Mobile Computing News

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Casually browsing the web late afternoon yesterday I stumbled upon this bombshell: major hard drive manufacturer Western Digital is looking to acquire competitor Hitachi for an eye-watering $4.3 billion. And while many consumers don’t know what either of these companies does, it could have a major bearing on the price of the computers you buy.

How the deal is structured

The deal is part cash and part equity, with Western Digital offering Hitachi $750 million (£463.3m) in common stock to augment their $3.5 billion (£2.16b) cash offer.

If the deal goes through, it will see Western Digital keeping their brand and headquarters, while current Hitachi president and CEO Steven Milligan would join Western Digital as president.

What that means for the Hitachi brand is as yet unclear. We imagine it may become a secondary Western Digital line – a la Compaq under Hewlett-Packard – or fall to the wayside completely, which would be somewhat surprising. Either way it would bring about big changes for the hard drive industry.

Seagate Maxtor all over again

This wouldn’t be the first time a major hard drive company acquired one of its competitors, with Seagate buying Maxtor way back in 2005 for $2 billion (£1.24b). With this deal being double the price of that, and in an even more mature and consolidated hard drive industry, the ramifications could be far more significant than the Seagate Maxtor deal.

The major concerns

The big concerns, of course, are what his will do to competition and consumer pricing. Without doubt the SEC will scrutinise this deal in the US, while the European Commission will look over it in the EU before everything is finalised in Q3, as is currently planned. Hopefully the effect this will have on the hard drive industry won’t negatively impact consumers through rising hard drive prices due to reduced competition.

What do you make of the Western Digital Hitachi buyout? And do you think it will, ultimately, be as insignificant as the Seagate Maxtor acquisition?

Photo: MktFan / Flickr

Rumours began swirling on Friday that Research in Motion, the makers of Blackberry smartphones, will be going through a significant executive – and identity – change in the coming months. The company’s chief marketing officer has just resigned, less than a month before the Blackberry Playbook is slated to do battle against the steamrolling iPad.

Large turmoil

The Wall Street Journal reported that Keith Pardy, RIM’s CMO and a former Nokia employee, was leaving the company due to ‘personal reasons’. Apparently Pardy will be on board for a six-month period to allow for smooth transition with whoever will be replacing him.

WSJ’s unnamed sources say that Keith Pardy had decided to leave a month ago already, with the move reflecting ‘larger turmoil’ within the company.

Playbook concerns

Outside of losing their chief marketing officer, tech commentators are saying that they are concerned for the future of the Blackberry Playbook, in general. Several have said that while the hardware of the prototypes recently shown at GDC 2011 was on point, the software was still far off the mark. Engadget wrote: ‘…the hardware was still pretty solid, but the software was a bit sparse, and what was there felt like it needed more than a few coats of polish’.

Given the Playbook is scheduled to launch in less than a month, there are concerns about whether RIM can polish fast enough, to continue that analogy.

Trying times

RIM is going through trying times. The company’s long-term viability against the strong Google Android platform has really been put to the test in recent months, with all signs indicating that the Blackberry maker is prepared to make some concessions. Those concessions seem to be the ability for the Blackberry Playbook to playback Google Android apps, as well as bringing the popular Blackberry Messenger platform to iOS and Android.

The departure of the chief marketing officer may be the first sign that RIM is (or will be) going through a transformation of identity. It won’t be easy by any measure, but it will be extremely interesting to watch.

Photo: aeu04117 / Flickr

I’m flummoxed. Microsoft really, really amazes me. The company is supposedly readying its proper tablet PC mobile OS platform. The problem is it will only arrive in 2012. What’s worse, that’s late 2012, not early.

Go on, have a huge headstart!

Bloomberg, citing ‘people with knowledge’ of the Windows tablet OS plans, says Microsoft will officially launch their iOS and Honeycomb competitor during the back-to-school period of 2012. So that means the middle of next year, after the iPad 3 will have launched already. Perplexed? You should be!

Public testing end of this year

Public testing of the new Windows tablet PC OS will start at the end of 2011, and will include vendor partners and customers, according to Bloomberg’s sources.

What’s more, the Windows tablet PC Os will be an updated version of Microsoft’s current hotshot operating system – Windows 7.

