In-Stat: Tablet shipments will rise to 250 million by 2017

Apple currently has the market cornered on tablets, constantly selling millions of iPads quarterafter quarter. Other tablet makers are struggling to keep up, with most others selling by the thousands (if even).

And then there are those that arrive with a lot of hype and are dead within in weeks. (See: HP TouchPad.) Based on all of this, the future for the tablet industry might look bleak with only one solid manufacturer.

But all of that is expected to change within the next five years. A recent survey from research firmIn-Stat argues that tablet shipments will topple 250 million units by 2017.

That assertion seems plausible as that gives other tablet makers some time to catch up (particularly those working within the Android ecosystem) and figure out what is missing in this market to make things competitive.

More importantly, the tablet market is expected to grow as tablet manufacturers are expected to lower prices from the standard $499 for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only tablet at some point. That point-in-time could be very soon given the recent example of the now $99 TouchPad. That product was actually considered by many to be the second best tablet available (after the iPad), yet it could not sell at $499, $399 nor even $299.

More highlights from the study:

• The 9-inch to 11-inch form factor is will be the dominant form factor with 56 percent of the market by 2017
• iOS and Android are expected to control 90 percent of the market share with Windows in a distant 3rd place
• Wireless providers could have a tremendous impact on tablet demand
• In the consumer market, tablets are competing against all computing devices — not just PCs
• Expect more and better things from Samsung, Motorola, BlackBerry, LG, and HTC

Most strikingly, In-Stat believes that none of the leading OS platforms will likely cause “the failure of several companies in the tablet market due to lack of application support.”

Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist for In-Stat, explained in a statement:

The tablet market and its associated ecosystem are still evolving. Over the next few generations we will see more differentiation between devices that are targeting different market segments and usage models. In addition, competitive device and service pricing will bring tablets into the mainstream consumer and enterprise markets.

Tablets are joining an array of smart-connected devices that allow users almost unlimited access to content and communications. These new devices mark a significant change in the value change of the electronics industry where the content and applications are now the key differentiators and innovation drivers.

The ball should get rolling more seriously next year. A recent report from DigiTimes posited that non-Apple tablet shipments are expected to rise by 134 percent in 2012. Specifically, DigiTimessuggested that shipments of Android tablets will surge to 44-45 million units shipped, while Apple’s iPad shipments will nearly double to 54-55 million units in 2012.

Source : zdnet

Research in Motion releases Curve smartphones running Blackberry 7 OS

Research in Motion has released three Blackberry Curve smartphone devices running on its operating system, Blackberry 7.

The Blackberry Curve 9350, Curve 9360 and Curve 9370 add to five handsets running on Blackberry's operating system (OS)unveiled earlier in August. The smartphones include US-only Bold 9930 and Torch 9850. The Torch 9860, Torch 9810 and Bold 9900 will be available in the UK.

RIM said the new Curve smartphone models address the market where customers are upgrading existing feature phones or older Blackberry Curve devices.

"These new models will build on the incredible success of the Blackberry Curve line and further expand the largest global launch of Blackberry smartphones in our history," said Mike Lazaridis, president at Research In Motion (RIM).

The new Blackberry Curves support GPS and Wi-Fi, have a five mega-pixel camera and video-recording as well as support for near-field communication (NFC).

Blackberry OS 7 - which was showcased at Blackberry World - includes voice-activated searching as well as support for HTML 5 in the web browser. RIM claims web browsing is up to 40% faster on OS 7 compared with smartphones running Blackberry 6.

The OS integrates with Blackberry Balance, which allows IT departments to control and secure business e-mail data via the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) while also enabling personal use of company-owned Blackberry smartphones.

The handsets have the latest version of Blackberry's instant messaging service, BBM version 6. Developers can build BBM connected apps within third-party applications, providing users in-app access contact lists.

The new Blackberry Curves will be available from September 2011.

Source : Computerweekly

Intel details quad-, eight-core "Poulson" Itanium chips

Intel has announced several details surrounding its upcoming Itanium CPUs, which will include a series that is currently referred to by the code-name "Poulson." The new chips, which were referenced during an Intel keynote at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, represent the 10th Itanium generation as the company jumps from 65nm manufacturing processes down to 32nm.

