In a few weeks, at the Samsung Developers Conference in San Francisco, Samsung’s Mobile Chief, DJ Koh, is slated to introduce their first foldable smartphone. This has been rumored to be in the works for over a year, and if he introduces this foldable, which would also double as a small tablet, it would be … Continue reading Apple’s Foldable iPhone Patents and the Inevitability of Foldable Displays
It’s been discussed before that a car industry parallel to generations of designs is the best way to think about Apple’s iPhone design strategy. In case you haven’t connected these parallels before, you notice that car companies change the designs of their car models very often. Apple appears to be on a four-year schedule with … Continue reading Apple’s 2018/2019 iPhone Collection
Samsung Launches First Always On, Always Connected PC On Thursday at a low key event in New York City, Samsung launched the Galaxy Book 2 running on Windows 10 and powered by Qualcomm on ARM. The device will be available on November 2 from AT&T and later in the month from Sprint and Verizon. Prince … Continue reading News That Caught My Eyes: Week of October 19, 2018
This week I have been in London for the launch of the Huawei Mate 20, Mate 20 Pro and Mate 20 X ( you can find a great review here ) and as I played with the devices and listened to Huawei dive into their silicon and artificial intelligence as well as watch an AR Panda … Continue reading Smartphone Innovation’s Geographical Shift
Oculus Quest This week at Oculus Connect 5, Oculus announced that in March 2019 they will ship the Oculus Quest. The standalone VR device will be the first wireless Oculus hardware to sport positional tracking, both for the headset itself and the dual hand controllers. The headset will ship with 50-plus games made specifically for the … Continue reading News that Caught My Eye: Week of Sept 28, 2018
Last week, more than 20,000 people descended on Los Angeles for the Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCA) Congress – the second year of a partnership with the CTIA to stage a signature annual mobile event in the United States. While Apple stole some of the spotlight with its own, Cupertino-based event on September 12, this … Continue reading Key Takeaways and Coolest Items from Last Week’s Mobile Conference
This week marks the release of the new series of GeForce RTX graphics cards that bring the NVIDIA Turing architecture to gamers around the globe. I spent some time a few weeks back going over the technological innovations that the Turing GPU offered and how it might change the direction of gaming, and that is … Continue reading Making Sense of the GeForce RTX launch
Two product families were on stage at the Steve Jobs’ Theater. A lot had been revealed in spoilers over the weeks preceding the event, but while we might have known names and sizes, we knew very little about what really makes up the essence of these new devices. By the time Phil Schiller finished introducing … Continue reading An iPhone for Everyone
Earlier this month a story posted on popular tech review site Anandtech discovered some interesting data when looking at the performance of flagship Huawei smartphones. As it turns out, benchmark scores in some popular graphics tests, including UL Benchmark’s 3DMark and long-time mobile graphics test GFXBench, were being artificially inflated to gain an advantage over … Continue reading Why Cheating on Smartphone Benchmarks Matters to You
One of the things I learned very early on in my limited relationship with Steve Jobs was that he was a control freak. That was both good and bad. Bad in the sense that this was a factor in him getting fired in 1985 when he tried to take control of everything related to the … Continue reading Apple’s Vertical Strategy is key to Their Success
Yesterday Qualcomm unveiled their newest Snapdragon creation which has been custom designed for the smartwatch/wearable category. On the heels of this announcement, there are a few critical observations to make when we think about the future of wearables. Custom Silicon The first observation, which should be obvious, is the role custom silicon will play in … Continue reading Qualcomm, Android Wear, and Competition in Miniaturization
The road to 5G is certainly interesting one and it’s increasingly clear that there are going to be multiple paths to get there. Different countries around the world are taking different routes and within countries, different carriers are also following unique strategies. The net result—realistically—is probably going to be an even more confusion as we … Continue reading The Many Paths and Parts to 5G
Evernote’s Troubles In the past month, Evernote lost its Chief Technology Officer, Anirban Kundu, its Chief Financial Officer Vincent Toolan and its head of HR Michelle Wagner. As it’s getting ready to raise more money it slashed its premium subscription from $70 to $42 a year. Via TechCrunch Evernote was the first of its kind … Continue reading News You Might Have Missed: Week of Sept 7th, 2018
