Rumors have circulated since late last year that wireless carrier Sprint might be considering a revival of the defunct Nextel brand name. That rumor first started circulation with a claim … Continue reading
Samsung Profit Growth Slows As Galaxy Faces Heat From iPhone And Cheaper Rivals
Posted in: Today's ChiliSamsung’s latest financial results underscored slowing growth in the smartphone business and its increased rivalry with Apple, which seems to be closing the gap, at least in the U.S.
Samsung reported its first decline in quarterly profit in two years for the December quarter. Fourth quarter net income was 7.22 trillion won ($6.7 billion), lower than what the analysts expected. Operating income for Samsung’s mobile business during October to December period remained flat at 5.47 trillion won.
While consumers in both India and China are expected to buy over half a billion smartphones this year, they are going to look for cheaper versions, triggering a pricing battle. This basically means lower profit margins for Samsung’s Galaxy range of phones — the company’s biggest and most profitable business division.
With Apple iPhone at the higher end of the market (and even pushing out lower-priced iPhones in markets like India), and aggressive rivals such as Lenovo and Micromax selling much cheaper versions of Android phones, this year is going to be tough for Samsung.
Investor concerns on Samsung’s ability to keep growing its mobile phone business became visible early this year, when the company lost $8 billion of the market value. According to a Bloomberg report, Samsung shipped only 9 million units of Galaxy S4 during the fourth quarter ending December, much lower than the 13 million units it had expected.
Samsung chairman Lee Kun Hee even warned employees last January to watch its back and continue to innovate in new business, as competition increases and the global economy continues to drag.
Earlier this year, Apple finally managed to strike a deal with China Mobile for selling iPhones in the country. Tim Cook also said that Apple sold more iPhones in China than ever before during the quarter. Moreover, Apple now seems to be working on bigger-sized iPhones to address the opportunity in markets like China where many consumers still prefer the 5.7-inch Galaxy Note over iPhones that offer 4-inch screen.
Among new launches planned for this year, Samsung said it will release Galaxy S5 by April and at least one other wearable device during 2014.
The company attributed lower growth to currency fluctuations and one-time bonus payments to workers to celebrate the 20th anniversary of chairman Lee’s new management strategy.
To be sure, Samsung is still the world’s biggest smartphone maker, accounting for nearly half of all the sales, but the challenge is more in terms of protecting its turf — both in terms of volumes and profitability.
This month a couple of services have popped up for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 – collections of games that can be played for free, crafted with HTML5 for … Continue reading
You don’t have to decorate the entire nursery in geek themes you know. Just a few touches here and there should be enough. In fact an adorable and nerdy mobile is all you need. It is a great way to teach your children about the characters you geek out over.
Etsy artist Drops of Color has just the mobile for you and your little gamer in training. Well, the seller offers several mobiles that are equally awesome. All made by hand with small felt plush characters. The Super Mario Bros. one is completely adorable, but the superhero ones are pretty cool too – and they teach your kids that DC and Marvel heroes can live in harmony.
Each mobile comes with five characters, and you can pick which ones you want. Each mobile is made to order and takes about 8 to 10 weeks to arrive at your doorstep. Be sure to stop by their shop and check out some of the other mobiles for sale.
[via Nerd Approved via it8bit]
The Zipi is a Kickstarter project that appears humble and almost silly on the surface, but that actually solves one of the biggest problems I have with day-to-day use of earbud headphones. I use earbuds whenever I leave the house, because exposing yourself to the noise of streets and other human beings going about their business is unconscionable, but getting them out of the way when you want to interact with people is a pain.
To solve this, the Zipi adds an around-the-neck strap to any existing pair of earbuds, with a simple magnetic clip-on design. It connects via magnets at the back of your neck, separates easily enough when you want to remove them entirely, and prevents your earbuds from just falling to the ground when you take them out of your ears.
