Mobiles @ NCSU

As expected, Apple has taken the wraps off of its latest flagship smartphone at its Cupertino media event today. The new iPhone 5S is an upgrade in the vein of the previous iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S—it is outwardly similar to last year's iPhone 5, but it includes a few key upgrades to keep the design going for another year.

The 5S still has a four-inch 1136×640 display and a Lightning connector, and it retains the iPhone 5's taller and slimmer profile relative to older models like the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. However, it includes a new 64-bit "desktop-class" system-on-a-chip (SoC) dubbed the A7 that boosts CPU and GPU performance over the A6 in the iPhone 5.

The chip has twice the general-purpose and floating point registers of its predecessor and is up to twice as fast at performing CPU tasks. The phone supports OpenGL ES 3.0, and Apple claims that the graphics performance in the 5S is 56 times better than in the original iPhone released six years ago.

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Trim, black-clad Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has become one of the mobile mad world’s biggest taste makers in a hurry. Maybe because Xiaomi — which means “little rice” in Mandarin — offers a case study in the power of speed. The company focuses on just a few cutting-edge models at a time. And it sells these handsets fast. The last model Lei introduced sold 100,000 units in 90 seconds.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun and NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

The result: the company is getting a lot of attention in a hurry. Xiaomi’s last handset quickly became the top selling smartphone in China, and thousands of press and enthusiasts jostled for the chance to hear Lei unveil Xiaomi’s latest model, the Mi3, in Beijing Thursday.

It’s a phone NVIDIA played a big role helping Xiaomi engineer, and NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was invited on stage to help introduce it, leading the crowd of more than 3,000 through cheers of “wei wu,” or “powerful.”

More than 3,000 ‘MiFans’ as they are known, crammed into a hall with room built for 2,100, spilling into the aisles and clambering over one another at the back of the room for a better look. More than 450 reporters from Chinese and international outlets were there too. No one wanted to miss this story.

Jen Hsun signs autographs for Xiaomi’s fans.

Founded just three years ago, the Beijing-based private company is now estimated to be worth $10 billion. Xiaomi has already pushed into Taiwan and Hong Kong. Fans are buzzing about the prospects for more, and Lei has built a team that can go there, picking up top technology talent from around the globe.

The Mi3 combines a mainstream price — less than US $327.00 for an unlocked phone — with premium specs and features. Powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 processor, the Mi3 includes a 5-inch 1080p IPS LCD display, 2 GB of RAM, up to 64 GB of storage, and a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera in a slick metal case featuring an aluminum-magnesium alloy metal inner frame.

Xiaomi’s new flagship is the product of a year-long collaboration between NVIDIA and Xiaomi’s growing team of engineers. The Mi3 takes full advantage of Tegra 4′s quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and fifth battery saver core, 72 GeForce GPU cores and the unique experience all that raw power unlocks.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun talks up Tegra 4.

That means best-in-class gaming, fast web browsing, full HD video playback with 4k video support, and crisp photos in a broad range of lighting conditions.

The result: a smartphone that stunned the press with its power and performance, and made an instant impression on Xiaomi’s legions of fans.

Crowded house: thousands of fans gathered to see Xiaomi launch its latest super phone.

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Now that Samsung has finally announced the Galaxy Gear, you've probably made up your mind on whether it's beautiful or hideous. What you probably don't have a great grasp of is what apps will be available on the smartphone, and how they'll work. We had a brief preview of Pocket for Galaxy Gear yesterday; it offers a complimentary experience to the Android app, effectively functioning as a remote control for the phone version. You can ask your phone to read an article aloud to you, favorite articles, or archive them, and that's about it. Other Gear apps are a little more ambitious.

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We’re at Qualcomm’s Uplinq 2013 conference where Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs has announced Qualcomm Toq, a smartwatch with a Mirasol color screen that can still be viewed outdoors in bright sunlight with touch capabilities, and wireless charging capabilities through WiPower LE.

The Toq shows notifications and looks like it has a few applications of its own, can control music playback and play locally to wireless headsets, and looks like it can do things like screening calls and show a variety of different watchfaces. Qualcomm is trying to leverage its mobile silicon leadership, Mirasol display, and enable partners to deliver better wearable products. The Mirasol display stays on all the time, never turns off, but still lets the Toq last multiple days between charges.

Later this month Qualcomm will make a limited number of Toqs available and continue to release more details about availability. There still are a lot of unknowns but we're hopefully going to find a lot more about Toq shortly. 

One of the most enticing "what-ifs" of recent years has come true: Microsoft has purchased Nokia's Devices and Services unit, bringing the Lumia lineup under the Redmond roof. The move unites Windows Phone 8 with its biggest hardware supporter, giving the company the integrated mobile offering it's been looking for with Surface and other devices. When the deal closes in the first quarter of 2014, Microsoft will pay 3.79 billion Euros for Nokia's business, plus another 1.65 billion Euros for its portfolio of patents. (The 5.44-billion Euro total is considerably less than Microsoft paid for Skype in 2011.) 32,000 people are expected to transfer from Nokia to Microsoft, including 18,300 that are "directly involved in manufacturing."

The...

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Net Market Share

In July, Windows 8 passed Windows Vista in market share. In August, it passed every single version of Apple's OS X, combined. Internet Explorer 10 grew sharply, too, with almost one in five Internet users now on the latest version of Microsoft's browser.

Net Market Share

Windows 8 made substantial gains in August, picking up 2.01 points of share. This is 37 percent growth on July's figure. Windows XP also fell substantially, losing 3.53 points. With luck, this might mean that Windows XP is finally on the way out. It has less than a year until it stops receiving free security patches from Microsoft; once this happens, it will essentially be in a state of permanent zero day exploits. Even this level of decline isn't enough to see the operating system eradicated in time for its end of life. That's good news for spammers, who'll have plenty of zombie machines to recruit into botnets, but bad news for everyone else.

Net Market Share

Net Market Share

Among desktop browsers, Internet Explorer was up 0.99 points, Firefox was up 0.59 points, and Safari was up 0.17 points. Chrome, however, was down significantly, losing 1.76 points. This means that yet again Chrome has closed in on Firefox, almost passing it, only to fall back.

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