Podcast: NVIDIA GTC, Samsung Pre-Earnings, Huawei P9

This week Bob O’Donnell, Ben Bajarin and Carolina Milanesi discuss NVIDIA’s GPU Technology conference, Samsung’s positive pre-earnings and the release of Huawei’s P9 smartphone.

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Bob O'Donnell

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.

27 thoughts on “Podcast: NVIDIA GTC, Samsung Pre-Earnings, Huawei P9”

  1. Interesting, thank you.

    Couple of nitpicks on the camera segment:

    1- the rush to increase megapixel counts is mostly over. Even though 20 megapixel sensors are available, Samsung, Huawei et al are not using them, are even scaling back from older flagships (the Galaxys S5,S6,S7 went 16,12,12 megapixels). So the storage, data, post-processing,… needs are not bigger today than 2 years ago. Granted, that’s different for video, 4k video is still getting more common.

    2- the main reason for megapixel count to not longer be the focus (ah !) is that it only has a loose relationship to picture quality, especially in low-light conditions (inside or at night). Low-light quality is mostly determined by
    – stabilization, since exposure times need to be longer, got added to the Galaxies at S6,
    – aperture, describes how “open” the lense gets to catch more light, f/1.8 being better than f/2.2, the Galaxies went 2.2, 1.9, 1.7
    – and pixel size, bigger pixels let in more light. That’s the main reason for the climb-down in megapixels: since sensor size is limited by the phone’s space constraints (as opposed to real cameras, which can accommodate much bigger sensors), the only way to get bigger pixels is by having fewer of them.

    Huawei is doing something different and interesting on the P9: 2 sensors. That’s been done before to brute-force the light & quality issue, or to offer a second wide-angle camera, or to allow for post-picture refocusing. But Huawei is doing something new: pairing a regular sensor with a black-and-white one, which they say is makes for exponentially better low-light pictures since the monochrome sensor A) basically doubles light intake and B) actually more than doubles because since it’s monochrome it doesn’t color-filter the light and needs 1/3 as many pixels to supply light info to the color sensor. I’m not quite seeing the “exponential”, but the pictures do seem good, one step below GS7 but at par with iP6S+. That’s a v1, maybe v2 will actually stand out, at least it’s not HTC’s “Ultrapixels” fiasco.

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