Find: Some Thoughts on Lenovo's Acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google

Good thoughts: in particular, that android will be the windows of mobile as devices become lower margin. 

I hope motorola innovation continues under Lenovo. 

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Some Thoughts on Lenovo's Acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google
// AnandTech

Earlier this evening Google announced the sale of Motorola Mobility to hardware manufacturer Lenovo for a deal valued at just below $3 billion. Given my fondness for the Moto X and Moto G, two of the best ergonomically executed handsets in the Android space from my perspective, I had a bunch of thoughts about this deal that I wanted to get down in writing.

I'll start off with a bit of praise for Motorola. The transformation of the company post-Google-acquisition has been nothing short of awesome. The in-hand feel of the Moto X and Moto G remain unparalleled by any competing Android device in my opinion. I absolutely understand that's personal preference, but the next three points aren't. With the Moto X, Motorola bucked the trend of higher CPU core counts (disregarding their driving-me-to-drink 8-core messaging for a moment) and instead opted for two high frequency CPU cores that ultimately delivered better thermally bound CPU performance than the quad-core alternative. Motorola also was the first Android vendor I came across to think of addressing the issue of random IO performance, in this case by deploying a NAND Flash aware file system (f2fs) on the Moto G and X. Finally, Motorola is one of very few Android OEMs that doesn't blatantly cheat in a whole host of terrible smartphone benchmarks. In short, I like the new Motorola. The good news is that I'm not sad to see the company go to Lenovo.

Lenovo doesn't have a history of ruining brands. Its acquisition of IBM's PC business seems to have done well, and I can only assume that Lenovo has the same intents with Motorola. Acquisitions that strengthen the position of the acquirer are (understandably) sensible ones, and here we're talking about two relatively small players in the overall smartphone industry combining with hopes of increasing market (and revenue) share. With both Motorola and Lenovo controlling single digit percentages of the smartphone market (1.3% and 5.1%, respectively, according to Gartner) it's clear that neither party has a chance independently. Lenovo could leverage its position in China, while Motorola would hopefully be able to do the same in the US (although with a much steeper slope to climb). So far the deal makes sense, although it doesn't guarantee anywhere near instant success.

The basic fact is that it seems like it's difficult to turn a profit, even in the face of substantial revenue, in the smartphone space. LG and HTC have both struggled here, while Apple and Samsung do quite well. Apple aims squarely at the high end, while Samsung arrives at great profits through a combination of factors - not the least of which is its ability to act as both an integrator and supplier of technologies.

While odds against turning a substantial profit would point to this deal being a bad (or neutral) one, if there's a company that knows how to successfully compete in a low margin business it's Lenovo. In a world where being a PC OEM is hardly desirable, Lenovo seems to have done fairly well. Leveraging its presence in China as well as higher margins from its corporate business, Lenovo has been able to support and reinvent its consumer facing PC business. It's entirely possible (likely?) that Lenovo views it can repeat the same success in smartphones.

(Side note: if smartphones end up being low margin businesses for most companies, that potentially increases the reliance of smartphone vendors on reference designs from silicon vendors - drawing an interesting parallel to how things work in the PC space.)

Google's position in all of this is interesting. CEO Larry Page posted his thoughts on the sale to Google's official blog. I'd like to call out a couple of important quotes:

"...the smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices."

and

"As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts. The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. "

The first point solidifies Google's position with regards to Android. It will be an OS and services provider, relying on its partners to build the hardware. Monetization comes from mobile search advertising, location based advertising and general mobile data mining. At a high level this is the Windows/PC ecosystem strategy, except instead of charging a ton for an OS license Google makes its money in these other ways. 

I have to point out that although Microsoft was once a proponent of this approach, as of late it seems to have lost some faith (for good reason) in the PC OEM ecosystem and chose to throw its hat in the ring with Surface. It took PCs a very long time to get to this point, and I suspect if the same end result happens to the Android ecosystem it will take a while before it gets there either. Following the Microsoft model makes a lot of sense from the perspective of growing marketshare. Given how Google primarily monetizes Android today, being in the software/services business and leaving hardware up to its partners is absolutely the right move for the company. If we've learned anything from watching the PC evolve however, it's that OEMs participating in a low margin business tend to prioritize profits first and user experience second. My hope for a Google-owned Motorola was a device vendor that was independent of that mess, but as I just mentioned I don't see this being a problem for some time to come.

Larry's side note above also makes sense, it tells us a lot about Google's willinginess to play in the hardware space. In a sense, Google won't be a fast follower but it will gladly reap the rewards of a being a first mover in any industry. Focus is extremely important for the success of any company, big or small, and in this case Google is doing right by its shareholders and being focused. Google is absolutely an early mover in the wearables space and with its acquisition of Nest you can say the same thing for its role in the connected home. As I wrote about the Galaxy Gear not too long ago, with those in the smartphone space addicted to exponential growth, a maturing market drives almost everyone to look for the next big thing. There are a handful of these markets that seem feasible in the near term: automotive tech, connected home and wearable computing (+ maybe a category for things like the Oculus Rift).

