Apple plans six monthly iPhones

two-applesBad news for Apple fanboys who have to take out a mortgage every time Jobs’ Mob releases a new phone – the fruity cargo cult might release a new one every six months.

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth rumour which suggests that Apple’s policy of releasing only one phone a year will be scrapped.

Apple is looking at a condensed six month release timetable going forward in order to not only keep up with the more frequent releases from Samsung but also to provide a boost to iPhone sales when the iWatch launches in the spring.

Jobs’ Mob has offered an S-model every other year because most carriers have only allowed their customers to upgrade every eighteen to twenty-four months. That is set to change as Verizon NEXT and AT&T EDGE allow more frequent smartphone upgrades than the traditional every other year eligibility, making that traditional timetable obsolete.

Apple has also heavily invested in the idea of making a major design change every other year.

This means that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 6S both arriving in autumn, with the 7 being the more expensive flagship model and the 6S being the mid-range model from day one.

Apple is hesitant about launching the iWatch in the spring of 2015 without a new iPhone to go along with it, as it could give hesitant consumers an excuse to wait on buying both until the fall.

This means that the iPhone 6S a release date in the spring with the Watch, and then launching the iPhone 7 in Sept 2015. Another plan being looked at is the iPhone 6S arriving in the spring and sticking around for a full year, with the iPhone 7 being released in the spring of 2016.

However, this could all backfire. Apple fans loyally buy their toys once every year, and this could be shaken if they have to do this once every six months. Lately changes to the iPhone have been cosmetic and this is likely to get worse if there is a six-month release cycle. Soon Apple fanboys will wake up to the fact that they are buying the same phone with changes which are just not worthwhile bankrupting themselves thinking different every six months.

 

 

OnePlus loses Cyanogen in India

Kazimierz_Nowak_in_jungle_2Mobile phone operating system Cyanogen was supposed to be making its first foray into India under the bonnet of the OnePlus phone.

In the US OnePlus’ One smartphone has used Cyanogen, which is an operating system built atop Google’s Android, but it looks like that will not be happening in India.

Cyanogen has instead chosen to go with Micromax, an OEM more familiar to the Indian market. Cyanogen and Micromax also have an exclusive deal.

The deal makes sense. Cyanogen Micromax is perhaps the largest player in the Indian smartphone market. Cyanogen likely struck a deal to make inroads in the emerging market, shunning OnePlus in the process.

One Plus is a little cross saying that Cyanogen, put countless hours of work into making this launch a success. Just last month, on October 7, Cyanogen released the 38R OTA update which included SAR values inside phone settings to comply with Indian regulations.

“ It was surprising and disappointing to hear from Cyanogen on November 26 that they had granted exclusive rights in India over the Cyanogen system to another company. Prior to this, OnePlus and Cyanogen have successfully cooperated to release the OnePlus One or carry out commercial operations in 17 countries and regions (including India). It is truly unfortunate that a commitment we both made to our Indian users will now not be upheld, OnePlus.

Cyanogen has unequivocally committed to continuing this global support and we look forward to working with them for another year on continuously improving our device.

It said that its concern was its Indian users “who may feel disappointed or deceived.”

“We can’t explain Cyanogen’s decision because we don’t fully understand it ourselves. But we can explain exactly how we’ll continue offering our fans in India an amazing user experience and support for this device,” the company said.

One Plus says it will have its own OS built on Android Lollipop for India. Once ready, One Plus will set up shops in India to help users port their devices to the new OS, and offer online instructions for doing so. Cyanogen will continue to support One Plus devices elsewhere in the world.

 

Samsung’s mobile head is still in his office not on spike

bush_game_of_thronesEmbattled Samsung co-chief executive J.K. Shin still has his job, despite rumours that the knives were out following the awful results at the company.

Shin heads Samsung’s underperforming mobile division and it had been expected that he would have to clean out his desk and be lead sobbing from the building with a photocopy box of his personal items.

Shin has been told will continue to head the electronics unit’s mobile division despite sagging smartphone sales. Semiconductor business chief Kwon Oh-hyun and consumer electronics head Yoon Boo-keun also kept their jobs.

What appears to have happened is that Jay Lee, likely successor and only son of group patriarch Lee Kun-hee, opted to keep his father’s key lieutenants in place to ensure stability. His own position is not exactly consolidated yet and he needs a few more people who owe him to keep his control on the company.

Chung Sun-sup, head of local research firm Chaebul.com pointed out that Samsung was undergoing major changes in the midst of the succession process. It would have been too unsettling to change leadership.