This is a head start taken to extremes

Speaking to Bloomberg, Michael Gartenberg who is an analyst with research firm Gartner Inc said: ‘If 2011 is the year of the tablet wars, Microsoft will be awfully late suiting up for the battle’. He continued, saying: ‘It’s not a good position to be in.’

Mr. Gartenberg is too kind. It’s a disastrously bad position to be in. It’s terrible in a number of ways, especially if the iPad’s early traction continues and, worse still, if Android Honeycomb starts to become anywhere near as strong as Android for smartphones currently.

Walking into a landmine

It’s hard to know what to make of this late debut of the Windows tablet OS Microsoft is prepping. It will literally walk into a wall of tablets, namely the iPad 3, Xoom 2, Galaxy Tab 2, HP TouchPad 2 and even the Playbook 2. How Microsoft will stand out without coming across as ‘me too’ will be something to witness. We can guarantee that the tablet PC market isn’t going to wait for Team Redmond to kick things into gear.

Photo: @cdharrison / Flickr

Mobile payments company Square is beginning to gather some serious momentum. The company is reportedly processing $1 million dollars in transactions everyday, confirming that adoption is growing at a steady pace.

Impressive growth

Towards the end of last year, Square was processing a couple of million dollars each month, suggesting they’ve continued their steady – if not meteoric – growth. The $1 million (£615,000) milestone was tweeted by the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey. It’s almost poetic that’s the manner in which he revealed his startup’s milestone, in that he co-founded Twitter.

Transaction fee dropped

Last week, Square also announced that they were dropping their fee per transaction to just $0.15 (about 10p). The startup hopes this will goose the number of transactions and the number of subscribers using the service, which will in turn further increase the volume of transactions processed daily.

How does Square work?

What makes Square so unique – and of interest to us – is how it works. The service uses a dongle that plugs into the earphone jack on your iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone. Once plugged in with the Square app downloaded, you can process a transaction by swiping a buyer’s credit card right on your iOS device.

It’s effectively a replacement for a credit card machine that leverages the modern smartphone as its platform.

You’re not alone

Square isn’t alone in this space, though, with VeriFone making a play for the space with their PAYware system targeted at business. It also stands to reason that credit card companies like Mastercard, VISA and American Express won’t sit to the side while these new mobile payments solutions look to erode their business.

To some extent the same can be said for PayPal, who built their business on top of eBay, before expanding across the web and onto mobile platforms, too. We suspect mobile payments will become big business, and Square is already leading the charge with that.

Photo: acaben / Flickr

After months of speculation, industry chatter, and guesses, the iPad 2 is now official. Apple unveiled the device at a San Francisco press conference that held few surprises, other than the on-stage arrival of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

This has been coming

Jobs, who has been fighting cancer for some time now, looked steady on stage, and, dare we say, pretty good, too. He said that the company had been working on the product for a long time, and that he could not miss the unveiling. It’s also likely he realised the value from a PR and an investor-relations standpoint of his being there.

So what’s new?

The iPad’s form factor has been revised, with the device being 33 per cent thinner than its predecessor. In fact the downsizing is so dramatic, it is even thinner than the iPhone 4. The iconic tablet PC has also gone on diet if you will, with the company managing to slim its weight down to just 1.3 pounds from its previous weight of 1.5 pounds.

The new A5 chip performs processing in the Apple iPad 2. The company says that the dual-core processor will afford them twice the processing speed and nine times the graphical output of the A4 chip found in the original.

Apple have also added dual-cameras for Facetime calling and HD video recording, while the gyroscope found in the iPhone and iPod Touch has made its way to the iPad, as well.

What did you not get?

Contrary to rumours and speculation suggesting otherwise, the iPad 2 did not come with a retina display. Moreover, Apple didn’t even address changes to the display at all during the press conference. Another major omission is a USB port, something many folks felt Apple was compelled to introduce in this iteration of the iPad. No such luck, folks.

How do you feel?

While it’s likely my powers of resolve will crumble come the 11 March release date of the tablet PC (come 25 March, 26 countries around the world will have access), I must admit I was somewhat underwhelmed by the Apple iPad 2. It was great to see Steve, and it’s not that it didn’t deliver the goods this time round, but rather that the months of speculation, rumours, lies and odd truths just spoilt the surprise.

