Smartphones set to become the fastest spreading technology in human history

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but it’s always nice to see it plotted on a graph: Smartphones might just be the fastest-spreading technology in human history. The only technologies that come close is the adoption of television between 1950 and 1953, and the recent emergence (and rapid growth) of the tablet market.

While these graphs, compiled by Michael Degusta for Technology Review, are entirely US-centric, they are representative of other Western world countries. The graphs clearly show that “last mile” technologies, such as landline telephone and electricity, take up to 100 years to reach market saturation — while wireless technologies, such as radio, television, and mobile (feature/dumb) phones can go from 0% to 75% market penetration in just 20 years.

Unfortunately Degusta doesn’t have complete data for 2011 or 2012 yet, but between 2007 and 2010 (spurred on by the release of the first iPhone) smartphones registered a gargantuan surge from 5% to 40% penetration. Smartphone growth is accelerating, too — in the US, more than two thirds of mobile phones sold are now of the smart variety. It is likely that smartphones will reach 75% penetration in the US in the next few years, making it the fastest-spreading technology in human history.

What about the rest of the world, though? Well, mobile phones (and now smartphones) are kind of unique in this regard. Historically, the adoption of advanced technologies is usually closely linked to a country’s GDP — but mobile phones have completely bucked that trend. In 2001, there was just one billion mobile phone subscribers — most of them in developed countries. Today there are six billion subscribers, and 73% of those (4.4 billion!) are in developing countries that account for just 20% of the world’s total GDP. In short, in just 10 years, mobile phones have almost reached saturation point in countries where people earn just a few dollars per day (and we have cheap ARM CPUs to thank for that!) Smartphones, with their larger screens and processors, are obviously more expensive than feature phones at the moment, but it’s only a matter of time until they’re cheap enough for worldwide adoption. In the first quarter of 2012, worldwide, 36% of all mobile phone shipments were smartphones, compared to 25% the year before.

While tablets have seen very strong adoption in the US since the release of the iPad in 2010, the jury is still out on whether worldwide demand will be anywhere near as ubiquitous as mobile phones. In Western countries, we can afford a laptop, smartphone, and tablet — in developing countries, at least for the time being, buying anything other than a smartphone would probably be a little foolhardy.

Of course, underpinning the growth of mobile phones are massive wireless networks. According to the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, some 90% of the world’s seven billion population is now covered by a 2G GSM wireless network, the vast majority of which also provide internet access via EDGE and GPRS. Furthermore, 45% of the world’s population (3 billion) are covered by a 3G cellular network. In a day and age where we’re still struggling to roll out high-speed internet via cable or DSL, we should be rather proud of ubiquity and performance of our worldwide wireless networks.

Read more at Technology Review

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Removing Windows 8 is better than…

I tried, folks, really I did. After unleashing my rant last week about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, I decided I would brave it for as long as I was mentally and physically capable. After all, this is a new operating system from Microsoft — I have as much a responsibility to myself as I do to the tech community to know it, use it, and understand it.

So I endured the Technicolor-eyesore Metro Start Screen, with all those oversize buttons that take seconds to launch programs that always started instantaneously in Windows 7. I pushed aside the psychological torture of opening program after program and never closing one, despite knowing I would never come back to it. I gritted my teeth through countless single-window screens, constant system slowdowns, and navigational awkwardness, always hoping that sticking with the pain would somehow make me a better person.

But after several additional days of seeing upgrades from Windows 7 fail on three separate computers, after several additional days of seeing even touchscreen all-in-ones and tablets actually become less usable as a result of being Windows 8ified, and after several additional days of being treated like a preschooler suffering from ADHD for wanting to perform the simplest tasks, I reached my snapping point.

As I said last time, I’m an adult and I want my computer to treat me like one. I have neither the time nor the inclination to trudge through multiple circles of interface hell just to do basic things that then fail to work as they always have before. And though I’m more than willing to pursue the workarounds people are discovering for bypassing Metro, I fail to see why I — or anyone — should have to. Microsoft, if you want to take over the tablet market, terrific. But can’t you find a way to do so that respects the hundreds of millions of customers who helped put you where you are?

