Beefy internals match the beefy-for-the-space price. by Kyle Orland
Say what you will about Android-based microconsole efforts likeOuyaandGamestick, but the $100 devices hold a distinct price advantage over more powerful consoles from the bigger manufacturers. Gaming peripheral maker MadCatz is giving up a lot of that pricing advantage by launching pre-orders forits previously announced M.O.J.O. microconsoleat $250 today.
That price reflects the beefy-for-an-Android-console specs inside the box. The M.O.J.O. upgrades the Nvidia Tegra 3 in the Ouya to a Tegra 4 processor and offers 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. That should help future-proof the console a bit, giving it a fighting chance to run high-end Android games that come out in the next year or two.
The bulk of mobile games today don't need nearly that much power, however, and even in the future a large proportion of Android-based titles are likely going to be casual fare that doesn't require anything close to high-end hardware. The $250 price point also pits the M.O.J.O. directly against full-fledged consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3. Those systems are at the end of their lifespans, sure, but they still sport better hardware and much better existing software lineups than MadCatz's Android effort. They are also likely to continue getting software support for a few more years.
It's hard to see what market segment MadCatz is specifically targeting with its pricey, powerful Android console, but if you're part of that market, you canplace your pre-order now; deliveries will begin on December 10.
To date, Dell hasn't been particularly invested in the tablet market. It has dipped its metaphorical toes in the water with Windows tablets like theLatitude 10and the Windows RT-running XPS 10. There are some less-successful experimentsin its more distant past, but so far the company hasn't jumped in with the enthusiasm of PC-making competitors like Asus, Lenovo, or even HP.
Today Dell expanded its efforts in the tablet market, launching a total of four tablets under its resurrected Venue brand. The tablets address a wide swath of the potential market—two run Android, two run Windows 8.1, and they range in screen size from seven inches to nearly 11—and they all use Intel's CPUs rather than chips from any of the major ARM partners. We got a chance to go hands-on with each of the tablets after the company's announcement today.
The “me too!” Android Venue tablets
Dell's Android-powered Venue 7 (left) and Venue 8 (right).
Andrew Cunningham
The two Android tablets, the 7-inch Venue 7 and 8-inch Venue 8, are competent but uninspiring. Both tablets share the same 1280x800 resolution IPS displays, which is in line with other budget Android tablets but short of the 1920x1200 displays in tablets like the 2013 Nexus 7 and the new Kindle Fire HDX. Both tablets are encased in sturdy plastic and run on Intel's older Clover Trail+ Atoms rather than the new Bay Trail chips—the 7-inch version uses a 1.6GHz Atom Z2560 and the 8-inch uses a slightly faster 2.0GHz Z2580. Both processors are dual-core chips with Hyper-Threading enabled, and both tablets run their near-stock Android 4.2.2 reasonably smoothly. While Dell alluded to future KitKat compatibility during its presentation, the company isn't ready to discuss update plans with any specificity.
Each tablet also includes optional LTE connectivity, 2GB of LPDDR2 RAM, 2.4GHz-only 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, and a GPS. The Venue 7 comes with 16GB of storage and the Venue 8 comes with either 16 or 32GB, and both sport a microSD card slot for storage expansion.
Both tablets have rear and front cameras. The Venue 7 uses a VGA front-facing camera and 3MP rear camera while the Venus 8 bumps the front camera to 2MP and the rear camera to 5MP.
Andrew Cunningham
Like the specs, the general build quality is good but not exceptional. Both tablets are backed with a smooth (but not slippery or glossy) plastic, and with the exception of the Intel branding on the back they feel like plastic Android tablets in the vein of the original Nexus 7 or Asus' newerMemo Pad HD 7. The Venue 7 weighs 0.52 pounds and is 0.38 inches thick while the Venue 8 weighs 0.64 pounds and is 0.39 inches thick—to compare, the2013 Nexus 7weighs 0.64 pounds and is 0.34 inches thick.
The good thing about both tablets is that the price is right—the 7-inch version starts at $149 and the 8-inch version at $179—but neither tablet has a "killer feature" that would recommend them over the Nexus 7. If you're really looking for an Android tablet in this size and general price range, thenewest Nexus 7is worth the extra cash. Both Android Venue tablets will go on sale October 18th.
