Just four months after its introduction, Sprint is axing its ‘One Up’ early upgrade plan, instead pushing its new "Framily" plan (which doesn’t offer any option for early upgrades without paying for unlimited data). That didn’t last long.
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In an interview with Bloomberg, Blackberry’s CEO John Chen said that the future of the brand is in hardware keyboards. "I personally love the keyboards," he said, "so you will look to Blackberry going forward to do keyboards — I wouldn’t use the word exclusively, but predominantly." Welcome to the past!
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Apple aired a new iPad advertisement during the NFL playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Carolina Panthers today, and it’s all about creativity. It’s no secret that Apple wants to push the creative aspect of its mobile devices, which are still seen largely as consumption gadgets, and this new ad embraces a grand vision of iOS as fertile ground for inspiration and creation.
“What will your verse be?” is the tagline for the ad, and the idea is that each person gets to contribute one verse to the overall poem of human experience (which is a terrible poem by the way). The iPad in the commercial is used in a number of different creative capacities, including as a filming accessory, as a prototyping tool, as a means for writing, and as a way to 3D prototype and work in the depths of the ocean.
It’s telling that many early iPad commercials depicted users in familiar settings using the gadget on their laps, on their couches or in other similarly mundane situations, while this one takes the tablet to the far corners of the earth. Apple also lists the uses depicted in the commercial in greater detail on its ‘Your Verse’ microsite to give more context.
The message is not only that the iPad is capable of true creativity, but also that it’s an aspirational device: This is a lifestyle ad akin to the kind of thing you see from Lexus and other high-end car manufacturers, and that’s a good marketing strategy for the iPad in terms of capitalizing on Apple’s brand cachet. The perceived superiority of Apple tablets in terms of quality is a key weapon the company retains in its ongoing battle with Android slates, after all.
A device with the (code) name Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Neo has appeared this week with specifications and a look that suggest Samsung is going back to basics. It’s like … Continue reading
Qualcomm showed off some of the magic powers of its latest mobile processors at CES this year, and many of the new features on display had to do with mobile cameras. The Qualcomm 805, announced back in November, will offer smartphone shooters some powerful new tools once it starts making its way into shipping phones later this year.
The most impressive new feature is the ability to select focus after a picture is captured. You can either put everything into sharp focus for incredible depth of field, or choose one point and throw the rest into attractive, soft focus for pleasing bokeh. You may recognize this tech; it’s similar to how the Lytro light field camera works.
The Lytro captures its images differently, however, which accounts for its elongated design. Qualcomm has managed to do all the heavy lifting by capturing multiple exposures in rapid succession, using existing camera hardware. That means it’ll be simple to build it into upcoming smartphones.
Besides focus selection, Qualcomm’s chip can also power intelligent lighting and exposure correction, as well as help with making sure that flash photos don’t appear too washed out or unnatural looking. All-in-all, Qualcomm is doing a great job bringing to market tech that seemed to be many years out only just recently, and it’ll be great to see how OEMs employ this tech in their products in 2014.
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It was about this time last year that Tactus — the company behind the amazing disappearing touchscreen keyboard — really started making a name for itself. So what does a buzzy company do to top its previous showing at the world’s biggest consumer tech show? In Tactus’ case it quietly showed off yet another potential game-changer, so we met with Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla on the CES show floor to dig into what the team has been working on.
If you’ll recall, the past few months have been interesting ones for Tactus. The Fremont, Calif., company linked up with Synaptics to cobble together a reference Android tablet and it just recently locked up a hefty Series B round to help it flesh out its relationships with new and existing OEM partners working to embed Tactus tech into their wares.
As it turns out, they’ve been working on some kooky (not to mention awesome) hardware prototypes, too. Ciesla brought one such device for us to peek at, and should it reach production, it could potentially solve one of Tactus’ biggest hangups.
You see, Tactus’ big deal is all about licensing its disappearing keyboard tech to other device manufacturers, which means that all the tablets currently floating around on the market are tablets that Tactus can’t make money off of. In order to fix that, the team whipped up an impressive 3D-printed case prototype within the span of a month that adapts that screen keyboard tech to existing devices. When it’s lashed onto a device (in this case, an iPad mini) the Tactus case pushes fluid into a series of vessels nestled in a thin layer that sits atop the tablet’s screen. The end result? A keyboard that can appear and disappear at will and work on any device.
The case has the sort of rough edges you’d expect a prototype to have, but there’s no denying that seeing a fluid-filled keyboard up and running on an iPad is tremendously cool. Because of the aftermarket nature of the case, there’s no way to coax the keyboard into appearing through software, so a slider on the side controls how much fluid gets pushed into the screen.
Neat as this is, Ciesla was eager to remind me that Tactus has no desire to craft and sell these sorts of devices under its own name. He expects the first batch of Tactus-enabled gadgets to hit the market toward the middle of the year, and with any luck, some smart OEM will bite the licensing bullet and crank these cases out for the masses soon.
