Tech News Today 483

Tech News Today Episode 483

Tech News Today 483: Xolo, More Like Zoloft

One data plan for many devices coming, government demands to spy on your car, Intel arrives on the cell phone, and more.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@SarahLane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar (@Iyaz)
• Jason Howell (@RayGun01)
• Patrick Beja
  • patrickbeja.com

Top Stories

• Nokia's Elop: Lumia 'actual sales have been mixed'
• Nokia's Q1 2012 financials: $9 billion in sales can't stop a $1.7 billion loss
• Nokia head of sales steps down after only a year on Leadership Team
• AT&T Stores Are Almost Completely Out of Lumia 900 Stock
  • Nokia reported Q1 earnings in line with it's last warning - $9 billion in sales $1.7 billion loss
  • Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said "We have launched four Lumia devices ahead of schedule to encouraging awards and popular acclaim. The actual sales results have been mixed. We exceeded expectations in markets including the United States, but establishing momentum in certain markets including the UK has been more challenging." (Gizmodo asked around at various stores and it looks like Lumia 900s are selling out)
  • Elop acknowledged they need to focus on the low-end: The portfolio focus will likely be on series 40 (7 new Asha devices) in 2Q12. Here (lower price tiers) Nokia is subject to considerable pricing pressure from rivals with better or improving cost controls and full touch UI.
  • Colin Giles, Nokia's executive vice president of sales leaving June 30th. Will not be replaced.

• IPhone bills boost Verizon 1Q revenue growth
• Verizon: We sold more iPhones in Q1 than all LTE phones
• Verizon Sees Sales, Profits Climb From Year-Ago Levels on Wireless Growth
• Verizon to stop adding DSL customers in FiOS areas, cutting pay phones and phone cards
• Verizon Signals Windows Phone Push
• Verizon shared data plans are due in mid-summer, target users with multiple devices

• Financials/Numbers
  • Overall: net income beat expectations: $3.6 billion. Last year at the same time, the company made $3.2b
  • VZ Comm owns 55% of VzW: Verizon Wireless reported a 3.6% increase in the average monthly bill for subscribers, now $55.43/month.
  • VzW: gained, 501k new post-paid subscribers in the quarter, 734k new customers (total of 93M subs)
  • VzW: data revenue was $6.6B, which is 42.9% of all service revenues for VzW
  • In contrast, a year ago data revenues were $5.5bn.
  • Landline: revenue declined, FiOS Internet got 193k new customers
• Tidbits:
  • VZW sold 3.2M iPhones in Q1, sold 4.2M in Q4 2011. Still that's more iPhones in Q1 sold than all LTE phones -- 2.1M sold, 2.9M LTE devices sold
  • 47% of customers are on smartphones
  • CFO Francis Shammo said Vz wouldn't offer DSL if FiOS is available in the same area.
  • VZ is cutting back on its phone cards and pay phones
  • Shammo also said it wants to build a third ecosystem for VzW (Android, iOS) and it hopes the third will be WP
  • In the earnings call Shammo also mentioned shared Data plans are targeted to launch in mid-summer.

• Galaxy S II successor to have quad-core processor with 'superlative' benchmarks, will be shown on May 3rd
• Galaxy S III: latest alleged leak not accurate, name still unconfirmed; tightest security 'ever' for a Samsung launch
  • The Verge Chirs Zeigler reports May 3rd event witll not be a new Tab or Note.
  • Galaxy successor may or may not be called Galaxy S III
  • Global version: Quad core (likely an Exynos 32 nm cortex-based) Regional variants may substitute other chips
  • Gizmodo's images may only be 'dummy' test boxes of Galxy S II successor's innards
  • security surrounding the preparation and launch of the Galaxy S III is tighter than it has ever been for any product in the company's history.