As we head toward Apple’s annual device announcement-palooza, it’s an interesting exercise to consider where we are in Steve Jobs’ vaunted, much quoted ‘Post-PC Era’. The fact of the matter is, that era never fully arrived, and it doesn’t look like it will, in the near- to medium- term future. Much was made last year … Continue reading The ‘Post-PC Era’ Never Really Happened…and Likely Won’t
Despite no longer being a hyper-growth category, smartphones are still a fascinating category to study. Not only because of the unprecedented impact they have on enabling humans of all shapes and sizes, races, and economic circumstances to engage in personal computing but also because of the global competitive strategies. In what was an entirely predictable … Continue reading Notch Wars
This week’s Tech.pinions podcast features Carolina Milanesi and Bob O’Donnell discussing VMWare’s VMWorld conference, chatting about new multi-language additions to Google Assistant, and analyzing a variety of product announcements from the IFA show in Europe, including those from Lenovo, Dell, Intel, Sony, Samsung and others. If you happen to use a podcast aggregator or want … Continue reading Podcast: VMWorld 2018, Google Assistant, IFA Announcements
As an analyst with a background in the semiconductor industry (my first tech job was at Cypress Semiconductor), and heavily covering the semiconductor industry when I first joined the Analyst community in 2001, I was beginning to think this knowledge and expertise was helpful to have but becoming less relevant. For a stretch, it seemed … Continue reading Semiconductor Foundry Battles
From the first time I used a VR Headset, I was skeptical that it could ever become a consumer hit. The industrial strength models, such as the original Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, were expensive and were tethered to a PC to work. While what they delivered in ways of VR functionality was exciting, … Continue reading Why Consumer VR Headsets Have Potential but Need a Killer App to Survive
Apple removes Facebook’s VPN app Onavo Apple officials told Facebook last week that Onavo violated the company’s rules on data collection by developers, and suggested last Thursday that Facebook voluntarily remove the app. Facebook said in a statement that it’s transparent with Onavo users: “We’ve always been clear when people download Onavo about the information … Continue reading News You Might Have Missed: Week of August 24, 2018
This week Amazon and Microsoft announced the rollout of Alexa and Cortana integration. First discussed publicly one year ago, the collaboration represents an important step forward for smart assistants today and voice as an interface in the future. I’ve been using Alexa to connect to Cortana, and Cortana to connect to Alexa, and while it’s … Continue reading Cortana and Alexa: The Next Step Forward for Voice
Over the last few months, I have often written about the idea that AR headsets could be the next big thing in mobile. In a column I wrote on July 16th, I pointed out that I believe Apple, Google and others will create what I call “light headsets” that receive all of its intelligence from … Continue reading Augmented Realities Role In Smart Cars
In early August, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, announced that his company had developed a new AI chip for his Electric cars and claimed that it is ten times faster than the ones they use today from nVidia. When I was at NVIDIA’s spring developers conference, I went to a session on NVIDIA’S AI Xavier processor … Continue reading Tesla, Google, Facebook and Others Move Towards Vertical Integration
Over the past few weeks, I have been asked a lot whether the prices of smartphones will continue to increase and if such an increase is justified. The success of the iPhone X took those who said people would never pay $1,000 for a phone by surprise. The iPhone X also gave hope to smartphone … Continue reading The Value of Smartphones
Samsung Unpacked 2018 On Thursday, Samsung held its “unpacked 2018” event in Brooklyn where they announced the Note 9, the Galaxy Watch, a DeX dongle, and they teased the Galaxy Home. A lot was packed in a keynote of just over an hour including an update to Bixby. Rather than summarizing all the product details, … Continue reading News You Might Have Missed: Week of August 10, 2018
I’ve been studying the Indian smartphone market for many years now, watching it closely as it grew into the worlds fastest smartphone market. It was only a matter of time until India became the second largest smartphone market since the size of the country is second only to China. However, these two markets could not … Continue reading Apple’s Struggles in India
