Tablet shipments have been on the rise in 2013, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody. IDC analysts tell us that a total of 217.1 million units were shipped in 2013, which represents a 50.6% YoY growth rate.
Unfortunately, though, the mature markets are already pretty saturated and there is lots of competition so the rate of growth is slowing down. The growth in 2012 over 2011 was a good 87.1%.
Manufacturers are turning their attention to developing markets however high-margin products such as Apple iPads are not doing that well in these regions. Read more »
Sony launched the slimmer, lighter PlayStation Vita PCH-2000 in Japan late last year and the refreshed portable has now made its way to the UK. Its launch price is lower – £180 (the original launched at £200) – and it features more internal storage and better battery life to boot.
Another change in the PCH-2000 compared to the original is that the 5″ qHD AMOLED has been replaced by an IPS LCD of the same resolution. Read more »
It seems Microsoft will be releasing two new variants of the Xbox One later this year. One of them will be a white variant of the current console, which is essentially the employee edition that was only given to, well, employees. The white console comes with a matching white controller. It is said to launch around October.
Another variant is a special edition Titanfall bundle, that comes with Titanfall theme decals on the body and controller along with a copy of the game. Read more »
It seems Samsung’s custom software enhancements have finally gotten Google’s attention. Enough for the Mountain View company to talk to Samsung and ask it to calm down a bit.
According to the sources at Re/code, the two companies are now in talks to bring Samsung’s vision of Android in line with Google’s. Google seems to be particularly taking offense at the presence of duplicate Samsung service that mimic ones by Google, such as the presence of a separate application store, music store, movie store and ebooks store. Since Samsung has to have Google’s services on board as well, it results in two of each on every device, which will likely confuse customers. Read more »
Nintendo has announced that they will be making an app for smartphones. Although far from releasing its games on the mobile platform like everyone wants, this app will at least let you access the Nintendo store from your mobile device.
The Nintendo smartphone app should be similar to the PlayStation and Steam mobile apps, where in it will let log into to your Nintendo Network ID (NNID) and let you purchase games and other content for your Nintendo consoles and access certain other features as well. Read more »
According to a report in The Register, Nokia’s highly-effective gyroscopic OIS tech has become available to other manufacturers on the open market. The tiny part made by ST Microelectronics was previously exclusively available to the Finnish manufacturer.
The dual-axis gyroscope for image stabilization carries the model number L2G2IS. Read more »
It’s no secret that the Wii U hasn’t been exactly flying off the shelves. The official numbers were released from Nintendo and they’re bad.
Only 2.8 million Wii U’s were sold in 2013, which is a paltry sum compared to the numbers that the PS4 and Xbox One accomplished in their first two months. Read more »
The Sony Xperia Z1 Compact promises to be everything the big Z1 is except in a smaller package. The reduction in size, however, meant less room for the battery and the Z1 Compact has a 2,300mAh battery compared to a 3,000mAh battery for the big one.
That’s still great for the class – the HTC One mini has a 1,800mAh battery and the two are roughly the same size. Read more »
Microsoft seems to have really bad luck with its SkyDrive cloud service. First a UK court ruled out Microsoft is infringing British Sky Broadcasting Group trademark last summer and Microsoft has agreed to change the name.
Just two days ago Microsoft announced the new name of the service – SkyDrive was re-branded to OneDrive. And as of today Microsoft is in trouble once again for the same reason. Read more »
Love Legos, but hate stepping on a brick in the middle of the night, dealing with misplaced pieces, or having to clean up after an intense miniature engineering session?
Well Chrome has teamed up with the beloved toymaker to create a web application, Build with Chrome. The app allows you to play with Legos right in your browser. Read more »
Viber has brought the Sticker Market feature to the Windows Phone 8 version of its instant messenger. Available in the latest update of the app, this is Viber’s first attempt at generating revenue with its services.
On top of that, the update brings enhanced notifications, which the company says are now smarter. Viber users also have more options to customize their statuses. Read more »
Electronic Arts is currently running a promotion on some of its games for Xbox Live and Windows Phone. Xbox games are up to 75% off, while the Windows Phone games are up to 40% off. It’s not just EA either, Amazon has a long list of discounted games too.
The price cut for Electronic Arts games on WP will only last a week, check the list of games after the break. Read more »
Samsung has chosen Carphone Warehouse as a “preferred partner” for Europe. The retailer will collaborate with Samsung to open and manage over 60 dedicated stores of the Korean company.
Carphone Warehouse is already managing the three pilot stores and it seems Samsung is happy with the results and has decided on an aggressive expansion. Read more »
A new player has officially entered the ARM CPU market – AMD. Opteron A1100 packs four or eight Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 2+ GHz. As you can imagine (if the Opteron name didn’t give it away), this will be a server part.
This chip is aimed at high-density servers where it’s more important to run many threads than run one thread quickly. Read more »
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