Right here and now I’ll make this pledge: As new major editions of Windows 8 are released along the road to the final RTM version, I will keep trying them. I’m going to give Microsoft every opportunity to turn around this fiasco, to convince me that this is the operating system I both need and want to use. And if (when?) my mind changes about, I will let you all know. Microsoft has released a lot of good products over the last few decades, many of which have had significant positive impacts on my life, so the company has at least earned that.

For the time being, however, I have too much self-respect and too many demands on my time to devote to what is currently, at its best, nonsense. So a repartition, a format, and 20 minutes or so of disc accessing later, I had wiped out Windows 8 and replaced it with a sparkling copy of Windows 7. Let me tell you, that whole process was far and away the most invigorating and intensely satisfying experience I had all week.

To make matters better, some other happenings I’ve been following in the tech world (completely unrelated to the new iPad, thank you very much) have made me feel good, too. Just not quite as good.

1) As it’s barely March, it’s far too early for any responsible journalist to start doling out heaps of book-closing superlatives on any game. But upon the release of Mass Effect 3last week, many reviewers did just that. I’ve been playing it quite a bit myself — sorry, bosses, sorry: testing it — and have been having a good time, though it hasn’t quite struck me as an eternity of ecstasy on two DVDs. What it has is borderline epic replayability, and far more customization of the basic gameplay elements than most titles offer. You can play in a way that either emphasizes or minimizes combat, or finds a comfortable role-playing balance between the two. If you’re starting from scratch, you’re given a host of character-creation options that let you customize your background and personality in ways that eclipse what you get in most games. Of course, the narrative builds itself as you go along based on your choices in key dialogue scenes, and you never know exactly the shape of the universe you’re piloting through; and if you decide to import a character from Mass Effect 2, your actions from it are seamlessly woven into this game’s story about what happens when the Reapers reach Earth. Though there are some pacing lapses and not everything completely works, Mass Effect 3 is a heck of a lot of fun, and a game that, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, I expect to return to frequently over the course of the next six to 12 months or so.

2) PCWorld reported what could be a major development on the entertainment front when it revealed that Nvidia has joined the Linux foundation. In addition to presaging the development of more effective drivers for Linux in general, Nvidia’s move could mean that it’s finally willing to take the plunge into — or at least be willing to consider — the possibility of open-source drivers. (TheNouveau project has been a significant step for the open source community, but not enough of one.) Better drivers for Linux could mean better games and better utilities for Linux, and those are always good things. Phoronix’s Michael Larabel is skeptical, seeing Nvidia’s move as a way to shore up the underpinnings of its Tegra platform, and he might be right. Whatever ends up happening, this is a good start.

3) I admit I’m not much of a mobile guy, but I was impressed by Roccat Studios’ unveiling at the Game Developers Conference of its new free Power-Grid app, which lets you monitor and interact with elements of your PC from your smartphone. There’s a contact aggregator for bringing together incoming messages from the likes of Skype, Facebook, Teamspeak, and more; a way to verify your computer’s vitals (operating temperatures, free hard drive space, and so on); media controls for playing MP3s and adjusting your system’s various volume levels; and an editor for configuring the app to do pretty much whatever else you want. Though that sounds exciting, I’m undecided about some of the company’s other advances — a keyboard with an iPhone dock? — but I’ll wait and see what develops. I tend to be happier when small devices make big devices work better than when they try to supplant their functionality altogether, and I’m thrilled that Roccat agrees.

