Analysts say Apple has beaten Samsung to become world's largest smartphone vendor [feedly]

Analysts say Apple has beaten Samsung to become world's largest smartphone vendor
// The Verge - All Posts

After recording the biggest quarterly profit by any company ever, Apple might have earned itself another accolade: world's largest smartphone vendor. It's clear that the iPhone maker had a bumper quarter, reporting record sales of 74.5 million smartphones. However, Samsung is only saying that it sold 95 million total handsets, of which, it says, somewhere between 71 million and 75 million (the "high 70 percent") were smartphones.

If Samsung sold more phones it would probably be keen to say so

So has Apple finally beaten Samsung? It's impossible to say with absolute certainty. Samsung isn't likely to give up any more information on the topic, and analysts and industry experts are hedging their bets accordingly. Some are marking it as a d...

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Find: This is what's happening inside your camera at 10,000 frames per second

For our coming discussion on cameras....

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This is what's happening inside your camera at 10,000 frames per second
// The Verge - All Posts

The "D" in DSLR does not stand for dark magic. In fact, that snap of the shutter you hear when taking a picture is a wonderful symphony of mechanical engineering at work, and happens so fast that you can't really enjoy it all with the naked eye. Luckily, the Slow Mo Guys have painstakingly chronicled what's happening with the mechanical shutter of a Canon 7D using a very fast (and expensive) Phantom Flex camera, recording various shutter speeds at a mind-boggling 10,000 frames per second.

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Find: Microsoft to invest in Cyanogen, which hopes to take Android from Google

Microsoft to invest in Cyanogen, which hopes to take Android from Google
// Ars Technica

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will be investing in Cyanogen, Inc., the Android ROM builder. The report says that Microsoft would be a "minority investor" in a $70 million round of financing that values Cyanogen in the "high hundreds of millions."

Cyanogen takes the Android source code and modifies it, adding more features and porting it to other devices. It has also started supplying Android builds directly to OEMs (like the OnePlus One), which ship the software on devices instead of stock Android. Last week during a talk in San Francisco, Cyanogen's CEO said the company's goal was to "take Android away from Google." It wants to replace the Google Play ecosystem with apps of its own, the same way that Amazon uses the Android Open Source Project for its Kindle Fire products but adds its own app and content stores.

Google pushes a lot of requirements on Android OEMs. If they want the Google Play Store, it also forces them to take all other Google products and services. There is also an "anti-fragmentation clause," which forbids OEMs from selling Android devices without Google Play. Cyanogen's Android distributions wouldn't have any such limitations, but then neither would a self-made AOSP build.

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Apple’s Q1 2015: Ridiculously high iPhone sales, 18% drop in iPad sales [Updated] [feedly]

Apple’s Q1 2015: Ridiculously high iPhone sales, 18% drop in iPad sales [Updated]
// Ars Technica

Apple's earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal 2015 is here, and as usual the numbers for the holiday quarter are looking pretty good. iPhone sales are way up, and account for over two-thirds of Apple's revenue. Macs continue their more modest but still impressive growth, while iPads have seen their sharpest year-over-year decline.

Let's get the numbers out of the way first. Apple broke quarterly records with $18 billion in profit and $74.6 billion in revenue, compared to $13.1 billion in profit and $57.6 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2014. It maintained a healthy profit margin of 39.9 percent. These results firmly beat Apple's guidance for the quarter, which predicted revenue between $63.5 billion and $66.5 billion and profit margins between 37.5 and 38.5 percent.

Apple managed to increase revenues across the board in all territories, and the Americas continue to account for the bulk of that revenue. However, China is clearly Apple's fastest growing market—revenue increased from $9.5 billion to $16.14 billion, a year-over-year increase of nearly 70 percent. Apple's deals with Chinese carriers and increasing focus on the Chinese market appear to be paying off.

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Find: Tim Cook: The Apple Watch ships in April

Tim Cook: The Apple Watch ships in April
// Ars Technica

Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped a rare bit of product news on the company's Q1 2015 earnings call: the Apple Watch begins shipping in April.

The Apple Watch will start at $349 for the aluminum Apple Watch Sport model, though starting prices for the more expensive stainless steel and gold models haven't yet been revealed. To use the watches, you'll need an iPhone 5, 5C, 5S, 6, or 6 Plus, and the watch's NFC chip will enable Apple Pay support for the phones that don't support it natively.