So long, Windows RT: the Venue 8 Pro and Venue 11
Dell's Venue 8 has a great screen and can go toe-to-toe with Android or iOS tablets in thickness and weight.
Andrew Cunningham
The more interesting Venue tablets are the ones that run Windows 8.1, particularly the 8-inch Venue 8 Pro. We're still looking for a really great small Windows tablet after the disappointingAcer Iconia W3, and at least at first glance, the Venue 8 Pro seems like it could get the job done.
Like the Android tablets, the Venue 8 Pro is limited to a 1280x800 IPS display, which at 189 PPI isn't particularly crisp but features decent color and good viewing angles. Everything on the inside of the tablet gets a significant upgrade, beginning with a newBay Trail-based1.8GHz quad-core Atom Z3740D. Bay Trail should offer significantly upgraded CPU and GPU performance over older Clover Trail and Clover Trail+ tablets, potentially helping the Venue 8 Pro out especially when running Windows desktop apps.
The Venue 8 Pro also includes 2GB of DDR3L, dual-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, a TPM module, a 5MP rear camera and 1.2MP front camera, and a micro SD card slot. Optional LTE. 32GB or 64GB storage options are also available, though it's still on a slow eMMC interface that will be significantly slower than a SATA or PCI Express storage interface. All of this fits into a package that is actually thinner than the Android-equipped Venue 8 at 0.35 inches, though it's slightly heavier at 0.86 pounds.
The Venue 8 Pro feels significantly more, well,tablet-ythan the Iconia W3, which is just a little too thick and heavy to fit in next to tablets like the Nexus 7 or iPad mini. The weight, thickness, and soft-touch back make the tablet nice to hold, and the tablet's UI is smooth and responsive on both the Start screen and the desktop. The tablet should get about ten hours of battery life, though of course we'll have to wait to get a review unit before we can put that claim to the test.
The Windows button has been relocated to the top of the tablet, rather than the front.
Andrew Cunningham
The Venue 8 Pro with its cover, keyboard, and pen accessory. None of these were available during our hands-on time.
Dell
You might notice that there's no Windows button on the front face of the Venue 8 Pro, a bit of an oddity given the button's ubiquity in nearly every other Windows 8 tablet or convertible we've seen in the last year. The button has been relocated to the tablet's top edge, which may take a little getting used to. Power and volume buttons, a headphone jack, and a USB 2.0 port are also peppered around the tablets edges. Finally, the tablet has a few optional accessories, none of which were on hand at the event: a Bluetooth keyboard, a cover that doubles as a stand, and a pen accessory that works with the tablet's Synaptics digitizer are all on offer, though pricing was not discussed.
The Venue 8 Pro (and the other Bay Trail tablets we've glimpsed so far) finally feels like a true Windows tablet, and not just an Ultrabook or netbook pretending to be a tablet. It starts at $299 and will go on sale on October 18th.
The Venue 11 Pro, ensconced in its keyboard dock.
Andrew Cunningham
Joining the Venue 8 Pro is the Venue 11 Pro, a larger tablet that gets into convertible PC territory thanks to a trio of different docking solutions—one for sitting the tablet on a desktop, one that acts as both a (shallow) keyboard and a cover, and one that effectively turns the tablet into a small laptop and boosts its battery to around 17 hours.
The keyboard part of the keyboard cover. It's serviceable, but key travel is predictably pretty shallow.
Andrew Cunningham
The cover also serves as a stand.
Andrew Cunningham
The "Mobile Keyboard" accessory transforms the tablet into a small laptop. Press the button in the middle of the dock to remove the tablet from the dock.
Andrew Cunningham
The desktop dock, not available for us to try at the event, gives the tablet an extra USB port and two display outputs.
Dell
The specs are a little more difficult to nail down in the Venue 11 Pro. The $499 starting price will get you a Bay Trail-based Atom Z3770 with 2GB of RAM in a tablet that weighs 1.6 pounds and is 0.40 inches thick (this is the version of the tablet that Dell let us get our hands on). There's also a Haswell-based version of the tablet, which includes Y-series dual-core Core i3 and i5 CPUs, can include 4GB or 8GB of RAM, and is up to 0.61 inches thick. In this configuration, the Venue becomes more of a Surface Pro 2competitor.