Android is turning out to be the mid-90s Windows of the mobile space, while Google wants Glass and Nest to be the iPhones of wearables and the connected home. I can definitely see the former, and I think Nest absolutely puts Google on the right right for the latter, I am uncertain about how Glass plays out in the wearables space over time. The wearables market is still very much in its infancy.



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Find: Creator of PGP e-mail encryption making secure Android “Blackphone”


 // published on Ars Technica // visit site
Creator of PGP e-mail encryption making secure Android “Blackphone”
Blackphone

Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP e-mail encryption, is leading a team of security industry executives building an Android phone with a variety of built-in privacy tools.

"I've been interested in secure telephony for longer than I've been interested in secure e-mail," Zimmermann said in a video on so-called Blackphone's website. "I had to wait for the rest of the technology infrastructure to catch up to make it possible to do secure telephony. PGP was kind of a detour for me while waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up to make really good secure telephony possible."

The narrator of the Blackphone video ominously says, "Technology was supposed to make our lives better. Instead we have lost our privacy—we have become enslaved." The Blackphone website says the phone will use "PrivatOS," an Android-based operating system, while letting users "make and receive secure phone calls; exchange secure texts; exchange and store secure files; have secure video chat; browse privately; and anonymize your activity through a VPN."

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Find: Chrome rendering engine will get faster, lighter, and better offline in 2014

Nice discussion of google chrome's new blink rendering engine. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site
Chrome rendering engine will get faster, lighter, and better offline in 2014
A Google software engineer has outlined the Blink team's plans for 2014.

In April of 2013, Google announced that its Chrome browser would move away from the then-current WebKit rendering engine to a new, Google-backed (but still open-source) engine called Blink. Reasons given for the switch included a desire to improve performance and reduce complexity, and a recent Google Groups post by Google software engineer Eric Seidel shows just what the Blink team will be working toward in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, many of the team's goals focus on mobile device performance, "in part because Web engines (e.g. Blink) are not nearly as good on performance-constrained devices as they need to be." Google considers smooth scrolling and animation, input responsiveness, and load time to be key factors on mobile devices, and the company wants to improve on these while reducing memory usage and power consumption.

Other goals are focused on "improv[ing] the mobile Web platform itself," blurring the line between locally installed applications and apps run in the browser window. Google wants to enable "better-than-AppCache" offline modes for apps, Web apps that support push notifications, and apps that support hardware-specific features like screen orientation.

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Find: AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers

Mobile internet is the future internet. This plan makes it more expensive for internet users to access new services, stifling innovation. 

Spectrum is a national resource. Maybe we should require it be used in the national interest, rather than the corporate interest. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site
AT&T turns data caps into profits with new fees for content providers
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

AT&T today confirmed a long-rumored plan to monetize wireless data caps by charging content providers for the right to serve up video and other media without chewing up consumers' monthly data limits.

Sometimes called 1-800-DATA, AT&T billed the plan as "a new way for eligible 4G customers to enjoy mobile content and apps over AT&T’s wireless network without impacting their monthly wireless data plan."

Basically, the price of data is being charged to content providers instead of consumers. The rates for consumers and business will be similar. "We will offer AT&T Sponsored Data providers a wide range of options," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. "Customers will be billed according to usage, with costs varying by amounts of usage. Rates are comparable to consumer rates."

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Find: Khronos Offers a Quick Peek at the Next Version of OpenGL ES

Compute shaders, no geometry or tesselation shaders 

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// published on AnandTech // visit site
Khronos Offers a Quick Peek at the Next Version of OpenGL ES

Amidst the hustle and bustle of CES 2014, Khronos has published a short announcement regarding the next version of OpenGL ES (OpenGL ES Next). In it they are offering a brief high level overview of their plans for their mobile graphics API.

In short, Khronos is announcing that they will be releasing OpenGL ES Next this year, which would put it roughly 2 years after the release of OpenGL ES 3.0. As is expected it will come with several new features – many of these being brought over in some form from mainline OpenGL – while at the same time continuing to walk the narrow line between being a separate API and a pure subset of OpenGL.

Feature wise, OpenGL ES Next will bring with it support for a number of features that were introduced in OpenGL 4.x. This includes compute shaders (OGL 4.3), shader atomics with load/store capabilities (OGL 4.2), indirect draw commands (OGL 4.0), texture multi-sampling (OGL 3.2). All of these features will be important additions to the API for different reasons, be it increasing the capabilities and performance of the shader system, or further adding onto the functionality of the texturing system. The addition of compute shaders will likely be the marquee feature for OpenGL ES Next, but that shouldn’t discount the importance of the other feature additions.

Meanwhile Khronos has also offered a brief glimpse of what they won’t be including, in order to better illustrate where they’re going with OpenGL ES Next and how it compares to other APIs. OpenGL ES Next will not be including some of OpenGL’s high-end geometry functionality, specifically geometry shaders (OGL 3.2) and tessellation (OGL 4.0). Just as how OpenGL ES 3.0 isn’t quite at feature parity with OpenGL 3, these omissions mean that OpenGL ES Next will still have some significant differences compared to OpenGL 4, and even OpenGL 3 again. In other words, just as how OpenGL ES 3.0 was in many ways a reduced scope version of OpenGL 3, OpenGL ES Next will continue that trend by being a reduced scope version of OpenGL 4.

