Tag: samsung

Apple, Samsung want your dabs

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

fingerprintFingerprint sensing technology has been with us for some time. But it seems that smartphone and tablet giants Samsung and Apple want to promote it a little bit more.

Research outfit IHS said the fingerprint sensor market will grow to be worth $1.7 billion by 2020.

The number of handsets and tablets using fingerprint sensors will total 1.4 billion units – four times the number of the 317 million units that will ship by the end of this year.

While Apple has been at the forefront of fingerprint sensing to date, other vendors are going to pick up the baton, said IHS. Samsung hasn’t yet got to the starting gate but is expectedto do so as soon as it finds a smaller rectangular sensor.

But while fingerprint sensors will have their vogue, swipe sensors will continue to exist, particularly in lower end smartphones.

One important element that will push adoption of fingerprint sensors are financial companies – companies like Mastercard, Visa and Paypal think they will be ideal for mobile payments.

Fingerprint sensing was first pioneered by Japanese banks but saw the sunset when there were several incidents of gangsters chopping off the fingers of victims to access accounts at ATMs.

Samsung, Microsoft argue over the best city in the world

Posted on October 8, 2014 by - News

Times_Square,_New_York_City_(HDR)Microsoft and Samsung cannot agree on the best city in the world to hatch out peace. Samsung thinks that Hong Kong is the best while Microsoft believes that it should be New York.

Samsung has started an arbitration proceeding in Hong Kong against Microsoft as the Seattle behemoth attempts to give it a Chinese burn over smartphone patent royalties.

The arbitration was disclosed in a court filing as part of a federal lawsuit Microsoft filed in August in New York accusing Samsung of refusing to make royalty payments to Microsoft after the software company announced its intention to acquire Nokia’s handset business.

Samsung specifically wanted the Hong Kong office of the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce. It is not clear why Hong Kong was chosen – perhaps it was the good shopping, better access to Dim Sung, pork in a bun and the students revolting.

The arbitration was started under the terms of a business collaboration agreement “to resolve a dispute concerning the calculation of success credits under that agreement,” Samsung said.

Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said the companies’ contract provided that the “appropriate venue to interpret the business collaboration agreement is New York”. After all, if they could make an arbitration there, they could make it anywhere and they could go all through the night because the city never sleeps.

The arbitration came just days after Microsoft filed an amended complaint in its New York lawsuit asking the court to rule that it did not breach a business collaboration agreement with Samsung.

Microsoft in the complaint also wants Samsung to pay $6.9 million interest on more than $1 billion in royalty payments which it delayed in protest of the Nokia deal.

Microsoft claims Google Android mobile system uses some of its technology, and most hardware makers, including Samsung, have agreed to pay patent royalties on Android handsets.

Motorola Google  said no and has been in litigation against Microsoft since 2010.

Samsung blue over low profits

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

samsung-hqDepending on smartphones appears to have cost Samsung – the company is headed for its first annual earnings drop since 2011.

The company has revealed its July-September profit would be the lowest in more than three years and the short-term prospects for smartphones were uncertain.

Samsung is finding that its market share is falling thanks to the rise of Chinese rivals like Lenovo and Xiaomi.

Samsung said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that operating profit for the third quarter likely fell 59.7 percent to $3.8 billion which was lower than the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.

This would mark the South Korean giant’s weakest quarterly profit since the second quarter of 2011 and the fourth consecutive quarter of earnings declines on a yearly basis.

Samsung said that although “uncertainty” persisted in the mobile business, which accounted for nearly 70 percent of its 2013 operating profit, it “cautiously expects” higher shipments of new smartphones and strong seasonal demand for TV products.

Operating margin for the smartphone business fell substantially in the quarter due to higher marketing expenditure and sharply lower average selling prices, as the proportion of shipments for high-end devices fell and prices for older models dropped, Samsung said.

The belief amongst analysts is that Samsung will be back with stronger volumes once it revamped its product lineup.  The outfit released its Galaxy Note 4 in recent months, featuring metal frames which will fix the accusation that its use of plastic had harmed sales.

Samsung also aims to launch more cost-competitive devices in the mid-to-low end segments. Analysts expect these products to appear by the end of October.

It is widely expected that Samsung would release a new mid-tier product late this month valued at between $300 and $400. The new device would use similar components to the flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone which is priced at about $500.

Samsung’s chip division is doing well. Samsung is the world’s top memory chipmaker and the returns from its memory business in the third quarter improved sequentially due to strong seasonal demand.

Microsoft makes a billion dollars a year from Samsung

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - News

Scrooge-PorpoiseMicrosoft made a billion dollars from Samsung from its patents on Android.

According to a Samsung court case, Microsoft collected $1 billion in patent-licensing royalties last year. Samsung originally signed two contracts, a cross-licensing agreement and a business collaboration agreement, with Microsoft in 2011.