Ordinarily when I remove earbuds on the go, I awkwardly throw them over one shoulder or roll them up and stuff them in a pocket. In scenario one, they almost always sneak off my shoulders and find their way to the floor where I step on them. In scenario two, getting them off and then putting them back on again amounts to a full-scale production, which is extremely annoying if you also happen to be carrying any bags or coffee or whatever.
I can still foresee potential issues with coat collars and other jazz with the Zipi, but it looks favorable when compared with the terrible, unending nightmare that is my current state of earbud cord management. Plus they’re only $6 per unit at the introductory early backer price, and they don’t seem to require any kind of advanced engineering that could cause innumerable shipping delays.
Project creator Frank Cho has a Master’s degree from MIT in AI, as well as a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in computer graphics, so he’s clearly got a good head on his shoulders. He makes no secret about the fact that the Zipi is his first foray into product design, but he has a realistic timeframe for delivery of early September and a fully functional prototype already built, so here’s hoping the Zipi meets its modest $6,000 funding goal.
The dirty little not-so-secret of smartphones is that you’ll never get the full amount of memory marked on the case. Operating systems take up space! But different phones leave you with different amounts of storage. Here, from Which?, are the most and least generous.
If you find most styluses in the market too big for your pocket, bag, or wallet, then you might want to look into Elektra Nails. It’s the most compact stylus we’ve seen yet – and a wearable one, at that.
Elektra Nails is essentially a stylus in the form of a nail that people can put on their fingers. In a sense, it turns a person’s finger (or rather, their nail) into a stylus so they can draw, write, and doodle with nothing but their digits.
The nails come in a neutral color, so guys can leave them as is while girls can paint over them with nail polish to customize them.
Made by Tech Tips, the Elektra Nails will be sold in packs of six and will come with six index fingernail styluses, adhesive strips, glue, a cuticle stick, and a prep pad for $14.95. They will be available by the second quarter of 2014.
[via C|NET]
Apple Patents Sapphire Display Tech After Last Year’s $578M Deal With Sapphire Maker
Posted in: Today's ChiliApple has had a patent approved today (via AppleInsider) that could make it a leader in a new kind of display material technology: Sapphire glass. The patent describes various methods for attaching sapphire crystal to electronic devices, and includes a description of how it does this with the sapphire glass covering the iPhone camera lens introduced with the iPhone 5, as well as a means for attaching sapphire as a cover for the whole display.
In the past, the iPhone has used Gorilla Glass to protect its screen (though some believe it may have stopped recently); Apple championed this tech and basically made its maker Corning the default choice for smartphone OEMs looking for a tough, scratch-resistant material to use to protect their screens. But last year, Apple made a $578 million bet on sapphire (which is used often in good watches) with GT Advanced Technologies to have it build a manufacturing plant for the material in Arizona.
When the deal was announced, our own Matthew Panzarino took a closer look at the investment, and at what sapphire glass could provide Apple. Sapphire, including the lab grown variety, is much tougher, more resistant to scratches, and more resistant to breakage after scratches than even Gorilla Glass, which has a strong reputation in all those arenas. It’s heavier, too, but would potentially allow Apple to use thinner pieces for both space and weight savings.
Of course, there are also existing needs at Apple for sapphire glass, including the iPhone camera lens and the new Touch ID-compatible home button, which many expect to make its way to other Apple devices including the iPad eventually. But the patent uses an iPhone-type device as its illustrative example, and specifically states that while the gadget depicted is a “smart phone,” the techniques described could be used on any number of devices. A smartwatch might be a good target case, for example, given that Apple has been rumored to have been working on one for some time, and that sapphire is a very common case material used in the manufacture of watches from most leading brands.
The patent itself details ways in which the sapphire material could be attached to the shell or casing of an electronic device, with examples in illustrations detailing jigsaw-type and tounge-and-groove mechanics for keeping the glass firmly in place.
At this stage, it’s more likely that Apple is simply laying the groundwork for a potential shift to sapphire in its phones and other devices a considerable way down the road, rather than tipping its hand for any immediately upcoming change in how its devices are made, but this patent demonstrates that it is indeed thinking in terms of smartphone displays and other applications that go beyond its current uses of the material.
