Cellcom Canada

Friday, 3 January 2014

Acer looks like it’s willing to try anything as it rolls out an Android-based all-in-one

The Acer TA272 HUL has a 27-inch screen with resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels. It runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean on an Nvidia Tegra 4 processor and has 16GB of storage, a 2-megapixel webcam, and a USB 3.0 port. It also has HDMI and DisplayPort inputs so it can become an external monitor for other devices. Acer hasn’t said how much RAM the computer has, but we’d guess either 1GB or 2GB.

In other words, it’s the guts of a typical Android phone or tablet inside a much larger touchscreen with a multi-angled kickstand. Acer says its Android all-in-one is “ideal for home entertainment, browsing, and sharing,” which is a reasonable statement given that Android is substandard for desktop-level productivity.

acer android all in one with Android — The Acer TA272 HUL in a side view

Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, Android has no windowing system for multitasking, and offers only primitive mouse and keyboard support. The things you’d expect from a desktop OS, such as being able to right-click on something to bring up a context menu, aren’t supported in Android.

The lack of Adobe Flash support is a bigger drawback on a full-blown computer than on mobile devices and, of course, Android versions of programs like Photoshop and Chrome aren’t nearly as useful as their desktop counterparts.

So is Acer’s $1100 price tag justified? In fairness, it’s hard to find Windows-based all-in-one PCs with displays with this large of a screen and this kind of resolution for this cheap (though the Microsoft Store currently has one from Lenovo

Meanwhile, some standalone monitors with the same screen resolution are pretty expensive, so you could think of Acer’s model as just a monitor for your Windows desktop with Android thrown in. But whether people actually want their Windows machines with a side of Android is the question of the moment.

Thursday, 2 January 2014

Nokia 5230

iphone 5

Samsung Unveils New 'Smart Control' TV Remote

the iPhone 5

Credit: Samsung

Tech giant Samsung has spilled the beans on one of its own products that it will be promoting at the 2014 CES in Las Vegas next week — the new 'Smart Control' remote. The remote has two improvements over last year's model. First, it abandons the traditional rectangular form for an oval shape that Samsung calls a "pebble-like design" and more ergonomic. Second, it features gesture control, allowing the user to move between menus by swinging the remote.

The Smart Control remote also has two major features returning from Samsung smart TV remote that was released last year. A microphone allows you to control the television via voice. It also has a touchpad, allowing you to swipe through menus, not unlike on a smartphone touchscreen. However, the touchpad's size has been reduced by over 80 percent to no longer dominate the remote like last year's model.

MORE: TV Buying Guide 2014

Altogether, the Smart Control features four ways to interact with a Samsung television: buttons, touchpad, voice and gesture controls.

Previous models of Samsung's smart TV remote were bundled with the company's high-end televisions and sold separately for use with other Samsung TVs. The company has not yet released details about the pricing and availability of the Smart Control remote

Analysts divided on Apple: Cantor calls it a 'top pick,' Wells Fargo downgrades citing margins

the iPhone 5

iPhone Plus

Both firms issued research notes to investors on Thursday stating their cases as to why investors should or shouldn't be excited about the prospects for Apple has the new year begins. White, of Cantor Fitzgerald, declared that Apple is his firm's top large-cap pick for 2014, declaring that he believes the next 12 months will be a "year of innovation" for the Cupertino-based corporation.

"For 2014, we expect Apple to enter new product categories, re-accelerate growth in China and deepen its offerings in existing categories," White wrote in a note provided to AppleInsider.Brian White of Cantor Fitzgerald believes 2014 will be a "year of innovation" for Apple.

Specifically, he expects Apple to release a wrist-worn so-called "iWatch" this calendar year, while he also predicts that Apple will launch new, larger iPhone models in 2014. He also believes that recent rumors of a 12.9-inch iPad are not really for a new iPad, but instead a "hybrid device" that would be bigger than an iPad but more mobile than a MacBook Air.

Finally, White is also bullish on Apple's newly announced China Mobile deal, which will see the world's largest carrier begin selling both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c this month. Cantor Fitzgerald has maintained its price target of $777 for Apple stock.

While White sees numerous reasons to buy shares of AAPL, Um of Wells Fargo is less confident. On Tuesday, he downgraded the iPhone maker's stock to "market perform," though he maintained his price target range of between $536 and $581 — as of Thursday morning before the markets opened, shares of AAPL were in the middle of that range at $561.

The reason for Um's downgrade is concerns over Apple's gross margins. In particular, he expects that Apple will launch a redesigned "iPhone 6" later this year that will cut into profitability, as has occurred in every new iPhone form factor cycle previously.

Analyst Maynard Um expects a redesigned "iPhone 6" to cut into margins this year.

In addition, he believes there's a "limited amount of incremental market cap opportunity in the existing product segments Apple plays in." He believes Apple's recent market capitalization gains did not come from increased consumer spending, but instead represented the "transfer of dollars" from competitors.

"With less market cap to absorb from its peers and continued pressures on the consumer wallet, we see limited market opportunity absent material share gains," Um said.

The last concern expressed by Um as Apple heads into 2014 is a prediction by the analyst that smartphone subsidies may become less of a focus for wireless providers. AT&T's CEO hinted as much last month, when he said carriers should push toward an ecosystem devoid of subsidies for high-end smartphones.

Um believes that carriers will instead focus on driving device usage to maximize their profitability in the future. This "shifting balance of power," he said, could drag down shares of Apple.

Still, Um believes Apple had a strong just-concluded holiday season, in which he predicts the company sold 54.8 million iPhones and 24 million iPads. Apple will report its holiday quarter earnings later this month.

Essential Android games: First 5 games to download on your new smartphone

If you own a new smartphone and would like to stock up on the absolute, must-have games for Android, there are some essential games you should download immediately after setting up a new phone.

