Mobiles @ NCSU

Find: Motorola signs a manufacturing partner for Project Ara's modular smartphones

Looks like motorola is serious. Excellent!

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Project Ara, Motorola's plan to create modular smartphones, is among the most ambitious ideas we've seen, but the company isn't wasting time in executing on its vision. 3D Systems has issued a press release confirming that it's partnering up with Motorola to "create a continuous high-speed 3D printing production platform and fulfillment system" for Ara. The deal announced today spans multiple years, and if 3D Systems is successful in building a manufacturing platform for Project Ara, it will also be creating its own Ara smartphone enclosures and modules "as Motorola’s exclusive fulfillment partner."

3D Systems CEO Avi Reichental said in a statment, “Project Ara was conceived to build a platform that empowers consumers all over the world with customization for a product made by and for the individual." According to Reichental, 3D printing "promotes a level of sustainability, functionality, and mass personalization that turns these kinds of global ambitions into attainable local realities." There's no telling when you'll be able to build your own smartphone with Project Ara, but Motorola is clearly taking steps to make the modular smartphone concept a reality for consumers. We've reached out to the company for more details.

Find: Google is working on a new Android camera API, supports Camera RAW

Adding API access to the camera would be a very good idea. A natural way for google to break out of androids camera doldrums. Potential applications could be very exciting.

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

The Nexus 5 camera was a huge disappointment, especially after comments from high-ranking Googler Vic Gundotra stating that "we are committed to making Nexus phones insanely great cameras. Just you wait and see."

That was nine months ago. We waited and saw, and what showed up on the Nexus 5 wasn't very good. There may be an explanation for this, though. According to commits in the public Android source code, which were first spotted by Josh Brown on Google+, Google is working on a new camera API for Android. Work on the new API started in December 2012, which would make it seem targeted for KitKat, but about a month before the new OS's release, the API was pulled from Android's framework code. The commit that removed the API from the release Android code is here, with the comment saying:

DO NOT MERGE: Hide new camera API. Not yet ready. Bug: 11141002

This commit was pushed on October 11, about a month before the release of KitKat. A month before release was probably "feature freeze" time, where work on new features stops and everyone focuses on fixing bugs in time for release. The camera revamp didn't make it and was replaced with the original camera API.

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The Find: State of Smartphones in 2013: Part I of the new Ars Ultimate Guide

Moto x is especially interesting on republic wireless.

// published on Ars Technica // visit site

More phones than you can shake a phone at.

Andrew Cunningham

It's been just under a year since the last time we examined the state of the smartphone. The intervening months have brought us the expected annual hardware refreshes and software updates, but it's striking just how similar things are at a high level.

Apple and Samsung are still standing at the top of the field, and at the moment there's not a strong third-place contender in sales or in reach. HTC continues to be down on its luck despite the critical darling that is the HTC One. LG is still taking pages from Samsung's playbook, trying lots of odd ideas in an effort to differentiate. Microsoft is still struggling to improve Windows Phone 8's standing with consumers, developers, and hardware partners. All of this is more or less as it was a year ago.

That doesn't mean there aren't interesting things happening at the margins. The Motorola division is still a big money-loser for Google, but the Moto X is a surprisingly good, usable phone that has been very well-reviewed. Alternative operating systems like Ubuntu and Firefox OS are trying new things, even if they're strictly for hardcore early adopters as they currently stand. BlackBerry (née RIM), which at this time last year was pinning all its hopes on the then-forthcoming BlackBerry 10, is circling the drain. Microsoft bought the part of Nokia that makes its Lumia smartphones. Few of these events drastically alter the state of the smartphone today, but they all have interesting implications for 2014 and beyond.

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Find: Indystate - Android and Windows Phone make huge third quarter gains as BlackBerry crumbles

// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

We know BlackBerry is a withering mobile brand, but how fast is it crumbling, and who is gaining from its demise? IDC's latest quarterly numbers yield some answers, showing that Android continues to solidify its dominant lead in the smartphone market, crossing the 80 percent threshold to hit a solid 81 percent of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013, according to the market research firm. Perhaps more impressively, Windows Phone posted a huge jump, increasing smartphone shipments by 156 percent from last year to capture 3.6 percent of all smartphones shipped in the quarter, which IDC rightly calls "amazing."

Find: os market share isn't what's in users hands

Market share counts what carriers buy, not what users buy. Only comscore surveys user ownership.

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// published on Daring Fireball // visit site

Charles Arthur has written the best piece I’ve ever seen on the folly of putting too much stock into “market share” as a metric. Bookmark this one:

But if the market share figure is so useless, why does everyone quote it all the time?

Now we get to the key point. Because it’s easy to measure market share — much easier than measuring installed base, which requires large panels of people who you interview on a regular, repeated basis. (ComScore does this in the US, where it provides a picture of the installed base of smartphone users that is consistent back to the end of 2009. Its figures for the three months to September 2013 show a 51.8% installed base for Android — that’s 76.6m — and 40.6% for iPhone — that’s 60m. It’s not 80% Android; not even close.)

