Monday, April 30, 2018

T=Mobile/Sprint Merger

The years-long wireless industry twist on the will-they-
won't-they romantic comedy is finally reaching its climax.
T-Mobile and Sprint finally -- finally! -- agreed to get

The $26 billion deal would combine the nation's third
and fourth largest wireless carriers, creating a larger
player to better compete against industry leaders
Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Under the deal, T-Mobile
parent Deutsche Telekom will assume control of the
two businesses, with Sprint parent SoftBank taking
seats on the board of the new company, to be called
simply T-Mobile.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere and his management
team would take over day-to-day control of the
combined business. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure
will be a director of the new board. The deal is
expected to close by the first half of 2019.

The merger marks the culmination of years of
flirting between T-Mobile and Sprint, which nearly
agreed to a merger late last year before talks fell
apart in November. As carriers have upped their
game to win you over, tossing in everything from
unlimited data plans to free Netflix and even a free
year of service, the intense environment has the
two carriers joining forces -- and resources -- to
better compete.

Both companies have made their impact felt on
the industry over the last few years. T-Mobile
eliminated contracts and phone subsidies and
last year led the push to bring unlimited plans
back to the industry in a bigger way. Sprint
introduced the concept of a phone-leasing plan
and in 2017 began offering a year of its service
for free.

No company in the wireless industry has been
as effective at turning itself around as T-Mobile,
which under firebrand Legere has routinely
outstripped the rest of the players in subscriber

growth.  It's no surprise he's sticking around.

Friday, April 27, 2018

Who Wants a Stylus?

"Who wants a stylus?" Steve Jobs famously asked when
he unveiled the original iPhone in 2007, implying that the
answer was "no one." Now, 11 years later, analysts believe
that a new iPhone may work with a stylus anyway.

The prediction comes from analysts at investment firm
Rosenblatt Securities (via AppleInsider), who believe that
a premium 2018 6.5-inch OLED iPhone (referred to as the
iPhone X Plus) will support an "iPen" device.

iPhone support for a pen would firmly veer into Samsung
territory, where Apple'sbiggest rival pioneered the use of
a digital stylus in the Galaxy Note series. Note phones,
like the Galaxy Note 8, have included a stylus (called the
S Pen) ever since.

Apple's support for a digital pen could bolster Samsung's
bragging rights over innovation, and also popularize the
digital stylus at the time we expect  to see Samsung's
next stylus-wielding phone, presumed to be the Galaxy
Note 9.

The "iPen" would not be included in the box with the
iPhone X Plus, according to analysts. If true, that would
give Samsung's Galaxy Note phones an advantage.
Those phones have a hollowed-out holster to store the

included stylus.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Samsung VR

Production company Sibling Rivalry has joined forces
with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and
design and director of research and development at the
Museum of Modern Art, to create an immersive virtual
reality (VR) experience for the Samsung VR video service.

Dubbed ‘&Design’, the episodic virtual reality experience
is rooted in themes of death, love, play and the idea of self,
along with featuring eye-popping design work, and it made
its debut during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. It was
originally conceived by Antonelli, who brought it to Sibling
Rivalry partner and creative director Mikon van Gastel.

“Design is one of the highest and most complex
expressions of human ingenuity,” Antonelli explained in
a release. “Design is about life. It tells us who we are,
where we have been, and where we are going. With
&Design, we are giving viewers a deep experience of
what makes up this creative field, and we are describing
a fascinating and diverse universe, of creators, thinkers,
and makers.”

The VR experience was made possible by a grant from
Samsung VR Video’s Pilot Season, a new initiative
aimed at infusing exclusive, original, episodic VR content
into Samsung VR Video service, driving growth within the

independent VR filmmaker community.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Women and Smartphones

As innovation in mobile changes how society operates,
women are using their phones to assist them in practically
every aspect of their lives, from consuming news to
budgeting to waking up in the morning. Almost half of
women ages 18 to 34 check their phones as soon as they
wake up, and another 36 percent check them within five
minutes. Screens have become so ingrained that over 60
percent of women own two or more mobile devices and
use them on a daily basis.

“Our research shows the incredible degree to which
smartphones are a millennial woman’s constant companion,
a gateway to constantly connecting with her passion points
and increasingly becoming her mobile wallet,” said Rob
McLoughlin, vp, PopSugar Insights. “Marketers need to
lean into the disruption these devices wield and deliver
content and commerce offerings that seamlessly fit into

her daily routine.”


Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Amazon Trunk Delivery

Last year, Amazon asked for permission to unlock your
front door so it could leave packages inside your home,
and a certain number of extremely trusting Amazon Prime
subscribers (Amazon won’t say how many) said okay.
Now, the tech giant wants to do the same thing with your
Car.

Amazon announced today a new service that gives its
couriers access to a person’s vehicle for the purpose
of leaving package deliveries inside. But rather than
use smart locks and a cloud-connected camera to gain
entry, Amazon wants to use the connected technologies
embedded in many modern vehicles today. The company
is launching this new service in partnership with two major
automakers — General Motors and Volvo — and will be
rolling out in 37 cities in the US starting today.

“We were really happy with the response to in-home
delivery,” Peter Larsen, vice president of delivery
technology at Amazon, told The Verge. “What we wanted
to do — and it was part of the plan all along — is how we
take that beyond the home.”

Amazon has been beta testing the new service in California
and Washington state for the past six months. In a video by
Amazon, a woman said she likes getting diapers delivered
to her car because it meant her toddlers could nap without
being disturbed by the doorbell. Another woman used it to
have a few birthday presents delivered to the trunk of her car

so as not to tip off her daughter.

Monday, April 23, 2018

No Apple OS Merger

In an interview published in The Sydney Morning Herald
today, Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested that Apple is not
working toward eventually running the same operating
system on Macs and mobile devices like the iPhone and
iPad, counter to widespread speculation.

The interview took place at the education-themed event
in Chicago at which Apple unveiled the last iPad. Here's
the relevant quote from Cook:

“We don't believe in sort of watering down one for the other.
Both [the Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons
that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them
to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two…
you begin to make trade-offs and compromises.

So maybe the company would be more efficient at the end of
the day. But that's not what it's about. You know it's about giving
people things that they can then use to help them change the
world or express their passion or express their creativity. So
this merger thing that some folks are fixated on, I don't think
that's what users want.”

Earlier this year, Bloomberg ran a report saying that Apple will
soon unveil tools for developers that will allow deploying an app
for both macOS and iOS machines. Apps that target both
platforms would be usable with either a touchscreen or a mouse/
trackpad, depending on which device launches them. While
some outlets are saying Cook's statement debunks that rumor,
that's not necessarily the case; apps that support macOS/iOS

interoperability don't require a unified operating system.

Friday, April 20, 2018

MSFT Translator App

Chances are you mostly need a translator app on your
phone while you are traveling. But that’s also when you
are most likely to not have any connectivity. While most
translation apps still work when they are offline, they can’t
use the sophisticated — and computationally intense —
machine learning algorithms in the cloud that typically
power them. Until now, that was also the case for the
iOS, but starting today, the app will actually run a slightly
modified neural translation when offline (though iOS users
may still have to wait a few days, as the update still has
to be approved by Apple).

What’s interesting about this is that Microsoft  is able to
do this on virtually any modern phone and that there is
no need for a custom AI chip in them.

Microsoft’s Arul Menezes tells me that these new
translation packs are “dramatically better” and provide
far more human-like translation than the old ones, which
relied on an older approach to machine translations that
has now been far surpassed by machine learning-based
systems. The updated language packs (which only take
up about half the space of the old ones) are now available
for Arabic, Chinese-Simplified, French, German, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and

Thai, with others to follow.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

ZTE Phones OS Problems

ZTE Corp executives are investigating software options
for the company’s smartphones after a US technology
ban threatened to cut off the operating system at the heart
of its devices, a source said.

The Android operating system, designed by Google, is
the core of ZTE smartphones, powering their apps and
other services.  

The US Commerce Department on Monday banned
American firms from selling parts and software to ZTE
for seven years. The move was sparked by ZTE’s
violation of an agreement that was reached after it was
caught illegally shipping US goods to Iran.

The move threatens to further complicate relations
between the United States and China. The two countries
have already proposed tens of billions of dollars in tariffs
in recent weeks, stoking fears of a full-blown trade war
that could hurt global supply chains as well as business
investment plans.

ZTE lawyers have been meeting with Google officials
about the issue, according to the source with knowledge
of the matter, who asked not to be identified because

the talks were private.