Hasta La Gadget!

Polaroid’s newish image as a digital media company got one more boost today, with the launch of a new, $150 Android tablet aimed specifically at children. Simply/obviously branded the “Polaroid kids tablet,” the 7-inch device has sidestepped the holiday shopping rush to try its luck instead launching among the throng at the CES show later this month in Las Vegas.

The news comes one day after Polaroid also announced a new retail strategy, the launch of at least 10 new stores this year dedicated to digital printing, which will also become a key place also to showcase its devices.

You might legitimately criticize Google’s Android for breeding a lot of fragmentation in the mobile market, but what the open-source OS has also done is help make wireless devices like tablets and smartphones truly mainstream, and, by way of being a ‘free’ OS, pave the way for some interesting devices that cater specifically to particular market segments. The Polaroid kids tablet is part of both of those trends.

The kids tablet, Polaroid says, will be made extra-durable — as you can see by the illustration here, that will include an extra-large bumper/bezel. Other hardware specifics for the Ice Cream Sandwich-loaded device, made in conjunction with Polaroid licensee Southern Telecom, include 8GB of internal storage with an additional external SD card slot; a 1.0 GHz CORTEX-A8 processor, a rear-only camera, and WiFi-only connectivity.

And, like other connected devices aimed at the youth market, it will come preloaded with parent-controlled security features and links to educational and kids-specific content.

This will include a “Kids Cam”, Music Studio and Draw features, as well as a couple of customized interfaces to deliver children-friendly content. These include a filtered video-streaming app called Kids Vids, as well as an interface called Free Play that presents all the free apps available from a child-filtered Android app store, the App Shop.

As a parent of two young kids myself, I have to admit that I’ve been pretty disappointed with a lot of the “kid friendly” devices on the market to date, which are usually too restricted and closed-source to be truly useful. And kids, after all, like to use tablets and smartphones pretty much like adults do, as evidenced by this Harris Poll study out today on smartphone and computer usage across the U.S.

I personally haven’t taken the time to “child proof” our own connected devices and so am constantly hovering over my children every time they use them, to keep them from lapsing into near-constant browsing of very, very random YouTube content (despite my very best efforts to restrict that browsing to Khans Academy ‘let’s learn math!’ videos). Something like this seems to take advantage of the huge amount of good content out there to keep them interested, while also giving a bit of peace of mind.

Other features include hotlinks to Nook children’s books, Dr. Seuss’ catalogue and interactive books from the Smithsonian.

Polaroid is selling the kids tablet along with its other devices online as well as through Kohl’s stores.

T-Mobile has just announced the BlackBerry Curve 9315, which will be available January 23 for the price of $49 on a 2-year agreement. They’re touting it as the most affordable BlackBerry on the T-Mobile network, and it is, but it’s also maybe the worst deal in smartphones right now. The Curve 9315 is essentially just the Curve 9310, which was launched in July 2012 and is RIM’s low-end phone. To see it rebranded for T-Mobile and introduced at this price on contract, hitting shelves a week before BB10 is officially unveiled is baffling.

BB10 is set to debut officially at a launch event January 30, taking place at a number of different locations worldwide. Reports and rumors suggest that the first phones using that operating system could go on sale shortly after that, possibly as early as February if not before. The Curve 9315 is being marketed as a low-cost device, and in fact “the most affordable BlackBerry smartphone” on T-Mobile’s network, but it will still come with a $49.99 “out-of-pocket down payment,” followed by 20 equal monthly payments of $10 and require that customers sign up for a 2-year special value agreement on T-Mobile’s Equipment Installment Plan. Or, if you’re going with a traditional contract plan (not the value variety), it’ll still cost you $49.99 (and that’s after a $50 mail-in rebate).

The Curve 9315 will become available for pre-sale to T-Mobile business customers starting January 16, and goes on sale to the general public through T-Mobile stores starting January 23. The device comes with a 3.2 megapixel rear camera, a microSD storage expansion slot, a 320×240 164ppi display and 512MB of RAM, and only offers 3G connectivity. It’s an aging device (and one largely based on the Curve 9300 platform released in 2010, with a few spec bumps), with a new model number specific to T-Mobile, and severely underspecced to arrive at this point in the game and at that price.