All versions of the tablet come with a 10.8-inch 1080P display, dual-band 802.11n (802.11ac is available in the top-end Core i5 configurations), NFC, a TPM, Bluetooth 4.0, and optional LTE. 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB storage configurations are all listed on the spec sheet, though we'd bet that the 32GB and 64GB configurations are limited to the Atom versions of the tablet and the larger storage options only come with the Haswell versions.
10-inch widescreen tablets: still not comfortable to hold in one hand.
Andrew Cunningham
In any event, even the Atom-based version of the tablet is a bit on the large side thanks to its large display—like many widescreen tablets, the Venue 11 is difficult to hold in one hand for long. The smooth soft-touch plastic back feels good in the hands, though, and despite the higher-resolution screen, the Atom SoC doesn't doom you to a laggy or stuttering user interface.
The Venue Pro 11 goes on sale in the UK on November 7th, with US availability to follow at some unspecified date. Pricing for its three main accessories was not announced.
Windows or Android, the Venue tablets are entirely Intel-powered.
Andrew Cunningham
The two Windows 8.1 Venue tablets really drive home how far Intel's silicon has come since those first Windows on ARMannouncements began to trickle out. Whatever configuration you buy, you're getting full x86-powered Windows, and following the demise of its Windows RT-poweredXPS 10 tablet the company has announced that it has "no plans" to introduce further Windows RT products. That leavesMicrosoft's Surface RT and Surface 2as the last Windows RT devices standing, and while it was once the case that ARM SoCs provided for much thinner and lighter tablets than Intel chips could, that clearly isn't the case any longer.
Elliptic Labs, a startup founded back in 2006 which uses ultrasound technology to enable touchless, gesture-based interfaces, has finally pushed its tech into smartphones. It’s been demoing this at theCEATEC conferencein Japan this week (a demo of Elliptic’s tech running on a tablet can also be seen in this TC video, from May) but today it’s announcing the launch of its first SDK for Android smartphones.
Elliptic’s technology is able to work with any ARM-based smartphone, confirmed CTO Haakon Bryhni in an interview with TechCrunch. “That is completely new to us, that we’re able to make the technology available on a low-powered platform,” he said. ”A major part of our technology development for the past half year has been to optimise our algorithms for smartphone use.”
Gesture-based user interfaces which turn mid-air hand movements into UI commands have pushed their way into console-based gaming, thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral, and also mainstream computing via the likes of theLeap Motiondevice and webcam-based alternatives. Mobiles haven’t been entirely untouched by ‘touchless’ interfaces — Samsung added limitedmid-air gesture support to the Galaxy S4earlier this year, for instance (and back in 2009 the now defunctSony Ericsson tried its hand at motion-sensitive mobile gaming) — but most current-gen smartphones don’t have the ability to respond to mid-air swiping.
That’s set to change in 2014, as Elliptic Labs is currently working with several Android OEMs that are building devices that will include support for a gesture-based interface. Bryhni would not confirm the exact companies but said he expects several gesture-supporting mobile devices to hit the market in the second half of next year.
“We are currently working very closely with three OEMs, in advanced prototyping stages with the objective of getting our technology into handsets — one tablet and two smartphone manufacturers,” he told TechCrunch. “We are also talking to some laptop manufacturers. But it is the smartphone and tablet vendor that are the most aggressive.”
As well as increased numbers of mobile devices packing gesture support next year, the technology is going to get more powerful thanks to the capabilities of ultrasound, according to Bryhni. He argues that the Galaxy S4′s gesture support is more limited, being as it’s powered by an infrared sensor which requires the user to be relatively close for it to function.
By contrast, Elliptic’s embedded ultrasound tech (which basically consists of microphones and a transducer, plus the software) can support gestures within an 180 degree sphere — in front of and around the edges of a phone, and at distances that could be customised by the user – allowing for a range of “natural gestures” to be used to control the UI, interact with apps or play games.
ULTRASOUND’S BACKERS & CHALLENGERS
Ultrasound also contrasts favourable to a camera-based gesture technologies like Leap Motion, according to Bryhni, which requires the user to perform their hand movements within a relatively narrow “cone” where the camera can see them. “If you put cameras onto the screen — let’s say integrated into the bezels — then you need to hold your hand at 90 degrees so it’s super inconvenient,” he said, discussing the drawbacks of using camera-based systems to enable gestures on mobile devices. “The benefit with our technology is it works with the sensor placed flat and invisible, hidden within the bezel of the screen.