What do you think? Should other tablet PCs be afraid, or is the Apple iPad 2 just more of the same?

Photo: morberg / Flickr

It seems Sony cannot bring itself to walk away from the Walkman – sorry – with promotional material indicating that the handset manufacturer is working on a new smartphone.

Talk about being literal

SE, if this was supposed to serve as a teaser, you’re doing it wrong. Android Community got hold of marketing material, with an accompanying tagline that reads: ‘A smarter Walkman phone is coming soon.’ Clearly the Sony Ericsson Walkman smartphone team failed the subtlety class. In a strange way, it’s decidedly refreshing.

Multimedia focus

Given that this new smartphone is Walkman-branded – and not Xperia, which seems to have become Sony Ericsson’s flagship line – it’s safe to assume there will be a heavy focus on multimedia. From a hardware standpoint, it would not be surprising to see the Sony Ericsson Walkman smartphone pack a decent built-in speaker, with a dedicated music button. A Bravia-powered screen would be unsurprising, too.

From a software standpoint, assuming the handset is built on Android OS, it’s likely Sony Ericsson will fit its own music playback solution in lieu of Google’s default one. If not that, some feature that enhances the music experience is required.

What would make this compelling?

The challenge for the new Sony Ericsson Walkman phone is to be compelling. In an age where every smartphone has decent to great audio playback features, making a dedicated mp3 phone isn’t as groundbreaking as it was, say, five years ago. Will this Walkman have instant-play buttons? Will it incorporate Sony’s own Shazam-like functionality and make it free for use?

I’m just struggling to see a case for the Sony Ericsson Walkman smartphone. Moreover, in the very crowded Google Android marketplace, is there really much space for SE to confuse customers, especially given the visibility and traction the Xperia brand now has?

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano / Flickr

Finance titan JP Morgan says that the tablet PC market will become a colossal $35 billion market come 2012. In the process, the market will also eat into the PC market, while growing competition will put downward pressure on the premium prices of tablet PCs.

Big sales this year and next

The bank predicts tablet PC sales in 2011 will total 47.9 million units, while sales in 2012 sales will be 79.6 million units. As such their revenue estimates for the period are $26.1 billion this year, with that leaping to $35.2 billion next year.
What’s more, JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz said that: ‘We expect tablets to have an increasingly negative impact on PC shipments’. He continued, adding that: ‘More than 35 percent of tablets sold in 2012 will be cannibalistic, particularly as relates to netbooks and notebooks.’ What he means by that statement is that people will be buying tablet PCs in lieu of buying netbooks and notebooks, negatively impacting sales in that sub-category.

Growth in verticals, premium pricing crushed

JP Morgan says much of the growth of tablet PC sales will be off the back of penetration into the lucrative enterprise and education marketplaces. Incidentally, the firm believes that when many competitors flood the market in Q3 and Q4, the price premium Apple enjoys with its iPad will be diminished.

This is hard to believe, really, with early iPad competitors struggling to compete with the iPad on price. The Motorola Xoom, now widely considered the number one competitor to Apple’s crown, costs $300 more than the cheapest iPad, which, while it is not a like for like comparison, the average consumer won’t be too fussed about giving up a little extra storage space. The point is it is likely that the iPad is not premium priced as is, and competitors may struggle to match – let alone beat – Apple’s tablet on pricing.

Back of the napkin iPad numbers

While $35 billion may seem difficult to believe, it’s actually very attainable if the early success of the iPad continues as competitors eek out some market share, too. If we assume that the average selling price of the iPad is $500 as a reference point, then Apple would need to sell 70 million iPads in one year to make the tablet PC business a $35 billion business.

It seems improbably, but given early Apple momentum plus inevitable sales of competitors, it is not impossible.

Photo: kretyen / Flickr

In a move that no doubts represents what’s possible with crowdsourcing at scale, Xerox has recently launched a website that will allow customers to try out the firm’s technology research projects.

Open Xerox

The aptly named Open Xerox launch yesterday, and it allows participants to use cutting-edge as yet unreleased Xerox technology, as well as providing feedback to the firm. So says Victor Ciriza, who is the lab manager over at Xerox Research Centre Europe.