This was before Samsung started selling  so many  Android phones and late last year Samsung decided it was tired of paying on time, or paying interest when a late payment was finally made.

Microsoft took Samsung to court and the Korean company insists it wants to walk away from the original deal because of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s phone business.

Samsung claims the acquisition invalidates the business collaboration agreement, but Microsoft doesn’t agree and wants the company to pay $6.9 million in unpaid interest from last year.

Samsung continues to build Windows-based smartphones, tablets, and PCs, so Microsoft is biting the hand which feeds it to some extent.

Microsoft is sure it will win and insists that Microsoft values and respects its long partnership with Samsung.  After all, a billion here, a billion there and soon you are talking about big money.

 

Apple to lose Siri to Samsung

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

Anovità-apple-2013pple could lose the core technology behind its voice-command assistant Siri to its rival Samsung.

Siri is the product of SRI International, a research lab that has created many technologies and biosciences products. The digital assistant was spun out as Siri which Apple acquired in 2010, but the voice recognition engine is provided by Nuance Communications.

In June, Nuance and Samsung began merger talks, and everything “slowed” due to “complexities”.

Now it appears that the talks are back on and Nuance  redeemed $250 million in 2027 convertible notes to save a  future acquirer around $50 million from a debt-to-share conversion.

If Samsung buys Nuance, then Apple is in trouble. It would not want to buy the outfit because it is too expensive for what it would get and Jobs’ Mob would get all sorts of businesses like health care and imaging it does not want.

Samsung on the other hand could lap that side of the business up.  It already has a small healthcare business, and it would get access to 450,000 clinicians, 10,000 healthcare institutions, 50 percent of radiology reports and 98 percent of most connected hospitals.

If Apple had not done so much to hack off Samsung, maybe the outfit would have let it buy a licence, however after all the court cases this is not likely to be the case.

Tablet market is all shook up

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

ipad3Apple and Samsung are going to have to fight hard to keep their place as leaders of the tablet pack.

Because, according to market intelligence firm ABI Research, other vendors including Asus, Lenovo and Amazon are fighting hard for third place and creeping up on the leaders.

These emerging vendors are set to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 percent between 2014 and 2019.  Lenovo, for example will ship 21 million tablets by 2019.

Samsung saw a 35 percent decline in growth between Q1 2014 and the second quarter, while Apple saw a 19 percent decline.

In the first quarter, Apple and Samsung had a hefty 72 percent of the marketplace but their combined market share dropped to 66 percent and that’s the way things are headed.

In fact, ABI Research thinks that advanced and mature markets are experiencing a stall in growth, partly because tablets don’t need replacing every few years like notebook PCs.

Smartwatches to steal the day

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

fobwatchThe jury is still out on whether smartwatches will storm the market but if one research outfit is to be believed, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

IHS, a market research company based in the USA, says revenues for smartwatches will be worth around $300 million this year and predicts a rise of 80 percent annually for “at least” four more years to come.

IHS claims the market will be worth around $23 billion by 2023, with shipments of 800 million units – compared to 54 million this year. Those optimistic figures are fuelled by the belief that we’ll see better resolution and colour displays in years to come.

Sweta Dash, who analyses displays at IHS, believes that fashion will drive sales.  “Wearables are best viewed as functional fashion accessories rather than as electronic goods.  Because the fashion accesory market is determined by design rather than by simple function, wearable products such as smartwatches must be adapable to various forms including squares, circles, or even ovals.”

Battery power is important too.

But Dash sounds a word of caution in what otherwise is a very upbeat report.  “Smartwatches and smart glasses from Google and others are not completely ready for mainstream consumer adoption.” They’re all expensive and won’t make them mass market until prices drop.

Samsung tablets up, Apple iPads down

Posted on October 1, 2014 by - News

cheap-tabletsA report from ABI Research said that sales of branded tabets such as those from Samsung and Apple only grew by 2.5 percent in the first half of this year.

The report said that sales of Apple iPads fell by 13 percent while sales of Samsung tablets grew by 26 percent year on year.

Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI Research, said: “The roller coaster ride from the leading two tablet vendors has market watchers looking to other vendors to create sustainable growth. All eyes are on Lenovo as it is one of the few to demonstrate consistent growth over the past year.”

But there is some good news for Intel. It is showing progress towards the goal it set itself of 40 million devices using its microprocessor in 2013. Orr described 2014 as the “tipping point” for Intel’s mobile stategy.

”Forty million units is only a minor dent in ARM’s domination of tablets, though Intel is quickly becoming a formidable applications processor architecture competitor,” Orr said.

