Ahmed Kaludi – Page 7

Apple still dominant in online movie sales, Walmart sneaking up

The online movie business has been booming in recent years thanks to everyone and their mom either starting up their own services or signing contracts with the major players. Despite so many entrants into the market, Apple has still managed to retain its dominance when it comes to delivering feature-length films to customers, though it has lost some of its share of the consumer dollar over time.

Apple got 64.5 percent of total consumer spending on online movies in 2010, according to a new report conducted on behalf of iSuppli by IHS Screen Digest, down from 74.4 percent in 2009. Microsoft came in second with 17.9 percent in 2010 (up from 11.6 percent in 2009), and Sony came in third with 7.2 percent of consumer spending (up from 5.7 percent). The “Others” category also went up between 2009 and 2010, from 8.3 percent to 10.4 percent.
Because the entire market grew, though, Apple still pulled in more dollars than it did in 2009, despite the percentage drop. “The iTunes online store showed remarkable competitive resilience last year in the US EST/iVOD movie business, staving off a growing field of tough challengers while keeping pace with a dramatic expansion for the overall market,” IHS research director Arash Amel said in a statement. “iTunes managed to grow because of the introductions of the iPad and the second-generation Apple TV, which have spurred the company’s movie rental offerings and have invigorated the iTunes multi-screen ecosystem.”

IHS did note that Microsoft and Sony have presented Apple with some major competition over the last year. The Zune and PlayStation Store are strong competitors, and it shows in Apple’s marketshare. However, the player seen as giving Apple the biggest challenge yet is one that’s not even on the top three list, yet: Walmart. Following Walmart’s purchase of online movie service Vudu, IHS saw a spike in consumption in the fourth quarter of 2010.

“The future of the online movie business may come down to a competitive battle between Apple and Wal-Mart,” Amel said. “Although Wal-Mart is not on the charts yet, the company soon will become a major player if its current momentum continues.”

webOS is coming to PCs later this year

HP’s decided to end its fireworks-rich presentation on a gorgeous bombshell: webOS is coming to PCs! The company says it’s thinking beyond today and intends to take webOS to “other connected devices, including printers, and some form factors you haven’t seen before.” Aside from the groundbreaking discovery that our next LaserJet might run the same code as the dashing new TouchPad, there are few specifics to be learned, but HP promises to share further details as the year goes on.

HP TouchPad first hands-on! (updated with video!)

By now, you know how HP’s new slate compares to the crowd — now, see how it looks up close and personal. We just got our hands on that dual-core Palm webOS tablet here in San Francisco, and it’s a beaut, with a slim black profile that highlights the brilliant 9.7-inch screen. We’ll be back in a jiffy with some impressions of that newfangled Tap to Share and card-based multitasking, but for now, simply feast your eyes on our gallery below.

Fanatec Porsche GT2 wheel and Clubsport pedals review

Sim racing keeps on moving toward higher-end accessories, while there have always been top-shelf components available to the hardcore, games like Gran Turismo 5 are encouraging more and more people to want a more and more realistic driving experience. Fanatec has been delivering that experience for years and its $250 Porsche 911 GT2 is the company’s latest and highest-end product, offering a luxurious Alcantara covering, the obligatory 900 degrees of rotation, and full compatibility with force feedback for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Fanatec was also kind enough to send us a set of its $200 Clubsport pedals to hit the virtual road with. Click on through to see how we did.

Smart grid and green tech at CES (photos)

Greenwave Reality CEO Greg Memo shows off how a grid-aware home energy system can be controlled and monitored either from a smart phone, PC, or Sony TV. Devices are connected to a home network by using smart plugs, seen on left, and a smart meter. The company is testing its system with utilities in Europe.

Soulra radios from Eton can charge are equipped with solar panels to charge an iPod which fits inside the case. The radios can also run off of an AC outlet. This week, the company also introduced hand-crank operated radios and lights designed for emergency situations or off-grid use. The hand-cranked equipment also comes with a USB port to charge a phone or other small gadgets.

Can Honeycomb tablets gain ground by being “just as good” as iPad?

The Google executives were still on stage at the Android Honeycomb event yesterday when a reader of our live coverage chimed in to respond to some chatter about Honeycomb not offering anything to make it better than the iPad. His comment was simple but it stuck with me.

He wrote: If it’s as good and not Apple, I’m fine with it.

Clearly, this reader isn’t a big Apple fan – so he has other motivations. But that got me thinking about whether the Motorola Xoom – the first tablet to be powered by Android 3 (aka Honeycomb) – needs to actually be better than the iPad. Is “just as good” enough?

After all, being “just as good” as the iPhone is how I initially saw Android smartphones. Don’t get me wrong. The iPhone is an amazing product and one that I wanted desperately – but wasn’t willing to do the AT&T thing. Now, I’m a big fan of the Android OS and have no desire to switch to the iPhone, regardless of which carrier it’s on. Never do I feel like I’m compromising my smartphone user experience because my device is powered by Android instead of Apple’s iOS.