Users of flagship smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone 5s and Samsung’s Galaxy S4 are continuing to suck down more data than their tablet-wielding counterparts, according to a large-scale survey of mobile data consumption in 2013 conducted by JDSU (which last year bought mobile data analytics company Arieso, the company that previously ran the annual survey).
Last year’s mobile data consumption survey, which looked at 2012 data, also found flagship smartphone device users outpacing the data consumption rates of tablet users.
But the most data thirsty phone users of all have an iPhone 5s burning a hole in their pocket.
As with the 2012 study, the 2013 survey examined the data demands of more than one million subscribers using more than 150 different devices over a single, 24-hour weekday in a Tier-1 European market, which had a mixture of urban and suburban morphologies. But for the first time the survey also studied a developing market for comparative purposes — with a further one million+ subscribers studied in this market over the same 24-hour period.
To ensure statistical validity the study only looked at the data demands of popular devices — i.e. those represented by at least 1,000 subscribers (conversely, the most popular devices had subscriber rates of well over 10,000 apiece).
The results are pretty telling about the habits of flagship smartphone owners, if not entirely surprising. You guys are a data-demanding bunch. Especially if you happen to own the latest iPhone.
Continuing the trend of the past three years’ findings, the 2013 study found that mobile subscribers using Apple’s flagship smartphone are the most data-hungry smartphone users of all. And they’re getting hungrier still: users of the new iPhone 5s are even more data-hungry than previous top-of-the-line iPhone owners — with the study describing them as the most voracious smartphone users it’s yet seen, with “unprecedented increases in uplink and downlink data demands”.
According to the findings, iPhone 5s users demand 7x as much data as iPhone 3G users in developed markets (the study uses the iPhone 3G as its mid-range benchmark device), and 20x as much data in developing markets.
The most data-demanding device in 2013 was the iPhone 5 — but iPhone 5s users are demanding a fifth (20%) more data than iPhone 5 users in developed markets, and 50% more data in developing markets.
Owners of Apple’s current flagship phone also have a greater data consumption than the Android-based Samsung Galaxy S4, which had a 5x data generation rate vs the iPhone 3G in developed markets and 11x in developing markets.
The SGS4 did rank a lot higher for uplink data generation — coming third in developed markets (vs sixth place for the iPhone 5s). The study goes on to note that the average user of the SGS4 generates almost as much uplink data as eleven iPhone 3G users in the developing market it analysed.
The SGS4′s “prolific” uplink data generation usage is described as “consistent with the improved high-resolution 13-megapixel primary camera and the 2-megapixel front-facing camera”. (The iPhone 5s has an 8MP rear camera.)
Both Apple and Samsung are amply represented in the top data gobbling devices across developed and developing markets, as the below tables from the report show:


The report also flags up the relatively reduced amount of data consumption by users of the lower cost iPhone 5c compared to previously released iPhones. ”This is consistent with the marketing of the device relative to the new flagship iPhone 5s,” the report notes.
Bottom line: even though the iPhone 5c is a shiny new iPhone, it’s not a flagship iPhone so the owners of this device have more modest data consumption habits (on average).
On the tablet front, Apple’s fourth-gen iPad has replaced the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 in the top tablet spot in the studied developed market (relative to 2012’s study). No sign of the iPad Air as yet, but it’s a little too early for that device to crop up on the analysed networks (being as it went on sale in November, when the data was being gathered).
The study also points out that — as with the don’t-call-it-cheap-but-it’s-not-a-flagship iPhone 5c — Apple’s lower priced tablet, the iPad mini, yields lower data consumption rates than its flagship tablet models. The report notes that iPad mini users consume only 80% of the downlink data consumed by 2nd and 3rd generations of iPads.
“Similar to the iPhone 5c, the iPad mini was not intended to be a flagship device and instead has sought to occupy a niche position in the market,” it adds.
Another characteristic of mobile data consumption detailed by the study applies to the hungriest 1% of all subscribers. The report notes that these users consume more than half of the downlink data volume — which it describes as “broadly consistent” with the trends reported over the past two years in developed markets.
