Sony’s announced a new mid-to-high-end "phablet" model today, with its Xperia T2 Ultra arriving in both normal and dual-SIM options. It combines a 1080p display with a 13-Megapixel camera, with Sony plumbing its quad-core Qualcomm MSM8928 chipset into 1GB of RAM.
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Sony is adding two smartphones to its growing stable of devices. Meet the Xperia T2 Ultra and the Xperia E1 — both substantial updates to Sony’s 2013 models. Best yet, both are offered in dual-sim variants.
These latest phones join the Z1S and Z1 announced last week at CES. However, it seems Sony held these close to its chest, as they’re somewhat mundane and not destined for the U.S. market. And, as Sony found out from years of experience, to “win” CES requires focused and streamlined announcements and not a proverbial conveyor belt of press releases.
Sony is up front about the T2 Ultra’s destination: This phone is for emerging markets like China, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific rim, touts the press release. But this phone isn’t lacking in any substantial way. It’s packed to the gills with the best Sony has to offer, including a near edgeless design with a 6-inch screen and a 13MP camera. The major downside of the phone comes in the way of a quad-core 1.4 GHz Snapdragon of an unannounced pedigree. However, the battery life is likely stellar thanks to this slower SoC and 3000 mAh battery.
The E1 is the budget phone in the mix. It leans on Sony’s audio brand and sports a speaker capable of hitting 100Db in case you want to share your love of Neil Young with co-workers in a different office building. Up front is a 4-inch screen, up from 3.2-inches found in the Xperia E released in early 2013.
There is no word on pricing or release dates, though. Sony is likely holding that information until Mobile World Congress in February.
With these latest models, Sony is continuing down the course of offering a simplified device lineup. The company is putting a lot of emphasis on just a few devices in each market unlike in the past when it would flood the scene with countless SKUs.
Airware wants to prove drones have plenty of uses beyond killing people. Today the unmanned aerial vehicle hardware/software/firmware startup detailed how it’s built and deployed special drones to thwart animal poachers in Kenya, Africa. The demo could build interest for the launch of Airware’s commercial drone platform later this year.
Airware was founded in 2010 and graduated from Y Combinator in March 2013 with the goal of bringing the drone revolution to a wide variety of businesses and other areas such as precision agriculture, land management, infrastructure inspection of powerlines or oil derricks, and search and rescue.
Airware builds drone hardware, software and firmware operating systems that control them, as well as their user interfaces. Businesses and organizations can then build apps and other functionality on top of Airware’s drone platform to perform their own specific purpose without having to create an end-to-end UAV system by themselves.
In May 2013, Airware raised a big $10.7 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Google Ventures, RRE Ventures, Lemnos Labs, Promus Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Felicis Ventures – the biggest post-Demo Day round in Y Combinator history. It’s been using the money to bridge the gap between hardcore military UAV development, and the do-it-yourself drones and toy quadcopters that have recently become popular.
Later this year, Airware’s commercial drone platform will expand beyond beta testser and become broadly available. But first it needs to help change the world’s perception of what drones are for. “We want to educate people on the very positive uses for drones”, Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey tells me.
Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Air Prime certainly helped, but commercial drone use in heavily populated area is a still a ways off and will require strict regulation. Airware wants to show how drones can be used for good right now.
So in December, Airware sent a team to Kenya to work at Ol Pejeta, East Africa’s biggest black rhino sanctuary. There the worked the Ol Pejeta Conservancy to deploy a drone built specifically to monitor the sanctuary for intrusions by poachers using the drone’s on-board cameras. Airware writes that “The drone, equipped with Airware’s autopilot platform and control software, acts as both a deterrent and a surveillance tool, sending real-time digital video and thermal imaging feeds of animals – and poachers – to rangers on the ground using both fixed and gimbal-mounted cameras.” You can see the drones in action in the video clip below.
Covering so much ground on foot or even by car would be cumbersome, while using full sized planes or helicopters would be prohibitively expensive. But with Airware’s drones, Ol Pejeta rangers can use a simple interface to fly drones around the sanctuary and spot poachers day and night.
Downey says “I think the more people that see these [non-military uses for drones], the more comfortable they’ll be with someone coming to their house and doing a rooftop inspection using a small drone.” While it’s easy to imagine all the scary things that drones can do, it’s important to remember that few technologies are inherently bad. It’s about what we do with them. Sure, some inventors become masters of war. But Airware wants to democratize drones to benefit mankind, not blow it up.