4) Using the occasion of the CeBIT trade show in Germany, Thermaltake held the official “coming out” party for its latest joint venture with DesignworksUSA: the Level 10 M Mouse. Much like the companies’ Level 10 cases, the Level 10 M is an effervescent exercise in ostentation. In addition to an unabashedly automotive design (which will be available in three colors: “Diamond Black,” “Iron White,” and “Military Green”), it’s loaded with buttons and lights, equipped with a high-resolution sensor (8,200 dpi), and you can adjust its height to perfectly fit with your hand. Its open design and plentiful ventilation holes are unusual but striking — the usual modus operandi for these types of products. Thermaltake is keeping quiet about the price at this point, but it seems safe to guess it will be somewhat higher than what you’d pay for most gaming mice. But, hey, if you want a mouse that doesn’t look like any other, this one will fit the bill. TechSpot says the Level 10 M will be available in the spring. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing whether its performance is as good as its appearance — on the bright side, it’s already a few steps ahead of Windows 8!

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Why get a Kindle Fire when you could have the Galaxy Tab 2?

Samsung has officially unveiled its competitor to the wildly popular Kindle Fire in the form of the Galaxy Tab 2, the second iteration of its first tablet device to run Android. Releasing in the UK this March, the Tab 2 is a seven-inch device that will be the first tablet from Samsung to run Android 4.0 (ICS). With a price point that is going to be around $350.00, it may make more sense to consumers to pick up a fully functional tablet rather than one that doesn’t have access to the Android Market.

Aimed directly at the mid-range tablet market, the Tab 2 doesn’t have specs that will blow you away but will get the job done nicely. Coming in both WiFi and HSPA+ flavors, the device has a 1GHz dual-core processor under the hood to display content on the 7-inch 1024×600 (WSVGA) screen. For video and pictures, it sports a 3-megapixel camera in the back, and a VGA cam in the front for video calls and Google+ Hangouts. Those of you familiar with the Galaxy Tab Plus will notice that this is a slight downgrade in terms of hardware, but again Samsung is looking to appeal to those consumers who either bought or would buy Amazon’s Fire. Of course, those who actually bought the Tab Plus will be wondering where the ICS upgrade is for their devices. My advice is to not hold your breath.

While there is no word to a US release date as of yet, Samsung is showing its market awareness by launching this device right now. If indeed the company can succeed at launching the Tab 2 at $350.00, I believe it can be successful. With Amazon selling over five million Kindle Fire tablets this past holiday season, it shows that consumers are open to the idea of looking for iPad alternatives. At seven inches, the form factor hits a sweet spot for portability. It’s a lot easier to put the Tab 2 in a pocket or purse for carrying on-the-go than a 10-inch device.

While getting the Tab 2 means parting with an additional $150 over the Fire, it’s money well spent to have a fully functioning Android device with the latest version of the OS out of the box. With the ability to be able to download the Kindle app from the Android Market, you can have your cake and eat it too.

Read more at Engadget.

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AMD’s Analyst Day confirms APU cancellations, trims core counts

AMD’s Analyst Day kicks off today and the news is starting to flow. Additional details will be disclosed throughout the various presentations, so we’ll update this story or publish follow-ups as appropriate.

So what are the headlines so far? As we expected, AMD has canceled its Krishna and Wichita APUs that were to follow Brazos, in favor of what it calls Brazos 2.0. Brazos 2.0, as it turns out, looks just like Brazos 1.0, but with minimally faster clock speeds and USB 3.0 tossed in. We spoke with the company yesterday in a pre-briefing.

This could be problematic for the company’s lower-end products. Qualcomm has given notice that it intends to push into the netbook market late this year or early next, while Brazos’ 40nm technology will face competition from Intel’s 32nm Atom, as well as 28nm Qualcomm and Cortex-A15 chips.

Hondo — a chip we discussed last August, and rumored to be cancelled — is still on target. It’s a respun version of Brazos that’s been rearchitected for low-power operation. AMD has had several wins with Desna, its 5.9W TDP tablet option; Hondo brings this down to 4.9W. With Microsoft’s Windows 8 not expected until the end of the year, AMD has time to ready something more competitive before the x86 tablet market really takes off.