Dell rules the PC monitor roost

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News, Products

Dell logoPC monitor unit shipments amounted to 32.5 million units in the second quarter of this year – and that’s a fall of 2.9 percent compared to the year before.

IDC released findings on the quarter, said that tendency will continue over the next three years.

But LCD technology had a 93 percent market share in the second quarter, an increase of 10.5 percent compared to the same quarter a year before.

The favoured screen size is 21.x-inches, and had a market share of 22.5 percent in the quarter.

While touch screen monitors continue to hold only a tiny part of the total PC monitor share of 0.4 percent, there was stronger growth in the USA than in other markets.

Dell managed to stay number one in the quarter, with market share of 15.4 percent, representing five million units.

Samsung, at number two, had a 17.9 percent share in market value. In revenue terms, it was number one, shipping $1.04 billion wrth of units in the quarter.

HP is the number three worldwide, but held the number one position in Western Europe, and the number two position in the US.

Next year’s server wars may be cancelled

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

soldiers-2The major battle in the server space planned for next year may be only a minor skirmish with the usual suspects winning.

Intel needs to see off the expected competition from ARM and is going to chuck a lot more cash in the area to keep its position as market leader. What we are seeing from the Intel Developer Forum is that its answer will be a a new Xeon D family of chips.

Xeon D chips will be the first server chips based on the Broadwell architecture, and will go into dense servers starting next year. But these are not your normal server chips, they are effectively systems on a chip which means that they will be deliberately targeting anything “low level and power efficient” that ARM is expected to come up with.

It means that Intel does not think that its Xeon E3 and Atom chips code-named Avoton will be up to the task of taking on ARM. The Xeon D chip will be faster, but more power hungry than Avoton, which is based on an architecture called Silvermont used in mobile chips.

But Intel thinks that the Xeon D will provide more performance-per-watt, which punters will find attractive.

Intel does have some other advantages in any coming server war. Intel’s chips already go into more than 90 percent of servers, and server makers like Dell have said that the chances for success of ARM servers are diminishing due to product delays. Intel also has a head-start on software development over ARM.

ARM’s server chips are based on the ARMv8 architecture, and have integrated networking, storage and I/O controllers. Its key weapon against Intel is still lower power consumption, something Chipzilla is fast catching up on.

A variety of companies had indicated interest in making server processors based on blueprints from ARM,  but so far ARM 64-bit server processors have not been made available commercially.

Chip makers like Applied Micro and Advanced Micro Devices have delayed shipment of ARM-based chips.

Dell is offering prototype ARM servers for benchmarking and application development. Hewlett-Packard announced plans to use ARM processors in its Moonshot “dense” server, which uses x86 chips, but hasn’t announced a definitive release date for the ARM edition.

The other player in any coming war AMD is also expanding its low-power server processor lines,  which could also will hurt adoption of ARM servers.

The other big hurdle for ARM is the fact that most firms already have software and hardware based around x86. To adopt ARM-based servers, companies will not only have to invest in new servers and components, but also port applications to the architecture.

This could make a switch to ARM very expensive in terms of capital and final cost of ownership. Then there are some licensing issues surrounding the adoption of ARM servers, as companies will have to pay more for software per core used in them, Norrod said.

ARM is also finding its allies thin on the ground. ARM server pioneer Calxeda folded operations and earlier this year Nvidia scrapped server chip plans. Samsung has also abandoned ARM server chip development.

Apple iPhone is favoured by thieves

Posted on September 8, 2014 by - News

Apple_iPhone_5_white-330x330A report from the UK Home Office said that thieves are brand conscious and prefer stealing Apple iPhones compared to the rest of the pack.

The report said over 50 percent of all phones stolen between January 2012 to January 2014 were iPhones.  Other brands appealing to thieves are Blackberry and Samsung devices. People who have had their phones stolen believe the value of the personal data to be more than £760.

While vendors have made improvements to security that appear to have put off some thieves, the report analyses their effectiveness in some detail.

It suggests that the introduction of Apple iOS7 this time last year “has affected the black market value of some stolen iPhones”.  An analysis based in London suggests reduction in thefts because of iOS7.

phonechart

Samsung’s intro of Find my Mobile and the Reactivation Lock have also probably reduced thefts.

People worried about losing their mobile phones should register their mobile devices at no cost at immmobilise.com, use PIN locks, don’t leave your phone hanging about, install a tracker app.  If a phone is stolen, it should be reported to the network straight away, and report it to your local cop shop.

Nvidia sues Qualcomm and Samsung

Posted on September 5, 2014 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxNvidia has sued Qualcomm and Samsung for infringing its patents on graphics processing technology.

Nvidia said Qualcomm and Samsung had used Nvidia’s patented technologies without a licence in Samsung’s mobile devices and the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge.

