AllThingsD » Android

You Spend a Lot of Time With Your Mobile Device at Home -- Even More if It's an iPad

Peter Kafka — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:48:40 +0000

We’ve touched on this before, but it’s worth repeating: Your phones and tablets are amazing multimedia devices. But just because they’re mobile doesn’t mean you’re using them on the go.

Here’s the latest reminder, via the broadband usage report Sandvine put out earlier this month. The Internet services company said that mobile devices now account for 20 percent of traffic on home broadband networks. That’s up from 9 percent a year ago.

If you own an iPhone or an Android tablet or whatever, you know exactly why this is: You spend a lot of time with these things on the couch or at the kitchen table or wherever. (Remember how Steve Jobs demoed the iPad, after all — on that comfy leather chair.)

And a lot of that time you are watching or listening to something — Sandvine says that 25 percent of all audio and video data sent to mobile devices now happens at home.

Here’s Sandvine’s breakdown of entertainment traffic to mobile devices at home. Missing from the chart are two interesting Apple factoids: Sandvine says that the iPad accounts for more home traffic than any other device, at more than 10 percent; and it says that if you added up all of Apple’s devices (iPads, iPhones, Macs, etc.), the company ends up with more than 45 percent of home broadband usage.

Caterpillar Aims to Make Splash With Rugged, Waterproof Android Phone

Ina Fried — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:00:45 +0000

Caterpillar is best known for making heavy equipment, but the machinery brand thinks it can add something to the phone business.

Cat has partnered with Bullitt Mobile, a British electronics firm that builds products using well-known brands to develop a rugged, waterproof Android phone.

The easiest way to make phones rugged is to just wrap them in a ton of rubber. But that also makes them big and bulky — something Floyd said his group was looking to avoid.

“It’s got to be a great phone — something that everybody would feel comfortable carrying,” said Dave Floyd, director of technology for Bullitt.

The result of their work is the Cat B15, a phone that is debuting at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas and will sell for $349 without subsidies. The device packs a 4-inch screen, a dual-core MediaTek processor and the Jelly Bean version of Android into a device capable of surviving a 6 foot drop onto concrete and withstanding up to 30 minutes in 3 feet of water.

Its screen is also designed to work with a wet finger — something that trips up most smartphones. And all that in a phone that weighs just under six ounces.

Bullitt isn’t talking carriers yet, but it’s a GSM phone with support for HSPA+ networks, so either AT&T or T-Mobile USA would be a good fit.

Start Spreading the News: Yahoo Gets New Times Square Office, Offers Free Terabyte on Flickr and Updates Design to Look Like 2013

Kara Swisher — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:10:46 +0000

At a media event in New York today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced a new office in Times Square for the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

“From one Mayor to another,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Mayer (get it?) about locating in Manhattan’s iconic location, which will house 500 Yahoo employees.

But not Tumblr, which will remain blissfully downtown, even after its $1.1 billion all-cash acquisition by Yahoo announced today.

“We’re very happy that Tumblr is a home-grown company,” said Bloomberg,

Irony alert: Yahoo’s new digs in the Big Apple is actually the old HQ of the New York Times.

“Twenty years ago there were a lot of Yahoos in New York,” said the Bloomberg, channeling Jackie Mason and then touting the local tech industry and reeling off the stats.

Boiled down: Geeks rule.

Mayer also talked briefly about the acquisition of Tumblr and repeated the trying-really-hard-to-be-wacky, “we’re going to try not to screw it up” promise.

Mayer then introduced another promise — a commitment to fix Yahoo’s last major acquisition screw-up, Flickr.

Yahoo exec Adam Cahan, who is in charge of the photo-sharing service and who uses the term “awesome” quite a lot, came on next to show the changes.

He introduced a new design, which looks kinda like Instagram and kinda like Flipboard and kinda like Apple and kinda like Facebook’s homepage. It does bring Yahoo up to speed with others in the key photo-sharing space, which is good.

(Sorry, I cannot be more detailed, since I could only see it via Internet, because AllThingsD.com was not invited to the event by Yahoo.)

From what I can tell, it’s very image-centric with big photos and little text.

Cahan also introed a new Google Android mobile version and said that Flickr will offer a terabyte of space for free to users, which is about 537,731 photos.

Then he talked about a terabyte a lot, claiming that “no other Internet company has offered you a terabyte” of space. (Well, I would imagine Google and Facebook will now do so in a New York minute.)

Some very nice man with a German accent demoed it. (Again, I am not there and did not see a name going by on screen, and I can’t ask Yahoo PR his name.)

It’s purty, for sure, and nice to be able to upload photos in their full fidelity without worrying about space constraints.

Mayer called it “spectacular,” “bigger” and, of course, “awesome.”

It is certainly much more striking than how the antiquated Flickr homepage used to look like — which was circa 1969. But, like I said, kinda like what others have already done, although these updates are certainly a welcome change for Flickr.

Mayer then ran a very cute video for the changes, which, well, was kinda like an Apple video.

“Flickr was awesome once and then it languished,” said Mayer, declaring victory already. “And now it’s awesome again.”

In a Q&A after, Mayer, Cahan and the nice German guy answered questions about integration of Tumblr and Flickr (not yet!); how it was like or not like Instagram (no cropping apparently — which is exactly what is fantastic about Instagram); the terabyte (it’s awesome!); and more Tumblr deets (you know them already); monetization; and a bizarre one about redundancy so you don’t lose photos.

Mayer also said that Yahoo had bought 11 billboards in Times Square to show off Flickr and noted there was a party after for the media. (Except the unchosen, so I am enjoying a nice glass of Cabernet all by my lonesome. Frankly, it’s awesome!)

(Photo credit: Kevin Tachman for Times Square Alliance.)

