Smart watches! I sure hope you like them, because literally everyone is developing one. And yet, given the vanishingly small proportion of watches that are “smart,” clearly, something is holding them back. Here are the trends that jumped out when I undertook a more or less comprehensive catalog of the forthcoming wrist-top wearables.
For hardware startups like Pebble (maker of the Pebble smart watch) and Ouya (which makes the Ouya gaming console), Kickstarter has been the holy grail of funding mechanisms. It provides a way for fledgling companies to rack up millions of dollars in seed funding without giving up an iota of ownership.
In its current incarnation, Google Glass is very much a beta, possibly even an alpha—in other words, a prototype that Google happens to be selling for $1,500 to a limited group of trial users. But as technology does its thing—smaller, faster, cheaper—and Google (or someone other than Google) figures out better ways to connect the computationally puny innards of face-based computers to smartphones and the cloud, they’re going to be able to do pretty much anything a PC can do, only from the bridge of your nose. Here’s our near-future wishlist for apps that would make Google Glass truly useful.
Demand for laptop computers is so weak in the first half of 2013 that the analysts at IHS iSupply have declared it virtually impossible that the overall market for laptop and desktop PCs will grow in 2013 over 2012. It’s the same death-of-the-PC-story we’ve heard before, only now the infection has spread to laptops as well. The numbers:
When he started Left Behind Games in 2002, Troy Lyndon—a one-time boy genius who with his former company became Inc.’s entrepreneur of the year at the age of 28—was sure his apocalypse-themed video games would make him millions even as they brought the gospel of Christ to gamers the world over. Eleven years later, Lyndon is 48, personally bankrupt, lives in a 450-square-foot apartment in Honolulu and makes ends meet by coaching entrepreneurs and selling insurance. On nights and weekends Lyndon is still the chairman and CEO of Left Behind Games, a publicly traded business with 10 billion shares outstanding, each worth one one-hundredth of a cent.
Just as we predicted, Apple’s deal with T-Mobile has turned things around for the iPhone maker. The deal, in which T-Mobile became the first major US carrier to offer unlocked iPhones at full price rather than subsidized through a two-year contract, has been a big hit with consumers, who made the iPhone the number one smartphone on T-Mobile in the three month period ending in May. That’s given Apple a rare reprieve from the steady takeover of the market by Google’s Android operating system. Android-based phones held steady at 52% of the US market during those three months, while the iPhone is now at 41.9%, a 3.5% gain, say new data from surveys by Kantar.
Apple has never been afraid to disrupt itself, and as the mass of budget iPhone rumors piles up, a picture of a device that will cannibalize existing iPhone sales but help guarantee Apple’s future is starting to emerge.
Something about the ailing PC industry, competition among makers of smartphones and the endless quest for the next big thing has nearly every major consumer electronics manufacturer working on a smart watch or at least contemplating it. The latest is Dell, whose global VP of personal computing just told The Guardian that the company is thinking about a smart watch despite “challenges in cost, and how to make it a really good experience.”
What’s more all-American than an American company designing a smartphone for the US market, to be manufactured in a half-million square foot factory in Texas? Nothing, says Google’s new ad campaign for Motorola’s Moto X “superphone,” which will be released in October.
Why didn’t French president François Hollande join the storm of criticism from EU member countries when it was revealed that the United States’ PRISM electronic surveillance program was spying on all internet traffic passing through the US? Perhaps because he knew that France has a similar program, alleges French newspaper Le Monde.
If you’ve always wanted to be able to check, from anywhere in the world, exactly how many eggs are in your fridge at home, the Egg Minder is for you. Sure, it sounds silly. Do we really need an internet-connected device and companion smartphone app to tell us something so inessential? But it’s no worse than most other examples of that growing category of products comprising the “internet of things” (the expanding realm of devices that send information to, and can often be controlled from, the internet). And, at a price that may ultimately be as low as $14, at least this internet-connected device has enough utility to justify its price.