Nvidia said Samsung devices made with graphics technology from Qualcomm, Britain’s ARM and Imagination Technologies infringed on its patents.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that the pair were using Nvidia technology free and were shipping an enormous number of devices.

Nvidia did not say it is suing Imagination – part owned by Apple –  or ARM  – started by Apple really, but it did say it is asking the US International Trade Commission to prevent shipments of Samsung devices containing ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures, as well as Qualcomm’s graphics technology.

However, since Imagination technology is also found under the bonnet of Apple’s iPhones, it could be that Nvidia plans to sue Apple.

It is clear that Apple was not a legal cage that Nvidia wanted to rattle yet. Huang said he was focused on Samsung and Qualcomm, and continues to have “productive conversations” with many other companies out there.

In other words the cunning plan is to take out Qualcomm and Samsung and the others will pay a lot of money to make Nvidia lawyers go away.

Samsung has said it will fight Nvidia, while the others have not made a comment.

Smartphone designers run out of ideas

Posted on September 4, 2014 by - News

Samsung rules the roostSamsung has just confirmed what many in the industry had thought – that there is nothing you can do to a smartphone which will make it much different.

Samsung unveiled new versions of its Galaxy Note smartphone to a loud sounding yawn from tech journalists.

To be fair there is nothing wrong with the phone,  at least not this time.  The new Galaxy Note 4 features a crisper, 5.7-inch display in a metal frame and accessories designed to attract gamers and an improved pen stylus and related software as a handwriting alternative to typing on a keyboard. It boasts easier to use multi-tasking features that take advantage of its large screen.

But really there is not much more you can do with a smartphone which has not already been done or would cost too much to be bothered with.

Samsung is pinning a lot on the Note, which came under a lot of mockery from Apple fanboys because of its size. Apple later realised that the large scale phone was popular and copied it in the designs for its iPhone 6.

However now the idea of a large smartphone has no novelty and users need something a bit more interesting to engage them.

Mobile phone analysts said that, while packed full of hundreds of features and many of the latest hardware specs, there is little in the Note 4 to excite new users.

Forrester told Reuters that all the phones could manage were incremental changes. Analyst Thomas Husson said Samsung needs to distinguish its devices from dozens of cheaper rivals and it could not manage it.

Samsung lost control of the Chinese market to Xiaomi during the April-June quarter. It continued to lose market share in other emerging markets, analysts say, undercut in part by rivals producing increasingly attractive products at much lower prices in the lower end of the market.

The company experience some major headaches with the Galaxy S5 which did not make the impact onto the market that users hoped.

The Korean electronics giant says it will get more aggressive on pricing and focus on a narrower set of products for its mid-to-low tier products.

Samsung teams up with Nokia

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

arr_treasureSamsung and Nokia have signed an agreement to bring Nokia’s HERE mapping service to Samsung’s shiny toys.

Apparently HERE for Android will be initially exclusive to Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone line, and it will also be bringing a mini version of HERE to Samsung’s Tizen-based smartwatches, including the newly-announced Samsung Gear S.

HERE was the love child of Nokia’s Ovi mapping service and Navteq, which was another purchase from the former rubber boot maker. HERE is one of the main competitors to Google Maps and powers Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Amazon Maps, and Garmin GPS devices.

For those who came in late this deal has nothing to do with Microsoft, which only bought Nokia’s “Devices & Services” division. The remaining parts of the company deal with maps, cellular networking technology, and R&D.

But the move will take Samsung further away from the Google ecosystem. Nokia’s business model is to charge for access to the map data, which presumably is what Samsung is doing, plus a little more to get HERE for Android as an exclusive.  However Samsung loses money for every user of its map app, while Google makes money from flogging its adverts.

 

Apple loses another court battle

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

novità-apple-2013A federal judge has rejected Apple’s attempt to block the sale of several older Samsung smartphones that copied auto-correction feature in the iPhone’s keyboard, the method to create links for email addresses and phone numbers appearing in text and the swiping gesture for unlocking the phone’s display screen.

While that particular trial, which was spun as a victory, is starting to make Apple look a little silly.  Firstly, in this case the jury awarded Apple only $119 million in damages well below the $2.2 billion in damages that Apple wanted.

And now Apple’s demand that US District Judge Lucy Koh issued an order that would have prevented future US sales of nine Samsung phone models that it claimed infringed on the iPhone technology has been rejected.

Koh said Apple had not adequately proven Samsung’s intellectual theft had hurt its sales or diminished its reputation for innovation. She noted that Apple had licensed some of the features that Samsung infringed upon to the makers of other smartphones that competed against the iPhone.

Samsung told the court the damages awarded to Apple amounted to a royalty payment for its past and future infringements on the patents at issue.

Apple had wanted to ban the US sale of these Samsung models: the Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S II, Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Galaxy S III, and Stratosphere.