Hasta La Gadget!

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

The buzz around drones is undeniable these days — as it turns out, even Martha Stewart uses one to survey her farm — but there still hasn’t been a runaway drone hit that has captured that imaginations of the masses. That’s exactly what a hardware startup called AirDroids is trying to accomplish with the Pocket Drone, a (relatively) inexpensive flying machine that’s meant to give people of all stripes a different perspective.

They’re serious about that “perspective” bit, too. The original vision was simple enough: co-founders Tim Reuter, TJ Johnson, and Chance Roth really just wanted to create a cheap way to tote a camera through the sky. Those ambitions evolved slightly though, and now they’re looking at the Pocket Drone as the ideal air machine to kick off a widespread drone revolution.

“We’re a mission-driven company,” Reuter said. “Our goal is to put flying robots in the hands of as many people as possible. We think it’s empowering to democratize the sky.”

Plenty of rapid iteration formalized the Pocket Drone’s shape — by which I mean marathon 3D printing sessions in Johnson’s basement — and the process seems to have been fruitful. In its current form, the Pocket Drone can tote around a GoPro (or something of similar weight) for up to 20 minutes, and support for GPS navigation and tablet controls means that you don’t have to be an RC fanatic (like some of the co-founders) to maneuver of these things through the air.

And, as the name suggests, the drone is just slight enough to fit into a pocket (albeit a pretty large one). It’s not going to fit in your jeans, but it does slide in and out of a windbreaker pocket without too much hassle. That’s mostly thanks to the drone’s folding design — the three rotors’ arms can fold back and telescope for easy storage. The inclusion of easily replaceable carbon fiber chassis components also simplifies the process of swapping out damaged bits — after all, no matter how skilled a pilot you are you’re probably still going to crash every once in a while.

In the event that you’re itching to take to the skies with a Pocket Drone, the team just recently launched a Kickstarter campaign where you can lay claim to your own unit for as low as $415 if you bring your own remote control equipment. Production is going to take a bit of time though — AirDroids is linking up with a Taiwanese manufacturing concern with operations in Mexico to bring the Pocket Drone to market and they hope to get units on peoples’ doorsteps and in the air by June of this year.

According to Verizon, a new Nokia phone is set to land in the United States. Dubbed the “Icon,” the Lumia handset sports a 5-inch screen, a 20-megapixel camera, a quad-core processor, and a 2420 mAh battery.

The device looks, as The Verge’s Tom Warren correctly points out, like a smaller version of the Lumia 1520, a phone already in the market. The Icon name appears to be final. As WPCentral uncovered here at CES, cases labeled for the Icon can already be found.

Windows Phone has seen strong success in the past year selling lower-priced handsets. But the platform, what you could call the combination of Microsoft software and Nokia hardware, has struggled to find market share in the United States and the upper-tiers of the maker globally. The Icon, provided that it is well-priced, could help ameliorate that stress point.

Pricing isn’t clear for now. The Verizon website has the phone pegged at $777 both off, and on contract. So we’ll have to wait for official figures. Tip: It won’t cost $777 with a new two-year contract.

The upper end of Windows Phone hardware is now quite diverse, with the Lumias 925, 928, 1020, 1320, 1520, and Icon each battling for share of a still-small pie. But, more and better hardware has never been a recipe for unit volume decline, so perhaps the muddle can be excused.

Current market news has been positive for Microsoft, but not groundbreaking. The company recently indicated that it saw “record sales of Windows Phone this holiday worldwide, nearly doubling phone sales during Christmas.” But as Microsoft will admit, doubling from a small baseline is only so strong an achievement.

For now, another Windows Phone looks set to land. If it can turn heads in the United States is a fair question. The comments are yours.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

French company and 2014 Hardware Battlefield contestant Alima thinks people want to know what makes up the air they breathe, and they previously launched a successful Indiegogo campaign to prove that it is indeed something consumers want. Once known as AirBoxLab, the Paris startup ran an Indiegogo campaign in 2013 to fund its cylindrical home air quality monitor, which measures and reports on the volume of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the air where you live.

Now rebadged as Alima, the startup is looking to move from its initial small production run to a much broader wide consumer launch. The Alima will refine the design of its hardware somewhat, but the eye-catching cylindrical tower perforated with holes designed functionally to collect air samples and aesthetically to look clean and fresh will remain the same.

Alima is designed to be a whole-home solution, with a single unit covering a house. Alima co-founder Jacques Touillon explained that it can provide accurate readings for a large, open-concept dwelling without the need to move it around, but also says that by flipping it upside down and right-side up again, you can prime it to measure another room, so that you can do spot checks even on broom closets, bathrooms or other enclosed spaces that might not be represented by a centrally placed unit.

Of course, Alima’s real value is in the data it collects, so presenting that information to users in a way that’s easy to understand is key. The Alima manages to do this with an app-based dashboard that lets you view readings from the sensor in easy-to-understand graphs and charts, complete with warnings and notices that prompt you to act if things are going wrong. It could suggest you open a window, or prescribe more drastic solutions like installing a professional air filter into your home’s air circulation system.

Touillon notes that the Alima is different from other air quality sensors because there will be an emphasis on developing predictive algorithms. The idea is that you can tell in advance when you’re going to experience hazardous air levels, and provide you with steps to prevent that from even happening at all. Also, it’s designed to be a way for everyone to work together collaboratively to improve their air quality experience.

“It’s a community device,” he said. “The community will be strong around the device, because your best practice will help me, and my best practice will help you, so that’s why we thought it’d be a good thing to do a crowdfunding campaign, to bring that community together.”

The Alima is launching on Indiegogo to drive that community interest. Pricing during the campaign for backers will be $199, and then going up to $249 for a single unit, and the retail price after that will be $299, Touillon says. Turning inside air into the next frontier for quantified self-measurement seems a likely area for potential growth, it’s just a question of whether Alima’s take is the right one.

Do you cringe when you hear people talk about Google Glasses? So does Google, it seems. The company today released a set of branding guidelines for its developers to clarify how they can use the Glass™ icon and brand name in their products.

Update: looks like the guidelines were actually on the Glass Developer site before, but mostly went unnoticed. Google recently updated the navigation of the site (that’s how I found out about them) and made the link to the branding guidelines more obvious, likely to emphasize most of the rules we describe below.

In this document, Google stresses that “Glass” can never be part of the name of a company that produces software for Glass, for example. You can call a product “Cat Facts for Glass” but never “Glass Cat Facts.” It’s okay to use “Glass” as a descriptor (Glass optics), though.

Google also stresses that whenever you use the “for Glass” construction in your logo, “for Glass” must be a smaller size than the rest.

Another rule states that Glass is always supposed to be capitalized and “is never plural or possessive.” This means, you aren’t supposed to say “”Wear Google Glasses” or “Swipe forward on Glass’s timeline.” I can see why the plural doesn’t make sense, given that the product name is Glass, but the only reason not to use the possessive, it seems, is that any word that ends with an ‘s’ always looks a bit off once it becomes a possessive.

One interesting guideline Google notes is that whenever users share content through Glass, developers are supposed to use the #throughglass hashtag “to categorize it for easy discoverability and aggregation” or “Sent through Glass” in emails.

Most of this is pretty straightforward (except for the odd rule around the possessive). It does show, however, that as more Glass software slowly becomes available now that the Glass Development Kit is in “Sneak Peak,” Google is starting to lay down a few more rules for developers.

Glass is a trademark of Google Inc.