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By Technology Times Staff Reporter Lagos. November 4, 2012: Etisalat Nigeria plans to unveil a Wi-Fi data roaming service that will enable its subscribers who travel abroad to connect their smartphones and tablets to millions of Wi-Fi hotspots following a deal with U.S.-based iPass. Etisalat Group, the Middle East’s largest telecoms operator with over [...]
By Olubunmi Adeniyi Lagos. October 18, 2012: The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have created a unique platform to use mobile technology to combat ill-health and diseases through an initiative tagged m-Health. Using mobile telephone technology, m-Health practices can help to save lives, reduce illness and disability as well [...]
Apple may have seen $13 billion in sales in China last year, but apparently those numbers could have been higher if they’d had a bit more faith. The iPhone sold in huge quantities in the markets served by China Unicom, which since October of 2009 has been the only carrier over there to offer it.
Adding a second major carrier to the mix should expand the market and the sales, as it has here in the US, and China Telecom has stepped up to bat. It’s the third-largest carrier after China Mobile and China Unicom, though the situation over there is rather different owing to fact that much of the industry is state-owned. Regardless, it represents a major opportunity for everyone involved.
Apple has an undeniably huge opportunity in China, but it is still facing some big challenges. As the iPhone maker claimed the top spot as the world’s biggest smartphone vendor in the last quarter (October-December), it actually slipped in the rankings in China and is now in fifth position after ZTE.
But with Apple only kicking off sales of the iPhone 4S in China this January, it’s arguable whether we will see a delayed reaction from the launch of the new device, or whether longer term this is simply a market that will ultimately gravitate to local brands and cheaper devices in the longer term.
Whenever you see those photos and stories of the crazy crowds at Apple stores in China, they seem to always be about the launch of a new iPhone. But if Apple has its way, soon those masses will be clamoring for something else as well: Mac computers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, speaking earlier this week at the Goldman Sachs conference, noted that China accounted for $13 billion in sales last year for his company, and in that time, sales of Mac computers in China went up by 100 percent.
We’ve seen handset makers like HTC, LG and Nokia all warning of declines in smartphone sales. But if there is a slowdown affecting some, it’s not because people are not buying smartphones; it’s because they’re all buying iPhones.
Figures out from Gartner today say that smartphone sales totalled 149 million units in Q4 2011 — 47.3 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, led by none other than Apple’s iPhone, which its analysts noted “saved” the smartphone market after two quarters of declining sales.
When Siri was announced strictly for the iPhone 4S, the mod community likely took that as a challenge. Before long, the service had been hacked and shortly thereafter ported to a number of potentially compatible devices.
The problem, of course, is that Apple gets to decide what devices are compatible, not the users. So they’ve taken steps to undo the work that hackers and jailbreakers have done to bring Siri to older iOS devices. Today brings a new volley, though it’s only a matter of time before it too is circumvented.
Call it a sort of a bear hug: Sprint, the also-ranniest of the also-rans in the carrier world, lost money selling phones that, on the aggregate gained them subscribers. It’s also Catch-22, a blindside, and a mess.
According to Sprint, the company reported a net loss last quarter while still selling 1.8 million iPhones and increasing their subscriber base by 1.6 million. How? The costs associated with provisioning and supporting these new phones drove operating losses to $438 million, up from $139 million in Q4 last year.
If you don’t know a resistor from a Mister Mister, this is the app for you. Built by Adafruit, creators of DIY Arduino gear, Circuit Playground is a $2.99 app designed to help you identify and understand various electronic components. For example, the app includes a resistor identification system based on the colored bands painted on the casing as well as a field guide to many electrical components.
There has been much debate about what the post-PC era is, when it will arrive, or whether it’s already here. But key pieces of new data, emerging last week, are making the case that we crossed the imaginary line from the “PC” era to the “post-PC” era at the end of 2011. According to analysts at Canalys, two major computing milestones were achieved at the end of this year: smartphone shipments outpaced PCs for the first time ever, and Apple became the world’s largest PC maker, if you count iPads as PCs (as well you should).
Combined, what these numbers tell us is that the post-PC era is happening now. Right now. And maybe we need to think about how we define “PC.”
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