Co-Founder Yat Siu on Animoca's Big Menu of "Fast Food" Mobile Games

Eric Johnson — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:19:20 +0000

If you’ve never heard of Animoca, it’s probably because — like nearly every company in the mobile games industry — the Hong Kong-based studio has never had a huge hit on the scale of Temple Run or Candy Crush Saga.

And Animoca couldn’t be happier about that.

Co-founder Yat Siu calls them “fast food apps.” His 150-person company, a conglomerate of 12 smaller studios, has developed and published more than 350 apps, he said, currently at the rate of about four every week. Its goal is to one day crank out a new app every day as it expands its reach further into Asia and beyond.

Siu, who is also the CEO of Animoca’s parent company, Outblaze Ventures, said as much in a recent interview with AllThingsD. But he also had a lot more to say about the advantages of working outside of Silicon Valley, the maturation of Google’s Android ecosystem and why quantity is sometimes better than quality.

AllThingsD: What’s the difference between being based in Hong Kong and being based in Silicon Valley?

Yat Siu: In terms of our [Android] ecosystem, it is the dominant marketplace, whereas in the Valley, there’s a lot of focus on Apple. We don’t have that much venture capital available to us, so we have to focus on profitability and the bottom line very, very quickly. Our games aren’t all profitable, but our business is. And we’re just a small island city, so we do not have a domestic market. It’s go global or die.

How do your games fare in different regions?

When we first started [in 2011], the U.S. was our biggest market, but just because it had a larger ecosystem. That’s changing today. North America as a continent is now in second place to Asia because Japan and Korea are driving a lot of the revenues. … The people who are buying iPhones or Android phones in the U.S. today are not the first movers, whereas in Asia, a lot of the marketplace still has way under 50 percent smartphone penetration rates. In Japan, at the start of this year, it was under 30 percent.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for you? Putting most of your eggs in that basket means you’re dealing with phones that range from the very low end to the very high end, right?

Two years ago, we had a testing rack of 600 devices. Now, Samsung is outselling basically everyone else, except in China and Japan. The second thing that’s different now is that “low end” is no longer really “low end.” You used to have really poor devices with poor resolution and processing power. Even the so-called “cheap” devices that are sold in China today are quad-core or dual-core devices; they just cost $100, is all. And they’re all standardizing around Jelly Bean (the most recent version of the Android OS). The whole Android philosophy was, “Here, take the operating system. Do what you want. Good luck!” We had weird memory issues because people would be coding stuff on top. Now, with Jelly Bean, most of the stuff that’s going on in the operating system is going on in the application side.

Pretty Pet Salon is one of the more popular games Animoca has published, and started a “Pretty Pet” franchise.

Tell me about your games and how they perform. How do you evaluate success?

We look at every product as a gateway to another product. The key driver is popularity. Monetization will come, we think, once people are in there, but the ability to cross-promote to other games becomes important. We want to make sure that the user always has at least a few of our games to play, because we don’t believe that there is such a thing as a person who can play a game for years and years and years. It’s “fast-food apps.” People just want to consume quickly, move quickly and go on to the next thing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to it, but they’re not prepared to invest console-style, sitting down and playing for four hours.

And if you spent $60 on a game, you’re probably going to invest a lot more time than if you spent nothing or spent 99 cents.

That’s true, too, definitely. But also, with mobile, whether it’s in trains or one-handed game time, sometimes it’s just when you’re lying in bed, the behavior that we’re seeing now is that a person is playing a game, and then after five minutes, he wants to move on to another game. He’s not necessarily playing the same game for an hour. He’s like, “I feel like something else.” It’s no different than people switching TV channels every once in a while, except they’re switching games.

So it’s not as much of a “hits-driven” business for you as it might be for others?

It’s all relative. What is a hit? Because it’s a global audience, a niche segment is pretty large. And yet, if you have a five-million-user niche, is that a hit? It’s probably a hit for an indie studio, but it’s not a hit for us because of the scale we operate in. Typically, we call anything a hit if it has over 15 million downloads, but as a franchise, as a series. We might have one app, and then if it does well and has a few million downloads and reasonable revenues, then we put sequels and additions on top of it. Out of the series, we may wind up having something like 20 or 25 apps.

For those games that aren’t sequels to existing games, how do your studios come up with new things to publish?

We have studios that are as small as six people. The producer is empowered to have his own budget and his own creative vision. There’s a weekly meeting where all the producers come together and talk about what they’re doing, and then go off and do their own thing. The advantage for the business is, if you start off with a studio of six people and it bombs, who cares? It’s not great for them, but the business can afford to do it. If they do well, they have a platform.

The independence of our studio is also attractive to our staff. They have the chance to be a startup without the startup risk. They don’t have to worry about payroll or finance, they can focus on the product and build their own team. The additional unintended advantage is that, in Hong Kong, we’re unique. So, if you want to do games and you want to publish your games, then, frankly, there’s nowhere else to go. People come to us because the other option is banking or finance — which is a good career, just not if you don’t like it. If we were in the Valley, we might end up getting slaughtered by the amount of recruitment and loss of staff. Who knows?

But it’s worth noting that you do also maintain an office here in San Francisco for non-game development roles like partnerships and PR.

In the past, the meccas of the global gaming space used to be different. They used to be Sony, Nintendo and, at one point, Sega. But it was never centered around Silicon Valley. That changed with the smartphone. Now the new mecca is the Bay Area, because Google Play is here and Apple is here. We have an office here because we have to pay homage to the new temples. Even though we’re not in the Valley, it’s absolutely required for us to go in. Every other app company that’s international that wants to succeed must do the same.

Almost all of your revenue, about 95 percent, comes from in-app purchases. Are you looking at other business models?

Advertising will come, but it is not dominant yet. Primarily, the buyers for that now are other app companies, and we’ve got our own network. If we focus more on our cross-promotion, we get more out of that than necessarily opening up inventory to everyone else. Right now, ads are generally low-quality, and they’re also spammy, so it’s a bad user experience. But that will change. The experience is there already — think about how much time you’re spending on mobile versus PC — but [ads] have to deliver value to the user. Facebook has the right idea. People who like casual games, you should really only show them other casual games. Today, the targeting doesn’t exist.