Discussion Stories

• Intel's Medfield Atom makes it debut in Lava's Xolo X900
• Xolo X900: Meet Intel's first smartphone
• Intel wasn't lying-
  • Intel and India-based Lava International today announced the general availability of the Xolo X900, built around the Intel Atom Z2460 processor.
  • Available April 23 22,000 rupees (US$420)
  • Partenering with megastore chain Crona
  • 8 hours talk time 5 ghours 3G browsing
  • 1.6GHz Atom processor,400MHz graphics chip clock, full 1080p HD video encoding, 8-megapixel camera with burst mode, HSPA+ 3G connectivity, 4.03-inch LCD screen, Android Gingerbread with upgrade to ICS ""shortly
  • Lenovo K800 will come soon. Orange, Motorola, and ZTE later this year.

• Next iPhone may be housed in 'Liquidmetal'
• How ‘Liquidmetal’ Could Give the Next iPhone Its Special Swagger
• iPhone 5 may launch in October due to Qualcomm supply issues
• Liquid Metal Demo Patrick mentioned
  • Korea IT News reported Wednesday that iPhone 5 is likely to be housed in Liquidmetal: alloy of titanium, zirconium, nickel, copper & other metals. It apparently makes the outer surface of the phone "smooth like liquid"
  • Liquidmetal comes via the California Institute of Technology in 1992. It's a class of patented amorphous metal alloys (basically metallic glass) with high strength, high wear resistance against scratching/denting, and a good strength-to-weight ratio. Apple was granted rights to use it 8/2010.
  • “Liquidmetal allows precision parts to be fabricated similar to plastic injection molding, but with similar properties to metal,” IHS senior principal analyst Kevin Keller said. Why use it? With traditional metal you either need to bend a piece of sheet metal, or die-cast with aluminum or magnesium. In die-casting, alloys are brittle, poor wear resistance. Liquidmetal’s injection molding process is new tech and $$$
  • Liquidmetal is in Apple products & other manufacturers for past few years. The SIM card ejector tool in some North American 1st-gen iPads was made of Liquidmetal, for example.
  • Investment banking firm, PiperJaffray says Apple will stick with fall launch for iPhone 5 because of supply issue with Qualcomm's 28-nm modem chip for LTE compatibility
  • Qualcomm's CFO Bill Keital told Reuters demand has surpassed availability so much that they've "decided to start spending more money to get more supply as soon as possible." Keitel also noted that this shortage is draining the company of tens of millions of dollars.

• Mandatory ‘Big Brother’ Black Boxes In All New Cars From 2015
• Hate To Break It To You, But Your Car Likely Has A Black Box 'Spying' On You Already
• Scroll to section 31406
  • Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder
  • Been passed by Senate and expected to be rubber stamped by the house
  • Data is owned by owner or lessee of the car, unless court-ordered, emergency services, or part of an investigation or inspection by Gov't like NTSB looking into Toyota Accelerator issues.
  • Recorders are mandated to record what happened right before and after a crash and to make the data accessible "regardless of vehicle manufacturer or model, with commercially available equipment in a specified data format."
  • Forbes reports black boxes have been around since 1996, are found in at least 60 million vehicles, and are a feature in 85% of new cars every year.
  • IEEE reports, recent rules from the NHTSA have standardized what those event recorders capture: “a car’s speed, how far the accelerator was pressed, the engine revolutions per minute, whether the driver hit the brakes, whether the driver was wearing a safety belt, and how long it took for the airbags to deploy.” So moving forward, these event recorders will be creating far more comprehensive recordings.

News Fuse

• When can you get your hands on some Facebook stock? TechCrunch's sources say May 17th is the target date for Facebook's IPO. The final date is dependent on the SEC. Previous reports expected the IPO in the third week of May and May 17th is in line with that.

• Sure, Samsung and Apple's CEOs will meet to discuss a settlement, but that doesn't mean there can't be more PATENT WARS! In a California lawsuit, Samsung filed a counterclaim against Apple, saying Apple infringes on eight of its patents. Apple initiated the suit back in February saying Samsung infringed on eight of its patents.

• Sony's been in the dumps with all that red on its balance sheets, so here's some good news for the company. The European Union approved Sony's purchase of EMI's publishing business for $2.2 billion. To get approval, Sony will sell off some European assets.