Come 2013, we’ve got debuts from Temash, Kabini, Kaveri, and Sea Islands, AMD’s next-generation graphics core. Temash will use the next-generation Jaguar CPU core and will be AMD’s first SoC, building on the expertise that AMD gains from Hondo. Kabini, meanwhile, uses the same core but fits into a slightly higher power envelope. It’s not clear if Kabini is also an SoC or not — keeping a separate APU part would give AMD more die space to devote to CPU/GPU processing cores.

Finally, there’s Steamroller, a third-generation Bulldozer core and what AMD calls “HSA” (Heterogeneous System Architecture) features. Based on the current rate of progression, the GPU at the heart of Temash, Kabini, and Kaveri will be based on AMD’s Tahiti (aka 7900). The Trinity GPU is based on Cayman.

This slide breaks down the differences between mobile and desktop. One surprising factor in AMD’s pre-briefing is that the third-generation CPU at the heart of Kabini and Kaveri doesn’t appear to have a high-end variant — at least not in 2013. AMD also intends to move to 28nm production in 2013. GlobalFoundries has a 28nm-SHP process that uses SOI, but everything we’ve heard from the foundry suggests that 28nm is a very modest improvement over 32nm as far as power consumption is concerned. As we’ve explored recently, however, modest improvements are the best the semiconductor industry can deliver these days.

The left-hand column shows server plans for 2012, the right side is 2013. This new roadmap is significantly different from slides that leaked back in August. At that point, AMD’s plan was to release new platforms, with 10 and 20-core Bulldozer chips launching in 2012 on 32nm, followed by 28nm die shrinks in 2013. As the new slide shows, AMD’s G34 and C32 platforms will survive through 2012. According to company executives, the performance improvements from Piledriver are significant enough to make the switch to deca-core and icosa-core processors unnecessary. Instead, AMD will hold upper core counts steady at octal and hexadeca levels. (This crash course in Greek nomenclature brought to you by the letter Qoppa).

This is good news. AMD’s previous guidance implied Piledriver would deliver a 10-15% improvement in performance-per-watt. Hopefully the company managed to exceed that target — but even if it didn’t, what BD needs is a combination of improved architectural efficiency, faster caches, and higher clock speeds. AMD’s roadmap doesn’t show anything beyond 32nm — a discrepancy that may be explained by the following older slide.

“Bulldozer NG,” in this case, is Piledriver. Given that the company has canceled its original plan to move to a new platform and 10/20-core architecture in 2013, it’s possible that AMD’s server platforms will move directly from the configuration on the far left to the far right, SoC-style implementation. Historically, AMD’s desktop and server CPUs have been tightly linked as far as their CPU architectures are concerned — the fact that we don’t see third-generation CPU core anywhere in 2013 could mean that the company will move to a unified SoC for servers and high-end desktop in 2014.

There’s still considerable question as to Trinity’s CPU performance and whether it’ll be strong enough to keep AMD competitive with Intel through 2012. The good news is that things should improve in 2013 with the launch of new 28nm hardware across the company’s entire product line.

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HP’s TouchPad Go: The WebOS tablet that could have been

Before we start, there needs to be a moment of silence for WebOS, set onto the uncertain path of open-source, there to fade into obscurity or find relevance in some niche of the mobile computing world. Here’s to hoping for the second, and dreading the first.

HP had some big plans for WebOS as their flagship mobile product, the TouchPad. WebOS was a true multitasking OS; intuitive, easy to use, fast, and stable. What happened is something that’s being debated still on many corners of the internet, but we didn’t want to talk about the past today. Today is about the tablet that could-have-been: The TouchPad Go. One of these turned up and, despite never being available for sale, it was given an actual review.

The TouchPad Go a 7-inch version of its famous brother the (9.7-inch) TouchPad. It boasts a 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, for those aching for product specs. Important to note here is that the screen isn’t the normal 16:10 ratio; HP opted to go with 4:3 with a resolution of 1024×768. This means the tablet can be pretty easily used both in portrait or landscape mode, which is pretty cool when set among the landscape-weighted tablet market today (not that the Touchpad Go will ever make it to market).