Try it on your own platform

Beyond using the tech on Xerox’s site, users will be able to incorporate the technology onto their own websites via open APIs or HTML. With this tech including projects like PDF converters, as well as Arabic language analysers, the use cases will, if nothing else, be fascinating.

It’s like a giant crowdsourcing beta

Ciriza says Open Xerox will afford the company the opportunity to ship ‘robust and well tested’ new projects. In this regard, for lack of a better description, this project is like crowdsourcing meets beta releases. While betas are nothing new in computing, this type of approach is very similar to what video game developers do when they beta test hugely anticipated new games.

Xerox Research gets all the feedback they need, and users get early access to potentially game changing technology. In fact, Ciriza himself punts how users benefit, saying: ‘The end user is going to access world-class research on topics that may not [be] accessible through out-of-the-box projects’

Xerox’s DNA

While many consumers know Xerox for its printers, what they don’t realise is Xerox Research is behind some of the biggest breakthroughs in computing history. In fact one of the biggest folklores in all of computing was how Steve Jobs first stumbled across the input device we now know as the mouse. While it wasn’t priority at Xerox Research, the Apple CEO saw the tech while he was on tour at their facilities and immediately became enamoured with it. As they say, the rest is history.

It’s doubtful Open Xerox will be that impactful, but it would be awesome if it were!

Photo: Togetherville

Entertainment icon Disney has just purchased a social networks for kids, as the house that Mickey built looks to forward its digital efforts. While the price was undisclosed, it seems an intelligent acquisition for Disney who have been building a lot of their online strategy around digital communities that attract children.

TogetherVille goes Mickey

The social network, called TogetherVille, works much like its more open and much larger counterpart Facebook. The big differentiator, of course, is that it is open to children aged 10 years and younger. In addition it has various parental controls, too, where parents are able to moderate who their children are connecting with – this includes approving each friend their child has, as well as connecting directly with the parents’ Facebook social graph.

It’s a very intelligent system, though, allowing parents to communicate with their children on one level, while also allowing children to connect with their friends – other children – securely.

The one concern is

If one couples TogetherVille with Disney’s massive Club Penguin, it’s obvious to see why the corporation bought this social network for kids. If kids are half as engaged on this platform as adults are Facebook, given Disney’s massive merchandising inventory running from pens to food and even DS games, it will give the company a direct line to children by using its platform to communicate what’s new in the world of Mickey.

Unified effort

Disney has spent a lot of time in recent years acquiring a combination of technology companies, social gaming firms and web services as the company adjusts to the digital age. While Pixar films, merchandising and attendance at Disney’s parks still account for a massive chunk of the company’s revenue, the house that Mickey built clearly sees its future being a digital one.

What do you make of a social network for kids, and do you think it was a smart acquisition?

Photo: Sony Ericsson

The Sony Xperia Play – what was long called the PSP Phone – has a release date and official pricing for the UK marketing. The folks over at Play.com are to thank for the reveal, putting to bed speculation on what Sony’s asking price for the handset will be.

28 March is D-Day

The Sony Xpleria Play will set you back £519.99 for the network unlocked sim-free version of the handset when it is released on 28 March. Though many British mobile carriers announced that they would be carrying the PSP Phone, they all overlooked the rather important step of telling us what it will cost and when we could get our hands on it. Thanks, Play.com, for doing their job for them.

Which carriers?

Speaking of carriers, if you’re not too keen on spending that much money upfront, it’s highly likely you’ll be able to pick up the Sony Xperia Play on subsidy from one of the five British carriers. However, with standard pricing for packages with devices in this range hovering around the £35 monthly mark for a 24 month contract, you’d actually save a fair amount splurging upfront.

Is this worth it?

Opinion on the Sony Xperia Play is divided. While the 1GHz Snapdragon packing, Android Gingerbread sporting, dedicated d-pad and face buttons having PSP Phone is powerful, it’s not what many folks were hoping it would be. Moreover on face value, as a pureplay handset, it isn’t quite in the league of the iPhone 4s and Samsung Galaxy S handsets of the world. On the flipside, as a pure gaming device, it falls short of both the incoming Nintendo 3DS and Sony’s own NGP handheld.

So one can’t help but ask – why does the PSP Phone exist? Come 28 March, we’ll be better able to say if this one is worth saving your pennies for, or if you should get your smartphones fix elsewhere.