CES may be finished for another year, but one of the biggest themes of the show — that anything (cars, watches, mirrors, tables, whatever) can be ‘hardware’ — is just taking off. And today’s news of Google buying Nest for $3.2 billion underscores how Google wants to be the player at the front and center of hardware.
Google’s Nest buy may not be giving the search giant access to all the data that zooms across Nest’s apps, thermostats and smoke detectors (for now at least), but it will give Google something else: top-shelf design expertise for that next frontier of hardware, by way of a team of people brought together by two senior hardware veterans from Apple, one of whom is known as the father of the iPod.
This is a significant turn of events for Google.
Up to now, the search giant has cornered business — on desktop internet, mobile devices — through software, and then monetized those markets with data — specifically advertising data.
It’s been a fundamentally different approach from Apple, the quintessentially vertically integrated company that controls not just a platform and the services that run on it, but the devices they run on, too. (And with that, the lucrative margins that come from successful, premium hardware sales.)
Nest will give Google an opportunity to diversify its revenues by tackling a whole new market — connected home devices — with that vertical approach.
“This is the new hardware movement,” as one person described it. “Devices + services, product-market fit and research done through crowdfunding platforms, mix of retail partnerships and direct online sales.”
For Google, Nest is a particularly attractive example. Not only does it make an integrated piece of connected hardware for the home, but it’s designed with interoperability at its heart — in the initial case, by way of apps that you control on your iOS or Android smartphone, along with a well-developed, direct and online retail channel and loyal following.
It’s an area, in any case, that Google appears to have already been eyeing up for some time. In December, for example, The Information uncovered a test Google was running called EnergySense, which appeared to be a smart thermostat program that helped people lower energy consumption. This reportedly was being trialled on third party devices from Nest competitor Ecobee, but could now potentially find their way to Nest’s thermostats instead.
“Will Nest and Google products work with each other?” co-founder Matt Rogers asked in a hypothetical Q&A post earlier today. “Nest’s product line obviously caught the attention of Google and I’m betting that there’s a lot of cool stuff we could do together, but nothing to share today,” he answered.
Yet, to say that the acquisition is a boost for Google alone is not the whole story.
For months now, Nest has been facing a growing cacophony of criticism from customers that the software on its products was buggy. Leaning on Google’s software expertise could come in handy here (although the overlap between Google haters and Nest lovers could pose a problem in this regard).
And there is also the issue of Nest’s intellectual property and patent fights. Nest is facing patent infringement lawsuits from Honeywell and First Alert maker BRK. To help fight those and also to protect itself from copycats, it’s been aggressive on the patent front, with 100 patents granted, another 200 filed and a further 200 ready to file; and an ongoing licensing agreement with Intellectual Ventures. Bringing Google into the mix will be another major boost for safeguarding the company in these battles, too.
The Nest acquisition also raises questions of how Google’s other hardware interests may come into play going forward.
Motorola, which Google acquired for $12.5 billion in 2012, at one time looked like it could be a way for Google to take a new, vertical approach to smartphones and tablets. Ultimately, Motorola remained a partner among equals with other Android OEMs, and patents became one of the most crucial parts of the deal. Could the Nest acquisition, bringing a new focus on hardware creation, see Google bring in some of the IP and talent that Google picked up in that Motorola deal?
With the folks at Tobii Technology you’ve got some of the most advanced work in the world being down with eye-tracking with the PC. This month they’re introducing a partnership … Continue reading
Just so you’re aware, there’s a new word in the English language this month, one made by Sprint, one called “Framily.” If you’re getting pumped up about the many, many … Continue reading
An interview with Nokia’s Viral Oza in The Economic Times published today details the company’s mobile strategy in India and the world at large.
Oza isn’t concerned about the potential for increased competition, telling the Times that “The entry of more players in the Windows Phone market will help the ecosystem to grow further.” Nokia’s Lumia line of Windows Phone smartphones has become the de facto brand of handsets, but there has been rumor of Sony jumping into the ring this year.
He then appears to tie the entrance of new hardware players to a more healthy application market: “Also, more developers will come on board, strengthening the ecosystem even more. In that sense, it only encourages the consumers to buy Windows Phone and broadening the ecosystem.”