A low-end Curve 9315 device release at this point in the game is definitely a head-scratcher, especially when it comes with a $49 price tag (which adds up to $200 if you’re doing the installment payment plan). But it’s made even more bizarre by the imminent launch of BlackBerry 10. RIM has been touting BB7 as still a viable mobile OS all along, even as it crowed about BB10, but looking for customers to pay that much for this device a week ahead of the unveiling of a new OS with which it won’t be compatible seems crazy. True, RIM won’t likely offer BB10 on hardware at entry-level prices out of the gate, but then use BB7 as a true budget mobile OS; at this point, the Curve 9315 should be free on contract, and extremely cheap without.

Leap Motion is announcing today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald told me that the company is still planning to ship its gesture-based controller sometime during the first quarter of this year, and he’s also announcing a partnership with Asus that should help get Leap Motion into the hands of consumers.

This is just one of the first in a number of deals that the company has in the works with manufacturers and retailers, Buckwald said. In this case, Asus is supposed to bundle the Leap Motion controller with its All-In-One PCs and high-end notebooks. Buckwald said he’ll have other bundling partnerships to announce, as well as deals with other manufacturers to integrate or embed the company’s products: “That’s a huge part of our distribution strategy.”

Why is this appealing to a manufacturer like Asus? Buckwald argued that it’s because Leap Motion can help turn PCs into exciting platforms again. (Though to be clear, he also plans to expand beyond PCs.) Unless they’re serious gamers, most people aren’t taking advantage of the computing power at their command, he said: “They use a tiny fraction of a very powerful processor — they browse the Internet or they use a word processor.” But by allowing users to interact directly with applications by just moving their fingers or hands, Buckwald said that Leap Motion makes a number of “computationally intensive” tasks more accessible — for example, there are apps that allow users to edit music with their hands.

In fact, the company says that that more than 40,000 developers have signed up to develop Leap Motion applications, with 12,000 developer units of the controller already shipped.

Right now, President and COO Andy Miller (a former VP in Apple’s iAd program, as well as co-founder at mobile ad network Quattro) said he’s seeing a mix between existing apps that are adding gesture-based controls and others that are built specifically for Leap Motion.

“As [the Leap Motion] app store matures, we’ll start to see the ratio shift towards apps that are built from the ground up, that are created and designed with this in mind,” Miller said.

You can see the controller in action in the (old-ish) demo video below. It’s supposed to be “iPod-sized,” while creating a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet around the user. The company says that the controller tracks individual hands and fingers at a rate of 290 frames per second and can register movements of 1/100th of a millimeter “with no visible lag time.”

This kind of interface sounds exciting, but also like something that might be challenging for consumers to get used to. Buckwald acknowledged that some education might be required, but he said that will happen through “consumers seeing the amazing apps that people have built on top of the platform.” Miller added that in the company’s tests, “it takes a user literally seconds to figure out where to place their hands.”

The combined interest from consumers, retailers, and manufacturers is the reason for the new funding, Buckwald said. Almost all of money will go towards creating new inventory, so that Leap Motion can ship “hundreds of thousands to millions of units.”

The funding comes from existing backers. Buckwald said that selecting the investors for the round was a competitive process, but ultimately the firms who had invested previously won out. One difference this time around — where Highland Capital Partners led the $12.75 million Series A (and participated in the current round), the Series B was led by Founders Fund.

At the end of last month we reported rumours that Samsung was planning to develop Tizen-based phones, in partnership with Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. Now Samsung has confirmed its intention to build hardware for the Intel-backed Linux-based Tizen platform. In an emailed statement to BloombergBusinessweek, Samsung said: ”We plan to release new, competitive Tizen devices within this year and will keep expanding the lineup depending on market conditions.”

The company’s statement is very light on details — with nothing about device type, specifications or price, and no launch timeframe beyond “this year”. We’ve reached out to Samsung for confirmation of its plans and to ask for more details and will update this article with any response.

Samsung is clearly looking at ways to reduce its reliance on Google’s Android platform which ships on the lion’s share of its hardware, including the popular Galaxy line of devices. The Korean electronics giant does have other OS irons in the fire — such as its Bada platform for lower end devices (although this time last year Samsung was talking about merging Bada and Tizen), and also a line of Windows Phone handsets, such as the Ativ S. We’ve also asked Samsung to confirm whether Bada will be merging with Tizen or carry on as a standalone lower end OS.