What does your conversion rate of non-paying to paying players look like? The typical curve has a lot of people at the bottom paying nothing or almost nothing, then a long tail with a bump at the end, composed of a small number of players who pay a lot.

That is the hardcore type of model, where basically you have a very low conversion rate, something like 2 percent, and a very high consumable model where people can spend thousands of dollars. That’s not our model. If you look at games like Pretty Pet Salon, you’d be hard pressed to spend more than 20 bucks, just because of the game play. We are expecting to have more volume of titles with a larger frequency of players coming in from outside. So, for instance, Pretty Pet Salon has an 8 percent conversion rate. Now, when we start working with Forgame (Animoca recently accepted a “strategic minority investment” from the Chinese hard-core game maker), that is different. We will listen to their suggestions, and it does appear that that will be the strategy, because people are prepared to spend that kind of money. It’ll be a learning experience for us.

Pentagon Clears iPhone and iPad for Use on Secure Networks

John Paczkowski — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:08:01 +0000

The U.S. Department of Defense has officially approved Apple’s iPhones and iPads for use on its networks, as expected.

In announcement issued Friday morning, the agency said it has granted iOS devices running iOS 6 FIPS 140-2 certification and STIG approval, granting them the same security clearances it issued to BlackBerry and Samsung last week. A crucial endorsement, and one that should open the door to lucrative contracts from customers in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

Certainly, Apple views it that way and used DOD’s announcement to plug the inroads its iOS devices have been making in enterprise lately.

“With iPhone and iPad being tested or deployed in almost every Fortune 500 company, Apple continues to scale across enterprise with nearly 30,000 companies globally developing and distributing iOS apps for corporate use by their employees,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told AllThingsD. “The FIPS 140-2 certification and STIG approval demonstrate our ongoing commitment to deliver a secure platform to our enterprise and government customers around the world who deploy iOS devices on their networks.”

Google Demos Linux Running on Hacked Glass

Ina Fried — Thu, 16 May 2013 22:07:58 +0000

Although Google is offering a limited set of developer tools for Glass — and more are on the way — the company doesn’t want to stop hackers from tinkering even further.

Indeed, during a developer conference session on Thursday, Google showed a variety of ways to gain deeper access to Glass. Some, such as running basic Android apps and even connecting a Bluetooth keyboard, can be done.

Google showed other hacks, such as running a version of Ubuntu Linux. Those actions, though, require deeper “root” access to the device. Google showed how developers can get such access, but cautions that doing so voids the warranty and could be irreversible.

That said, Google plans to make its factory image available so in most cases rooted Glass devices should be able to be returned to their original settings.

The session ended with a video showing a pair of the pricey specs being blended to a powdery mess, to heartfelt groans from the packed audience, many of whom forked over $1,500 to be among the first to buy the developer edition of Glass.

Showing a different level of interest in Glass, several members of Congress sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page on Thursday asking questions about privacy issues raised by the high-tech specs.

Update: At a follow-up Fireside Chat session with developers, Google reiterated that a software development kit for Glass is coming, but Google’s Charles Mendis said not to expect it soon.

Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer for Glass, showed off one of the bulky early prototype designs for Glass as well as a current prototype that combines Glass with prescription glasses.

Prescription Google Glass prototype

Olsson, who quips that she has been working on Glass since it was a phone attached to a scuba mask, said that the development of Glass was “so ambitious and very messy.”

Getting the device light enough has been a key, Olsson said.

“If it is not light you are not going to want to wear it for more than 10 minutes,” Olsson said. “We care about every gram.”

Asked what kind of apps the Glass team would like to see, Olsson said she wanted a karaoke app, while Mendis said he would like to see some fitness apps.

Google Glass product director Steve Lee said Glass is designed around brief glances or “micro-interactions,” rather than watching a movie or reading an entire book.

“That would be painful,” Lee said. “We don’t want to create zombies staring into the screen for long periods of time.

Support for Facebook, Twitter and Video Streaming Coming to Google Glass, With New Tools on the Way

Ina Fried — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:24:29 +0000

Facebook and Twitter are among a new array of partners that announced on Thursday that they have built or are building apps for Glass, Google’s high-tech eyewear.

Facebook is building an app that allows photos taken on the glasses to be shared directly to the social network. Twitter is doing the same, as well as allowing access to send and receive tweets.

“In addition to sharing photos, you can also keep up with the people you follow on Twitter through notifications — for mentions, DMs and Tweets from users for whom you’ve turned on notifications,” Twitter said in a blog post. “As always, you can reply to, retweet or favorite these Tweets.”

Other partners include Evernote, CNN and Tumblr.

Google also said on Thursday that it is preparing a broader set of tools for developers to write software for Glass.

So far, Google has released a relatively limited programming interface, known as the Mirror API. During a technical session on Thursday, though, Google said it is working on a broader Glass Development Kit.

“We’re actively building it,” said developer advocate Timothy Jordan, speaking to a crowd of developers that filled the main room and an overflow room, and even spilled into beanbag chairs in an impromptu viewing area in the Moscone West lobby.

The developer kit is essentially similar to developing for Android, Jordan said, with some specifics tailored to the Glass hardware.

As for whether there is going to be an app store for Glass, Jordan noted that things are still in the early developer preview phase, but said, “We’re definitely going to have something.”

Google also announced Thursday that it will start supporting video streaming to Glass. Previously, Google had only talked about support for short video clips to be shown on the eyewear.

Meet the Dudes Behind Dots, the iPhone Game of the Moment

Lauren Goode — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:16:48 +0000

By now you may have heard about Dots, the free mobile game that is singlehandedly responsible for at least a 27 percent decline in U.S. workplace productivity over the past two weeks, based on my very unscientific research.