Wrapping things up, with a publication date set for this year, it’s a solid bet that we should hear more about OpenGL ES Next towards the middle of this summer. Khronos’s major announcements typically come around SIGGRAPH (Aug. 10-14, 2014), with OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.4 being announced at that show in previous years, so that’s where we’d expect Khronos to announce at least a preliminary draft of Open GL Next, if not the final version.



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Find: Pebble Steel hopes to deliver the same experience in a new stylish body

Huge. 

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/ published on Ars Technica // visit site
Pebble Steel hopes to deliver the same experience in a new stylish body
Jason Inofuentes

When we last visited Pebble, we suspected that the startup was at least a few months away from updating its hardware. It turns out we were wrong. Announced today and available to order, Pebble is unveiling its latest revision, called Pebble Steel. Housing the same internal hardware (including the same e-paper display), Pebble Steel features a more traditional watch design while being smaller and thinner than the original.

The Pebble experience remains mostly unchanged. The same size display and identical internal silicon means developers have nothing to modify in their Pebble apps, though it launches with SDK 2.0 so apps based on earlier SDKs will be incompatible.

We had a few minutes to speak with Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky about the new hardware's development, and we were impressed to discover that work on a refreshed design started just after the original began shipping to Kickstarter backers. Early criticisms focused on the size of the device, particularly its length, and the inability to pair the device with dressier outfits. The original Pebble's design is unabashedly chunky, and the glossy plastic fits in well with jeans and a hoodie. Worn with a suit though, the Pebble stands out awkwardly. Pebble Steel, especially with an analog watch face, looks like a traditional watch.

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Find: NVIDIA Reveals First Details about Project Denver CPU Core

The next nvidia mobile gpu. 

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// published on AnandTech // visit site
NVIDIA Reveals First Details about Project Denver CPU Core

During its CES press conference, NVIDIA revealed its new Tegra K1 SoC will be available in two versions. One version will ship with four ARM Cortex A15s, while the other will ship with two NVIDIA designed Denver CPU cores. We don't know much about Denver other than it's a custom 7-wide superscalar 64-bit ARMv8 design.

NVIDIA claims very high single and multithreaded CPU performance. It's important to note that the Denver version only comes with two cores, something we've argued is likely the more optimal use of die area in mobile. Max frequencies top out at 2.5GHz. Given that NVIDIA has silicon back already I suspect this is a 28nm design. The L1 cache is 128KB + 64KB (I$ and D$?).

The Denver CPU cores will be paired with a 192 CUDA core Kepler implementation (1 SMX). No word on differences in power or performance. The Cortex A15 version of Tegra K1 will be available in 1H 2014, while the Denver version will be available in 2H. The two SoCs are pin-compatible, indicating that there won't be any difference in memory interface width.



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Withings Aura uses light, sound, and science to help you sleep better


// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site
Withings Aura uses light, sound, and science to help you sleep better

Withings has a scale, a blood pressure monitor, and an activity bracelet — now it's trying to help us all get a little shut-eye between all that activity. This week at CES it announced the Aura, a $299 device designed to help you fall asleep faster, sleep better, and wake up easier. It comes in two parts, one a small pad that goes underneath your pillow to monitor you while you sleep and one a light that sits on your bedside table. The pad senses your heart rate, movements, and breathing, while the light also scans your room for noise, light, and temperature.

Like plenty of other devices, the Aura collects and shares data with your smartphone, showing you how you slept and what helped or hindered you through the night. But the...

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Find: TrewGrip reverse engineers the smartphone keyboard


 
// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site
TrewGrip reverse engineers the smartphone keyboard

TrewGrip's Kickstarter campaign failed to reach its $100,000 goal, but that doesn't mean its founders have given up on their dream of bringing "rear typing" to the masses. TrewGrip today debuted its titular product, a keyboard for smartphones that very literally turns the idea of a QWERTY keyboard on its head. Whereas other Bluetooth keyboards aim for portability or more natural-feeling tactility, the TrewGrip asks you to type backwards — on the bottom of the device itself. As you type, corresponding lights illuminate on the device's top, letting you know you've pressed the correct key.

Tab, enter, space, and back are the only buttons on the front of the TrewGrip and can be pressed using your thumbs. The TrewGrip uses Bluetooth to...

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Find: The lost secrets of webOS

Nice survey of unfinished designs. 
  
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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site
The lost secrets of webOS

Next week, LG will unveil new televisions running webOS, the ill-fated operating system it acquired in last February. Although LG is expected to retain some form of webOS’ interface, exactly what that will mean on a television instead of a phone or tablet is still a mystery. If LG has any luck at all, it will be more successful than the last consumer webOS products. It's been over two years since HP’s TouchPad and the Pre 3 were released and then discontinued in a surprise decision from then-CEO Léo Apotheker. In fact, most people within HP were blindsided when executives decided to stop hardware production and left the software team twisting in the winds of uncertainty. Apotheker's decision ultimately led to the open sourcing of...

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