All posts from Boy Genius Report

For those that are not up to speed, here is the Reader’s Digest® version of the Apple and Nokia legal saga. Nokia sued Apple, Apple sued Nokia, the ITC got involved, and here we are. A U.S. court date to settle the alleged patent violations has tentatively been scheduled for some time in the middle of 2012. Legal analysts have said the proceedings could last for two or more years which, barring a settlement, would delay the verdict to sometime in 2014. For those cheer-leading the demise of one of the involved parties, you’ll just have to wait until then.
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This February, Microsoft Xbox 360 sales bested those of the Sony Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii for the first time since September of 2007. The February sales figures were: Xbox 360 422,000 units — up 8% year-over-year, Wii 397,900 units — down 47% year-over-year, and Playstation 3 360,100 units — up 30% year-over-year. Take-Two Interative’s BioShock 2, which hit store shelves on February 10th, can be partially credited for the surge in Xbox sales. BS 2 sold over 750,000 copies, 75% of which (562,000) were for the Xbox 360. Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. Wii, sold 555,600 units raking second on the game sales chart and Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 came in a respectable third.
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A lot happened in the US smartphone market from October 2009 to January 2010, but thankfully there are companies like comScore kicking about to help us make sense of just which platforms were the biggest winners and losers during this period. The biggest platform was not surprisingly Google’s Android which saw an uptick of 4.3% to a total of 7.1% thanks in part to the successful launches of handsets like the DROID, DROID ERIS and Hero. RIM’s BlackBerry OS, which faired second best with a gain of 1.7% continued to dominate the total smartphone market at 43%, but one has to wonder if RIM could have done just a little bit more. After all, it did launch the BlackBerry Bold 9700, Curve 8530 and Storm2 during these months. Apple’s iPhone didn’t do as well as many would have guessed, but its 0.3% increase makes quite a bit of sense when you consider the tradition of people holding out on iPhone purchases in the six months leading up the summer release of the devices later iteration. Nonetheless, it does hold a 25.1% stake in the US smartphone market. When it comes to market share, one’s success is another’s misfortune. Not exactly a stranger to losing ground, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile managed to shed 4.0% thanks in part to what can be politely summed up as a general indifference to its current platform (how things will change). After this, we saw Palm with a loss of 2.1%. In Palm’s defence a lot of this can be attributed to people finally getting around to ditching Palm OS, but the fact remains that thing’s aren’t going to well for a company that many felt was on the path to recovery just 15 months ago.
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Finally, the day is here. Well, one of the days is here, as you won’t be taking home an iPad today, but you can get in line and preorder one starting at 8:30AM ET this morning. Need something to keep you occupied until it arrives by courier? We highly suggest leaving grandma’s basement and finding a job (editing battlestarwiki.org doesn’t count).You only have 22 days to come up with at least $499 before applicable taxes and it’s highly unlikely she’ll be willing to give you her tax credit just so you can mess around with the Star Trek Communicator app on a 9.7″ display. Tick-tock on the clock, fellas. Let us know if you preorder one and which one you grabbed — Wi-Fi or 3G!
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Bad news today for Google and the Nexus One as investment firm Goldman Sachs has slashed its estimate for Nexus One sales by a third. Predicting a bright and rosy future for the Nexus One, Goldman Sachs originally estimated that Google will sell 3.5 million Nexus Ones in FY2010. After a disappointing first month in which Google only sold a rumored 80,000 handsets, Goldman Sachs has lowered its 2010 estimate to a mere one million handsets which will be sold across multiple carriers including T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone. Google’s FY2011 outlook will improve to two million handsets if, according to Goldman Sachs, Google rolls out second generation handset, markets it aggressively, and drops it online-only sales model. That last criteria is condemning and suggests that Google’s online-only model needs to be supplemented, if not supplanted, by brick and mortar retail sales. So peer into those magic eight balls that predict the future and let us know — is Google’s online-only sales model fatally flawed or does it just need some time to mature?
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Images and details on the HTC Incredible have emerged from the depths of Android Forums today. Most notable is the loss of the bright orange backing which has been replaced with a matte black covering emblazoned with a Verizon Wireless logo. Internally, the Incredible is rumored to have 500 MB of RAM (320 available), an 8 megapixel camera, measurements of 117.5 x 58.5 x 11.9mm, and a blinding red interior with a matching red battery. Though it packs a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the Incredible, just like the Acer Liquid A1, has been underclocked to 768 MHz, a battery savings measure which hopefully can be reversed once the handset has been rooted. Thankfully, the slowed down processor seems to have little effect on perceived performance as the Android 2.1 handset is reportedly “blazing fast”. If all these circulating rumors pan out, look for this handset to touchdown as soon as April or as late as May with Verizon Wireless. Hit the jump for a few more spy shots.