Chairman Lee Kun-hee has not even indicated that he has stepped back for good, and he appointed Shin, Yoon and Kwon. It might have been too much for Vice Chairman Jay Lee to change the people his father put in position.

Lee the younger needs more time to shore up his position in South Korea’s largest conglomerate with his father still in hospital after a heart attack in May.

Lee the Younger pointed out that Shin was “a major contributor in Samsung Electronics’ emergence as the top global player in the handsets business” and would be given an opportunity to turn the business around.

Sony makes electronic bow tie

Don Ameche and his famous bow tieJapanese electronics giant Sony is toying with making watches and bow ties using e-paper.

The watch, called the FES (Fashion Entertainments)  Watch, has 24 design patterns, according to a report on the Wall Street Journal.  You can switch between the designs by using different gestures.

Sony apparently wants to make electronic paper a new kind of fabric.

Products may well be available as soon as May next year, the Journal said.

The fashion in the tech business is wearables, and a whole host of vendors is trying to hype up the concept – from Apple to Google.

There’s no indication as yet of how much your e-paper bow tie or e-paper watch will cost.

Cops swoop on airline ticket thieves

europolEuropol said that over the  last three days, worldwide law enforcement agencies have taken steps to combat people using stolen cards to buy airline tickets.

The organisation said over 60 airlines and 45 countries took part in the joint activity at 80 plus airports worldwide.

The organisation said that in many cases credit card fraud is connected to other serious crimes including human and drug trafficking, with banking, airline and travel sectors suffering losses of $1 billion a year through fraudulent online ticket booking.

Three coordination centres in The Hague, Singapore and Bogota were set up and worked with airlines and credit card companies to identify suspicious transactions.

The operation resulted in 281 suspicious transactions being recorded and 118 people arrested.

Europol Director Rob Wainwright said: “This operation is another example of law enforcement and the private sector working seamlessly together, to prevent and fight cybercrime – this time identity theft and credit card fraud. We are reaching new levels with our cooperation and aim to become an ‘unbeatable alliance’ with aspirations to make cyberspace as crime free as possible for global citizens.

“Europol’s EC3 will continue to invest heavily in conducting similar operations and other activities that will make life harder for cybercriminals”. This international operation was the result of months of detailed planning between law enforcement, prosecuting and border control agencies, airlines and credit card companies, coordinated by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3).

Free UK wi-fi has big holes in it

Ed VaizeyThe UK minister of state for digital industries came under tough questioning about broadband in the House of Commons yesterday.

Ed Vaizey claimed that all UK homes have access to broadband and 97 percent have access to broadband at speeds of two megabits.  He claimed superfast broadband availability has doubled, and the average speed of broadband has trebled.

He also claimed that the UK has the lowest prices for broadband of the big five countries in the European Union, and in the United States.

But that position was questioned by Tory MP Anne McIntosh.  She claimed that 28 percent of farms and rurals businesses in Thirsk, Malton and Filey won’t have any fast speed broadband by 2016. She asked Vaizey what steps his department was taking to allow acccess. He claimed the government was well ahead with its plans in North Yorkshire.

Helen Goodman, Labour’s shadow minister of Culture, Media and Sport said that while many people were pleased with the recent announcement of 1,000 free wi-fi spots across the UK, the department’s own map shows that Glasgow, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Bristol – with a combined population of four million – seemed to have no provision at all.

Vaizey said that the governmetn worked with the cities “so they came up with their own proposals… It is up to the cities how they choose to use the money”.

Tablets face squeeze from notebooks, phones

ipad3Shipments of notebooks are only set to grow 0.6 percent in 2015, amounting to 174.6 million units, while sales of tablets will fall by 3.5 percent to 185.6 million units.

That’s according to Taiwanese market intelligence firm Trendforce, which said that this year notebook vendors struggled to gain market share this year by essentially engaging in a price war.

But Caroline Chen, a notebook analyst at the company, said that next year we’ll see an array of different products with tablets and low priced notebooks facing stiff competition from smartphones and so called phablets.

She thinks notebook vendors need to rethink their strategies.

Tablets didn’t do well this year and overall 366 million mobile PCs – a category that she defines as including notebook computers and tablets – shipped. That’s largely similar to sales last year.

Subsidies from major players like Microsoft, Google and Intel have skewed the market. Chromebooks, she thinks, will account for eight million units in 2015.

She said that because subsidies from Intel and Microsoft lower manufacturers’ costs, the subsidies benefit end users.  “It would be better if Microsoft and Intel can find more substantial ways to develop the market,” she said.

trendforce

Social media no guide to human behaviour

humanoidsWhile researchers are mining social media in an attempt to understand human behaviour, some scientists are warning there are big pitfalls using the data.

