Hasta La Gadget!

It was probably gonna happen sooner or later, but a new report from IDC confirms it: smartphones are now out-shipping feature phones in western Europe. According to the company’s statistics, only 20.4 million feature handsets were shipped to the Old World during the second quarter of this year, representing a 29 percent decrease from Q2 2010. Quarterly shipments of smartphones, on the other hand, increased by 49 percent to 21.8 million units, marking the first time that they’ve surpassed basic phone orders. Smartphones also comprised 52 percent of all mobile shipments, which shrunk by three percent, collectively — something IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo attributes, in part, to Europe’s brutal economic climate and Nokia’s steep decline (see chart). On the OS front, Android once again came out on top within the region, thanks to a whopping 352 percent year-to-year increase in shipments, while Samsung controlled the manufacturing side, with 33 percent of the European market. You can find more IDC math in the full PR, after the break.

[Thanks, Pauly]

Continue reading Smartphones out-ship feature phones in Europe, Samsung leads the way

Smartphones out-ship feature phones in Europe, Samsung leads the way originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon’s doing it, so why not Vodafone too? That’s right, folks, the big red telco from abroad has decided to get into the swing of things in Silicon Valley with its new Vodafone Xone R&D center in Redwood City, California. Unlike VZW’s Application Innovation Center just a few miles north in San Francisco, the Xone is focused on identifying startups with potential and putting their ideas on the fast track to proof-of-concept trials. In order to do so, the center provides technical expertise, business advice and access to its lab to ensure that products are compatible with Vodafone’s global 2G, HSPA, and LTE networks. This R&D center is also aligned with Verizon’s facility in Massachusetts, so budding entrepreneurs have access to stateside LTE infrastructure, too. We got a chance to check out the new business incubator ourselves, so read on for more.

Continue reading Vodafone Xone R&D center opens its doors in Silicon Valley, wants to help startups grow

Vodafone Xone R&D center opens its doors in Silicon Valley, wants to help startups grow originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Copper wire’s relatively cheap, pliable and can conduct electricity, but it’s hardly ideal. Powering cities requires cables meters wide and the metal loses a lot of energy as heat. Fortunately, a team from Tel Aviv University thinks it’s solved the problem. Borrowing a fiber of sapphire from the Oakridge National Lab in Tennessee, it developed a superconducting wire barely thicker than a human hair that conducts 40 times the electricity of its copper brethren. Cooled with liquid nitrogen, the sapphire superconductors carry current without heating up, which is key to their efficiency. The team is now working on practical applications of the technology — because it’s so small and pliable (unlike previous superconductors) it could replace copper in domestic settings and its cold efficiency makes it perfect to transmit power long distances from green energy stations. The wire’s going on a world tour as we speak and will touch down at the ATSC conference in Baltimore in October. Anyone who makes jokes about wires and Baltimore will be asked to leave, politely.

Superconducting sapphire wires are as cool as they sound originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 05:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in February researchers at Stanford first taunted us with the possibility of simultaneous, two-way data transmission on the same frequency. Now some folks at Rice University are edging full-duplex communication closer to reality. By the time carriers get around to rolling out 4.5G networks, engineers could potentially double throughput without adding more cell towers and using only existing mobile hardware. With an extra antenna and some fancy software tricks, which allow the device to ignore locally produced signals, the Rice team was able to produce a connection ten-times stronger than previously published studies. Since the technology is based on existing MIMO setups, it may also prove the shortest route to asynchronous full-duplex transmissions. That means you’ll be able to upload ill advised videos of your drunken antics (and suffer the consequences) that much faster, without having to pause the latest Maru clip. Check out the PR after the break.

[Image credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University]

Continue reading Researchers demo full-duplex wireless: double the throughput with no new towers

Researchers demo full-duplex wireless: double the throughput with no new towers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already seen how awkward computers can be when they try to speak like humans, but researchers from North Carolina State and Georgia Tech have now developed a program that could make it easier to show them how it’s done. Their approach, outlined in a recently published paper, would allow developers to create natural language generation (NLG) systems twice as fast as currently possible. NLG technology is used in a wide array of applications (including video games and customer service centers), but producing these systems has traditionally required developers to enter massive amounts of data, vocabulary and templates — rules that computers use to develop coherent sentences. Lead author Karthik Narayan and his team, however, have created a program capable of learning how to use these templates on its own, thereby requiring developers to input only basic information about any given topic of conversation. As it learns how to speak, the software can also make automatic suggestions about which information should be added to its database, based on the conversation at hand. Narayan and his colleagues will present their study at this year’s Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference in October, but you can dig through it for yourself, at the link below.

New program makes it easier to turn your computer into a conversational chatterbox originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Sep 2011 01:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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