Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been waiting for this one, the first indicator of the mythical Verizon iPhone‘s impact on the fortunes of the formerly exclusive Applephone carrier, AT&T. As it turns out, business is rolling along as usual over on the blue team, where AT&T spent Q1 2011 activating a total of 3.6 million iPhones, a nice round million more than the same period last year. Also interesting is AT&T’s note that somewhere around 40 percent of its smartphone sales come from Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices, leaving the iPhone to account for the remaining 60-ish percent. Taken as a whole, that group totaled up 5.5 million sales in the quarter, a new best for AT&T in the first three months of the year, and the smartphone segment is now said to account for 46.2 percent of the company’s postpaid user base. Jump past the break for more details in AT&T’s press release.

Continue reading AT&T reports best-ever first quarter for smartphone sales with 5.5 million, 60 percent of them are iPhones

AT&T reports best-ever first quarter for smartphone sales with 5.5 million, 60 percent of them are iPhones originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re firmly of the belief that SSDs are our future and Samsung would seem to agree. The Korean electronics giant has just announced that it’s selling its hard disk drive-manufacturing arm to Seagate Technology for a neat $1.375 billion in equal measures of cash and stocks. As a result, Samsung Electronics will own approximately 9.6 percent of Seagate and get to nominate one new member to join Seagate’s Board of Directors, while the two companies have further agreed to deepen their strategic relationship with related cross-licensing and supply stipulations. Samsung will provision Seagate’s solid state drives with NAND flash memory, whereas Seagate will furnish Samsung’s PCs and consumer electronics products with hard disk storage. The deal is expected to complete in full by year’s end and you can read all about it in Seagate’s press release after the break.

[Thanks, Pavel]

Continue reading Samsung sells HDD division to Seagate for $1.375 billion

Samsung sells HDD division to Seagate for $1.375 billion originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Philips has been making teevees for over 80 years, but today its new CEO has announced that this storied history is coming to an end. Unable to generate a profit from its HDTV division — it lost the company €87 million in the first quarter — Philips will soon sell the majority stake in it to Hong Kong manufacturer TPV Technology, while retaining a 30 percent ownership share and agreeing guaranteed royalty payments of €50 million per year from 2013 onwards. It’s not a bad deal for the Dutch consumer electronics maker, whose bottom line for the first quarter was €137 million in the black, but would have been double that had the new arrangement been in place. All 4,000 Philips employees working under the HDTV umbrella will be transferred over to TPV, though the company says it doesn’t want the “market to misread that [it] intend to lay-off a lot of employees.” Which is not to say that it won’t. A video interview with Philips’ chief Frans van Houten discussing the change of direction can be found after the break.

Continue reading Philips sells HDTV business to Hong Kong-based TPV Technology, will sate itself with royalty payments

Philips sells HDTV business to Hong Kong-based TPV Technology, will sate itself with royalty payments originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 05:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A report commissioned by the World Bank’s infoDev unit has cast fresh light on one of the more fascinating aspects of our brave new interconnected world: the virtual economy. The “third-party gaming services industry” — where wealthy but impatient players have someone else grind away at online games for them in exchange for monetary reward — is one of the focal points of the study, chiefly owing to it having generated revenues in the region of $3 billion in 2009 and now serving as the primary source of income for an estimated 100,000 young folks, primarily in countries like China and Vietnam. What’s encouraging about these findings is that most of the revenue from such transactions ends up in the country where the virtual value is produced, which contrasts starkly with some of the more traditional international markets, such as that for coffee beans, where the study estimates only $5.5 billion of the $70 billion annual market value ever makes it back to the producing country. The research also takes an intriguing look at the emerging phenomenon of microwork, which consists of having unskilled workers doing the web’s version of menial work — checking images, transcribing bits of text, bumping up Facebook Likes (naughty!), etc. — and could also lead to more employment opportunities for people in poorer nations. To get better acquainted with the details, check the links below or click past the break.

Continue reading World Bank report finds selling virtual goods in games more profitable than ‘real’ economy

World Bank report finds selling virtual goods in games more profitable than ‘real’ economy originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Apr 2011 04:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia once said that going with Android was like “peeing in your pants” for temporary warmth. Well, even if that warmth doesn’t last forever, it has now helped one of its upstart competitors, HTC, to rise beyond Nokia in terms of market valuation. This is a somewhat beguiling metric to compare companies by — market cap measures the value of a company’s shares available on the market, and not every company has the same proportion of its overall value available in stocks — but it illustrates well the diametrically opposite directions in which the two mobile phone makers are moving. Bloomberg informs us that HTC’s stock has risen by 33 percent this year, while Nokia’s has shrunk by 19 percent. Surpassing Nokia now means HTC is the world’s third most valuable smartphone maker. Of course, neither Nokia nor RIM is sitting idly by and letting the Taiwanese whippersnapper have things its own way, however both companies’ roadmaps for re-conquering the smartphone high-end seem to stretch far off into the 2012 distance. As for HTC, we expect it to launch another Sensation of a device on Tuesday.

HTC’s market capitalization reaches $33.8b, overshadows Nokia and RIM originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 02:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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