Now that we’re moving into tablets, it needs to play out the same way. Google needed to make sure that the Honeycomb experience would be just as good as the iPad experience – and from what I’ve seen it is. And, based on some of my own personal metrics, it’s actually better.

Flash is still a big deal. Android tablets will run Flash while iPad doesn’t. And as much as Steve Jobs wants all of us to hate Flash as much as he does, it really does make me stop and pause. Flash exists in my world and I can’t just not have it – especially in a tablet.

The same goes for expandable storage. I never liked that Apple prices its devices – all of them – based on storage capacity. I love the microSD card in my Android phone – that’s where I store my music and photos. And with Xoom coming in with 32 GB of internal storage and the ability to expand to 32 GB more, it’s a one-up over the iPad.

Still, none of that matters if Google and partners don’t get the pricing right.

We still don’t have any pricing information for the Xoom. If Google or the partners don’t come in lower than the iPad, then it’s going to be an incredibly tough sell. If this experience is the same and the pricing is the same, then they’ve just handed the people who were on the fence over to team Apple. After all, the iPad is already a proven winner. Why would anyone pay the same money for a crapshoot that might or might not live up to the hype? I cannot overstate this: Pricing is key.

Certainly, the forthcoming release of iPad2 will be something to watch, especially if there are significant changes to the device or software. But if Google can build a following with tablets the way it has with smartphones, it can be go head-to-head with Apple – forcing both companies to compete on innovation, as well as pricing.

And when that happens, the consumers – all of us – are the ones who win.

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Does a Facebook Phone Make Any Sense? (Updated)

Kat Hannaford and Jason Chen — A flurry of rumors circulated today about HTC launching Facebook-branded phones. Let’s talk about this! Updated.

Why this rumor doesn’t make sense

What CityAM is saying about the facebook phone might be right. But it seems off. CityAM didn’t quote any sources, instead relying on old favorites “City A.M. has learned” and “it is understood…”. OK, that happens all the time. But CityAM is hardly known for breaking tech news. Not to discredit a publication for never having made a scoop, it’s unlikely that a free financial paper—in England, no less—that’s handed out for free at train stations has the necessary contacts to dig up a story of this size. And they’ve changed it now, but CityAM originally described HTC as a Korean company (they’re Taiwanese). If they can’t get this minor point right, it says something about their expertise, now, doesn’t it? Still, we don’t know CityAM is wrong any more than we can prove they are right. Lets just talk about the idea of a Facebook phone, itself.

CityAM’s article says the phone will “run on a tweaked version of Google’s Android operating system and will prominently display users’ Facebook messages and news feed on the home screen.” My HTC Android already does that. Likewise, “other areas of integration expected include being able to call or email friends from information stored on their Facebook page.” Looking at my “contacts” list now, I can see plenty of my Facebook contacts’ email and phone numbers, which I wouldn’t have otherwise. Of course, the Facebook phone could really just be a much more immersive experience, Android is for Google services as compared to the iPhone and its Google App.

Then:
• The two engineers CityAM claims that are working on the project—Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos—have previously been fingered as working on Facebook-branded phones last September. It wasn’t much of a stretch to align them with some mystery HTC phones.

• We know CEOs lie all the time, but for what it’s worth, Zuckerberg himself said at the Facebook platform event last fall that they would not be doing a Facebook phone, outright.

Why make a Facebook phone at all?

Facebook’s iPhone app and lack of a dedicated iPad app are telling. The company is into its web based content but still behind on developing specific versions of their content for specific platforms. Those priorities make sense to me.

So the push for a specific piece of hardware, when Facebook won’t even develop solid apps for all the existing mobile platforms, seems iffy. It’s more likely that HTC is working on an updated version of Sense, its UI for Android, integrating Facebook—and perhaps even Twitter—deeper than we’ve seen in the past.

Indeed, Facebook spokesperson Jaime Schopflin herself confirmed back in September that Hewitt and Papakipos are already working on projects integrated Facebook into existing OSes, such as iOS and the INQ Mobile OS.

Here’s another small point: If you take a look at Moto Blur on Motorola’s Android phones, or Palm/HP’s webOS, or HTC’s Sense UI as mentioned earlier, you’ll see that many phone manufacturers have already been integrating Facebook tightly. You can post status updates from just about anywhere on the phone. Facebook contacts are often merged with your phone’s contacts. Facebook messaging is just another choice in a dropdown menu that includes texts, IMs and emails when you’re talking to your friends. And all your friends have their Facebook photos viewable to the point where your phone just uses their profile picture as your contact photo automatically. These are, essentially, Facebook phones.