If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the gist: You connect and swipe away rows of matching-colored dots to earn as many points as you can in 60 seconds. If you’re able to draw a square of dots of the same color, it’s like getting a raise on your birthday. You share high scores with friends — and by friends, I mean the Internet. And then you do it all over again. Immediately.

The iOS-only app, which was created by New York City-based Betaworks, has been downloaded more than two million times since it hit the App Store on May 1. Yesterday, I had the chance to catch up with the game’s creators, Patrick Moberg and Paul Murphy, to ask them about the inspiration behind Dots, who is playing the game — including a legion of “Dot-moms” — and what tips they can offer. Below are excerpts from our conversation:

Where did the idea for Dots come from?

Moberg: A lot of the early thinking was just looking at what was already out there, what was highly illustrated or cartoonish, and deciding we wanted to do something new, something that wasn’t out there.

But why dots? Why not coins, or squares, or birds flying through the air?

Moberg: Well, some of my inspiration for the design of the game actually came from the fine art world. I copied and pasted a bunch of fine art images from Google into my design documents and thought, if an app could be like fine art, maybe this would be it. But Dots was also inspired by board games. Old-school board games are fun and playful but have such — I guess the word would be neutral — such neutral personalities that anyone can approach them and play them.

You just crossed two million downloads on Tuesday. What are your engagement numbers like?

Murphy: It’s growing pretty well on its own, with very little marketing on our side. We’ve tracked that 100 million games have been played, so that means 100 million minutes, which is a lot of time. It probably doesn’t help the world with productivity. Every time somebody opens the app, they spend almost five minutes in there, and then tend to come back day after day.

At AllThingsD, some of us have this theory that Dots is a “mom” game. On Mother’s Day, I showed the game to my mom, who isn’t really into new tech or mobile games, and she couldn’t stop playing it. So I guess the question is, what does your audience look like so far?

Moberg: Yeah, my mom went to her Pilates class and said her friends kept telling her how addictive the game was. But she doesn’t have an iPhone. So now she’s thinking of buying an iPhone, so she can play Dots.

Murphy: But it’s not just moms. We started doing research on social networks and Instagram, and it seems a lot of young people are playing it, too. And we don’t have hard data, but we get a little bit of insight through the people that connect through Facebook. We know that it resonates heavily with women, but there are also a lot of men playing, too. So it’s really pretty broad right now.

What’s coming first, iPad optimization or Android?

Murphy: iPad. It’s not that we don’t love Android, but we got a lot of feedback right away from people that want iPad, and our instinct is to listen to the users. On Android it’s a little bit trickier because of the different strategies. One is, just make your app for Android, and the other is, build from the ground up, take advantage of all the features of Android, and we want to do the latter.

When will we see the iPad app?

Murphy: We’re aiming to do something by the end of the month.

You’ve also said that you want to make the app color-blind-friendly. What does that involve?

Moberg: Yeah, that’s something that will be in the next version, but we want to get it right. We want to make it so users can enable a color-blind mode within the existing app. It involves modifying the hue saturation, which is something we’re going to have to test with a lot of people first. It’s a fine line between useable and beautiful.

What are your highest Dots scores?

Murphy: I’m at 380, which is sort of lame. Patrick is — hold on, let me check — 472. He’s done a bit better, but he has access to the leaderboard, so maybe he’s made tweaks to his score.

Moberg: I feel like I’m not that successful at it. I have friends who score much better than I have. It’s a tricky thing. One of my friends compared it to spotting a pitch in baseball. When you see the initial board, you can see whether it’s going to be flush with squares, or even one step away from the initial square. Some people are just good at that.

What is the best tip you can give Dots players? (Readers: Also see this helpful guidebook, courtesy of Quartz.)

Moberg: Other than squares? Finding environments that you’re most comfortable playing in. I find that if I play on the subway when I’m trying to de-stress, it’s not the best. I’m just sort of playing to pass time. I play my best games when I’m home playing Dots with my girlfriend.

Murphy: I’m a big fan of the expanders, so whenever I accrue a lot of points I usually use them to buy a pack of expanders. If you use these at the right time, you can get more squares. The best time is usually at the start of the game.

Are Dots players actually making in-app purchases?

Murphy: People are buying dots, kind of to our surprise. We did want to make the game so people didn’t ever have to spend money and could earn dots just by playing, but also so you can spend a little bit of money and get those features right away.

How much money have you made through the app so far?

Murphy: We don’t really want to share that. But we are making money, so that’s positive.

Can we expect to see any ads popping up in Dots?

Murphy: It’s not in our road map. The game feels different from other games, and I think we’re going to try to preserve that. So we don’t have any ads immediately planned.

When you look at other mobile games that quickly became popular and then sort of fell off — Draw Something comes to mind — what do you think you can learn from that?

Moberg: Well, not to sound silly about it, but we’re testing some of the assumptions around how you’re supposed to do this for mobile games. That might mean the falloff still exists, or maybe this game won’t have that falloff. I don’t know. I think the key is optimizing for longevity instead of optimizing for mobile. When you look at old board games, there were no in-app purchases, right? And yet we’ve been coming back to them for years.

Murphy: The rule book would say, throw a bunch of ads at people’s faces right now! Jack up the prices in the game! And we don’t want to do that. We’re just sort of focused on the game experience.

Windows Phone Overtakes BlackBerry in Smartphone Shipments, Not That It Matters

John Paczkowski — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:05:43 +0000

In the race for third mobile platform, there’s a new favorite: Windows Phone.

According to new research from IDC, Microsoft’s mobile operating system accounted for 3.2 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter. That’s a significant gain from the OS’s performance in the first quarter of 2012, which saw it capture a market share of 2 percent. And it was enough for Windows Phone to unseat BlackBerry from its third-place spot and claim the rank for its own.