Twenty million Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones—the primary competitor to the iPhone—have apparently been sold in the first two months since the device’s mid-April launch, but those numbers are unlikely to address deeper fears investors have about the South Korean electronics giant. On June 7, analyst notes from JP Morgan, among others, revised downward previous estimates for third quarter sales of the Galaxy S4. That sent the stock plunging 6.2%, and lopped $12.4 billion off of Samsung’s $187.8 billion valuation.
Have some spare computing capacity in your data center, aka the “cloud”? Why not make some scratch by selling it on the open market? Or, if you’re so inclined, you could trade derivatives of cloud computing. In place of mortgage-backed securities, perhaps the world’s banks can pour their savings into another abstract financial instrument that depends on the reliability of Amazon’s web services. What could possibly go wrong?
Software developers who have early access to Apple’s competitor for office software programs like Google Drive and Microsoft Office are tripping over themselves to sing its praises.
The world’s second-largest mobile phone maker by volume is in danger of crashing so hard that the company is sold for scrap to competitors or partners, who are rumored to include Lenovo, Huawei and Microsoft. It’s looking increasingly unlikely that Nokia can avoid such a fate, as two of its four primary lines of business are under threat. Here’s the breakdown:
Here’s a paradox: Google is so devoted to the web that it has built an entire computer operating system—Chrome OS—based on the web, and it is so devoted to mobile phones that it built a mobile OS—Android—that is now the most popular in the world. And yet, it won’t be the first company to build a web-based OS for a mobile phone. That distinction goes to the Mozilla Foundation, non-profit custodian of the Firefox browser, whose web-based Mozilla OS for smartphones has just been released on a line of phones available in Spain.
Two different channels for leaks direct from the production lines of Foxconn, where iPhones are made, have released, via social media, remarkably similar images of colored backs for what are supposedly the rumored, forthcoming “cheap” iPhone. If you’re in the market for this phone, we hope you like the color palette usually associated with Starburst candies.
Update: New Scientist reported Feb. 25, 2015, that Canavero will announce at a conference in June a project to make the first human head transplant possible by 2017.
Nokia’s ultra-low-cost handsets might not be as sexy as the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. But they are a much-needed source of cash for the ailing Finnish company, as well as a staple of the telecom networks of the developing world. If you—like a good many of the people on earth—need a phone that’s water- and dust-resistant, can last a month on standby between charges, and only costs $20, Nokia’s new Nokia 105 is the way to go. And even at this price, reveal the industry analysts at IHS, Nokia is making money on the phone.
More and more of the things that set the internet on fire are of that species of charmingly moronic pairing of text and image that allows even the post-literate to feel like they have partaken of a shared cultural moment. And now, scientists are beginning to understand how the curiously addictive visual tropes known as “memes” are born, why they die, and whether or not it’s possible to predict which will “go viral” and be harvested by the night-soil merchants up at meme warehouses like Cheezburger.
It looks like Google is working on a video game console based on Android, the same operating system that already runs a majority of the world’s smartphones, as well as a zillion other devices.
Two bits of news this week point to an intriguing conclusion: Sooner rather than later, Apple will have the ability—and just as importantly, the incentive—to create notebook computers that run on its own custom microchips, rather than ones made by Intel.
More than ever, smart watches are looking like MP3 music players before Apple unveiled the iPod and began a lineage of mobile computing that would eventually turn the world of personal computing upside down. At the time, MP3 players were dominated by companies no one remembers now, like Diamond Multimedia, and MP3 players like its Rio were a novelty that consumers clearly wanted, even if manufacturers hadn’t yet figured out how to make them well.
The parallels between Snapchat, the photo-centric social media darling of Silicon Valley that is now valued at $800 million, and Instagram, which Facebook acquired for $1 billion (ultimately $715 million because the value of Facebook’s stock fell) are uncanny. Here’s the rundown:
