Announcement: last day for course evaluation!

Hey folks,

This is the last day to do online course evaluation! Please do take the time to evaluate this course, it really helps make the course experience better for your fellow students.

Cheers,
Kalpesh

Find: Worldwide smartphone shipments outpace dumbphones for the first time

The future is here: smartphones make up the majority of mobile phones sold. 
 
published on Ars Technica // visit site
Worldwide smartphone shipments outpace dumbphones for the first time
Pick a smartphone, any smartphone. It's what most of the world is doing!
Andrew Cunningham

While the PC market is slowing down, the smartphone market continues to grow. In fact, market research firm IDC is reporting that worldwide shipments of smartphones outstripped shipments of feature phones for the first time this quarter. There were 418.6 million phones shipped in total, of which 216.2 million were smartphones. Overall, the phone market is up 16.2 million units compared to the first quarter of 2012.

Samsung remains the undisputed leader in this market: it shipped 115 million phones (both smart- and feature-) in the first quarter of this year, compared to 93.6 million handsets last year. Other companies that showed growth include Apple (from 35.1 million units to 37.4 million) and LG (from 13.7 million units to 15.4 million), though IDC notes that "the last time the iPhone maker posted a single-digit year-over-year growth rate was 3Q09."

The world's other phone makers, all lumped together into the "others" category, shipped 175.4 million phones in the first quarter of 2013, compared to 161.1 last year; this doesn't tell us much about how individual companies like HTC are doing.

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Find: As traditional PC sales and chipmakers slump, ARM rakes in the cash

Momentum continues swinging from desktop to mobile. 

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published on Ars Technica // visit site
As traditional PC sales and chipmakers slump, ARM rakes in the cash

ARM Holdings—the British semiconductor design company that has made all of our gadgets more energy-efficient—has just announced that yes, it's done quite well for itself in the first quarter of 2013. The Cambridge-based company makes its money largely from licensing its intellectual property to other chipmakers.

According to new unaudited financial results ARM released on Tuesday, revenue is up 26 percent over the first quarter of last year, reaching nearly $264 million. Its profits before tax come in at over $136 million, a 44 percent increase over the corresponding previous quarter. ARM said the industry as a whole shipped 35 percent more ARM-based chips (now reaching 2.6 billion) in first quarter of 2013 compared to the same period last year.

Given ARM's rapid rise, is it any wonder that traditional chip companies like Intel and AMD (and the entire PC industry, for that matter) are having a rougher go of it?

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Find: All thumbs on deck with the BlackBerry Q10

The bberry keyboard phone. Pretty good, they say.

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published on Ars Technica // visit site

Review: All thumbs on deck with the BlackBerry Q10
The BlackBerry Z10 (left) and Q10 (right): the Q is for QWERTY. The phone will be available in the US from all major carriers "by the end of May."
Andrew Cunningham

If the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone was a bold statement, a declaration that BlackBerry and its new operating system were ready to quit messing around and really compete against modern phones, the Q10 is the company's love letter to its most loyal customers. The Z10 and its big, rectangular touchscreen look like the post-iPhone devices that we've gotten used to; the Q10, with its hardware keyboard and square screen, looks much like the BlackBerrys of a decade ago.

But the Q10 isn't some half-measure like the BlackBerry Bold or Curve, stopgap hardware running an operating system in desperate need of an overhaul. It's a proper BlackBerry 10 handset, running the same OS and applications as its taller, slimmer cousin. So what can it do that the Z10 doesn't, and vice versa? How do the physical keyboard and smaller screen change the BlackBerry 10 experience? And does the Q10 strike a satisfying balance between old and new, or does it simply feel outdated?

Body, build quality, and BlackBerry 10.1

Andrew Cunningham
Specs at a glance: BlackBerry Q10
Screen 720×720 3.1" (330 ppi) Super AMOLED touchscreen
OS BlackBerry 10.1
CPU Dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus
RAM 2GB
GPU Qualcomm Adreno 225
Storage 16GB NAND flash, expandable via microSD
Networking 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, 4G LTE
Ports Micro-USB, micro-HDMI, headphones
Camera 8.0MP rear camera, 2MP front camera
Size 4.71" x 2.63" x 0.41" (119.6 x 66.8 x 10.35mm)
Weight 0.31 lbs (139 g)
Battery 2,100 mAh
Starting price $249 with two-year contract.
Sensor Accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity, gyroscope, ambient light sensor
Other perks Power adapter, case, headphones, extra battery with charging cradle (retail phones may or may not come with all accessories)

If you're familiar with the BlackBerry Bold or BlackBerry Curve, the BlackBerry Q10 will seem familiar. It looks like a Bold and the Z10 had a baby, with the Z10 having mostly recessive genes. The Q10 is a bit shorter and a bit thicker than most all-touchscreen phones, and its front face is split by its 3.1-inch, 720×720 touchscreen and 35-key backlit keyboard.

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Guest Visit by David Lanham

Hello folks,

David Lanham, Designer, Icon Factory will be visiting us for guest lecture on April 24.

He has also designed twitterific, a twitter client and clear, a scheduling app.

Cheers,
Kalpesh

Find: From touch displays to the Surface: A brief history of touchscreen technology ((tags: finds, touch, history))

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From touch displays to the Surface: A brief history of touchscreen technology
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

It's hard to believe that just a few decades ago, touchscreen technology could only be found in science fiction books and film. These days, it's almost unfathomable how we once got through our daily tasks without a trusty tablet or smartphone nearby, but it doesn't stop there. Touchscreens really are everywhere. Homes, cars, restaurants, stores, planes, wherever—they fill our lives in spaces public and private.

It took generations and several major technological advancements for touchscreens to achieve this kind of presence. Although the underlying technology behind touchscreens can be traced back to the 1940s, there's plenty of evidence that suggests touchscreens weren't feasible until at least 1965. Popular science fiction television shows like Star Trek didn't even refer to the technology until Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, almost two decades after touchscreen technology was even deemed possible. But their inclusion in the series paralleled the advancements in the technology world, and by the late 1980s, touchscreens finally appeared to be realistic enough that consumers could actually employ the technology into their own homes. 

This article is the first of a three-part series on touchscreen technology's journey to fact from fiction. The first three decades of touch are important to reflect upon in order to really appreciate the multitouch technology we're so used to having today. Today, we'll look at when these technologies first arose and who introduced them, plus we'll discuss several other pioneers who played a big role in advancing touch. Future entries in this series will study how the changes in touch displays led to essential devices for our lives today and where the technology might take us in the future. But first, let's put finger to screen and travel to the 1960s.

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Find: Hands on with the Pebble watch ((tags: finds, peripherals))

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Hands on with the Pebble watch: a handy device with a lot of potential

After several months of patient waiting, I finally received my Pebble in the mail a few weeks ago. This Pebble is not the kind that gets stuck in your shoe (hopefully); it's a brand-spankin'-new, Kickstarter-funded "smart watch"—an e-paper bracelet that connects to your iOS and Android devices, which means you can tell the time and do some other cool stuff too.

The "other cool stuff" is the part that had Kickstarter backers excited in early 2012; excited to the tune of $10.2 million. During the fundraiser (which ended in May of last year), backers who pledged $99 or more were promised one Pebble watch, which now retails at $150. While it's not perfect, it is a rather interesting step forward that should culminate in a healthy platform later this year.

First impressions

At its most basic level, Pebble tells the time. You may scoff at that—it's a watch you say, of course it tells the time. But it does its time-telling really freakin' well. It currently ships with three default watch faces, as well as 12 others that you can load onto the watch with the companion app (free on iOS and Android). By far my favorite custom watch face is "Fuzzy Time," which rounds the current time to the nearest 5-minute interval and translates that number to what you might say if your friend asked you the time. While seemingly trivial, I love this rough approximation of time. Rarely do I need to know that it's 5:13:23pm, but seeing that it's "quarter after five" is awesome.

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Find: The cellphone is 40 years old today ((tags: finds, history, leaders))

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The cellphone is 40 years old today
Marty-cooper-3_large

On April 3rd, 1973, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper placed the first public call from a cellphone. In midtown Manhattan, Cooper called Joel Engel — head of rival research department Bell Labs — saying "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone." The call was placed on a Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, which weighed 2.5 pounds, a far cry from today's 4-ounce handsets.

Last year, The Verge's Chris Ziegler sat down with Marty Cooper to discuss the history of the cellphone, the issues facing the current market, and the future of phones and spectrum. What better way to celebrate the forty-year anniversary of the portable phone than to hear from the man who invented it?

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Find: How today’s touchscreen tech put the world at our fingertips

Nice review of capacitive touch technology.