This is a long-term argument. Presumably the entrance of a large player, say Sony for example, could depress Nokia’s short-term device sales. But in Oza’s eyes, if that leads to a healthier platform, Nokia could sell more Windows Phone handsets in the long term, provided there’s a more healthy Windows Phone.
Nokia’s Lumia group therefore could be willing to cede short-term market share if it means they get help in growing Windows Phone down the road.
This all becomes complicated in that Nokia’s Lumia business is about to become Microsoft’s Lumia business, but Microsoft has echoed the sentiment that more players building Windows Phone hardware is something to be sought out, not discouraged; as a firm, Microsoft doesn’t want to make every Windows Phone handset that is sold, post its purchase of Nokia’s hardware group.
Oza goes on in the interview to discuss download figures, something always worth examining when discussing the health of a platform:
We already have over 5000 developers in India, who develop apps for Windows Phone platform. 65 percent of all downloads for India developed apps are from outside India, while 35 percent is from India. There is a huge traction towards these India developed apps for Windows Phone. Downloads in India are around 4 million downloads a week from the marketplace.
This tells us that Indian developers are building English-language applications that are seeing global traction, and that a market the size of India does around 16 million downloads per month, or just under 200 million a year at current pace.
That figure scales, given Windows Phone current market share tear in the Indian market.
Tempering the above as unmitigated good news, keep in mind that Microsoft-Nokia continue to struggle for similar growth rates in the United States market, even as numbers for their platform improve in Europe and Latin America. Developer sentiment and innovation are often set in the U.S. market, making it more important than its subscriber rates would normally indicate.
Finally, Oza doesn’t anticipate a pricing war if new OEMs enter its market, implying that Microsoft can anticipate little new margin pressure on its 7.3 billion dollar purchase of Nokia’s hardware assets. That also gives OEMs future price stability to invest against. Perhaps not the most critical element in their planning, but something that could help lure the new players that Windows Phone certainly needs.
The Pebble smartwatch is a great gadget in many respects, but the one thing that has always struck me as less than convenient is the fact that it uses a proprietary magnetic cable to charge. I lose said cable with fair frequency, and in fact I have no idea where it is right at this very moment. New Kickstarter project Sidekick will at least make it harder to lose, with a Pebble dock that holds your charger cable and provides power to your Pebble.
The Sidekick is a small rounded triangle, hewn either from black or white plastic or from wood, with a special channel cut out to perfectly fit the cable. It also supports your Pebble in an upright position, providing a clear view of the screen if you’re sitting at your desk working on your computer for instance.
Sidekick creator and design company Documont founder Rodney Timbol says that he has become a devoted fan of the Pebble itself, but also found that it wasn’t quite as convenient as it could be for off-wrist use.
“My wife and I purchased the Pebble and both had the experience of the Pebble and charger dropping on the floor from our nightstand so needed a really simple way of avoiding damaging our newly purchased watches,” he explained. “I started thinking I needed a stand but I got so consumed by the functions of the Pebble and that began my quest to design a different docking experience.”
It’s definitely true that as a watch-wearer myself, I always take mine off while typing in order to allow for free and easy typing. Usually, I keep my iPhone in a dock below my monitor to also keep up with info coming in on that device, but the Sidekick might better serve that purpose for those looking to maintain the kind of information prioritization that smartwatch notifications can provide.
With no moving parts and an attractive design, the Sidekick is a deceptively simple Pebble accessory that actually seems like something you’d expect Pebble might eventually ship in the box itself. It’s extremely affordable, too: $15 gets you one in the natural maple finish, and currently you can get a black or white version for just a $19 pledge. It can dock a Pebble either with charging or without (which means you won’t unnecessarily be putting stress on your battery), and it supports after-market bands as well as those that ship on the Pebble.
Timbol says that he plans to build a Pebble Steel version as well once he receives his device in early February, so anyone who has pre-ordered this device can expect something similar to emerge to suit the new Pebble magnetic connector, which differs from the original design. The Sidekick has an anticipated ship date of April 2014.
Supposing you’ve had a peek at the Nokia smartphone platform over the past few years, you know good and well two things are true. The first is that Nokia runs … Continue reading
Sony finally got one mostly right
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