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
I’ve updated one of my more popular charts, and upon further reflecting and sharing via video conference at a couple of Ivy League business schools, I think there are some deeper observations to be made. Here is the chart. This chart, in its most cursory interpretation, shows how Microsoft fell as the dominant market share … Continue reading Open Platforms and Market Share
About 18 months ago, I was talking to my contacts in Hollywood, and they told me that Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg had become interested in short form videos. The word they used to describe his thinking was “short telenovela’s” that could tell an entire story in about 10-15 minutes. At the time I heard this … Continue reading Video for Short Attention Spans
Ok, there may be more than two charts to dive into, but all the charts are on the same theme. Thanks to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, for helping me get my hands on this data. Merrill Lynch/BofA ran a large global survey that is packed with some fantastic survey data. This study spanned key countries including US, … Continue reading Two Charts for the Apple Bull Case
I tweeted yesterday a chart I love to show, and always gets great reaction on Twitter, with the statement “the PC is alive and well and it comes in many shapes and sizes.” I could spend a good hour or more talking about why understanding the various roles personal computers play in humans lives and … Continue reading HP and Microsoft PCs, The PC Evolved, Android + Windows and Avoiding Platform Disruption
As technology evolution and maturation continue to move forward, many PC and other device companies emphasize the experience of using their products as key to their design philosophy. The goal, they say, isn’t just to deliver on the key technical requirements and other specs necessary to provide good performance, but to make the overall encounter … Continue reading Are Leather and LTE the Future of PCs?
It has been interesting to research consumer spending habits over the last few years in a series of quantitive studies we did. While people in the tech industry may assume that tech represents the largest part of a consumer holiday shopping budget, the reality is it often does not. Most consumers may have one or … Continue reading Rising Tech ASPs and the Holiday Season
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
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
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
Earlier this week, a story ran on Digitimes that indicated there might be some problems and slowdown with the rollout of 7nm chip technologies for Qualcomm and MediaTek. Digitimes is a Taiwan-based media outlet that has been tracking the chip supply chain for decades but is known to have a rocky reliability record when it … Continue reading Despite rumors, 7nm is Not Slowing Down for Qualcomm
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
It looks like Samsung’s long-rumored flexible or foldable smartphone will hit the market later this year. According to Toms’ s Guide-
“Speaking to CNBC in an interview published on Tuesday (Sept. 4), Samsung’s mobile division chief DJ Koh said that the foldable phone would launch later this year, possibly as soon as the company’s developer conference in November.” It kicks off Nov. 7.
We are exactly a week away from the Apple September event which calls us to gather together in Cupertino to see what is to expected to be the next iPhone generation. As we get closer to the event rumors and leaks multiply. A consistent expectation seems to be that Apple will remove the home button, … Continue reading What Current iPhone X Users Tell Us About the Opportunity for the New Models
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
I’ve spent the last few weeks using Lenovo’s Miix 630 detachable product that utilizes Qualcomm’s 835 Snapdragon processor running Windows 10 Pro (upgraded from Windows 10S). It hasn’t been an entirely smooth experience, and there is still work to be done on this new platform (especially regarding a few key apps). But this combination of … Continue reading Windows on ARM: Good Today, Better Tomorrow
More than a full year into the Windows on Snapdragon product life, the jury is still out on how well received the first generation of notebooks were. Qualcomm launched machines with three critical OEM partners: HP, ASUS, and Lenovo. All three systems offered a different spin on a Windows laptop powered by a mobile-first processor. … Continue reading Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS Laptop First with Snapdragon 850
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
The past year has been a challenging one for tech, what with #metoo moments, security and privacy breaches, unseemly use of power, and certainly some missteps in the ‘fake news’/Russia meddling arena. And despite the seeming incongruity between these incidents/actions/behaviors and tech company earnings and sky-high valuations, there has started to be a reckoning, of … Continue reading The Great Tech Questioning
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
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
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
In early June, after I came back from the industries premier display conference known as SID, I shared in my PC Mag column some of the significant developments I saw there in flexible displays. The two major players who were very vocal about their breakthrough flexible displays were Visionox and BOE. However, while I was … Continue reading Samsung Joins the Flexible Display Wars
Even in a tech world seemingly dominated by AI, voice computing, and other intriguing new developments, there’s one thing that’s still hard to beat: a great-looking, large display. Being able to see the cinematographic nuance of a well-lit scene, the fine-grained details of a high-resolution photo, or just a razor-sharp image of whatever you happen … Continue reading The Beauty of 4K
Apple’s recent earnings call, where the company revealed its iPhone average selling price (ASP) for the second quarter grew to $724, stunned many industry watchers. And while it’s true that no other smartphone vendor is selling phones at near that price in the same volumes as Apple, the reality is that four of the top … Continue reading Rethinking Conventional Wisdom Around Hardware ASPs