Scientists at McGill University and Carnegie Mellon University say that thousands of research papers are based on data from social media and used to make decisions in both industry and government.

But there are serious problems using such data.  The researchers point out that Pinterest is dominated by women between the ages of 25 to 34, and other social media attract different users.

Researchers don’t know when and how social media providers filter their data streams while the way some of the social media websites are designed dictate how people behave.  Facebook’s absence of a dislike button skews the measurement of positive versus negative responses.

Attempts to discover the political attitude of people on Twitter only work with 65 percent accuracy while some studies claim 90 percent accuracy for gauging such views.

The researchers say that all of these factors should be borne in mind when attempting to use the data to discover how humans think.

Syrian Electronic Army hijacks analytics

syrian-electronic-armyOnline users  visiting some websites are being shown popups and being redirected to the Syrian Electronic Army’s website as the hacker group has managed to hijack an online analytics system.

News websites such as The Independent and The Telegraph were the first to show signs of hijacking when popups started to appear for visitors. Many websites such as PC World, Forbes and Dell were later reported by users across the web to have been affected by SEA’s hack as well. Similar popups on Logitech’s website.

What appears to have happened is that the SEA hijacked the DNS of Gigya, which is an online analytics system, used to track user behaviour for marketing purposes. No personal data was taken from Gigya’s own system or the affected websites, some companies have turned off the feature while the issues are resolved.

This hijacking has given the group access to more sites to spread their messages due to the use of the Gigya platform by various outlets.

 

Apple asks Samsung for help to fix iPhone 6

ByRWIdiIUAAWry9Apple is turning to smartphone archrival Samsung in order to fix an  iBug with its new iPhone 6 phablet.

The super expensive machines keep crashing which is something that Apple does not like talking about much.

According to Business Korea Jobs’ Mob is going to buy more components from Samsung for its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, along with Apple Watch parts.

In return Samsung is going to help Apple fix a bug in the NAND flash in the higher storage 64GB which is triple-level cell flash and the SK Hynix, Toshiba and SanDisk TLC NAND the 128 GB models.

Samsung will supply fresh modules which avoid the performance issues that some users have encountered.

This isn’t the only bug Apple has had with its phablet, either. Some users have reported problems with the camera, namely the optical image stabilisation (OIS) going awry and causing blurry shots.  Apple’s answer seems to be to return to its old business partner and get some decent gear under the bonnet.

 

AMD’s R9 390X will put the wind up Nvidia

1-AMD-s-New-Steamroller-Architecture-to-Bring-Significant-PerformanceFigures leaked to the great unwashed by deep throats within AMD show that its next-gen flagship gaming graphics card will really put the wind up its envious competitor, Nvidia.

Dubbed the R9 390X, the card has numbers which make Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture-based GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 look a bit weak.

Let’s be clear, the GTX 980 and GTX 970 are damn fine cards – they are both faster and more power efficient than their predecessors, a tough act for AMD to follow. AMD was already behind in the power consumption stakes with its R9 290X performing well, but consuming much more power than the GeForce GTX 980.

It appears that AMD has cracked the high power consumption of its previous generation graphics cards.

Leaked benchmarks claim to show that a yet unknown graphics card is over 15 per cent faster than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980, yet consumes only 12W more power on average.

Several websites, including WCCFTech, claim that the style of the leaked slides is the same as those that appeared for several previous GPU launches too, so there is some credibility to the results as well.

This means that AMD could well be launching a stunning graphics card early in 2015 which will give Nvidia a good kicking.

It certainly needs to do something. Nvidia is in charge of the above $300 market, with its GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 out-performing AMD’s equivalents both in terms of speed and power efficiency. Nvidia is expected to launch its GTX 960 soon too, which will further cement its dominance a little lower down the price range.

 

Dell finds itself patronised

screen_image_398032_w620Computer maker Dell is planning to expand its manufacturing facility in India.

Top officials of Dell have apparently had words with the Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and expressed keen interest in expanding its Chennai plant. We assume that they were tapping Prasad for some sort of sweetener for the deal.

Judging by what he told the media, Prasad did not really seem to know what Dell is. Prasad said, “Dell is very interested in electronic manufacturing” which he was clearly surprised about. “Dell has a facility here which they want to expand and have expressed need to have complete ecosystem of components suppliers as well.”

“They told me that Dell employed 27,000 people in the country. They are very positive under (Narendra) Modiji led new government and with growing interest of investors in the country,” Prasad said.

