In order for Amazon to stay competitive in the cloud computing market, its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) could take some notes from Apple’s iCloud (launching October 12).
Seamless integration “provides iCloud with huge scale advantages over Amazon,” suggests Forbes, by wirelessly storing content from iPhones, iPads, the iPod touch, Macs or PCs and automatically pushing content to all devices.
“Consumer-centricity” makes cloud-computing user-friendly with targeted features like iTunes Match. “This feature prevents the need to painstakingly upload music into the cloud as iTunes Match itself creates a library matching the user’s existing playlist.”
And pricing. “While the iCloud provides free 5GB-worth of storage for documents, mail, and back-up for iOS 5 users, Amazon’s S3 service charges users for even the first gigabyte of storage space.”
The article points that little is yet known about Amazon’s other competitor, Google’s GDrive.
Apple CEO Tim Cook officially unveiled the company’s new iPhone 4S yesterday from Cupertino. The smartphone is expected to ship by October 14.
The new version features a dual core processor with up to 7x faster graphics performance, an 8 megapixel digital camera that can capture 1080P video, a GSM/CDMA radio with enhancements to speed data downloading and more.
The biggest news is possibly Siri, Apple’s voice-command assistant that can handle surprisingly complex commands and dictation (the name comes from a “virtual personal assistant” company that Apple purchased last year).
While some have expressed disappointment that Apple didn’t release the iPhone 5 this week, early reaction to the iPhone 4S features seem positive. The device’s new A5 processor, for example, is the chip used in the iPad 2, and packs an Apple-designed digital signal processor that helps with things like face detection. The phone also now supports the faster HSPA+ network.
The 8MP camera features backside illumination, allowing it to gather 73 percent more light and have 1/3 faster photo-snapping speed. It can also record higher-resolution 1080p high-definition video.
The iPhone 4S supports mirroring to a TV over AirPlay, Apple TV or a wired connection, while also packing iOS 5.
“The 4S will come in both black and white, starting at $199 for 16GB and $299 for the 32GB, but the big news is a new 64GB model coming in at a whopping $399,” reports Engadget.
Additionally, Sprint will now be offering the 8GB iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Sprint customers can place pre-orders for the device starting this Friday, October 7th.
Pandora now claims more than 100 million registered users. CTO and EVP of Product Tom Conrad credits the success of his company’s Internet radio service with the decision to embrace both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system. Conrad spoke at this week’s GigaOM Mobilize conference.
However, Pandora had a rocky start regarding growth on mobile platforms until the iPhone came along to help turn things around. And at one point, Conrad had little interest in Android. Pandora shipped its app through the iTunes store and watched its user base explode from 13 million to what it is today.
“Conrad has also since made peace with Android, about which he had previously said that he needed the platform ‘like I need a hole in my head,’ referring to the confusing state of Android fragmentation. On Monday, Conrad didn’t want to go into the specifics of Android vs. iOS market share amongst Pandora users, but he called Android’s growth ‘nothing short of remarkable.'”
Now Pandora is embracing HTML5 as it looks to what’s next.
“The company launched a new HTML5-powered website last week, and Conrad said that using HTML5 helped to both dramatically increase the performance of the site as well as implement new social features,” reports GigaOM.
Conrad calls HTML5 a “key enabler for connected devices,” hoping that it will provide opportunities for Pandora on connected TVs and car dashboards.
Currently, 70 percent of Pandora’s listening occurs on mobile devices. “In the future, the majority of Pandora listening will happen in the car and on the connected device,” predicts Conrad.
A year ago, laptops made up two-thirds of Wi-Fi connections at airports. Today, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets comprise 59 percent of the total, reveals new data released this week by Boingo Wireless.
Boingo suggests that laptops are not going away — in fact, their numbers have doubled since 2007 — it’s simply that mobile devices are proliferating at a faster rate, fueled by the launch of the iPhone in 2007 (Apple’s iOS dominates the mobile segment with 83 percent of total devices on Boingo’s network).
Not surprisingly, the report suggests similar findings for inflight Wi-Fi, as offered by the likes of Gogo. In the air, iPads make up more than one-third of connections, along with 41 percent for PCs and 20 percent for Macs.
According to All Things D: “Mobile devices are also gobbling up a lot more data than they did just two years earlier, Boingo said. On a monthly basis, the average mobile device consumed 211 megabytes of data in June, compared with 114 megabytes in May 2009. And the devices are also consuming that data in less time, gulping an average of 8.9 megabytes in every 10 minutes of use, compared with 3.7 megabytes in the same period two years earlier.”