That’s no reason for Facebook to not make a phone, but there is an important point here. Unlike Google and Android, who places restrictions on the API so that other phone OSes can’t get the same level of, say, Gmail client performance, Facebook is pretty much open. Why would they make a phone if someone else can make it for them?

Other than these features, think about what you’d want to do on Facebook today that you can’t already do on your Android/Pre phone. It’s hard to come up with something, isn’t it? But facebook’s user base is big enough that a phone with a user experience built around facebook wouldn’t be out of the question. HTC could surprise us all with a pair of Facebook-branded phones at the MWC trade show next month, but it just doesn’t seem like something like this would be a priority for a company that is still working out OS integration on already huge platforms for its already huge user base. [CityAM via TechRadar]

UPDATED: Unsurprisingly, Facebook has denied all talk of a Facebook phone existing, with their head of business development, Dan Rose, stating that “this is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programming interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way.”

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Roundup: ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte & MSI

A few weeks ago, NVIDIA released the GTX 560 Ti; a graphics card that has proven to be just the right fit for a large cross-section of the current market. AMD did their best to rain on the parade with their own HD 6950 1GB and did succeed to a certain extent even though availability has been a bit spotty and selection is limited. Nonetheless, NVIDIA’s own board partners have forged ahead with a long line of GTX 560 derivatives.

The GTX 560 Ti follows very much in the GTX 460’s overclocking footsteps since it has the ability to increase both core and memory clock speeds to some incredible levels. This has allowed several companies like EVGA, Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI to release some higher end products which feature increased clock speeds, custom cooling and some excellent software which can be used to push things even further.

For this roundup, we have chosen four of the more popular GTX 560 Ti cards currently on the market: the ASUS DirectCu II TOP, MSI Twin Frozr II OC, Gigabyte Super Overclock and the EVGA Superclocked. Their clock speeds and feature lists run the gamut so by seeing what they offer, we should be able to get a good indication what the GTX 560 market will look like in the coming months.

In previous generations, it wasn’t unusual to see $30 or more tacked onto a GPU’s price simply because it carried a minimal speed increase. Times have changed as the market has become more competitive and every one of the cards featured in this roundup carries no more than a $20 premium over reference-based products while clock speeds get significant bumps. Indeed, the MSI Twin Frozr II OC model features a $249 price; the same cost as a standard GTX 560.

AMD: We’re Benefiting from Intel’s Woes

FOX Business reports that AMD is benefiting from Intel’s current Sandy Bridge platform design “woes” thanks to OEMs and retailers approaching the company for additional supply. The news arrives just after Intel announced that it would resume shipments of the faulty Cougar Point chipsets for use in specific hardware configurations.

In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Leslie Sobon, AMD vice president of product and platform marketing, said the company has received hardware requests as a direct result of Intel’s issues. “We have some customers and retailers who have come to us specifically as a result of Intel’s chip problem,” Sobon said. “Some retailers have had to take things off their shelves, so they call us to ask what they could get from our OEMs that’s similar. And OEMs are asking us for product, as well.”

Sobon admitted that most of the requests are for mainstream setups, typically notebooks costing more than $500. Some are also requesting the company’s lower-end Fusion chips given that the mainstream version isn’t expected to ship until mid-2011. Of course, there are also requests for AMD’s older mainstream computer processors. As Sobon indicated, retailers have contacted AMD about PC’s with similar price points or screen sizes.

Naturally Sobon wouldn’t reveal the identities of the OEMs and retailers. She also couldn’t provide any projections about the financial impact the sudden boost in requests have provided. “We can’t quantify it because we’re smack in the middle of it,” Sobon said. “It’s hard to find a pattern because it’s different by market and retailer, but it’s all over the place in terms of opportunity.”

LG Optimus 2X & NVIDIA Tegra 2 Review: The First Dual-Core Smartphone

In many ways, the smartphone platform has evolved following the same kinds of steps we saw in the early days of the PC – lots of different software and hardware platforms, rapidly changing lead players, faster and faster platform update cadence, the slow emergence of obvious majority leaders. Anand and I have talked extensively about just how striking the similarities are between the PC evolution and the current mobile one, but one of the striking differences is just how much faster that evolution is happening in the mobile space. The reason is simple – nearly all the hard lessons have already been learned in the previous PC evolution, it’s just a matter of porting that knowledge to mobile under a different set of constraints.

2011 is going to be a year dominated by multi-core smartphone launches, but there always has to be a first. So just like that, we have our first example of said category of smartphone, the LG Optimus 2X, with Nvidia’s dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 AP20H at its heart. The Optimus 2X (simply the 2X henceforth) hasn’t changed much since we saw it at CES – the hardware is aesthetically the same, and software at first glance is the same as well. We weren’t able to publish benchmarks at that time purely because LG hadn’t finalized the software build on that test hardware, but we definitely can do so now.