“Using ultrasound enables a very natural way of gesturing. And also the big benefit that we can work on a smartphone and a tablet, and we’re not dependent on any high powered lights or cameras.”
“Ultrasound uses a fraction of power in comparison to optical 3D technologies. Even in low light or in the dark, you can use the same natural hand movements you use every day,” added Elliptic Labs CEO Laila Danielsen in a statement. “With our software SDK we are giving smartphone manufacturers a way to easily and cost effectively include consumer-friendly touchless gesturing into their phones.”
Elliptic is not the only company looking at using ultrasound to extend user interfaces in new ways.Chipmaker Qualcomm acquired digital ultrasound company EPOSlast November — perhaps with a view topushing ultrasound tech into styluses, which would allow for a nearby mobile device to detect the position of the pen and pick up notes being made on a paper notepad, for instance. Qualcomm is also evidently interested in how ultrasound can be used to support gesture interfaces on mobile devices.
In terms of competing with Qualcomm, Bryhni argues that the EPOS’ pen tracking technology Qualcomm acquired is different to what Elliptic Labs has been focused on. “We’ve been dedicated on gesture recognition for eight years. We’ve seen this coming,” he said, adding: “We have the time and expertise in the market.” He also points out that Elliptic is offering device makers who make their own processors — as Samsung and Apple do, for instance — an alternative to having to buy all Qualcomm chips. “Our customers are quite interested in having an independent chipset for gesture-recognition technology,” he added. “The vendors tend to like that flexibility.”
Another area of flexibility is that Elliptic has made its technology available within an off-board DSP — the Wolfson 5110 – which allows an OEM to create a device that supports gesture controls even when the phone’s main processor is sleeping (i.e. so that a gesture interface does not compromise other power efficiency technologies which help to improve battery longevity on a mobile device). “A trend in modern smartphones and tablets is you offload some of the heavy, single processing to a dedicated DSP,” he said. “We have done that at this point… with a very high powered and super small DSP.”
GESTURE INJECTION FOR EXISTING APPS
As well as today’s Android SDK, which lets developers and OEMs build new software that can take full advantage of Elliptic Labs’ ultrasound tech’s capabilities, it is offering the ability to ‘retro-fit’ the tech to existing applications. It’s calling this ability to map mid-air gestures to existing apps “gesture injection”.
“For example if you wave left to right you create an arrow left event. If you swipe from the top of the screen and down you generate a close application event, for instance. And if you detect a gesture coming in from the right into the screen we for instance engage a menu, so in this way a legacy game such as Fruit Ninja… [can be gesture-mapped],” said Bryhni.
“It’s much more fun slashing fruits in the air than swiping on the screen,” he added.
Fruit Ninja mid-air swipes certainly sound fun but that’s just one application. Does the mobile space generally need gesture-based interfaces? As noted above, OEMs have dabbled here already with relatively uninspiring results. Smartphone touchscreens continue to engage their users with evolving on-screen gestures. So off-screen gestures are likely going to need some killer apps to get the users fired up — something that makes mid-air finger wiggling as cool as pinch to zoom was, when that first aired. But what are those gesture-powered apps going to be?
KILLER APPS: FROM COMMS TO CARS & WATCHES
Bryhni sees two main use-cases for gesture-based interfaces on mobiles. Firstly, controlling the UI, so things like changing apps, engaging menus, browsing up and down, selecting images and so on; and secondly: custom applications, such as games or mapping apps, or switching between productivity apps. He also sees potential for the tech to allow our devices to pick up on some of the unspoken communication that’s conveyed by things like hand gestures and body language.
“If you watch people communicate a good fraction of their communication is actually gestures… So gestures are actually quite an important part of expressing yourself and we think computers should detect this and include it in the general user interface,” he said. “It’s been a major change in smartphones when the touch panel was invented… and we believe that new user interfaces that can make it more natural to interact with your device actually has the potential to… strongly influence the market.”
But perhaps the biggest pull on the technology in the mobile space at least is the need for Android OEMs to add something different to their devices so they can stand out from each other and the rest of the industry. “I would say the ones that really need this are the OEMs,” Bryhni added. “They have a very strong need to differentiate themselves.”
Asian mobile makers are likely to continue to be at the fore of smartphone-based gesture interfaces, according to Bryhni. “We are a European and American company but the Asians are quite aggressive when it comes to introducing new technology,” he said, noting that Elliptic, which has offices in Norway and Silicon Valley, will be opening an office in the region soon, to support Asian OEMs.
“It should be our turf,” he added, discussing how innovation is shaking out in the smartphone space, with Asia leading the charge when it comes to pushing new technologies into devices. “They are more willing to try. [The U.S. and Europe] can’t afford to let Asians completely rule this business.”
Moving beyond mobile, Bryhni said he sees potential for ultrasound-powered gestures to elbow their way into cars — as a hands-free way to command in-car entertainment or navigation systems, for instance. “Car applications is a use-case that we are pursuing. We are working with automotive manufacturers to put ultrasonic touchless gesturing into cars. The automotive use case is highly relevant because it works in the dark and in changing light situations (such as when you are driving with the sun coming into a window or at night),” he said.
Asked Specifically about smartwatches, which have obvious screen size constraints and could therefore benefit from a gesture-based interface that doesn’t require the user’s fingers to block on-screen content, he said it would certainly be possible to mount the tech in a wrist-based mobile device.
“The process is feasible to make this happen and that is something we are envisioning but we are not actively working with anyone at present,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s an opportunity that could work because nobody has looked into it before because of power consumption. With our technology, it becomes feasible to command a new smart-watch and make it touchless. It could be a distinctive new feature that could differentiate one vendor from another.”
It would be nice if our phones knew to read our text messages aloud when we’re busy driving, or to silence themselves when we’re sleeping, but all too often that kind of stuff doesn’t just work out of the box.
While apps like Google Now — apps that assist users proactively and are contextually aware — are one of the trendiest things in tech, they’re usually entirely too complicated, or only helpful in theory.
Agent, a new app from Tagstand, aims to be a smart personal assistant that actually helps get things done without requiring tech know-how, extensive configuration, or the powers of imagination to dream up what your phone could automate for you.
Agent costs $1.99, and it’s only available for Android. Compared to alternatives likeIFTTT for iOSand Tasker for Android, it is built to have more mainstream appeal.
“What we’re doing is quite complicated and requires a lot of calibration,” said Tagstand co-founder Kulveer Taggar. “But we want you to install it and then not have to think about it.”
Some of Agent’s nifty tricks include:
Turning on driving mode when it detects that a phone has accelerated past 25 miles per hour or is connected to a known Bluetooth network. Then, new text messages get read aloud and sent an autoreply (“Liz is driving, she’ll get back to you soon.”).
After driving mode stops, Agent marks down the location as a parking spot, so it can be quickly found afterward.
When the phone drops below 10 percent of its battery life, Agent turns off Bluetooth, dims the screen, and stops apps from updating in the background. As soon as the battery level rises, it switches all that back on.
Between 8 am and 6 pm on weekdays, when there are events on a user’s calendar, the app silences the phone so it doesn’t interrupt meetings.
During set sleeping hours, the app silences the phone — but it automatically turns sound back on if it detects the phone display is still being used, or if someone from a list of important contacts calls.
To be clear, I haven’t tested this app for any significant period of time, so I don’t know what its always-on impact would be on battery life. Agent users will also have to give up significant amounts of personal information, like their location and calendar, to get the app to work. However, Taggar said the app saves most data locally, rather than on its own servers (in fact, the service doesn’t yet have user accounts).
Kulveer Taggar
Also, it’s not clear how well Agent will react when it doesn’t get things right. For instance, when I take public transportation, I might go more than 25 miles per hour — but at the end of the trip I won’t need to know where I’m parked. Or maybe I do want to be interrupted while I’m in certain meetings.
Taggar said his team will be carefully monitoring patterns in when and where people change settings, so it can make better assumptions going forward.
What are the chances for a little startup app to become a key phone utility? Slim. The new Moto X has many of these features, and the more useful ones are increasingly being added by handset and mobile platform makers. It’s stupid how long phones have gone without addressing and alleviating their contribution to distracted driving, but that’s finally happening.
Competition from the big guys is scary, Taggar admitted, but he said he likes his chances as an independent app that works across all Android phones — especially when built-in software from players like Samsung can be so shoddy.