“Mega Man” co-creator and former Capcom head of production Keiji Inafune says, “You don’t use a smartphone camera for an interview, and you don’t use a really professional camera to take some small pictures when you’re going to work.”
Similarly, Inafune suggests smartphones are good for a quick game away from home, but dedicated gaming portables and home consoles offer a more complete gaming experience.
Still, game developers cannot ignore the smartphone market, which is currently the target for one of his company’s announced games. Inafune started two companies since leaving Capcom — Intercept and Comcept.
Inafune believes that developers cannot ignore the growing smartphone market: “We have to think about that when we’re making new games, because it’s kind of becoming very easy to let people play games now,” he says. “They don’t have to buy big consoles to play simple games. So that’s what we should think about for the future.”
Sprint Nextel will reportedly offer unlimited data service plans for the new iPhone 5, expected to debut next month. This would be attractive to big data users and mark a major difference from rivals AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
Sprint has been struggling with its bigger rivals and hopes that adding the iPhone to its lineup will lure new customers. “It’s a competitive disadvantage if your two larger competitors have the iPhone and you don’t,” says Matthew Thornton, an analyst at Avian Securities. “Getting the iPhone closes that gap.”
Sprint, the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier, already offers unlimited voice and data for RIM’s BlackBerry and HTC’s Evo customers at $99.99/month.
According to Bloomberg: “Apple’s iPhone has proved to be a valuable recruitment tool for rivals: Of the 5.6 million smartphones AT&T sold in the second quarter, the device accounted for 3.6 million. A quarter of the subscribers who bought the iPhone were new to AT&T, the company said.”
Jaguar Financial Corporation CEO Vic Alboini, an investor in struggling Research In Motion, is urging the BlackBerry maker to consider selling the company. He has recommended that RIM form a committee of independent executives to explore the proposal.
According to the article: “RIM is seeing its once commanding presence in the smartphone market eroded by the likes of Android and Apple’s iOS: where a year ago RIM accounted for 19 percent of the market, second-quarter figures from Gartner put the company’s current share at 12 percent.”
Alboini suggests that selling RIM would maximize the company’s value to investors, who have watched their investments in the Canadian company significantly decline during the last year.
“RIM has been hanging hopes for its future on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, as well as a new swath of smartphones expected to land in 2012 based on RIM’s recently-acquired QNX operating system — the same OS used in the PlayBook,” reports Digital Trends. “So far, industry response to the PlayBook has been muted, with many citing its reliance on a BlackBerry handset for email as a major impediment — and U.S. mobile carrier Sprint recently backed out of plans to offer a 4G version of the PlayBook, citing lack of customer interest.”
Sony Ericsson is adding Google Talk and video features this fall to its Xperia smartphone line.
The features will be available courtesy of an upgrade to the Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread platform.
The phone maker is also adding 3D camera features and increased social networking capabilities such as making Facebook access easier and quicker.
According to eWeek, key features include: “The ability to let users turn their Xperia smartphone into a mini PC by connecting mouse, keyboard or game controllers via USB to the Sony Ericsson LiveDock multimedia station, or to a TV via HDMI; Swipe text input (a competing technology to Swype on Android handsets); and screen capture from anywhere in the phone, a valuable tool for Web publishers.”
Expect the Xperia line to be available by October, possibly before the iPhone 5 fall launch.
MasterImage 3D is developing a 3D screen for smartphones and tablets that doesn’t require special glasses.
The screen uses what the company calls “cell matrix parallax barrier” technology, which it claims is more sophisticated than the autostereoscopic technology currently available.
GamesBeat lead writer Dean Takahashi points out that the viewing experience is vastly improved as compared to disappointments such as the Nintendo 3DS: “But the glasses-free experience MasterImage 3D has developed is something altogether different. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to offer an outstanding 3D experience on smartphones and tablets.”
Roy Taylor, executive vice president and general manager for MasterImage 3D, demonstrated a working prototype for Takahashi, who was very impressed: “The quality blew me away. On a 4.3-inch WVGA screen, Taylor showed a 3D movie running in stereoscopic 3D. I didn’t need to wear glasses to see the sharp 3D imagery. When I moved my head, it didn’t get blurry. And if I moved my head too far to the side, it gracefully transitioned to a two-dimensional image.”
Can Research In Motion turn around waning sales of its BlackBerry smartphones by adding the ability to run Android apps?
Rumors suggest that the next generation of BlackBerry phones, to be released during the first half of next year, could be designed to run Android apps.