Admittedly, ousting BlackBerry wasn’t exactly a difficult task. In the first quarter, the struggling handset maker saw its share of global smartphone shipments halved year over year. In Q1 of 2012, it claimed a 6.4 percent share. This year, BlackBerry managed to snag only 2.9 percent.

An unfortunate loss of momentum for BlackBerry, though one that’s not entirely attributable to the ascension of other platforms and a lack of interest in its own. BlackBerry is in the midst of a transition to an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 10. Right now, the company has just two smartphones that use it. The bulk of its handset portfolio continues to run on its older OS. And according to IDC analyst Kevin Restivo, that’s almost certainly having an effect on sales.

“Windows Phone is clearly gaining momentum,” Restivo told AllThingsD. “But BlackBerry’s decline this quarter really has more to do with the lag between sales of its old handsets and its new ones than anything else. Sure, Windows Phone is ahead now, but there’s no guarantee that it will maintain its third-place ranking in upcoming quarters.”

And, as I’ve noted before, third place in the current smartphone OS rankings doesn’t mean much. According to IDC, Google and Apple captured 92.3 percent of all smartphone shipments with their Android/iOS duopoly (Android: 59.1 percent; iOS: 23 percent). In other words, Windows Phone and BlackBerry are so far behind the two leading mobile platforms that their ranking is really just a moot point, anyway.

Alcatel One Touch Idol Smartphone: Nothing to Be Idolized

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:31:21 +0000

How do you introduce the world to a new smartphone from a company that most people have never heard of? With a cameo in “Iron Man 3,” of course.

Alcatel One Touch is a cellphone brand from Chinese consumer electronics company TCL Communications. Its first U.S. smartphone, the mid-range Idol, will make its debut at the end of the month. To get the name in front of more eyes, the Android-based handset is featured in the latest installment of Marvel Comics’s “Iron Man” film series. But in real life it faces the heroic task of going up against smartphone stalwarts like Samsung, HTC and LG.

[ See post to watch video ]

Unfortunately, this smartphone isn’t going to reach superhero status. I’ve been testing the Idol over the past week, and I found it to be unremarkable. The phone lacks 4G LTE support and is somewhat sluggish, which makes it frustrating to use. Plus, it’s currently priced at $299 without carrier backing. For that money, you’ll get a lot more from the Nexus 4 by LG.

There’s really nothing that sets the Idol apart from the competition. The design resembles a lot of other all-touchscreen smartphones, and without any type of branding on the front of the device, you’d be hard-pressed to pick it out of a lineup of Android devices — not that I want a huge company logo splattered across the front. Alcatel One Touch does offer the Idol in a number of colors, including red, green and blue, but, alas, I received the boring silver one.

The smartphone measures 5.24 inches tall by 2.66 inches wide by 0.31 inch thick, and weighs 3.84 ounces. It’s smaller than the Samsung Galaxy S4, but bigger than the iPhone 5. The construction of the phone is largely plastic, but I didn’t think it felt particularly cheap or fragile. It was comfortable to hold, and I had no problems navigating through the menus with one hand.

The Idol has a 4.7-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 960 by 540 pixels. That’s on par with other midrange smartphones, and the display was bright and clear for reading text and viewing videos. But for the same price, you can get the Nexus 4 with a 4.7-inch, 1,280 by 768-pixel touchscreen, which offers sharper image quality.

Another advantage to the Nexus 4 is that it’s running the latest version of Google’s Android Jelly Bean operating system (4.2.2). The Idol runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1, so it’s not too far behind, but the rate at which it will receive software updates may not be as quick as the Nexus, since the latter is offered directly by Google.

The good news is that the Idol’s user interface is clean and easy to use. The company hasn’t added too many of its own customizations, and it’s not bogged down with useless software. A couple of apps that I found particularly useful were MobiSystem’s OfficeSuite for viewing and editing Office documents, and Movie Studio for editing videos right on the phone.

The quality of the Idol’s main eight-megapixel camera is mediocre. As with many camera phones, I got the best results when taking pictures outdoors in natural light. But even then, I didn’t find the colors to be that vibrant. Photos taken indoors or in low-light conditions were a bit grainy, and using the built-in flash only washed out colors. There were other issues, as well.

To focus, you can tap on the screen, but I found it slow at times (the phone also makes a weird clicking noise). There were also delays when I tried to launch the camera from the lock screen, and a couple of times the camera app unexpectedly closed as soon as I launched it from the main menu. It didn’t give me much confidence for using the Idol’s camera to capture spontaneous moments.

A photo taken with the Alcatel One Touch Idol’s 8-megapixel camera.

Unfortunately, performance issues weren’t uncommon during my time with the Idol. It’s powered by a slower processor than other phones in its price range, and I ran into delays when launching apps or loading social networks like Facebook. There was once instance where it struggled to even get to the main menu of apps, which I have never seen before. The problems weren’t constant, but it was enough to make it frustrating. The speed of the Nexus 4 offers a more fluid experience.

Also, the Idol doesn’t support 4G LTE for faster data speeds. Instead, it works on another 4G standard called HSPA+, which can be just as fast or faster than LTE in some places, but in my testing I didn’t find this to be the case. Using the iPhone 5 on AT&T’s LTE network in San Francisco, I averaged download speeds of 22.04 megabits per second and upload speeds of 18.17 Mbps. Meanwhile, the Idol averaged 3.77 Mbps down and 1.03 Mbps up. To be fair, the Nexus 4 also lacks 4G LTE.

Calls sounded clear, and I didn’t experience any dropped calls. Voices sounded natural, without any disruptive background noise. But the volume can get piercingly loud, even at mid-levels. My friends had no major complaints on their end.

For my battery drain tests, I simulated a voice call with Wi-Fi on, allowing the screen to time out after 30 seconds, and the Idol offered six hours and 18 minutes of continuous talk time. In real-world usage, where I used the phone to check email and social networks, read articles on the Web and watch a couple of YouTube clips, I needed to recharge the phone by early evening.

