Richest phone owners use BlackBerrys
The wealthiest smartphone owners prefer BlackBerrys over iPhones. The iPhone, in turn, trumps Android when it comes to the moneyed class. But Android looks to be the people's choice among the middle class.
What's wealthy? In this case, a household income of $150,000 or more a year, according to Prosper Mobile Insights, which surveyed 25,000 respondents in June for its "Simultaneous Media Usage Survey."
In that top income category, 11.3 percent of smartphone owners said they have BlackBerrys; 10.9 percent, iPhones; and 7.2 percent, Android.
The same is true in the $100,000 to $149,999-a-year category, where 21.2 percent have BlackBerrys, 19.1 percent iPhones and 15.8 percent Android. At least in these categories, BlackBerrys are maintaining their lead, while in the real world, the devices once considered the Cadillac of smartphones have been losing significant ground to Android and Apple's phone. Read more...
HP customers seek stability with Whitman
Hewlett-Packard customers disconcerted by management shakeups and product strategy shifts are hoping for a stable future with Meg Whitman, who Thursday was appointed the company's new CEO.
Some customers who felt disrupted by recent changes at HP said they want Whitman to stabilize a chaotic situation by quickly and decisively communicating a product road map.
Whitman was appointed HP's CEO to replace Leo Apotheker, who was on the job for only about a year. During his reign, Apotheker set the stage for HP to move away from PCs to focus on the more profitable enterprise hardware, software and services. In August the company said it would acquire software maker Autonomy for $10.2 billion, and also proposed selling or spinning off the PSG (Personal Systems Group), which deals in PCs and mobile devices. HP at the time said it would kill its line of WebOS smartphones and tablets, while retaining the software platform. Read more...
LightSquared to defend project in open letter in newspapers
LightSquared said late Sunday that it planned to run the next day in major newspapers in the U.S. an open letter explaining its position over the controversy surrounding its LTE (long-term evolution) network, particularly concerns about its interference with GPS (global positioning system).
Demand for broadband wireless will outstrip the current total spectrum available in the U.S. within the next 24 months, "jeopardizing everything from the smartphones and tablets we love to the emergency responder services we rely upon to keep us safe", LightSquared's CEO Sanjiv Ahuja said in the open letter. "The current nationwide wireless providers have failed to innovate and in the process have failed to keep pace with consumer and technological demands."
Tests have shown LightSquared's proposed LTE network, which would operate in a spectrum band now devoted to satellite services, would run into interference with most GPS products in the upper part of its band and with some high-precision units in the lower part of its band. Read more...
MS denies secure boot will exclude Linux
Microsoft has hit back at concerns that secure boot technology in UEFI firmware could lock out Linux from Windows 8 PCs, saying that consumers will be free to run whatever they want on their PCs.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications, designed to reduce start-up times and improve security, allow computers to verify digitally signed OS loaders before booting. The feature in UEFI, the successor to BIOS ROM, is designed as a countermeasure against rootkits and other bootloader nasties.
However computer scientists, including Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University, warned earlier this week that the approach would make it impossible to run "unauthorised" OSes such as Linux and FreeBSD on PCs. A signed build of Linux would work, but that would mean persuading OEMs to include the keys. Read more...
Mozy ships hard drives to cloud backup customers
In an attempt to spur adoption of its MozyProcloud backup service, Mozy today shipped external hard drives to many of its small- to medium-sized business customers to speed initial system backups.
The new service, called Mozy Data Shuttle, is not dissimilar to what many enterprises do when creating offsite backups: the initial full backup is made to local hard drives, and then those drives are shipped to a disaster recovery site where the data is ingested by a storage array or tape library.
Mozy's Data Shuttle consists of a bright green 2TB Iomega hard drive with both USB 2.0 and eSATA connectivity.
After a customer orders the service, Mozy ships the customer a hard drive. As soon as the hard drive is connected to a system, it prompts the MozyPro customer to perform an encrypted full backup of the system. The customer can then use a pre-printed shipping label to ship the drive back to Mozy where the data is downloaded onto its servers. Read more...
Five outsiders who could lead Hewlett-Packard
Having gone through a rash of CEOs in the past 10 to 15 years, Hewlett-Packard may soon find itself looking for yet another new chief, despite just tapping Meg Whitman for that job this week.
HP's announcement Thursday that board member Whitman would replace Leo Apotheker came under fire from some observers who believe that the company should have named an interim leader and conducted an executive search.
"We would view any decision not to conduct a comprehensive search of internal and external candidates for a permanent CEO role as unsatisfactory and unnecessarily hasty," analyst firm Sanford Bernstein wrote in a research note this week before Whitman was named. "We also believe that shareholder reaction to Whitman as a permanent CEO would be mixed." Read more...
Fighting Facebook feature fatigue
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this week that his social network is now "a new way to express who you are."
Zuck, I know who I am. Who are you?
We all joined Facebook to reconnect with old friends, keep in touch with family, and enjoy a stream of comments and photos that kept us up to date with the lives of people we care about.
Suddenly, thanks to a flood of new features, Facebook is a newspaper and a media hub, a scrapbook and life-streaming platform. Which is great -- for Facebook.
Unfortunately, Facebook is now violating three unwritten rules for making users happy with social services:
- Keep it simple.
- Keep it linear.
- Deliver the mail.
And because of these reckless violations, users are becoming unhappy. Very unhappy. Read more...
Amazon’s tablet serious challenge to Apple’s iPad: analysts
Amazon.com Inc, which revolutionized reading with its Kindle e-reader, is expected to unveil a tablet computer this week that analysts say will seriously challenge Apple's market dominating iPad.
Amazon on Friday invited media to a press conference to be held in New York on Wednesday, declining to provide further details.
But analysts were confident that the world's largest Internet retailer will introduce its long-awaited tablet computer this year to expand in mobile commerce and sell more digital goods and services.
"Wednesday is tablet day," BGC partners analyst Colin Gillis told Reuters. Read more...
uTorrent Adds Android, iOS, PS3 and Xbox Integration
The latest alpha release of uTorrent now supports integration with a variety of devices including the iPhone, iPad, PS3, Xbox 360 and Android hardware. This allows users to quickly sync downloaded content to these devices. Additional capability to convert videos and audio to playable files will become available later, but only to users of the upcoming paid version of the BitTorrent client.
With more than 100 million active users a month and a market share of nearly 50 percent, uTorrent is without doubt the most-used BitTorrent client.
Despite the success story that it is, the uTorrent development team hasn’t been sitting still in recent years. The user interface is continuously being updated and new features are launched on a frequent basis, such as the BitTorrent App studio.
Today we can add another feature to the list, as BitTorrent quietly rolled out support for external devices in the latest uTorrent alpha release. Aside from the usual bug fixes, the new release allows users to drag and drop downloaded files to Apple and Android devices, as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. Read more...
Italy Proposes Draconian One-Strike Anti-Piracy Law
In recent years Italy has taken several far-reaching measures to thwart online piracy, including a nationwide block of The Pirate Bay and BTjunkie. Building forth on this tough stance, lawmakers are now proposing several new measures that will put Internet users at risk of losing their connection after one alleged infringement. Even worse, these copyright complaints can be sent by anyone, not just the copyright holder in question.
In recent years the entertainment industry has been lobbying extensively for tougher anti-piracy legislation. So-called three-strikes policies, where repeat copyright infringers are disconnected from the Internet, are particularly high on their agenda. Read more...