You probably turn to Yelp to look for single, stand-out restaurants and businesses. But there’s a lot of data inside all those reviews, which can make for fascinating analysis—letting you spot trends across geographic locations.
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Few trend-spotters would disagree with the following prediction from ARM, but it’s worth laying it out anyway: Of the 300 million mobile devices sold in 2010, the majority cost over $400. Within the next two years, however, these “crazy money” products (as a spokesperson described them) may represent just 25 percent of the total mobile market — still huge in absolute terms, since almost two billion phones and tablets are forecast to be sold in 2015, but a distinct minority relative to entry-level and mid-range options.
In an effort to convert these expectations into an even taller heap of gold, ARM has just announced a new mid-range core, the Cortex-A12, which is designed to replace the aging Cortex-A9 while offering a 40 percent boost in performance. This gain will likely come with the added advantage of better battery life, since the Cortex-A12 will initially be fabricated at 28nm instead of 40nm, and will be offered to manufacturers alongside a new Mali GPU (the Mali-T622) and video engine (Mali-V500) that promise further power savings of their own. The Cortex-A12 will also support big.LITTLE configurations, allowing it to be installed alongside Cortex-A7 cores that will take over for low-effort tasks in order make further power savings. Big.LITTLE hasn’t really blown us away so far, at least not on the Octa-core Galaxy S 4, but its wrinkles may well have been ironed out by mid 2014, which is when the Cortex-A12 is due to land. Check out the PR for more technical details on each component.
Richard Lai contributed to this report.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile
Is the Ukraine hooked on Game of Thrones? What’s Kenya’s favorite Justin Bieber song? Thankfully, those questions (and more) may finally be answered, with the expansion of Twitter’s Trends offering. The list of hot topics is coming to 160 new locations, including, for the first time, Belgium, Greece, Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal, and Ukraine. The list also includes 130+ cities located in countries that already have trending representations. Interested parties can switch locations in the Trends sidebar on Twitter’s homepage.
Source: Twitter
Ofcom’s annual report into the communications habits of Britons has revealed that it’s not just geeks who stare in annoyance when the phone rings. The general consumer is now abandoning voice calls is favor of texting in a big way, making five percent fewer calls than they did the previous year. The numbers also showed that on average, people send 50 texts a week, smartphone ownership was up 12 percent and tablet purchasing shot from 2 to 11 percent in a single year. The trend isn’t slowing, either, given that a whopping 96 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds prefer SMS and Facebook to talking — giving us hope that we’ll soon be spared having to listen to that guy’s conversation during our morning commute.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablet PCs, Wireless
Ofcom: Texting is more popular than talking originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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