Bloomberg cites “three people familiar with the plan” who suggest RIM is building smartphones now that will use its new QNX software. Phones with the new software will be able to run Android apps, the sources claim.
“It has to be said, [BlackBerry] App World looks a bit sorry for itself when compared to Google’s Android Market,” reports Digital Trends. “App World currently has around 40,000 apps available for download. If next year’s phones are able to run Android apps, that’ll open up owners of the new BlackBerry devices to a further quarter of a million. If BlackBerry can create some unique, feature-rich phones in the coming months, that may well cause consumers to pay RIM’s devices some serious attention.”
As smartphones gain greater market penetration, and data-intensive applications become more popular, cellular carriers are creating limits on how much data customers can consume, and raising the price of that data.
T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have all phased out their unlimited plans, and introduced tiered plans that charge customers based on how much data they consume. Only Sprint still offers an unlimited data plan.
Some developers worry that the caps will stifle innovation of data-intensive applications, and that customers may blame the applications if they go over their limits. This problem is compounded by the fact that consumers have no intuitive sense of how much data a given application may be using.
Industry analysts predict that the availability of data will become an increasingly important profit stream for cellular carriers, and a key point of competition between them.
GLMPS (pronounced “glimpse”), a new iPhone app, hopes to stand out from the growing collection of available image-sharing apps by creating a new type of media that combines stills and video.
Digital Trends describes the basic premise: “When you take a picture with your smartphone through the app, GLMPS captures a photo as well as a short, 5-second video clip of what took place just before the picture was taken. When viewing the GLMPS file, the video plays first, and is then shrunken down and superimposed as a thumbnail over the photo. The video then plays on repeat, much like a GIF file.”
All images are automatically stored to the iPhone’s camera roll. Users can then share the images through the free app, or post GLMPS files to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, imagines the iPhone 8 will be faster than an Xbox 360 and will probably plug into our TVs or connect wirelessly, perhaps making next-gen consoles less significant.
“I think that’s the real challenge for us now,” explained Capps to IndustryGamers, “rather than worrying about the difference between a couple consoles and some order of magnitude, whether 3X or 4X. It’s about how do we deal with iPhone 8.”
“Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound,” added Capps. “So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles? It’s a very interesting situation to be looking at. That’s what we’re starting to think about more…not how do we scale from some Nintendo platform to some other future console.”
Capps’ observations are similar to remarks made recently by EA CEO John Riccitiello, who described the iPad as the company’s fastest growing platform.
“We have a new hardware platform and we’re putting out software every 90 days,” Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. “Our fastest growing platform is the iPad right now and that didn’t exist 18 months ago… Consoles used to be 80 percent of the industry as recently as 2000. Consoles today are 40 percent of the game industry.”
Verizon began selling the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 this week, the first LTE-supported tablet available in the U.S.
A 16GB version of the Honeycomb 3.1 device is offered at $530, while a 32GB model is available for $630 (although InformationWeek was not impressed with the pricing of the data plans). Verizon will also offer the Wi-Fi-only model for $499.
Additionally, the wireless provider will begin selling an LTE-ready HP Pavilion Entertainment laptop and will upgrade its Motorola Xoom tablet to LTE in September. InformationWeek reports the new HP laptop “ships with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and it features an 11.6-inch, high-definition HP BrightView LED display at 1366 x 768 pixels. Under the hood, it is powered by a 1.6-GHz AMD dual-core processor, offers 2 GB of RAM, and 320 GB worth of storage with HP’s ProtectSmart hard drive protection.”
ETCentric recently reported that Verizon expanded its LTE 4G network to more than 100 markets last week. Verizon claims its customers can expect download speeds between 5 and 12 Mbps and upload speeds between 2 and 5 Mbps.
Consumers are increasingly using iPads and other tablet devices for mobile purchases, according to a new report by Forrester Research released this week.
Tablets might even one day outpace smartphones and PCs in terms of e-commerce volume.
The devices already account for 20 percent of mobile sales, even though just 9 percent of online shoppers have tablets. Additionally, 60 percent of tablet owners say they have used the devices to shop.
Tablets typically offer richer catalog presentations than those available via smartphones, and applications often produce faster loading times than retailers’ websites.
“Everyone thinks that mobile phones and mobile commerce are the next big things, and I think what this data shows is it’s probably actually tablets,” explains Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst. “We have always capped e-commerce at 10 to 15 percent of total retail sales, but this potentially has the capability of really expanding e-commerce much beyond that.”