A new update to iOS, version 8.2, will also be required to use the watch—it's currently in its fourth developer beta. Some of those betas have already outed some Apple Watch features, and like Android Wear it looks like the watch relies on your phone for the majority of its functionality.

Read on Ars Technica



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Fwd: User Interface Design Research

If you feel like pitching in on developing a development tool....
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ashley Friedman <ashley.friedman@duke.edu>
Date: Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 1:13 PM
Subject: User Interface Design Research
To: bwatson@ncsu.edu <bwatson@ncsu.edu>


Hi Professor Watson,
 
I hope this email finds you well.

My name is Ashley Friedman, and I am currently a first year MBA student at Duke. I am participating in Duke’s Program for Entrepreneurs (P4E). My team is building a software prototyping/wireframing tool targeted towards user interface designers. Since there are a lot of tools on the market that can be used for design, we are currently gathering input about what people like and don’t like about what is available on the market.
 
We wanted to see if there was any way of reaching out to current Computer Science graduate students or faculty who may have professional experience designing user interfaces. We would like to send out a brief survey to gather information about their experiences with other tools or invite them to a focus group. Here is a link to the survey: http://ift.tt/1LfhkZv
 
Please let me know if you would be amenable to sending this to your students or how we could go about contacting students. Please also let me know if there are others within the department that we may want to reach out to for advice.
 
Thanks in advance!
Ashley Friedman
Rethinking the Boundaries
Ashley Friedman
Candidate for MBA, Class of 2016
Duke University, The Fuqua School of Business
Tel +1.303.903.6071
ashley.friedman@duke.edu


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Find: This concept turns old phone parts into a supercomputer

This is a good idea. Here's hoping it actually happens. 

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// The Verge - All Posts

One of the selling points for modular smartphones like Project Ara or the Puzzlephone is that they reduce waste. But little has been said about how discarded modules could be put to use. Finland's Circular Devices, the company developing the Puzzlephone, has now revealed its answer to that question: it's called the Puzzlecluster, and it's a scalable supercomputer.

Reuse and reduce

The concept is pretty simple: when a Puzzlephone owner inevitably decides to upgrade their modular phone's "brain" (read: processor unit), the old module can be repurposed to power a versatile computer. With many different outdated smartphone CPUs combined, the cluster should have enough processing power to make the Puzzlecluster a useful addition to...

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Reminder: bring in your old devices

We'll do some show and tell.

Panasonic's incredible cameraphone is coming to America, Leica lens and all [feedly]

Panasonic's incredible cameraphone is coming to America, Leica lens and all
// The Verge - All Posts

In September, Panasonic made waves at Photokina by using a camera show to announce a smartphone. But the Lumix CM1 isn’t just any smartphone: it has a 1-inch sensor, the kind you’d find in high-end point-and-shoot cameras, plus an f/2.8 Leica lens that you’d be lucky to find on a high-end point-and-shoot. Along with a 20-megapixel sensor, this phone is designed to basically reinvent the wheel when it comes to smartphone cameras.

It also has a 4.7-inch, 1080p display, a Snapdragon processor, Android 4.4, and 2GB of RAM. We liked it a lot at Photokina: it’s fast, full of useful camera software, and surprisingly manageable in size given what’s inside.

This is the kind of phone that never comes to America, the spec monster that...

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Find: Watch Microsoft's HoloLens in action

Watch Microsoft's HoloLens in action
// The Verge - All Posts

Microsoft's event this afternoon may have focused on Windows 10, but the biggest news out of it was HoloLens — a headset that lets its wearer augment their world with apps, games, and other information. Since that's a difficult experience to convey on stage, Microsoft first presented its vision for what'll be possible with HoloLens in a pair of videos, both of which it's now published onto YouTube. You can watch the glasses' introduction above and an additional video speculating about their potential below. In case you haven't caught on, Microsoft has huge ambitions here: "This is the next generation of computing," one person says. "This is the next PC."

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Here's what your Project Ara phone could look like as a health tracker [feedly]

I continue to think google is onto something with ara. It aligns well with trends in reuse and differentiation. 