The Poulson chips have yet to receive final numbers for clock speeds, however the series promises to deliver up to eight cores. The current Tukwila lineup offers a choice between two and four cores, with speeds of up to 1.73GHz.

The platform will support Intel's Instruction Replay technology, a new way to quickly resolve errors with minimal interruption. Hyper-threading has also been improved with "dual-domain" capabilities that enable simultaneous front- and back-end execution, according to a AnandTech report.

Despite the feature upgrades, Poulson processors will utilize the same 7500 chipset as Intel's current enterprise chips.

Source : electronista

Microsoft demos USB 3.0 support for Windows 8

Microsoft has finally demonstrated USB 3.0 compatibility for Windows 8. In the company's engineering blog, Windows team leader Steven Sinofsky pointed out the challenges in adopting the new standard without compromising compatibility with existing hardware and software built for the USB 2.0 protocol. The company worked to design a new USB software stack for the new controller, while retaining the existing software stack for older controllers.

“Perhaps the most important aspect of USB 3.0 is the expectation that customers have of USB: it’s just USB3 so it should just work, right? Each and every USB device, low, full, high, and SuperSpeed, has to work in Windows 8," Sinofsky wrote. "That’s our focus while also delivering the most robust and reliable USB stack."

USB 3.0 supports data transfer rates of up to 5 Gigabits per second, a significant jump over USB 2.0 speeds that peak at 480 Megabits per second.

Microsoft is expected to release a Windows 8 developer preview sometime next month, however the company has yet to announce a specific launch date or other details surrounding the upcoming OS.

Source : cnet

Hurricane Electric takes its IPv6 expertise to the datacenter

Hurricane Electric, arguably the world’s largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and co-location provider, has expanded its IPv6 Professional Services offerings so that they can now help you with IPv6 datacenter deployments.

If you’re a home user or just have a small office/home office (SOHO), you don’t need to worry about the fact that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon. It’s a different story though if you’re managing a datacenter. In a datacenter, you can need hundreds or thousands of new Internet addresses on any given day. Since the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) expects to allocate its last IPv4 addresses before year’s end, datacenter managers must start converting over to IPv6.

According to Owen Delong, Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 evangelist and director of professional services, recommends transitioning to a dual-stack environment by implementing the following steps:

” Add IPv6 Capabilities to provisioning and monitoring systems

” Upgrade critical infrastructure (hardware and software) to support dual IPv4/IPv6 stacks

” Plan data center addressing and deployment

” Enable IPv6 on your core and backbone

” Establish IPv6 peering and transit sessions

” Add IPv6 capabilities to external facing services, including email, Web and DNS

“From improved network topologies to built-in IPSec, IPv6 can bring immediate benefits to the data center. By investing in good staff training, the average data center operator should have few problems deploying IPv6 and avoid costs later on down the road,” said Owen Delong in a statement. “For those data center managers looking for some guidance and assistance, Hurricane Electric’s professional services division is available to assist.”

Since Hurricane Electric has been doing IPv6 starting in 2001, I’m inclined to trust them. If I had to bring over a datacenter to IPv6 and I didn’t have the in-house expertise I’d go to them. Frankly, even if I did have a covey of Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIE) at my beck and call, I’d still call in Hurricane. Shifting over a datacenter to any new technology demands all the expert help you can get, and when it comes to IPv6, that means Hurricane Electric.

Source : zdnet

HP Pre 3 canceled in U.S., reportedly sells out in Germany

Once poised to be Hewlett-Packard’s first webOS flagship mobile phone, HP has canceled its U.S. plans for the Pre 3 altogether.

The news comes one week after the handset was launched in Europe and after the doomed HP TouchPad was discontinued.

Now here is when the bargains come in for those consumers who wouldn’t have bought these gadgets before.

PC Magazine reports that the unlocked Pre 3 will be discounted to the equivalent of roughly $75 in Europe. Although a price drop date hasn’t been announced yet, the cut possibly already took place in Germany, as PC Mag reports that the device has magically already sold out there. (Of course, who knows how many units were available for sale to begin with…)

For reference, the Pre 3 was originally selling for €349 ($502) on the continent and £299 ($494) in the United Kingdom.

The Pre 3 was first unveiled in February as a business-friendly phone with a slide-out full QWERTY keypad, a 3.6-inch multi-touch display (800 x 480 resolution), a Qualcomm MSM 1.4GHz processor and mobile hotspot support.