However the device-types these hungriest of data-hungry mobile users are conducting their bandwidth hogging activities on has seen a bit of a shift. The report notes that in the developed market being analysed, smartphones now constitute the majority of “extreme devices”, taking a 63% fraction vs 40% in 2012′s study. While tablet device usage among this group has experienced the largest relative decline, dropping from 6% in 2012 to 2% in 2013.
It’s possible this is a consequence of smartphones getting bigger and thus more tablet-esque — aka the rise of the phablet — allowing extreme users to choose a compromise device that’s quasi-pocketable (compared to a full-fat tablet), and thus able to appeal to their desire to remain tethered at all times to the Internets, while still being large enough to eyeball most of the stuff they want to on the go.
There’s no doubt phablet usage is on the up — earlier this week analyst Juniper Research forecast that 120 million palm-stretching phablet units are expected to ship annually by 2018, up from an estimated 20 million in 2013. And with some signs that tablet sales might be softening, it seems logical to connect the swelling waistlines of the average smartphone as a contributory factor in swelling rates of data consumption among phone users.
Bigger smartphones, after all, often more screen real-estate for performing data-consuming activities. And, unlike tablets, these gizmos are merely a handy pocket away from users’ fingertips.
The report also touches on the role being played by LTE/4G in encouraging data-gobbling — noting that the higher speeds supporting by this next-gen cellular tech are doing the equivalent of pouring lighter fuel on the data consumption bonfire.
“The most extreme 0.1% of all users consume nearly half of all downlink LTE data,” the report notes. “Extreme behavior in UMTS required ten times as large a fraction (0.1% -> 1%) to get to half of all downlink data. As such, we can declare that LTE users are ten times more extreme than UMTS users.”
In other words, throw LTE into the mix along with powerful, fatty phablets and increasing levels of mobile data gluttony is a given. It’s almost enough to make you pity the poor carriers whose networks have to shoulder the burden of “extreme users” and data-diva flagship owners.
*Almost*
“The faster the speeds that mobile operators provide, the more consumers swallow it up and demand more,” concludes report author Dr Michael Flanagan.
“One would expect a honeymoon period in which early adopters test their toys. But for 4G users to consistently exhibit behaviour 10 times more extreme than 3G users well after launch constitutes a seismic shift in the data landscape.”
It only took four hours for the Glyph, a head-mounted “personal theater” from Avegant, to reach its $250,000 funding goal on Kickstarter.
Unlike the Oculus Rift’s focus on virtual reality, or Google Glass which forces a heads-up display into every facet of life, the Glyph is a media-centric device. For now, it offers a nice pair of high-end headphones with a headband that can transform into an immersive display.
The $499 wearable headset, complete with over-the-ear headphones, uses a new display technology the company called “Virtual Retina Display”. The Virtual Retina Display involves no screen at all, instead projecting images directly onto the retina with a complex array of LEDs and mirrors.
According to co-founder Ed Tang, this is meant to mimic the way our eyes work in real life, when they aren’t focused in on a computer or TV or smartphone screen, providing a much sharper, more realistic viewing experience.
The Glyph isn’t supposed to be a virtual reality device that cuts you off. Instead, it’s meant to be a headphone replacement with an optional display.
The Glyph can work natively with any audio or video source (including Xbox, smartphones, Netflix, etc.) through an HDMI/HML cord, and Avegant ensures that users can get to whatever content they want from anywhere in the world through a single cable.
But what about head-tracking?
The Glyph is packed with a 3-axis Gyro, accelerometer, and a digital magnetometer to allow for head-tracking when content is compatible. Tang claims that the team is working on mapping the headtracker to a mouse, with the goal of making most PC-based first person games will work right out of the box.
Later on, they’ll release some developer tools to give coders the option to build out mobile-based content.
We caught up with co-founder Ed Tang to discuss the instant success on Kickstarter and future plans for the Glyph.
TechCrunch: Can you give me a little background on Avegant as a company?