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// The Verge - All Posts

Google's first crop of Project Ara modular smartphones won't be available until later this year, and only in Puerto Rico, but people are already trying to figure out ways to use it differently than existing phones. That includes Lapka, a company that makes a beautiful (albeit expensive) set of sensors for tracking humidity, radiation, and temperature in homes. Where that project was inspired by NASA and designer Yves Saint Laurent, the group has taken new inspiration from designer sneakers to come up with a set of conceptual sensors for Project Ara devices that promises to turn your phone into a portable health testing station. You might not be able to text or even fit your phone in your pocket, but you could find out if you're too drunk...

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Find: “Overheated” Snapdragon 810 won’t make it into Samsung’s Galaxy S6

On Qualcomm and cpus 

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Report: “Overheated” Snapdragon 810 won’t make it into Samsung’s Galaxy S6
// Ars Technica

Samsung won't be using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in the next Galaxy S smartphone because of overheating issues, according to a Bloomberg report published this morning. The phone will instead use "Samsung's most advanced chips," according to Bloomberg's sources—this suggests a 64-bit Exynos 7 Octa or a closely related chip.

Though the Galaxy S series isn't the sales juggernaut it once was, it's still one of the single best-selling handsets in the Android ecosystem, and Qualcomm has supplied SoCs for some variants of the S phones since the days of the Galaxy S II. Samsung still uses Exynos chips in S-series phones destined for its home turf in South Korea and some other markets, however, so it wouldn't be a major engineering feat to drop Qualcomm in other territories, especially since Samsung's in-house LTE modems are coming into their own.

In some ways, it's not surprising that the Snapdragon 810 might be giving Qualcomm trouble. The company has switched from using its own custom-designed Krait CPU architecture to off-the-shelf Cortex A57 and A53 designs from ARM, at least in part because of demand for 64-bit chips from OEMs and users (previous Snapdragon generations only used Cortex cores in lower-end SoCs with less potential for thermal problems). Major transitions like that can be tricky, especially when you're working with small, tightly integrated chips. These also aren't the first reports about the 810's overheating problems, and some CES previews of LG's Flex 2 suggested that the phones on the floor kept dimming their screens because they were running too hot. All mobile SoCs throttle their performance to some degree when they run up against heat issues, but most of the time the effects are subtle enough that you won't actually notice them during normal use.

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Our first look at Windows 10 on phones, and Universal Apps for touchscreens

This is probably of more immediate impact than the holo lens announcement, and the universal interface is a very good idea. 

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Our first look at Windows 10 on phones, and Universal Apps for touchscreens
// Ars Technica

Today at Microsoft's Windows 10 preview event, the company gave us our first look at what Windows 10 will look like when it's running on small screens. The "standard" Windows 10 experience as demonstrated in the Technical Preview is only for screens 8 inches or above; phones and smaller tablets get their own interface. Though Microsoft simply referred to this as "Windows 10 for phones and small tablets," this is our first look at the next version of Windows Phone.

The biggest overarching feature of the small-screened version of Windows 10 is better integration with the desktop version of Windows—Microsoft is really pushing the new OS as a "universal platform." If you've got a Windows phone and a Windows laptop or desktop signed into the same Microsoft account, most of your information will be able to sync seamlessly across platforms. If you dismiss or interact with a notification in your Action Center on your phone, for example, the change will be reflected in the Action Center on your laptop so you won't need to interact with it again. Lists of recent documents in the Office apps will roam between devices, and playlists created in a new music app will sync between devices as well. These are just the applications that Microsoft mentioned, but you can expect all of the first-party Windows apps will support some kind of syncing.

Dragging the software keyboard around will be useful on larger screens.
Microsoft

Microsoft is also making more of an effort to make apps on Windows phones, tablets, and touch-enabled PCs look and work the same. A number of "Universal Apps" will lead this charge, including a touch-enabled version of Microsoft Office that will be included with all phones and small tablets.

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Find: Google to launch wireless service this year

Speaking of mvnos....


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Report: Google to launch wireless service this year
// Ars Technica

Update: The Wall Street Journal is corroborating this story with a report that makes this sound like a done deal. The Journal mostly focuses on the Sprint side of things, saying the MVNO agreement with Google went all the way up to the Sprint and Softbank CEOs. Apparently Sprint was worried it would be "letting a rival into the gates" by dealing with Google, but a clause limiting Google's customer base calmed the company's fears.

Reports about a rumored Google wireless service are cropping up again. The Information (subscription required) is reporting that Google plans to resell Sprint and T-Mobile services as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO).