Tagstand hasn’t built Agent for iOS yet, in part because Apple doesn’t give outside developers access to many key features. Plus, it only has a team of five people, Taggar said.
Based in San Francisco, Tagstand had emerged from the Y Combinator program two years ago as a startup that wanted to help automate the real world by selling NFC tags, labels, and stickers. Needless to say, that didn’t have mainstream appeal.
Since then, it built anAndroid Task Launcher appthat’s now meant to be the more hard-core, configurable version of Agent. That app has 200,000 monthly users, according to Taggar.
Tagstand has raised about $1.6 million in angel funding across two rounds, from investors including NextGen founder Atiq Raza.
Google may have accidentally shown off its much rumoured Nexus 5 smartphone before it is officially unveiled.
Following theannouncement of Android KitKat 4.4, the company posted a video showing the unveiling of the new KitKat statue.
In the video, it shows staff atGoogleattending the unveiling; many of them filming the event on their Androidsmartphones and tablets.
However, one employee appears to be filming the event using an unknown Nexus device. The scene appeared 38–39 seconds. A screen capture of that moment is below.
The video has since been taken down by Google adding fire to the suggestion that we may have accidentally been privy the the first sighting of the rumoured Nexus 5.
From the size of the device, its horizontal Nexus branding and the feint LG logo at the bottom of the handset, it is more than possible this is the Nexus 5.
Rumours began emerging last month, suggested that Google has askedLGto make a five-inch Nexus smartphone based on its recently launchedG2handset.
Those reports have suggested that on the outside, the Nexus 5 would look similar to the Nexus 4, with a glass back. The phone in the video matches that description.
Internally, the phone is rumoured to come with a 5.2-inch display and be based upon the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset. Other rumours have suggested Google may opt for the slightly older Snapdragon 600 chipset in an effort to help keep prices down.
Google has so far refused to comment on whether or not the device in the video was a Nexus 5.
Looking at previous Nexus launches, it seems about right that Google is preparing to launch a new model of its pure-Android handset line up.
Google unveiled the Nexus 4 at the end of October last year. We’d peg that as the most likely date for Google to unveil any new addition to the Nexus family.
With Apple in the middle of its first month of sales of two new iPhone models, the latest figures out fromKantar Worldpanel, a market research division of WPP, indicates that going into September, sales of Android smartphones are the strongest they have ever been. In the last 12 weeks ending August 31, smartphones running on Google’s mobile OS accounted for over 70% of all sales across the five biggest markets in Europe (UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy), with corresponding rises in all other major markets surveyed, including the U.S., compared tolast month.
However, a look at the bigger picture highlights another trend, and an opportunity for the likes of Apple, Nokia and Android OEMs who are not called Samsung. In key leading markets surveyed — U.S., UK and Australia — the share of sales to Android are down over a year ago (respectively now at 55.1%, 56.3% and 62.1%). And specifically, the analysts note that Samsung has seen a “dip” in sales for a couple of reasons: market saturation in mature markets; and competition from others at the lower end.
After years of increasing market share, Android has now reached a point where significant growth in developed markets is becoming harder to find,” writes Dominic Sunnebo, director of research at the group. “Android’s growth has been spearheaded by Samsung, but the manufacturer is now seeing its share of sales across the major European economies dip year on year as a sustained comeback from Sony, Nokia and LG begins to broaden the competitive landscape.”
Important to note that right now Android and Samsung are at a high-enough marketshare that even dips in specific markets are not doing much to tip the balance overall. In Spain, for example, over 90% of smartphones sold in the last 12 weeks were Android handsets. In China the figure is over 72%.
We have reached out to Kantar analysts to see if they can give us data on Samsung’s current share of sales, and whether they can provide any early indications on what kind of an impact the new iPhone models are having on the market. (We’ll update when / if we get more data.)
TARGETING BARGAIN HUNTERS
People have remarked a lot about how the new 5c version of the iPhone is not the budget device everyone had been expecting from Apple (although it is priced at a discount to the premium 5s model). So, notwithstanding the fact that the iPhone 4S is now seeing bargain (andoften free) bundling with mobile contracts, this will leave the field open to other players who are targeting the “budget” smartphone market — that is, users in both developed and emerging markets that are more price-conscious.