Sadly, Iron Man can’t save the Alcatel One Touch Idol. At its current price, the smartphone doesn’t hold a candle to the more powerful and robust Nexus 4. Even if the smartphone was eventually offered by a carrier at a cheap price or even for free, the performance issues aren’t worth it.

Mobile Game Biz to Nintendo and Sony: Seasons? What Are Those?

Eric Johnson — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:36 +0000

As if you needed any further reminding that phone and tablet games are where it’s at, take a look at the new portable gaming report that IDC and App Annie are releasing today.

The report, obtained in advance by AllThingsD, shows just how different the new generation of mobile games is from the gaming-only devices that previously reigned supreme. For context, back in Q4 2012, total consumer spending on games for iOS and Android devices surpassed spending on “gaming-optimized handhelds” (that is, Sony’s PSP and Vita, and Nintendo’s DS, DSi and 3DS).

But the real bombshell is in the new report, which covers Q1 2013: In that quarter, consumer spending on Sony’s and Nintendo’s handhelds declined significantly, while iOS and Google Play spending both increased, also significantly. Combined, the phone and tablet crowd spent nearly three times as much on games as handheld device owners.

(And bear in mind, of course, that a new 3DS or PS Vita game costs about $40, while even brand-new mobile games are typically free or 99 cents to download, with many offering optional in-game purchases.)

But wait, you say. This is the first quarter of the year, being compared to the lucrative holiday-driven fourth quarter. How is that fair to Sony and Nintendo?

Exactly. It’s not. With slower game production schedules and much lower device turnover, the holiday quarter matters a great deal to Nintendo and Sony. But for consumers with a steady stream of new games and newer, better devices on which to play those games, seasonality is mostly irrelevant.

IDC and App Annie’s numbers, then, amount to a double whammy: At both the best of times and the worst of times, new-school mobile games beat out their older counterparts.

A few other points of interest from the new report:

The global install base for those “gaming-optimized handhelds” was about 200 million in Q1 2013. To put that in perspective, Gartner estimates that more than 2 billion phones and tablets are being/will be shipped this year alone. In other words, it’s through volume that mobile devices have closed and blown past the revenue-per-user gap.
Although the total amount consumers spent on mobile games was far greater on iOS than on Android, gaming amounted to about 80 percent of all consumer spending on Android, vs. about 70 percent on iOS.
The report splits consumers into four geographic zones: North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. For both Android and gaming-optimized handhelds, the Asia-Pacific share of total spending increased by more than 10 points (see the chart embedded below).

This report is the second such collaboration between IDC, which tracks videogame and entertainment hardware, and App Annie, which tracks mobile software and in-app revenue.

Android Quietly Commits to Better Support for Bluetooth

Ina Fried — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:00:37 +0000

At nearly three and a half hours, you’d think Google would have been able to get all the news into its I/O keynote address on Wednesday.

But a few announcements missed the cut.

One of the more interesting was a commitment by Google to support advanced Bluetooth natively in its Android operating system. Google had supported basic Bluetooth for specific things like keyboards and headphones, but had yet to build in support for the latest version of the wireless technology.

The new move opens up opportunities for a range of new accessories, including very low-power devices.

“I think that opportunity is actually going to be huge,” said Steve Hegenderfer, director of developer relations for the group that oversees the Bluetooth specification. Hegenderfer said that Bluetooth devices have gotten so small that the batteries are sometimes the largest component.

But with support for low energy, Hegenderfer said he expects a wave of devices to hit the market in the next year that are powered by kinetic energy — basically, the energy created by a body in motion.

Google’s move will allow those developing such devices for iOS to offer the same products more easily on Android.

Apple already supports the latest version of Bluetooth, as does BlackBerry with BlackBerry 10 and Microsoft with Windows 8 (though not, as yet, with Windows Phone 8).

The lack of Android support has been a sore spot for developers because it makes an already fragmented hardware landscape even more challenging. Nearly all the devices shipping today have chips that support the latest version of Bluetooth, but until Google’s move, developers didn’t have a unified way to call on the Bluetooth functions.

Instead, developers had to tweak their code not only for particular versions of Android but also based on which Bluetooth chip was in use.

While Google announced its plans on Wednesday, support for the new Bluetooth won’t come immediately. It is due to arrive in a month or two, with the next update to the Android programming interfaces.

Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors

Mike Isaac — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:04:51 +0000

Talk about a total head fake.

After writing a post on Tuesday about being diagnosed with a rare voice condition which has barred him from making many public appearances over the past two years, Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page made a surprise appearance at Google’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday.

The CEO, who has not appeared at the I/O conference in years, took about 10 minutes to deliver a sort of evangelist-like mission statement, thoughts on how he sees Google’s role in the world at large, and how the different parts of his organization — Android, Google X, Maps, Search — help people.

“Technology should do the hard work,” Page said, “so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.”

Page’s appearance is noteworthy in that, unlike other technology CEOs — Zuckerberg, Cook, Bezos — Page has not often stepped into the limelight for new product introductions or company updates, aside from his appearances on the company’s earnings calls.

But unlike his quarterly appearances filled with balance-sheet numbers and chats with Wall Street analysts, Page’s talk today aimed to appeal to a more emotional part of his audience, even evoking a memory of a time he went to a technology conference with his father, when Page was a child.

At other moments, Page seemed to wax philosophical. “If I think back to a long time ago, all of humanity was basically farming or hunting all the time,” he said. “If you lived in that time, you probably hoped that you could feed your family. For us, we don’t worry about that … and the reason for that is technology.”

Indeed, a lot of the speech had a very “Kumbaya” feeling to it, with Page calling for an end to the animosity that inhabits much of the tech industry.

“Every story I read about Google is ‘us vs some other company’ or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting,” Page said. “We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress.”

Yet in the very same address, Page took some potshots at competitors like Microsoft and Oracle, both of which are involved in litigation over certain Google products.