The last time we heard about this was back in April 2014, when Google was supposedly talking to Verizon and Sprint. MVNOs are resellers of wireless access—they get access rights from one of the "Big Four" carriers and resell it to end users. Google does a lot of ISP work with things like Google Fiber, Project Loon, and the Space X investment, but those are all projects where it owns the hardware and is free to innovate. As a reseller, Google controls little other than the price and packages it provides to end users and the software it puts on devices it sells.

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Find: Hands-on: Microsoft’s HoloLens is flat-out magical

Microsoft showed off some augmented reality glasses yesterday. 

Looks amazing, but the demo was so controlled that I have to wonder if it's even close to ready. Ar is very challenging, since it requires real time tracking of the real 3d environment. This may not be ready to work outside a well known environment, especially without tethering. 

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Hands-on: Microsoft’s HoloLens is flat-out magical
// Ars Technica

For the second time in as many months I feel like I've taken a step into the world of science fiction—and for the second time in as many months, it's Microsoft who put me there.

After locking away all my recording instruments and switching to the almost prehistoric pen and paper, I had a tantalizingly brief experience of Microsoft's HoloLens system, a headset that creates a fusion of virtual images and the real world. While production HoloLens systems will be self-contained and cord-free, the developer units we used had a large compute unit worn on a neck strap and an umbilical cord for power. Production hardware will automatically measure the interpupillary distance and calibrate itself accordingly; the dev kits need this to be measured manually and punched in. The dev kits were also heavy, unwieldy, fragile, and didn't really fit on or around my glasses, making them uncomfortable to boot.

But even with this clumsy hardware, the experience was nothing short of magical.

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Find: My love for gadgets is purely physical

Expression on your mobiles. 

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My love for gadgets is purely physical
// The Verge - All Posts

One of the rubber feet on my old MacBook got scuffed shortly after I bought it. For a long time, I fretted about reducing the laptop’s resale value and spoiling its precise, perfectionist aesthetic, but now that I’m using a new machine, I miss that stupid scuff so dearly. I wasn’t aware of it then, but I’d developed a habit of fingering the fissure when anxiously waiting to cover a live event or new product launch. It was my little bit of tactile reassurance that I had the equipment needed for my job, which my new Haswell MacBook, though faster and longer-lasting, just can’t provide. Unless I decide to personalize it by spoiling it just a little.

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Find: Watch a supercut of every user interface from Star Wars: A New Hope

Fun. 

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Watch a supercut of every user interface from Star Wars: A New Hope
// The Verge - All Posts

I occasionally hear someone, while sharing their opinion of a movie, complain how none of the characters ever ate dinner or used a toilet on screen. It's a complaint most often lobbed at action films, where the heroes can feel like robots turned on moments before the film begins and turned off during the credits. It's a silly request for a 90-minute movie to stop while its hero waits for an elevator, but it's not the worst request. We may not fight evil empires, but we eat three meals a day and, you know, evacuate those meals with some regularity. The rituals of everyday life, like buying coffee and taking off shoes, are familiar and they help to humanize characters.

Something can be boring, but cool at the same time

This supercut of...

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Assignment: diary study of mobile use, due Wednesday 28th

Folks,

For your next assignment, you will participate in a diary study of mobile use.

Over three days in the coming week or so, please make an entry in this form once each waking hour. You can fill it out pretty easily on your mobile, and should usually take only a minute or two! You may wish to set a repeating alarm to remind you.

Please complete this by Wednesday the 28th.

Later we'll look at various aspects of this data.

Professor Watson

Announcement: extra credit for experiment

Folks,

Your classmate Chris Stroud is performing an experiment on improving mobile interfaces, and needs more participants. If you haven't already performed the experiment in an earlier class, you can earn 1% extra credit by participating in his experiment.

To schedule a time with him, please use this Google calendar, and click on it to find available slots.

Thanks,

Professor Watson

Assignment: example mobile app

Hey folks,

Now is the time to begin finding an example mobile app, and posting on our Google community.

Details here!

The assignment is due by end of day Wednesday January 21.

The assignment asks you to turn in using our Google Community. Use the tag #examples.