• Over at the Oracle-Google lawsuit of amazingness - Mark Reinhold, Oracle Java Platform Group chief architect, answered all kinds of questions about Java. Reinhold explained that class libraries and APIs are not in the Java language comparing it to how a dictionary doesn't contain every word in a language. Google's Java guy, Joshua Bloch also testified explaining what an API is, "names or words and a set of rules." All of this is groundwork to determine whether those APIs are copyrightable.

• Microsoft announced its financials today for its fiscal third-quarter and profits were $5.11 billion compared to last year's $5.23 billion. However, Microsoft's revenue was up 6% which beat expectations. The Business Division had a 9% increase in revenue thanks to Office 2010. The Entertainment & Devices Division earned $1.6 billion which is down 16% compared to last year. Microsoft chalks up that decrease to a "soft gaming console market."

• The state of New York sued Sprint claiming tax fraud and wants over $300 million to make things right. NY says Sprint should have charged its customers more than $100 million in taxes over the course of seven years. Sprint has responded and said, "We have collected and paid over to New York every penny of sales taxes on mobile wireless services that we believe our customers owe under New York state law."

• Our long drawn out national nightmare is over as an update to the iOS version of Draw Something brings new features like Facebook support, commenting on drawings, saving images and undo! The Android version will get an update soon.

• Anonymous is taking on PasteBin, but in a different way than you'd expect. Anonymous along with the People's Liberation front have unveiled "AnonPaste," which they say is "safe and secure." The site is meant to be an alternative to PasteBin. And now Iyaz will tell you about a secret menace that may reside in your own home that may be draining your wallet dry.

• There may indeed be a wallet draining device in your home, specifically near your television. A new study by Carnegie Mellon University says that over the course of 2010, video game consoles have caused $1.24 billion to be spent in energy costs while those very consoles were idling. The study says that approximately 68% of energy consumed by those consoles were while those lazy machines were in idle mode.

Randomizer

• 1 in 10 Have Sent Sexts to the Wrong Person [INFOGRAPHIC]

Calendar

• Tumblr will launch ad spots starting May 2 on its Tumblr Radar page and says advertisers will see 120M impressions per day. As recently as April 12, Karp told Ad Age that advertising was "a complete last resort."

• Apple giving away Snow Leopard free to MobileMe customers so they can upgrade to Lion and use iCloud. MobileMe shuts down on June 15th.

INCOMING

Email

"Just a quick shout to say there was a Data Portability group back in 2005 right up today - http://www.dataportability.org/

I was one of the founders along with Chris Saad and many others. We were able to convince the likes of Yahoo, Google, Myspace, etc to embrace data portability.

There is a slightly altered view on wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPortability

Ian Forrester - cubicgarden.com"

"Hey TNT,

I'm really tired of everyone saying the Lumia 900 ""only"" has a single core processor, has a ""lower resolution"" screen, and can't ""run head to head"" with other flagship devices. It seems like every time the phone comes up in conversation, these are the arguments everyone has against the Windows Phone. None of these arguments are a reason not to buy the device.

The phone doesn't need a dual core processor. Windows Phone has absolutely no lag on the hardware in the Lumia 900, and neither do any apps. It's absolutely buttery smooth. Windows Phone can only run on very specific hardware, making it possible for Microsoft to target development for those lower specification pieces of hardware. The Lumia 900's processor is more than sufficient for Windows Phone.

The screen is ""lower resolution,"" yes, but the screen still looks absolutely fantastic. What people don't understand is that the Lumia 900's screen still has pretty high PPI. Here's some math: On a 23"" 1080p monitor, PPI is 95.78. On the iPhone 4S, the PPI is 329.65. On the Lumia 900, the PPI is 216.97. So if you're like most people, who can use a 1080p monitor with absolutely no complaints about supposed pixelation, then the Lumia 900's screen-which is more than half as dense as the iPhone 4S, and over twice as dense as 23"" 1080p monitor-is going to be perfectly fine for you. 

The only real argument for why the Lumia 900 isn't the phone to get right now is that it might not be getting Apollo, which is still unconfirmed. 

- Jacob Bearce"

Sponsors

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Production Information

• Edited by: jason
• Notes:

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