Plus “market share” gives journalists who like nothing better than a metaphorical horse race (look at the preponderance of polls, especially in the US presidential election) something to write about. Trouble is, it doesn’t necessarily give us useful information.

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Find: flexible oled displays on smartphones promise less reflection from environment

When concave, displays needn't be nearly as bright, because they reflect background less.

Oleds will work outdoors. Better enough to compete with lcds?

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// published on Daring Fireball // visit site

Display expert Raymond M. Soneira:

Introducing a slightly curved cylindrically concave screen is a very important and major innovation in Smartphone display technology — very far from being a marketing gimmick as has been widely reported. The Galaxy Round screen curvature is very subtle, just 0.10 inches away from flat, which is similar to the slight curvature in a handheld magnifying mirror. But that small curvature is the key to a series of optical effects that result in significantly reducing interference from reflected ambient light by a large factor. It substantially improves screen readability, image contrast, color accuracy, and overall picture quality, but can also increase the running time on battery because the screen brightness and display power can be lowered due to the reduced light interference from ambient light reflections.

But that’s for a concave display. Bloomberg’s report regarding Apple’s supposedly forthcoming displays describes “larger displays with glass that curves downward at the edges” — downward sounds like convex, not concave. It’s possible that Bloomberg’s source is describing a design where the display is flat but the glass surface above the display tapers at the edge of the device.

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FInd: FCC’s new app will need your help to quantify mobile broadband speed

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Late last week, the FCC published the agenda for its commission meeting next week—the first with newly-appointed chairman Tom Wheeler at the helm. In that agenda, the FCC said it would hear a presentation on the new FCC Speed Test App for Android. The organization plans to make this app public in the hopes that smartphone users will measure their data speeds and send the results back to the FCC to compile and analyze the results.

This isn't the first speed test app that the FCC has been a part of, but it will be the first time the FCC has made efforts to crowdsource information on carrier speeds. (The author remembers using an old app made by a developer called Ookla that had the FCC's logo emblazoned on it back in 2011 when she was employed at PC World. It appears that the “FCC-approval” branding was dropped from that app in the years since.)

The new app will likely function much like the old one, measuring upload speeds, download speeds, and latency for all major carriers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the commission has the cooperation of all four major carriers as well as the wireless trade association CTIA. “Given the paucity of information on mobile broadband availability and prices, this type of data collection seems like the first step toward evaluating whether Americans are getting what they pay for from their carriers in terms of mobile data speeds,” writes the WSJ.

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Find: The FCC is rebooting a three-year-old plan to crowdsource mobile broadband speed tests

Um, yeah. Why'd this take so long?

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

After being sworn in earlier this week, new FCC chair Tom Wheeler is preparing to pick up where his predecessor left off. The Wall Street Journal reports that today, the FCC said it's almost ready to preview an app that will let users test and report their mobile broadband speed. Using this data, the agency will compile its first nationwide study of mobile broadband service across different carriers — much like the broadband tests it's been conducting over the past few years. An open meeting on Thursday, the first with Wheeler in command, will include a presentation on the app, which is set for release on Android in the spring of 2014.

The mobile broadband report has been a long time in the making: the FCC announced its intention to...

Apple's share of mobile market grows to over 40 percent, but Samsung also shows momentum

Apple 40 % in us, android. In devices, apple 40, samsung 25.

// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

According to new figures from comScore, 40.6 percent of US smartphone subscribers are using iPhones. In the three month period that concluded September 30th, Apple's share grew by 0.7 percent from where it stood in June. The company launched two new iPhone models on September 20th, and the ensuing ten days of sales likely helped boost Apple's position some. Still, the jump wasn't enough to put a dent in Android's commanding lead: Google's OS is running on 51.8 percent of smartphones used by consumers in the US. That's actually a slight (0.2 percent) dip compared with Android's standing in the prior three-month period, when it enjoyed an even 52 percent share.

BlackBerry's customer base continues to dwindle; only 3.8 of US smartphone...

Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary

// published on Ars Technica // visit site

Aurich Lawson

Six years ago, in November 2007, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was announced. The original iPhone came out just a few months earlier, capturing people's imaginations and ushering in the modern smartphone era. While Google was an app partner for the original iPhone, it could see what a future of unchecked iPhone competition would be like. Vic Gundotra, recalling Andy Rubin's initial pitch for Android, stated:

He argued that if Google did not act, we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice.

Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, Android was launched as an open source project.

In that era, Google had nothing, so any adoption—any shred of market share—was welcome. Google decided to give Android away for free and use it as a trojan horse for Google services. The thinking went that if Google Search was one day locked out of the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the "moat" around the Google Search "castle"—it would exist to protect Google's online properties in the mobile world.

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