The slider mechanism used ball bearings. Ball bearings.
Earlier today, several top designers at HTC were arrested in Taipei under suspicion of fraudulent expense claims, as well as stealing trade secrets ahead of leaving the company to run a new mobile design firm in both Taiwan and mainland China. Five people were interrogated, with the most notable ones being Vice President of Product Design Thomas Chien, R&D director Wu Chien Hung and design team senior manager Justin Huang (who also personally sketched out the One's design). Chien and Wu are taken into custody, whereas the others were released on bail. Their offices were also raided yesterday as part of the investigation.
HTC certainly looks like a sinking ship, doesn't it?
"BlackBerry has a thriving ecosystem with BlackBerry 10." That's what CEO Thorsten Heins said this May at a developer conference before revealing that users had a choice of 120,000 apps from its still-young app market, BlackBerry World. The problem is that over a third of those apps come from a single developer. Yes, a Hong Kong-based company called S4BB has published just under 47,000 apps to BlackBerry World since launch. That's not a good sign of a "thriving ecosystem."
This is what happens when the technology press lets itself be dictated by companies. The companies were the ones who started touting quantity over quality when it comes to mobile application stores, and the press played right into their hands. In a statement to The Verge, BlackBerry confirms the issue, but states that it's not actually an issue at all. Of course they say that. They want to keep touting that number.
Companies wanted this to be a numbers game, and now it is. Go into any mobile application store, and 99.9% of the applications in it are crap. Comparing numbers reveals nothing. It never has, and never will.
The first production batch of Jolla smartphones has been fully booked by consumers and selected sales channels. Jolla launched its first smartphone at the #JollaLoveDay event inMay. At the same time, Jolla kicked off an online pre-order campaign, which reached its first batch limit by mid-July. Online pre-orders were received from 136 countries in all.
I'm one of those who pre-ordered, so it's good news for me. They won't reveal just how many people placed a pre-order, but they do state that a typical batch (as mentioned) is about 50000 units.
After spending a little time with the Ascend P6 getting it set up with our accounts and apps, we have to say we're quite impressed with the build quality. This is a big step up over some of its offerings last year, and even over what it announced just at CES in January. It is incredibly thin and relatively light as well, without feeling cheap or flimsy and the use of different metals along with small plastic accents is quite nice. The display also looks crisp and bright despite only being 720p (although the resolution is quite acceptable at 4.7-inches), and the device is overall refreshingly small compared to the ballooning sizes of recent handsets.
This thing is going places. Huawei is advertising it all over the country on national TV here in The Netherlands, and it's being pushed by retail chains. The next Samsung won't be American or European, but Chinese.
Android tablets browsing share is still relatively low in Europe, but very strong in Asia. Despite the iPad's head start in the market, Android's tablet browsing share has nearly matched the iPad in Asia. More importantly, the overall trend is sharply in favor of Android tablets, which supports the strong shipment performance over the past few quarters.
Good analysis. Sameer Singh compares the growth trend of Android tablets to that of Android smartphones in the past, and it shows that Android tablet usage is actually growing faster than Android smartphone usage did in the past.
At this point, nothing seems to be able to stop Android's total and utter dominance. Not Apple, not Microsoft. Scary.
Sure, Apple will most likely still make far more money per sold iPhone device than competitors will per Android phone, but the trend is clear: as much as I love my iPhone, it will be relegated to a ~10% market share figure within a few quarters.
After Samsung announced the Galaxy S4, its futuristic slab of a smartphone, it was only a matter of time until LG countered. Today, at a jazz hall in New York City, LG dealt its hand in the form of the new G2, and not surprisingly it's a lot like the other phone shipping from Korea this year.
It has its power and volume buttons on the back. I'm pretty sure that's a comfortable location - but boy it looks terrible. Like Samsung, LG also slaps an absolutely horrible skin on top of Android, further adding to the dreadfulness of the G2. Yet another reason this is essentially an S4 with the buttons on its back.
I guess I'm not the target customer for this stuff. I wonder if any of us here are.
In product lore, high profile gadgets that get killed are often more interesting than the ones that succeed. The Kin, the HP TouchPad, and the Edsel are all case studies in failure - albeit for different reasons. Yet in the history of those killings, nothing compared to the Apple Newton MessagePad. The Newton wasn't just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men. And yet it was a remarkable device, one whose influence is still with us today. The Ur tablet. The first computer designed to free us utterly from the desktop.
'First' is debatable, but this was definitely an interesting product. It was far too complex though, and the simpler, more focussed Palm Pilot then showed the market how mobile computing ought to work - something Apple took to heart a decade later with the iPhone.
Stay classy, Samsung.
The common parlance that only Samsung is profiting off Android is, as I've said before, simply no longer true. All it took for companies like LG and Sony to become profitable with Android is to, you know, stop making crap phones, and start producing good ones.
Shocker.
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