So far, Nokia’s aim of developing handsets to meet that latter demand has been paying increasing, if not huge, dividends, Kantar notes. It says that Windows Phone sales, as led by Nokia, are now in double digit percentages in the UK and France, at 12% and 10.8% respectively, with its share of sales in Europe’s five biggest markets at 9.2%. But other important markets like the U.S. (3% of sales) and China (2.1%) remain huge challenges for both Microsoft and Nokia on the mobile front. All things relative, it is still overall doing better than BlackBerry, which is now down to 0% of all sales in China, 1.8% in China, and nothing over 4.2% in any other market.
Judging by the numbers, it looks like Nokia’s and Microsoft’s best bet would be to keep going for bargain hunters or those who are less inclined to buy premium-priced handsets, which interestingly tap into two quite different demographics. “Windows Phone’s latest wave of growth is being driven by Nokia’s expansion into the low and mid range market with the Lumia 520 and 620 handsets,” writes Sunnebo. “These models are hitting the sweet spot with 16 to 24 year-olds and 35 to 49 year-olds, two key groups that look for a balance of price and functionality in their smartphone.”
APPLE’S OPPORTUNITY
While Kantar doesn’t give any indicators on early iPhone sales, we already know from Apple that sales of the two new modelstopped 9 millionfor the opening weekend, compared to 5 million for the iPhone 5 release last year. They haven’t released any numbers yet, but Kantar’s analysts hint that this is a good indication of more sustained strong sales figures for Apple. “This is set to spike in the coming months with the release of the iPhone 5s and 5c,” Sunnebo writes.
For the three months that ended August 31, Apple accounted for nearly 40% of sales in the U.S., up nearly six percentage points over a year ago but down by over three percentage points on last month’s figures (perhaps because of anticipation over the new models). At the time, the new phones could see Apple pulling ahead of Android for the first time in a while. In Japan, Apple’s iOS was nearly level with Android going into September, at 48.6% versus 47.4%, but the phones are now going to be sold for the first time by the country’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo, and that “makes it likely that Apple will pull ahead of Android in this key market.”
Android doesn’t really have an AirPlay equivalent – its Miracast and Mirrorlink technologies are similar, but lack the kind of opportunity Apple’s tech provides to build second screen experiences that work independently of what’s being shown on the original. That’s whySolution57created their Remote Application Framework (RAF for short), which goes even further, making displays attached to Android devices work more like displays attached to traditional desktop PCs.
Using RAF, Android devs can build experiences that run an app on a remotely connected display while also running separate software on the host device. The host device runs all the apps, and the receiving one displays its contents. UI is completely separate on both devices, which means that a user can play games while also running GPS on a second attached display. It’s a single system, with who separate displays, just like when you plug a monitor into your MacBook Pro.
It’s not exactly the same, though – the connected display still needs to be running some kind of OS itself, which is why RAF is being touted initially as a feature for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. You can imagine how a GM or a Nissan could implement this kind of functionality easily, no matter whether they’re using an IVI based on QNX or any other non-Android software, allowing users to either opt for their own in-built tools, or have an experience where their Android phone can take over entirely, just like Apple is proposing with its iOS in the Car feature introduced with iOS 7.
It doesn’t require any special changes to Android or the individual apps themselves to work, but Solution57 Director Rafal Malewski tells me in an interview that it would help greatly with adoption if RAF became part of the Mirrorlink official specifications.
“For automotive integration between mobile and IVI, to get proper penetration, we need this to get adopted as an extension to the Mirrorlink spec,” he explained. “We have initiated contact to the Car Connectivity Consortium to see if they are interested in picking up the technology.”
Meanwhile, Solution57 is already in talks to a couple of OEMs for non-IVI use of the remote tech. It’s in use in consumer-facing VNC clients that work on Android, iOS, QNX, Windows and Linux, and there are all kinds of potential applications Malewski sees as possible, including for secondary displays on wearable tech, or on smart controllers for Android-based gaming consoles and smart TVs.
Ultimately, Solution57 wants to see this adopted as a built-in technology by Google, which they’d likely hope would happen via an acquisition of the Danish firm. Currently, it’s available for OEM licensing, and the first devices with RAF integrated should start shipping around the middle of next year is all goes as planned, per Malewski.