The Google Play Store is filled with thousands of apps, games, books, movies - so much so that it's easy to get a headache while trying to figure out which games are worth your hard-earned money. Pocket-lint has come to the rescue by compiling a Top 5 list - in no particular order - of some of the best Android smartphone games.

This list features the essentials; the games you just can't resist. They're popular, they're addictive, they're entertaining, and they're everything you need to have fun with an Android smartphone. And some of them are free.

Check 'em out below, and let us know in the comments what you think.

Ingress

Ingress is an augmented reality, multiplayer online game created by Google's Niantic Labs start-up. It's currently only available for Android devices, and it has everything you could want in a game: strange videos, weird clues, futuristic-like language, an underground cyber war, and the ability to explore in (near) real time. It's more than an interesting Google project though: it's a fantastically fun time-suck.

Wednesday, 1 January 2014

Get Ready For A Seriously Huge Year From Apple In 2014

Half way through 2013, it looked like a lost year for Apple.

Apple had no product announcements. Its stock was cratering. As the stock fell, the media started writing stories about Apple losing its innovative spirit.

But now that 2013 is over, it's clear this was not a lost year for Apple. In fact, it was really big year, one that set the table for the next 2-3 years of innovation from Apple.

It's very likely we're going to look back at this year as the first one in which Apple fully entered the post-Steve Jobs era.

There's one event that really stands out: The introduction of iOS 7. Apple expert John Gruber writing about iOS 7, said, "it shows that the company is not afraid to boldly move forward from the Steve Jobs era."

Jobs loved the bubbly, glitzy, faux-realistic icons and design in iOS 6. His partner Jony Ive killed all of that in iOS 7, which had simpler icons and design with a brighter color palate.

Breaking from Jobs' flavor for iOS 7 was a statement. "I’m not going to pretend to know Jobs’s taste — no one could, that’s what made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs — but I can certainly make a guess, and my guess is that he would not have supported this direction," said Gruber in October, adding, "I do think it’s a tangible sign that Tim Cook means it when he says that Jobs’s advice to him was never to ask 'What would Steve have done?' but instead to simply ask 'What is best for Apple?' and judge for himself."

Burberry

Angela Ahrendts

Beyond iOS 7, which was the boldest, most in-your-face move by Apple in 2013, there were a number of other, somewhat smaller moves that point to what it's planning for 2014:

Apple hired Angela Ahrendts, formerly CEO of Burberry to run its retail operations. (Some people are so high on Ahrendts they think she'll be CEO one day. I'd like to see her work a day at Apple before making proclamations.)
It bought 15 (!) companies this year. Apple has been criticized for not being aggressive on M&A. Seems like it got aggressive this year.

• Of the companies it bought, it seems that at least 3 are mapping related.
• One of them will help with search.
• One of them could be used in Apple TV.

It poached Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch to run a special project. At Adobe, Lynch talked trash about Apple, so this hire was surprising. He's supposedly leading a team of ex-iPod engineers on something.
Yves St. Laurent CEO Paul Deneve joined Apple as a VP working on special projects reporting to Tim Cook. Think Apple is going to go down market? It hired people from Burberry and YSL.
Apple scooped up a lot of the people that developed Nike's FuelBand. Cough *iWatch* Cough.
It released iOS 7, a total remake of Apple's mobile software. (We just talked about this.)
The iPad Air is an incredible product, and the iPad Mini with Retina ain't too bad. Two new iPads that keep it ahead of the competition.
It added a fingerprint scanner to the iPhone in a simple elegant way that no other company has done for smartphones.
It added 64-bit, or desktop computing-level, architecture to the iPhone and iPad. This seems like one of those things that will be massive in the next year or two. Tablets as powerful as laptops are coming.

The high-end phone market will be a chamber of horrors in 2014

the iPhone 5

2014 Smartphone Sales Projection

Many news sites have reported perky news items about Flurry’s Christmas app download statistics. And most of them have been comprehensively out to lunch. The real news in Flurry’s numbers is not that Christmas Day app downloads once again bounced sharply from the average December day since that obviously happens every year. A truly gruesome bit of real news was buried in the exhibit that compares Christmas 2012 download volume growth to Christmas 2013: App download volume increased by 90% year-on-year back in 2012 but by just 11% in 2013.

The Christmas app download volume growth has collapsed. This matters a great deal to the smartphone industry, because high-end smartphone sales depend on affluent markets where the Christmas bounce is big: The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, etc. Low-end smartphone sales dominate markets where the Christmas sales bounce is small-to-non-existent: Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Nigeria, etc.

The cataclysmic slowdown of app download volume we just witnessed is likely a sign that the number of consumers buying a high-end smartphone for the first time has tanked in the Western world. The people who triggered the massive Christmas app download surges of 2012 and 2011 were consumers who had just received the first high-end smartphone and have either switched from a feature phone or a low-end smartphone that lacked strong app support (Nokia, BlackBerry, etc.).

That pool of consumers has been exhausted. Refugees from Nokia and BlackBerrycamps have already bought an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy. All high-income and middle-class consumers have already migrated from feature phones to smartphones. Gartner’s Q3 2013 numbers reflected the same phenomenon. Globally, Apple and Samsung stopped gaining market share in the autumn quarter while Lenovo, LG and Huawei were all market share gainers.

The point about Flurry’s Christmas statistics is that consumer behavior may be changing faster than anyone predicted. Nobody in the app industry expected that app download growth relative to Christmas 2012 could drop to just 11%. A decline to roughly 30% growth was widely expected and some pessimists anticipated just 20% growth.

But consumer behavior is shifting faster than we comprehend. The industry history of the high-end device market in 2014