. The reason behind the rosy numbers was a combination of cash-saving exercises and canny investments in securities, pushing total revenue to $1.3 billion. The network now has just under nine million customers, with more than a million of those subscribing to one of the company’s LTE packages. It’s also managed to reduce churn down to 3.7 percent, a reduction of 0.8 percent since Q3 2011. CEO Roger D. Linquist remarked that the next quarter will see the business “re-energize” subscriber growth at the expense of its bottom line — probably wise, given that it’s lost just over half a million customers in the last six months.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

MetroPCS breaks 1 million LTE customers, makes $193 million profit despite losing 312,000 users in Q3 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Oct 2012 06:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The first season of Nissan GT Academy has completed and Nissan and Sony have announced that they have teamed up to bring a second season of Nissan GT Academy competition to the US. The Nissan GT Academy is a competition that takes participants who win online races in a Grand Turismo special series and pits them against each other for the chance to drive a real Nissan racecar.

The second season of GT Academy will begin airing on November 1 on Spike TV. The first of the six episodes will air on Thursday, November 1 11:30 PM Eastern 10:30 PM central. The remaining five episodes of the series will air the same time each Thursday night.

People who want watch that don’t get Spike TV on cable or satellite services will be able to watch each episode via the Nissan YouTube channel the following Monday after the episodes air on Spike TV. Episodes will also air on MTV 2 a week after the original airdate on Spike TV. Like the original series, there’ll be an online competition to find the top online racers.

Those online racers will then be whittled down to the fastest 16 that will be invited to the Silverstone Racing complex in England for mental and physical challenges in addition to track driving in a variety of vehicles. So far, drivers from GT Academy have done very well in real life racing with the first season winner, Lucas Ordonez, winning the P2 Class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Nissan and Sony to offer second season of Nissan GT Academy is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It was rumored yesterday that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 could feature an Exynos 5450 processor clocked at a whopping 2.0GHz. Given that NVIDIA has a stake in the mobile market as well with their Tegra processors, unsurprisingly it looks like the company might be stepping their game up and come CES 2013, rumor has it that NVIDIA will be taking the wraps off Tegra-4, which has also been given the codename “Wayne”. According to the rumors, Tegra-4 will be a quad-core chipset that is based on the Cortex A15 architecture, much like Samsung’s Exynos 5450, although it seems to be clocked slightly slower at 1.8GHz.

Reports have suggested that this particular Tegra-4 chip will be used to power tablets and possibly netbooks, although an updated model called the T43 will bump the clock speed to 2.0GHz. No word on whether we will be seeing the Tegra-4 incorporated into handsets, but assuming these rumors are true, we guess we will be finding out at CES 2013. Until then we suggest taking it with a grain of salt for now.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: NVIDIA Looking At Quad-core Chips For Smartphones, Kontron KTT30 Tegra 3 PC Mini-ITX Motherboard,

It’s election season and Google is doing its part to help you “rock the vote.” No, the search kingpin isn’t endorsing a specific candidate, instead it’s doing what it does best — help people search the internet for information. The company’s open source Voter Information Tool is designed to help people research candidates and locate polling places. In an effort to reach the masses, Google is partnering with companies such as Foursquare and AT&T. Election Day can be a chaotic event to say the least. Hopefully this powerful new web-based tool will make things run a little smoother for frantic voters trying to beat the clock.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

Google’s Voter Information Tool hopes to make Election Day a little easier originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Oct 2012 06:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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