[Via Engadget]
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It’s inevitable, tiered data plans for mobile devices are coming.  It’s a reality that wireless providers and consumers are soon going to have to deal with. As phones add more features and become more data-centric, they tax wireless networks, and ultimately, the network provider’s bottom line. Verizon’s CTO, Tony Melone, had this to say when he was asked about unlimited data plans by the Wall Street Journal:  “As much data as you can consume is the big issue that has to change… It’s one thing to say all you can eat is gone, it’s another to have consumers worrying, ‘Can I stream this radio?’ That’s what we don’t want.” It is mildly comforting to know that Verizon’s CTO understands — you can get rid of unlimited data… as long as we can have unlimited data. One thing we’re sure of: when the first major U.S. carrier institutes a tiered data pricing policy, the others are sure to follow suit. You can look for this to roll out prior to Verizon’s first 4G handset dropping circa summer 2011. 
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The battle between HTML 5 and Flash wages on with the discovery of an interesting report comparing the CPU usage of HTML 5 and Flash on both Mac and Windows platform. In the midst of all the smack talk about Flash, Flash was presumed to be a CPU hog that chokes your system to the point of death. A series of measurements performed by video compression guru Jan Ozer reveals that Flash may not be as much of a CPU killer as previously thought and that, in some cases, HTML 5 is the culprit that causes CPU overload. Ozer tested HTML 5 and Flash on a Mac using Safari, Chrome and Firefox and on a Windows machine using Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
The results show that Flash CPU utilization is much higher on a Mac with Flash 10.1 gobbling up 32.07 CPU % points when using Safari, 42.07 when using Firefox and a whopping 49.79 when using Chrome. Flash 10.1 was much gentler on the Windows machine with CPU utilization topping out a reasonable 14.63 CPU % points when using IE and dropping as low as 6% when using Firefox. HTML 5 results were all over the chart with HTML 5 consuming a mere 12.39 CPU % points in Safari, presumably due to the built-in H.264 decoding found in the Apple browser, while at the same time, chomping down a staggering 49.89 in the Mac version of Chrome. The Windows platform fared a bit better with Chrome using 25.66% CPU points when rendering HTML 5 content. In the end, Flash is markedly better on Windows (which we already knew) and HTML 5 shines in the Safari for the Mac but why is there such a disparity between the two platforms? Hit the jump to find out.

Ozer believes that one of the deciding factors influencing CPU utilization by Flash is the presence (or absence) of GPU hardware acceleration. On the Windows platform where GPU hardware acceleration for Flash is often written into the drivers for video cards, Flash performance is exceptional while HTML 5 is only mediocre. On the Macintosh, HTML 5 performance is boosted by the presence of H.264 decoding built into Safari for the Mac while Flash performance is significantly worse as Mac OS X does not provide access to the APIs necessary for GPU acceleration. If Apple opened up the appropriate hooks for Adode to tap into, CPU utilization by Flash could be reduced significantly and its performance would rival that of HTML 5. So yes, Steve, Adobe Flash is a CPU hog but only on the Mac and one of the reasons is because you let it be.
[Via ReadWriteWeb]
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Available today from Verizon Wireless is the long awaited Casio G’zOne Brigade. The Brigade keeps the rugged good looks of its G’zOne predecessors but shakes things up by debuting as a horizontal clamshell instead of the traditional flip phone. The Brigade also ups the specs of the G’zOne line by offering the following:

3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, video capture and LED light function
Full QWERTY keyboard
Push to Talk
Field Force Manager
MIL-STD-810F standards for Water, shock, dust, immersion, vibration, humidity, salt fog, altitude, high and low temperature storage, and solar radiation
GPS with support for VZ Navigator
Front facing speakerphone
Text to speech capability
microSD expansion

The Casio G’zOne Brigade hits the shelves of Verizon Wireless at a rather pricey $249 after a $50 mail in rebate and two year contract, $319.99 after a $50 mail in rebate and one year contract and $419 full retail. It also comes with an optional $5 monthly PTT plan and is outrageously classified as a 3G Multimedia phone which will require a minimum 25MB data plan for $9.99 monthly. Anyone interested in a $250 feature phone with mandatory data?
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Our friends from Norway have dropped a little present in the Android Market — especially for all you Opera fans — as Opera Mini 5 beta 2 is available for download starting… now. Opera’s next generation mobile web browser packs tabbed browsing, speed dial, Opera Link, a download manager, and a password manager, amongst other things. Those of you who are sick of the default Android browser and can’t quite cozy up to Dolphin can go ahead and take Opera Mini 5 for a spin… and do let us know what you think about it.
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It’s no secret that Google and China aren’t exactly BFFs at the moment, but now Motorola has thrown its hat into the foray in a rather large way in order to protect its own interests and presumably make a nice bit of coin while doing so. As of this quarter, all of Motorola’s Android smartphones sold in China will see Google search and Google Maps replaced by Bing search and Bing Maps. Devices currently in the hands of consumers or sitting unsold on store shelves will be getting an OTA update sometime in the not too distant future. Both Motorola and Microsoft have not announced any specific plans to expand on their partnership outside of China — one could argue it’s already in the US — but based upon our understanding of the term “global alliance”, we don’t doubt for a second that this partnership will be forced upon other markets.
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Apple fans waiting to scoop up the latest and greatest Mac Pro have been drooling at every rumor and waiting patiently for these half-truths to come true. Circulating today is yet another rumor to get those technology taste buds tingling by suggesting once again that the Mac Pro will receive a processor overhaul of colossal proportions extremely soon. According to anonymous sources, the upcoming Mac Pro will rock the recently announced Intel Core i7-980x processor which will clock in at a fast 3.33GHz with TurboBoost to 3.6GHz and feature 6 cores and 12 threads of processing power, a 32nm architecture, Socket LGA1366 and 130W TDP. Before your knees buckle and your head hits the floor, make sure you circle March 16th on your calendar as that is the date these bundles of joy are expected to debut if this rumor pans out.
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