Who would have thunk it? Dell wants to start manufacturing computers and already hires a lot of staff in India, we would have thought that Prasad might have heard of them

Dell has actually invested $30 million in a manufacturing facility at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai in Tamil Nadu.

India’s proximity with the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe make it superior location for export compared to other parts of Asia, Dell officials said.

“They also want to work on Digital India programme which is now a buzz word across the world. They have said that the programme should also be linked to e-commerce expansion in the country,” Prasad said.

 

How Apple destroyed Sapphire glass

Broken_glassMIT Technology Review  has been going through the bankruptcy documents of GT Advanced and seems to have found out what went wrong – and why the iPhone 6 bends.

Apple invested more than $1 billion in an effort to make sapphire one of the device’s big selling points. Making screens out of the nearly unscratchable material would have helped set the new phone apart from its competitors. It would have also enabled it to be structurally strong

When Apple announced the iPhone 6 this September, however, it didn’t have a sapphire screen, only a regular glass one and was structurally weak, so that it bent in your pocket.

GT Advanced Technologies, declared bankruptcy as without Apple it was doomed.

Apple had been using sapphire to cover the cameras and fingerprint sensors in some iPhones since October 2013. But making large pieces of sapphire—enough for a smartphone screen—would normally cost 10 times as much as using glass.

In 2013, GT claimed it could cut the cost by two thirds by increasing the size of its equipment and adapting the crystal growth procedures to make cylindrical crystals—called boules—that are more than twice as large as ordinary sapphire crystals.

Apple originally offered to buy sapphire growing furnaces from GT. But according to sources familiar with negotiations, after five months Apple demanded a major change in terms, requiring GT to supply the sapphire itself. Apple wanted to drive costs down by having GT build the world’s largest factory to produce the stuff.

Apple moaned in the court documents that GT failed to produce “any meaningful quantity of useable sapphire”.

However GT’s bankruptcy filing said that was mostly Apple’s fault.

Producing sapphire requires a very clean environment, but construction at the factory meant that sapphire was grown “in a highly contaminated environment that adversely affected the quality of sapphire material,” according to GT.

It also needs uninterrupted supplies of water and electricity to regulate the temperature of the molten aluminium oxide used to form the boule. GT said that to save costs, Apple decided not to install backup power supplies, and multiple “outages” ruined whole batches of sapphire.

GT said in the documents that there were problems with much of the sawing and polishing equipment used to slice the boule—equipment that it says Apple selected. For example, a diamond-wire saw that was supposed to cut sapphire in 3.6 hours took 20 hours to do it and had to be replaced. According to GT, problems like these increased the costs of processing the sapphire boule by 30 percent.

Then came the worst of it. The terms Apple negotiated committed GT to supplying a huge amount of sapphire, but put Apple under no obligation to buy it.

 

Internet of things war hots up

Internet of ThingsA wave of consolidation in the internet of things (IoT) market is assured in the next few years.

That’s according to financial company Hampleton Partners, which said in a report that vendors have spent over $9 billion in the marketplace in the last few years in a bid to put their stake in the ground.

And early players in that market include Google, Samsung, Verizon and others.  Apple wants to make a play in the market too.

In the next year, Hammpleton thinks that other companies will make acquistions in the next year or so to get into a market estimated to be worth many billions by the end of the decade.

Those include Intel, TI, Texas Instruments and AT&T.

One of the problems is that when there are countless devices equipped with semiconductors and the ability to be connected to the internet, is that there are few standards and so far few attempts to create such standards.

Estimates vary about the number of devices connected by the end of the decade but it’s certain the number will be in tens of billions.  Each device, however, will cost very little – money to be made will be in the way such things are interconnected and structured.

Euro Parliament votes for Google breakup

euroflagzThe European Parliament has sort of voted to break up Google into little bits, separating the search function from its other businesses.

The resolution was passed today with 384 in favour and 174 against – but the vote is more of a gesture than a resolution because the Parliament has no power to split it up.

What it does mean is that there is additional pressure put on the European Commission to step up its now four year long inquiry into Google’s alleged dominance of the market – domination that the Mountain View, California company denies.

Google maintains it has plenty of competition from a number of companies including Amazon, Expedia and others.

The parliamentarians are supported by a number of lobbyists and by publishers in Europe such as the Axel Springer group, which alleges Google has way too much power to influence the market.

Google hasn’t formally replied to the vote at press time, but has mounted a spin offensive in Europe over the last few months in an attempt to show that it isn’t evil, but is a force for good.