In the announcement of the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact, the company made a rather pointed suggestion – our best doesn’t have to be our biggest. Working specifications that closely match … Continue reading
Google today started rolling out the latest version of its Google Play services for Android. Just like earlier updates, version 4.1 brings a number of incremental changes to the company’s service for integrating Google services into mobile apps. The rollout is currently in process and should land on all Android devices worldwide within the next few days.
Today’s update brings support for turn-based multiplayer games to Play services, for example. With this, developers can easily build asynchronous games with up to eight participants. Every time a player takes a turn, the data is uploaded to Google’s servers and shared with the other players. Google has integrated this service with its tools for matching players with others, too.
Also new in this update is improved support for Google+ sharing. This, the company says, will make it “even easier for users to share with the right people from your app.” As part of this update, users will be able to get auto-complete support and suggested recipients for all Gmail contacts, device contacts and people on Google+.
Developers can now also use Play services to access Google Drive through a new API that’s now in preview. With this, they can read and write files in Drive. Users will be able to work on these files offline, and changes will be synced automatically.
For developers who use Google’s ad products, this new version introduces full support for DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Search Ads for Mobile Apps. What’s most interesting for advertisers, though, is that publishers can now also use a new location API to give Google access to a user’s location when requesting ads. Location-based ads are likely to perform better than generic ads, after all, though users have generally been a bit nervous about sharing this data with advertisers given the potential privacy ramifications.
One other feature most users will likely appreciate is improved battery life. While Google isn’t sharing any details about this, the company said that anybody who has Google Location Reporting turned on should see longer battery life after this update, though whether that means less than 1 percent more (likely) or 10 percent more (very unlikely) remains to be seen.
Qardio was one of the startups competing in our battlefield competition at Disrupt Europe 2013, last October. On stage in Berlin it showed off a forthcoming consumer ECG monitor, the QardioCore, along with a wireless blood pressure monitoring device, QardioArm. The startup has now kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to help get the less expensive of the two, the QardioArm, to market — using the Indiegogo platform as its springboard.
Qardio’s devices are designed to undercut the high cost of current-gen medical kit, while also offering a simpler and more passive way for people to monitor their health that leverages the power of smartphones/tablets — with data from Qardio’s hardware streamed or synced to the user’s mobile device where it can be tracked and reviewed.
Qardio is looking for $100,000 in crowdfunding via Indiegogo to help it get the smart blood pressure monitor to market. It previously said it expects this device to retail for $99 but is offering it to early backers for $75.
This campaign is a flexible funding one, meaning Qardio does not need to meet that target in order to get the pledged funds. Indeed, it largely looks to be using Indiegogo to boost visibility — i.e., mostly as an additional marketing channel — and to get feedback and ideas to help further development, rather than because it needs the cash for manufacturing.
The QardioArm syncs blood pressure readings to Qardio’s secure cloud, where data can then be shared with others, such as your doctor. Users can also view their blood pressure data in Qardio’s companion iOS app.
As to when the QardioArm will be in the hands of users, the startup says it’s currently awaiting “final clearance” from the US Food and Drug Administration (for shipping to the US) and certification under EU Product Directives (for Europe).
It’s currently expecting to get clearance in time to ship the QardioArm to backers in March 2014 — which fits with its previously discussed timetable. At Disrupt Berlin, Qardio said it was planning to retail both the QardioCore and QardioArm online and through brick-and-mortar partnerships early this year.
At the time of writing, a few days into its Indiegogo campaign and with 27 days left to run, Qardio has raised more than $30,500.
With Android landing on all-in-one computers and Windows extending its reach deeper into the mobile world, the platform world is tightening into three key teams: iOS and OS X, Windows, and Android.
Chrome OS, BlackBerry, and the other minor players have derivative unit volume, and can therefore be discounted in our larger image of the market.
To compare those three groups yields an irksome, yet interesting, picture. Gartner recently released a set of statistics and prognostications along those operating system niches, stacking the groups against one another. The fine folks over at Redmond Magazine did us the favor of graphing the results.
Here, in a single chart, is the rise of Android, the slippage in the PC market, and Apple’s rising tide:
Microsoft manages to stay atop Apple, but the chart makes it plain that if Microsoft doesn’t want to fall even further behind Android — recall that Android is now being deployed across device classes — it will have to grow its mobile base at a far more rapid pace than it has thus far. Put another way, for Microsoft to chase Google, it can’t lean on the PC market, even as that market category stabilizes.
We can presume that Apple’s growth is mostly iOS-based, given that its OS X offerings are dealing with similar headwinds as Microsoft’s Windows platform.
In July 2013, my colleague Josh Constine and I called Android the new Windows. Recently, Paul Thurrott made the point that 2013 was “the year that Android became the Windows of the mobile world.” In an increasingly multi-modal computing market, where the difference between device classes is blurring, operating systems are becoming more diversely deployed. So, we can’t keep Android unit volume in one bucket, and Windows PC numbers in a separate class.
Microsoft, if it wants to regain the mantle of the leading platform company, has to do more than end the decline in the PC market: It has to ignite its own mobile growth.
Top Image Credit: Flickr
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