U.K. buyers will also get a bargain on the TouchPad. HP has announced that its tablet will now cost £89 ($147) and £115 ($190) for the 16GB and 32GB versions respectively.

As for U.S. consumers, HP is offering the TouchPad for $99 and $149 for the 16GB and 32GB editions while supplies last, which has proven to be popular enough now to boost the TouchPad to the top of Amazon’s current electronics bestsellers chart.

Source : zdnet

Android dominates iOS in Q2, study finds

Google's Android mobile operating system dominated the U.S. smartphone market last quarter, research firm NPD announced today.

According to NPD, Android was running on 52 percent of all the smartphones sold in the States last quarter, overshadowing iOS, which secured 29 percent market share. BlackBerry OS came in third in the smartphone space with 11 percent share, NPD said. Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile, and WebOS all trailed with less than 5 percent market share each.

NPD's findings follow a similar report earlier this month from research firm Gartner. That company, whichanalyzed worldwide smartphone sales, said that Google's platform captured 43.4 percent of the OS market during the second quarter, up from just 17.2 percent during the same period last year. Symbian came in second in Gartner's study with 22.1 percent share, followed by iOS at 18.2 percent. RIM's BlackBerry OS tallied 11.7 percent share worldwide.

Although NPD didn't dig into each vendor's market share on the quarter, the company did discuss Motorola Mobility. The research firm said that the handset maker's overall mobile phone market share declined in the second quarter from 12 percent last year to 9 percent this year. In the smartphone space, Motorola Mobility's share dropped from 15 percent to 12 percent. Perhaps most concerning for the company, its Android market share hit 22 percent during the period, down from the 44 percent ownership it had during the second quarter of 2010.

That said, things might soon change for Motorola. Earlier this month, Google announced that it had agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The companies expect the deal to be completed by the end of this year or early next year. When that happens, NPD says, Motorola could find the reprieve it needs as it tries to keep up with a host of competitors, including Samsung and LG.

"Much as it did in the feature phone market in the RAZR era, Motorola is experiencing increased competition from Samsung and LG in the smartphone market," NPD executive director of industry analysis, Ross Rubin, said of Motorola. "Closer ties to the heart of Android can help inspire new paths to differentiation."

However, for Google, its acquisition might have more to do with patents than anything else. The search giant and its vendor partners are being targeted from all sides by competitors that are launching lawsuits against Android, thanks to their stronger mobile patent portfolios. Google is being sued by Oracle, while Microsoft and Apple aretaking aim at HTC, Samsung, Barnes & Noble, and others.

In a recent blog post, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond targeted those companies, saying that they are launching lawsuits based on "bogus patents." Those lawsuits, Drummond said, are only proving to stifle innovation in the mobile space.

"But Android's success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and other companies, waged through bogus patents," Drummond wrote in the post. "Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it."

Now, it seems, Google might soon have its own weapon to stop the patent lawsuits it takes so much issue with. Rubin said today that "Google's acquisition of Motorola shifts the balance of power in the handset-patent conflict between Google and its operating system competitors."

Aside from lawsuits, Rubin said that other Android vendors, worried that they will be hurt by Google's Motorola Mobility acquisition, shouldn't be concerned. He said that the operating system "has made for a larger pie" that allows everyone to benefit from its success.

Source : cnet

Best Buy offers iPhone 3GS for free--for a day

The iPhone 3GS just got better--for the moment, anyway. Best Buy is offering a free 8GB version of the one-rev-back iPhone model with a two-year AT&T contract. Clearly we're in the iPhone 5 rollout zone.

The offer's only good for one day--today, Monday, August 22--and it's only available in-store at Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile. But I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be the start of a trend.

Analysts have recently been predicting that the 3GS price would drop from $49 to $0 and the 16GB iPhone 4 from $199 to $99 when the iPhone 5 is officially announced.

According to analyst predictions, free iPhone 3GSes could more than double the number of iPhone users worldwide from an estimated 64 million to 150 milllion. A Touchpad firesale this ain't.

So, is free (with contract) cheap enough for a phone that's soon to be two revs old? Buying a 3GS wasquestionable at $49. Free seems like a pretty good deal.

Source : cnet