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published on Ars Technica // visit site
How today's touchscreen tech put the world at our fingertips
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Welcome back to our three-part series on touchscreen technology. Last time, Florence Ion walked you through the technology's past, from the invention of the first touchscreens in the 1960s all the way up through the mid-2000s. During this period, different versions of the technology appeared in everything from PCs to early cell phones to personal digital assistants like Apple's Newton and the Palm Pilot. But all of these gadgets proved to be little more than a tease, a prelude to the main event. In this second part in our series, we'll be talking about touchscreens in the here-and-now.

When you think about touchscreens today, you probably think about smartphones and tablets, and for good reason. The 2007 introduction of the iPhone kicked off a transformation that turned a couple of niche products—smartphones and tablets—into billion-dollar industries. The current fierce competition from software like Android and Windows Phone (as well as hardware makers like Samsung and a host of others) means that new products are being introduced at a frantic pace.

The screens themselves are just one of the driving forces that makes these devices possible (and successful). Ever-smaller, ever-faster chips allow a phone to do things only a heavy-duty desktop could do just a decade or so ago, something we've discussed in detail elsewhere. The software that powers these devices is more important, though. Where older tablets and PDAs required a stylus or interaction with a cramped physical keyboard or trackball to use, mobile software has adapted to be better suited to humans' native pointing device—the larger, clumsier, but much more convenient finger.

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Job: Summer position in mobile graphics

Himesh's email is himesh.patel@sas.com



Begin forwarded message:

I just got an approval for summer intern position, and would like to see if you have any candidate that I can interview. Project will require some basic course work in computer graphics, c++  and preferable work in mobile area preferable Android. You can have them email their resume directly to me.

Thanks

Himesh

 

 

Data Visualization R&D

Phone: (919) 531-7132

http://www.sas.com

SAS...The Power to Know

All growth depends upon activity.

There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.

Calvin Coolidge (1872 - 1933)

 

Announcement: Course Evaluations are up now


Hey folks,

Course evaluation is up and running for Spring 2013! Please make sure to go there soon and evaluate this course; it'll help me make improvements for your fellow students in the next course.

Evaluation closes on May 1 at 8am.

Cheers,
Kalpesh

Find: The PC market sees its steepest decline ever in 2013, according to IDC


The PC market sees its steepest decline ever in 2013, according to IDC

Vizio_27_inch_all_in_one_touch_large

According to research firm IDC, things are not looking great for the PC industry. The firm says that PC sales saw "the steepest decline ever in a single quarter" this year (excluding tablets and notebooks with a removable screen or keyboard), down 13.9 percent to 76.3 million from the same quarter last year. If you'll recall, thats more than double the loss the industry experienced in the fourth quarter of 2012, which saw a 6.4 percent decline. Back in January, IDC noted that sales declined year-to-year during the holiday season the first time in more than five years. Today's newly reported results from IDC mark the fourth consecutive quarter that PC shipments have fallen.

Continue reading…

Find: Leap Motion hacks show what 3D gesture sensing can do

published on New Scientist

Leap Motion hacks show what 3D gesture sensing can do
Gamers, designers and photographers have innovative treats in store when the Leap Motion 3D gesture-sensing computer interface is launched next month

Find: Google offers Python and Java libraries that bring SMS, voice to apps

   
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Google offers Python and Java libraries that bring SMS, voice to apps

Google has released a set of Python and Java libraries that help developers who use Google App Engine integrate text messaging and voice communications into their apps.

Google App Engine is Google's cloud-based development platform, which lets developers build and host applications in Google data centers. The new Python and Java libraries for App Engine add easy access to SMS and voice capabilities by working with the APIs offered by Twilio, another cloud development platform that focuses on communication-heavy applications for mobile devices, desktops, and the Web.

"Twilio Voice enables your application to make and receive phone calls," Google notes in a description of the new integration. "Twilio SMS enables your application to send and receive text messages. Twilio Client allows you to make VoIP calls from any phone, tablet, or browser and supports WebRTC."

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Find: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

This diversity will be good, and focusing in the code components chrome needs may also make it faster. 

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Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine
Aurich Lawson (with apologies to Bill Watterson)

Google announced today that it is forking the WebKit rendering engine on which its Chrome browser is based. The company is naming its new engine "Blink."