Ed Tang: My co-founder, Allan Evans, was getting his PhD at U of Michigan and doing advanced research on various medical devices and microsystems. He was working on projects for the U.S. government’s national research lab while he was out there, and was encouraged by people in the military to look into building new display technology. For things like night vision and other military uses, the performance has always been really bad on these displays, which causes a lot of eye strain after more than an hour, and users become actively tired.
So he approached things from an engineering standpoint as well as a physiological standpoint, thinking about how we, as humans, see. Our eyes get tired if we stare at displays, but when I look out the window or around the room, things are comfortable and realistic. So we chose to replicate the kind of light we see in real life, which is reflective light. Emissive light doesn’t have the same properties that make it less exhausting and more realistic.
The system he built is a virtual retina display, and it’s a display with no screen. Instead the image is being projected onto the retina, the way we see things in normal life, with a very low-power LED. Kind of like the flashlight on the end of a keychain.
The cool thing is that anything you put into this technology, from a movie to a game or whatever, looks so much more crisp and vivid and comfortable, than any other display we have ever seen.
So once we realized what it could do, we had to make it smaller. At the beginning of last year, the prototypes were the size of a coffee table, and it felt like going to an eye doctor exam. You sat down in this huge machine, and adjusted various objects around you, with tons of cords. Still, we proved the concept, which let us raise a little funding from friends and family, which let us repackage it into the size of a big pair of glasses.
We had some great reviews on that product, and after talking to consumers and looking at test cases, seeing how people wanted to use this, we realized that people are engaging more and more with mobile devices, and less and less with TVs at home. Most of what people do with their smartphones and tablets is watching videos, playing games and listening to music.
The device that really wins is the one that fits what people want to do today, which meant building a very premium set of headphones into this revolutionary display tech. That way, when you want video content, you can flip down the headband and turn headphones into a display.
When we looked at other head-mounted display tech out there, there was never a good audio solution paired with it. We knew we had to change that. But one of the challenges is that if we’re going to replace someone’s high-end headphones, our product has to be really good. People are picky about headphones.
TC: So how did you go about doing that? Do you have people on your team focused solely on the audio experience?
ET: We have a couple of audio engineers on our team. One worked on projects for TI, Amazon, and Google, and they were both trained by the top audio engineers in the world. They helped us a lot on our current design.
We benchmarked our headphones against all of the competing high-end headphones out there, from Sennheiser to Audio Technica to Bose or anything else we could find over $300, and we feel we match up against the best of them. We want the user to start out with a really accurate, super precise sound and then slightly tune it to be more pleasing.
I’d gladly put our headphones up against any audio product over $300.
TC: In your Kickstarter video, you had some great endorsements from Second Life and High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale and Netflix VP of IT Operations Mike Kail. Why are other people so excited about the Glyph?
ET: These endorsements are well deserved. When it comes to the Glyph and partners, it’s more about helping the entire industry, not about us.
Many people we talk to believe that video won’t stay the same as it is today, where it’s a passive experience around your TV. We’re going to see a massive change in how consumers consume media and what we’re doing here with Glyph is something that excites people in the industry.
For Philip, a realistic looking head-mounted display is the key to virtual reality. It’s what’s always been missing, to let you look around and hear audio change as you turn your head. So that the experience is truly immersive and convincing.
Netflix, on the other hand, is an interesting company that has changed its business model a number of times, from DVD rental to streaming to content creation. This company has seen a huge decline in traditional media delivery first hand, and is being proactive about the future of the mobile market. As bandwidth has gotten cheaper and faster, people can use Netflix on their phone, but the device that delivers the best experience hasn’t reached market yet.
TC: Aside from similar devices we’ve seen from Sony and other large players, the Oculus Rift seems to be one of your competitors in the head-mounted, virtual reality display space. How do you differentiate?
ET: We actually don’t consider ourselves direct competitors with Oculus. They’re solely focused on virtual reality, and growing interest and excitement in the virtual reality space again.