When asked during a Q&A session about the fate of Android in light of Oracle’s court victories, Page seemed eager to snipe: “Money is more important to them than cooperation,” Page said.

Speaking of a lack of cooperation, just today The Verge surfaced a cease-and-desist letter from Google to Microsoft, demanding that Microsoft remove the YouTube app from its Windows Phone devices, citing a lack of in-app advertising. Funny timing.

Page is hardly the only Google executive — much less Google employee — to shoot down competitors. Google Maps VP Brian McClendon was eager to make a subtle dig at Apple’s less-than-lauded mapping product. And Google+ SVP and long-time I/O emcee Vic Gundotra has thrown quite a few competitive elbows at other tech companies in his time.

Regardless, the Street seemed to eat it up. Shares of Google reached an all-time high on Wednesday afternoon, hitting $916.38 per share, before edging back slightly to close at $915.89.

Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing

Lauren Goode — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:20:33 +0000

Chrome, Google’s homegrown Web browser, has seen a pretty big uptick in users in recent months. And, increasingly, those users are coming from mobile.

That was the gist of the Chrome-focused presentation given by Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android, and Linus Upson, vice president of engineering at Chrome,at the Google I/O conference earlier today.

Pichai announced that Chrome now claims more than 750 million monthly active users, with 300 million new users since ~~last month~~ the last I/O conference a year ago. (Google used to measure browser users on a weekly basis, but has since adjusted this to reflect industry standards.)

Pichai and Upson didn’t say exactly how many of those users are coming from mobile, except to say that, not surprisingly, that segment is growing. In an effort to nudge the browsing experience forward in a “multiscreen world,” Upson showed how a Chrome Web browser will mimic the experience as you’re running game applications from an Android tablet (Nexus 10, natch).

So the user starts a race or performs a function on a touchscreen Android tablet, and the same action will occur in the game on his or her desktop browser.

They also demoed Racer, a multiplayer Chrome experiment that uses Chrome across up to five devices at once.

Chrome mobile, Upson said, has been getting speedier, with performance improving by “more than 50 percent” on mobile, compared with 25 percent speedier on desktop.

Google’s browser, of course, serves as the foundation for Chrome OS, a computer system based solely on the Web — i.e., the $1,300 Chromebook Pixel — but Google only said that there would be “more to talk about” later this year in regards to Chrome OS.

Chrome has previously claimed the top-browser-in-the-world title, according to third-party analytics firm StatCounter, but other reports indicate that Internet Explorer is still the dominant Web browser in many parts of the world.

Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android

Ina Fried — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:58:57 +0000

While not a new Nexus phone, Google said on Wednesday that it plans to start selling an unlocked version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 through its Google Play store.

Like Nexus devices, the unlocked Galaxy S4 will be able to get Android updates as they are released, rather than having to wait for the carrier and device maker to customize and approve the new software.

Google’s Hugo Barra made the announcement at Google’s I/O conference, generating lots of “oohs” and “aahs” for the features — right up until he mentioned the price.

It will cost a hefty $649 when it goes on sale June 26. (The price drew outright boos at the Google I/O viewing party in Chicago, I’m told.)

The phone will support LTE networks from both AT&T and T-Mobile USA.

Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming

Ina Fried — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:11:23 +0000

Google said on Wednesday that there are now 900 million Android devices out there.

“It’s an extraordinary achievement,” Google’s Sundar Pichai said at the company’s I/O conference in San Francisco. “But it is an incredible ecosystem achievement.”

There were 100 million activations in 2011, and 400 million as of 2012. But, as Pichai notes, there are seven billion people on the planet. The company’s goal is to start reaching the next several billion people who have never had access to the Internet — a goal Eric Schmidt talked about recently during his appearance at D: Dive Into Mobile.

On the app side, Google’s Hugo Barra said the company has paid out as much to developers in the first four months of 2013 as it did for all of 2012.

In its first announcements of the show, Google launched a pair of new location tools that developers can use to include Google’s mapping services into their apps. Of particular note is a new low-power tool that Barra said will use less than 1 percent of battery life per hour. That’s important because location-aware apps tend to be big battery drains. In addition, Google said it would support developers including geo-fencing, as well as the ability to use a phone’s accelerometer to recognize if someone is walking, cycling or driving.

Google also announced a series of new services targeted at game developers, including the ability to save one’s game state to the cloud and to create multiplayer games.

“We’re going to deal with all the hard networking connections,” Barra said. (However, the demo of said multiplayer gaming didn’t work quite as planned.)

Google also announced support for achievements and leaderboards (a la Xbox Live and the iOS Game Center). Google’s game services will work across both iOS and Android.

Additionally, Google is updating the tools that Android developers use to make their apps and the console used to market and sell the programs. Among the features are a means to gauge effectiveness of advertising by tracking referrals, as well as for developers to purchase professional translations to quickly get their apps into more languages.

And, in stark contrast to Apple’s approach with iOS, Google is adding support for developers to do public beta testing of their apps and to deploy updates in stages to various percentages of their users.

The company is also upgrading its Google Cloud Messaging service to support an always-on connection between a developer’s servers and Google’s data center, and adding the ability to send messaging back to servers from an app. Also, when a notification is dismissed on, say, a phone, it will go away on one’s tablet, too.

Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More

Liz Gannes — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:57:00 +0000

Here at the densest concentration of Google Glass devices since the factory floor, team AllThingsD is covering the news out of Google’s I/O developer conference this morning.

The maker of Android and Chrome is just about to kick off a three-hour keynote, and if you want to see it for yourself, you can: Here’s the livestream. Meanwhile, we’ll be doing live coverage, but it’ll be quick blurbs and takeaways rather than transcribing every last Googley word.

Anticipation is high; Google shares just topped $900 for the first time ever.