Prof. Watson

Assignments: online permission and collecting IDs

Folks,

Two bookkeeping assignments:

  • We need your permission to have you use some sites the university hasn't officially approved, such as GitHub, Gplus and Blogger. These will let us carry on a dialogue despite the large size of our class, and publicize your work. Of course at no point will we reveal your grades! If you would rather not give us permission, just let us know.
    • To indicate your decision, fill out this form.
  • Assuming you give this permission, we need to give you access to these services. You'll need to activate your gplus functionality on your ncsu ID, and get a github ID. For example you will need gplus to post readings and topic reactions.

Please complete this by end of day Thursday, if not sooner.

Professor Watson 

Find: This is the app you'll use to manage your Apple Watch

This is the app you'll use to manage your Apple Watch
// The Verge - All Posts


Similar to its early look at the Health app that later shipped in iOS 8, 9to5Mac today posted a comprehensive overview of the "Companion" app that iPhone owners will use to control and manage settings on the Apple Watch. The leak — complete with numerous screenshots — covers everything from customizing notifications to the method by which users will rearrange apps on the Watch's home screen.
The iPhone app will play a pivotal role in interacting with and setting up the Apple Watch. With it, you'll choose which contacts appear on the Watch's "Friends" screen, which allows for quicker messaging, and take granular control over the device's fitness features. Users will be able to decide whether to receive a reminder to stand up if they've...
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Find: free form displays

These will certainly begin appearing on vertical mobiles and wearables soon. 

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These are the amazing 'free-form' displays that Nintendo may be using
// The Verge - All Posts

Sharp first showed off its unique Free-Form Displays last year, and the technology took on a whole other level of intrigue when it was reported that Nintendo would be the first customer — possibly for a new portable games console, or the company's mysterious sleep-tracking device. The latest prototypes are on display at CES 2015, so we thought we'd take a look for ourselves.

The displays are an evolution of Sharp's IGZO technology, and can be cut into virtually any shape. (Nintendo reportedly, inexplicably wants a doughnut-shaped display with a hole in the middle.) The gate driver circuits are embedded into the active area of the display, allowing for ultra-thin bezels and unprecedented form factors.

Sharp's prototypes are mostly...

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Find: LG is putting webOS on its new smartwatch

Webos back from the dead?

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LG is putting webOS on its new smartwatch
// The Verge - All Posts

LG is indeed putting webOS on a watch. Android Central has directly confirmed that the smartwatch briefly teased during Audi's CES event is running a build of Open webOS, showing that LG is exploring new uses for the software that extend beyond TVs. During yesterday's presentation, Audi's Ulrich Hackenberg briefly flashed the unannounced watch to summon a self-driving car to the stage. But a single demonstration made it impossible to figure out the underlying software of LG's new wearable. Android Central managed to track one down, and the settings screen shows "Open webOS" clear as day.

But there's much more. The settings menu also reveals that LG's new watch will be able to connect to cellular data networks (T-Mobile is pictured), so...

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Find: a 5"x5" all in one gadget for streaming movies from lte onto your wall

ZTE's new mini projector is a mobile hotspot that lets you stream movies
// The Verge - All Posts

For cord cutters out there uninterested in buying a TV and the set-top box to go with it (or even those who just want a TV screen they can take on their travels), ZTE has the projector for you. ZTE just announced the Spro 2 at CES today, a mini projector that runs on Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat and can project 1080p video onto any nearby wall you need. And while projecting movies, it can be used as an LTE hotspot for nearby devices or to queue up new content.

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Find: NVIDIA Tegra X1 Preview & Architecture Analysis

NVIDIA Tegra X1 Preview & Architecture Analysis
// AnandTech

In the past few years, we’ve seen NVIDIA shift their mobile strategy dramatically with time. With Tegra 2 and 3, we saw multiple design wins in the smartphone space, along with the tablet space. These SoCs often had dedicated GPUs that were quite unlike what we saw in NVIDIA’s desktop and laptop GPUs, with a reduced feature set and unique architecture. However, with Tegra K1 we saw a distinct shift in NVIDIA’s SoC strategy, as the Tegra K1 was the first mobile SoC to achieve parity in GPU architecture with desktop GPUs. In the case of the Tegra K1, this meant a single Kepler SMX which made for truly incredible GPU performance. However, in the time since we’ve seen companies like Apple release new SoCs such as the A8X, which managed to bring largely similar performance with less power. To find out what Tegra X1 brings to the table, read on for the full article.



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