This is fantastic for us, because the more familiar people get with head-mounted displays, the better it is for all of us. That includes Oculus and Google Glass and anything else. But while Oculus is focused on virtual reality, we’re focused on more general audience use.
We want the business professional, or even my mother to use the Glyph. These are people that really want to engage in media and play games and watch movies and listen to music. The Glyph is a multimedia device for every day use, and people listen to more music than they watch video.
So we built something that let them switch from one to the other easily, when they want it.
Another big differentiator between what we do and straight virtual reality is how cut off from the rest of the world you are. You can’t hear or see anything around you. We don’t want to do that.
If you’re going to use our product in the airport or on the train, you need to feel comfortable, so we tried to maximize peripheral vision around the user. That way, when the drink cart comes by on a plane or the passenger next to you wants to go to the bathroom, you know what’s going on.
TC: One of the biggest issues with wearable tech has been that mainstream audiences have trouble wearing their technology. Google Glass and Oculus Rift target geekier, more tech-savvy audiences who are more willing to adopt. How do you plan to tackle the mainstream audience who seems to be resistant to wearables?
ET: When you look at wearable technology, everybody is focused on the technology and not the wearable part. If people aren’t willing to wear it, it doesn’t matter how cool the technology is. I have Google Glass but I feel really uncomfortable wearing it. People stare at you and look at you funny. When I’m just hanging out and talking to my buddy, there’s this thing in between us all the time.
That’s why we went after the headphone form factor. You can wear the Glyph just as you do any other headphones. Since people engage in audio way more than video most of the time, they can replace the headphones they already own and feel totally normal wearing the product. No one around you will think you’re doing something weird by wearing them.
But when you want to tune out the rest of the world and watch a movie, you can flip down the visor and watch movies. We look at it as one small step toward wearable technology, because we’ve given the user something they’re already comfortable with wearing and added an extra feature to it.
That’s why I think the smartwatch will be so successful. Because people already wear watches, so it doesn’t look weird or out of place.
TC: You’ve raised your $250k goal in less than four hours, and it doesn’t look like demand is slowing down. We’ve seen many Kickstarter projects blow past their goal and later run into manufacturing or shipping issues. Are you prepared to supply this sort of demand?
ET: We’ve prepped all of our manufacturing for low quantity and high quantity demand.
For the foreseeable future, we’ll be just fine with this demand. On our Kickstarter pages, we’re claiming a December delivery date, but we expect to have units ready to ship a few months before that. We’ve manufactured a lot of these components already in lower quantities as a test run, to explore and answer all of these questions. And we feel very confident.
Now, it’s just about taking current prototypes we have and improving fit and finish. The prototypes look great and image quality is fantastic, but we want a premium quality product that isn’t even a little bit bulky or heavy. We’re not worried about manufacturing because having more units actually makes it easier for us to scale our model.
Building 1,000 units is easier than building 100.
TC: Companies have been trying this sort of technology for years. What has changed over time that makes this a viable product with lots of demand?
ET: People have been trying to do this for ten or twenty years, but there are a number of reasons why it hasn’t picked up at all.
First, the visual experience has to be there. There hasn’t been a head-mounted display that has a good enough visual experience. The Glyph experience isn’t just decent, it’s better than a TV or a movie theater. In fact, it’s ruined going to the movies for me.
The second thing is form factor. It has to fit in your life. It can’t be something extra you have to carry or something cumbersome that isn’t comfortable to wear. By replacing headphones, the Glyph takes up the same spot in your bag, and even if you don’t watch a lot of video you still have fantastic headphones.
The third factor is that it has to work with people’s existing content. People want to watch their own stuff, portably, and they want to be able to watch it on all the devices they have today. It has to be battery-powered with a single cable. The Glyph runs all the content you already own.
I never wanted to build something that required developers to create content for it. I would hate selling something to someone on Kickstarter and having to tell them that they won’t see good content for it for another six months.
The last part is audio. If you don’t combine audio with it than you only offer part of the experience. It’s the key to letting the general consumer adopt this technology.