The WebKit project was started by Apple in 2001, itself a fork of a rendering engine called KHTML. The project includes a core rendering engine for handling HTML and CSS (WebCore), a JavaScript engine (JavaScriptCore), and a high-level API for embedding it into browsers (WebKit).

Though known widely as "WebKit," Google Chrome has used only WebCore since its launch in late 2008. Apple's Safari originally used the WebKit wrapper and now uses its successor, WebKit2. Many other browsers use varying amounts of the WebKit project, including the Symbian S60 browser, the BlackBerry browser, the webOS browser, and the Android browser.

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Find - Indystate: Jelly Bean reaches 1 in 4 Android devices

   
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Jelly Bean reaches 1 in 4 Android devices

Jelly Bean has finally cracked a 25 percent install base across Android devices in use, according to data released by Google Wednesday. The OS version is still bested by 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which is present on 29.3 percent of devices, as well as by 2.3 Gingerbread on 39.8 percent of devices.

The data on Android versions was collected by Google over a 14-day period ending April 2. The company now measures only devices that check in to Google Play, rather than any device that pings Android servers.

Back in March, 4.1/4.2 Jelly Bean was still lagging at a 16.5 percent user base five months after launch. That month marked the first that Android 4.x versions overtook 2.x ones in their installed base.

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Find: How Fast is Your Smartphone/Tablet in PC GPU Terms

A current mobile gpu is about 7 years behind a current desktop gpu -- not counting bandwidth, which some say is the real gpu currency. 

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Shared via feedly // published on AnandTech // visit site
The Great Equalizer 3: How Fast is Your Smartphone/Tablet in PC GPU Terms

For the past several days I've been playing around with Futuremark's new 3DMark for Android, as well as Kishonti's GL and DXBenchmark 2.7. All of these tests are scheduled to be available on Android, iOS, Windows RT and Windows 8 - giving us the beginning of a very wonderful thing: a set of benchmarks that allow us to roughly compare mobile hardware across (virtually) all OSes. The computing world is headed for convergence in a major way, and with benchmarks like these we'll be able to better track everyone's progress as the high performance folks go low power, and the low power folks aim for higher performance.

The previous two articles I did on the topic were really focused on comparing smartphones to smartphones, and tablets to tablets. What we've been lacking however has been perspective. On the CPU side we've known how fast Atom was for quite a while. Back in 2008 I concluded that a 1.6GHz single core Atom processor delivered performance similar to that of a 1.2GHz Pentium M, or a mainstream Centrino notebook from 2003. Higher clock speeds and a second core would likely push that performance forward by another year or two at most. Given that most of the ARM based CPU competitors tend to be a bit slower than Atom, you could estimate that any of the current crop of smartphones delivers CPU performance somewhere in the range of a notebook from 2003 - 2005. Not bad. But what about graphics performance?


Find: Nvidia VP - Next mobile chip generation will outperform Xbox 360, PS3

   
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Nvidia VP: Next mobile chip generation will outperform Xbox 360, PS3

The next generation of Nvidia mobile chips will be able to push more polygons than current high-end game consoles, according to Nvidia Senior VP of Content and Technology Tony Tamasi. Speaking to Bit-tech recently, Tamasi noted that "The PS3 and Xbox 360 are barely more powerful than mobile devices... the next click of mobile phones will outperform [them]."

To be fair, this probably says more about the age of the current HD game consoles than the power of Nvidia's upcoming mobile chips. The Xbox 360 and PS3 both have GPUs that can handle about 200 gigaFLOPS, which is not that much better than the 80 gigaFLOPS Nvidia is boasting for its current Tegra 4 mobile chips (yes, we know FLOPS aren't a perfect measure of processor performance, but they're close enough to highlight the power scales involved). Sony's PlayStation 4 will push the console space up to 1.8 teraFLOPS later this year, of course, and it will take mobile chips a while to catch up with the 4.5 teraFLOPS possible in Nvidia's current high-end Titan PC graphics cards.

Still, passing the mark set by current HD consoles has implications for the products that will be based on those Nvidia mobile chips. This level of performance has been the de facto standard for millions of console gamers for years now, and being able to pack that kind of processing power into a cheap, tiny form factor could change the market in some interesting ways. Imagine when next year's model of the Ouya or Nvidia's own Project Shield are able to run 3D games at the level of Gears of War: Judgment or Uncharted 3 without breaking a sweat, for instance.

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