Samsung’s strategy of offering a vast portfolio of devices with screen sizes and price-tags ranging from the cramped to the gigantic is matched by its willingness to offer multiple OSes — giving it another way to spread itself across the market while ensuring it can hedge its bets. Too much power being concentrated in Google’s hands — with the Android OS shipping on three out of every four handsets sold worldwide in Q3 last year (IDC’s figure) — is also likely to be making Samsung increasingly uncomfortable. And while Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform offers an alternative to Android, it’s not a solution to power being concentrated in someone else’s hands. Whereas the open source Tizen platform is a partnership between Samsung, Intel, the Linux Foundation and others.

BloombergBusinessweek quotes Byun Han Joon, an analyst at KB Investment & Securities in Seoul, on the partnership: “The Tizen was born as Samsung hoped to lighten its growing dependence on Google on concerns that its top position in the smartphone market may weaken following the Google-Motorola tie-up. Intel always wanted to boost its presence in the mobile CPU market.”

Google and LG’s Nexus 4 has been such a coveted item this past holiday season, that it’s been in and out of stock since its release in mid-November. Because Google doesn’t publicly comment on device sales, it’s been hard to understand exactly how much OEM partner LG produced for the device’s initial launch.

However, a little sleuthing by some Android enthusiasts and Nexus 4 owners suggests that LG produced about 400,000 devices going into the end of last year.

How did they do it? They’ve taken the IMEI numbers of their phones and backtracked the production number of their devices using an LG mobile link that’s usually used for finding new firmware. An IMEI number, or International Mobile Station Equipment Identity number, is usually printed on the battery compartment of the inside of the phone. It can be used to prevent stolen phones from accessing a network.

If you take this link and put your IMEI number at the very end, this LG site will spit back out the IMEI followed by a long string of characters that looks something like this: “LGE960 ACAGBK 212KPHG188745 20121206 GLOBAL/GLOBAL N N”

If you break this string apart, you get:
LGE960 = phone model
A = ?
CA = Country where the device was sold. (Others include ‘US’ for the U.S., ‘HK’ for Hong Kong, ‘AU’ for Australia and so on.)
G = Storage (G = 16GB, 8 = 8GB)
BK = Color
2 = ?
12 = Production Month (November)
K = Production Country (Korea)
PHG = ?
188745 = The line or production number, showing that phone was the 188,745th device made.
2012121206 = The production date in YYYYMMDD format

A number of Nexus 4 owners have been sharing and compiling the production numbers day by day (see below). It suggests that LG made about 70,000 devices in October, 90,000 in November and 210,000 in December. Google declined to comment on these numbers.

Still, they’re interesting for a couple reasons. It appears that Google and LG have been conservative with the Nexus 4 launch. LG has previously said that the Nexus 4 “had proven extremely popular, and as such retailers have been met with huge demand.” Google’s U.K. and Ireland managing director Dan Cobley likewise has said there have been communication problems on both ends with managing supply for the Nexus 4.

Keeping supplies tight have made the Nexus 4 debut a world apart from the launch of the original HTC-manufactured Nexus One back in 2010.

DEC
165000
264000
265133 14-th ADEUBK GERMANY
266133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
267133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
268133 15-th ADEUBK GERMANY
269133 15-th ADEUBK GERMANY
270133 15-th ASWSBK SWS Switzerland (looks like around 500 units)
271133 16-th AISRBK Israel
272133 15-th ADEUBK Germany
273133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
274133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
275133 15-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
277133 17-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
278133 17-th AHKGBK Hong Kong
279133 16-th AMYSBK
280123 17-th AMYSBK
289000 18-th UK
300123 19-th ADEGBK
305112 19-th ACA8BK
306000 28-Oct (?) AUSGBK, 211KPPB306000 “csn” is also very different from the “surroundings”
306001 8-Oct AUSGBK 211KPHG306001 esnoutgodate=null >>Never shipped?
306009 4-th Dec AUSGBK 212KPHG306009 esnoutgodate=null
306010 19-th AUS8BK 212KPYR306010 esnoutgodate=null
306020 19-th AUS8BK esnoutgodate=null
314001 19-th AFRGBK
314002 19-th ADEGBK
314050 19-th ADEGBK
314123 19-th ADEGBK
315112 19-th ADE8BK
319123 20-th ADEGBK
320123 20-th ADEGBK
321123 20-th AAUGBK
325112 20-th AUSGBK
330123 20-th AUSGBK
340123 21-th ACAGBK
350123 22-th AUS8BK
360123 26-th AUSGBK
365123 27-th AUS8BK
370123 27-th AUSGBK
374110 28-th AUSGBK