These dimensions match the larger Touchpad screen pixel-for-pixel on less space, making the Touchpad Go the most pixel-dense tablet out there at 184 pixels per inch (ppi). For comparison purposes, the iPad 2 has 132ppi, the ASUS EEE Transformer 160ppi and the original Touchpad 132ppi as well. The Touchpad Go was ahead of the game in this regard.

While not insanely good, the Touchpad Go was the first WebOS tablet to include a rear-facing camera. Cameras on tablets are something best left out of reviews, however, as they are almost universally terrible with the Touchpad Go’s 5MP offering being no exception. Images taken are reported to be blurry and dim. Who uses their tablet’s camera with any seriousness anyway?

As far as performance, we’re never going to really know how the Touchpad Go did against its various competitors. It never made it beyond the test version of WebOS 3.0.5, which was unstable at the time of the review and lacked functionality the finished product would have included. The tablets odd size kept it compatible, dimension-wise, with any application designed for the 9.7-inch Touchpad, so there was no concern of a repeat of Apple and Google’s multiple screen size design issues with application development. Typing seemed to be easier on the 7-inch tablet, as holding it is much easier than a larger tablet.

Would there have been a niche for this odd little device? That’s hard to say. The tablet market is bloodthirsty, and not many devices can compete with the likes of the iPad and the rising Kindle Fire, as well as the more popular Android offerings like the ASUS EEE Transformer and the Transformer Prime. With a refined WebOS and an app store full of applications, a smaller tablet could have been a welcome addition to the market.

With the Touchpad Go never making it to production and the rumor being only dozens in existence, however, we’ll never know. The tablet has gone the way of too many cute and cool looking devices, cut off at the knees by a situation outside of its maker’s control. We can only wonder and hope that the future holds a phoenix-like rise from the ashes for this blocky little brother of the Touchpad.

More at Web OS Nation

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Kindle Fire mobile ad impressions are growing at 19 percent a day

With millions of units sold in the past weeks, it’s safe to say the Kindle Fire can be considered a wildly successful product. Traditionally very secretive about sales figures when it comes to the Kindle line, Amazon broke its silence to announce that the Fire is the most successful Kindle device to date. That may be the understatement of the year as analysts are projecting that by the end of December the online retailer will have shipped almost five million total units to customers worldwide. Along with brisk sales, the Kindle Fire is shining in another area as well, namely online ad impressions which are the revenue lifeblood of every company with a large web presence.

Millennial Media, which is the second largest mobile ad network in the country right now, has released some interesting figures when it comes to the Kindle Fire. MM is reporting that the Fire is seeing a daily increase of 19% in overall ad impressions on its network. An astronomical rate that is equaling out to a monthly rate of “hundreds of millions” of impressions. Those kinds of numbers are exciting to any advertiser or publisher, but what is even more encouraging is the prospect of those numbers increasing come Christmas.

Perhaps even more startling is the fact that the Kindle Fire is outpacing the ad impression rate Apple’s iPad put up in early 2010. There are certainly some variables to consider however, the first iPad was breaking ground in consumer thinking while the Fire is coming into a more mature tablet market. Nevertheless, it’s certainly a landmark for Amazon. What is interesting however is that there is no mention of this fact from the company itself. Amazon has been very careful to not put the Fire in a comparison war with the iPad. It has been a deliberate effort on its part to put the Kindle Fire into a mid-range league of its own, a move that shows how much savvy the company has in understanding its place in the mobile device market.

Amazon is an example of a company that has leveraged the Android OS in the correct way. From the launch of the Amazon App Store to the release of the Kindle Fire, the online retailer has made all the right moves that has resulted in a successful product offering. Perhaps Google should take a page out of Amazon’s book in regards to the launch of the rumored Nexus tablet as a roadmap for success.

via TechCrunch

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