“We are very fortunate to have two platforms,” says Sundar Pichai, who is now in charge of both Chrome and Android and also Google Apps. He’s addressing an I/O audience of 6,000 in-person attendees and some 1 million via livestream. He notes the advent of smartphones and connected devices has been a massive, rapid and global change over just the past six to seven years.

There have been 900 million Android activations to date, announces Pichai. Here’s some more context on those numbers, via Ina Fried.

As an update to Google Play services, Android product leader Hugo Barra announces three new location tools for developers that will reduce battery drain and add awareness of users’ location and activities for the purposes of geofencing and activity tracking (the latter thing is just like the Moves app for iOS, which understands the difference between walking, running and biking motions as you’re carrying a phone).

A few more of Barra’s Google Play updates that get cheers from developers will help sync accounts and notifications across multiple devices. Plus, new game developer tools on Android, iOS and web will show personalized leaderboards, help players challenge each other and save games.

Google introduces a brand-new development environment, Android Studio, for building applications. It helps rapidly visualize layouts across different devices, languages. This goes over extremely well with the developer audience.

And here’s some more stuff that developers care a lot about, and other platforms like Apple’s iOS don’t do a great job of. Later this summer, Google will add new Android analytics tools to help developers do things like track conversions from their app advertising and visualize revenue over time and geography. Plus, a biggie for people making new apps: Beta testing and staged rollouts with private feedback.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty APIed out,” says Barra. Yes indeed!

On to content and entertainment: Personalized recommendations for content in Google Play are rolling out “over the coming weeks,” and navigation is improved. This gets the mildest round of applause so far.

But here’s the real news: Google Play Music All Access, which comes with “a uniquely Google approach,” says Google content guy Chris Yerga. For some savvy handicapping, here’s Peter Kafka’s advance take.

What is interesting about it? The radio service is interactive (you can mess with what’s coming next), it has personalized recommendations and it includes Google’s collection blended with your personal library. It’ll cost $9.99 per month but there are some promo and trial options. Here’s a fuller summary from Mike Isaac.

Barra shows off a Galaxy S4 running Google’s Nexus version of Android rather than jammed with Samsung stuff. Not cheap, though. It’ll be sold for $649 on Google Play on June 26. Ina Fried has more here.

Back to Chrome and Chrome OS. The browser now has 750 million monthly active users, up from 450 million last year. As for Chromebooks, Sundar Pichai offers no actual numbers, but says they’ve been the No. 1 seller on Amazon for a while. (C’mon, where are the numbers?)

Next, an update on some of the underlying Web formats, tools and components that Google contributes to. This now includes a data compression proxy for Chrome for Mobile that sounds like like Opera and Onavo. Plus, some demos of what’s in the pipeline, including a nifty race car game played on a track made of five devices laying next to each other that keeps in sync using Web sockets. Lauren Goode has more on all the Chrome news here.

Sundar Pichai is giving out Chromebook Pixels to everyone at I/O, which they are rather stoked about.

How about them Google Apps? Lots of people use them — 74 of the top 100 U.S. universities. That was an extremely short segment.

And another little launch coming this fall: Google Play for Education. Google wants to help schools manage Android tablets, offering a library of apps recommended by teachers, and mechanisms to push apps directly to groups of student devices.

Plus, cute kids around the world use Chromebooks, as displayed in like the 30th feel-good product movie of this keynote.

Vic Gundotra says he’s here to introduce 41 new features for Google+, which I hope he is not going to go through one by one.

The G+ feed is now three columns, with posts tiled like Pinterest.

Google is also going to automatically tag posts with hashtags so people can find related content. These are extracted with image recognition and text analysis.

Also, Gundotra says as part of Google’s efforts to help computers get out of people’s ways, it will better support multiplatform conversations. That means: group messaging, persistent conversations between groups (a la GroupMe a few years ago), albums of shared images, synced notifications, free group video and support for Web, Android and iOS as of today.

On to photos: Google wants its data centers to be your darkroom, says Gundotra, who seems to only speak in slogans. G+ saves “all the pixels, because some memories are not meant to be downsized,” says Gundotra, with a nice visualization that shows how much larger G+ photos are than Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Also, new tools will help users find their best photos and edit them, especially faces. Vanity, eat your heart out.

For further reading, Mike Isaac has detailed pullouts on the new G+ stream design and Hangouts.

“Auto awesome” features like collage generation, smile detection, making a series into a GIF and stitching panoramics are now generated automatically. And these features have been in “dark launch” so Google is already ready to spring them live on every photo you’ve ever uploaded.

Next up: Amit Singhal wants to talk about “the end of search … as we know it.” He’s the smiley guy who always talks about the Star Trek computer. Yup, there we go: He dreamed as a child of building the Star Trek computer for the world.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is today coming to Polish, Turkish and Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, adding to nine existing languages.

Singhal announces conversational search for the desktop and laptop. Users can launch voice queries by saying, “Okay, Google.”

Plus, Google Now, the smart personal assistant app, is adding reminders, public transit and TV shows.

Johanna Wright demos a voice search using the new tools for Chrome and Chrome OS with the premise of planning a trip to Santa Cruz. Her computer listens to a set of queries including “How far is it from here” that returns directions with current traffic.

More snazzy voice demos: Saying “when does my flight leave” returns a personalized result based on email archives, “show me my pictures from New York last year” brings up photos with those characteristics, and giving commands sends emails and sets reminders. Basically it’s like Siri, but it seems to actually work.

Ina Fried has more on this voice search section here.

Maps head Brian McClendon comes next. Google has a long history of building and growing its map quality — subtext: Unlike some other noobs in the industry — and McClendon recaps the history of Google’s mapping layers: local data, imagery, street view (including underwater view) and base maps. Over 1 million websites are using Google maps today, he says.

Google Maps for iPhone is “sleek, simple, and let’s not forget, accurate,” says Daniel Graf. So what’s next for mobile maps?

Google is launching a unified five-point rating scale for local results, says Graf, which doesn’t really seem like an innovation to brag about. There’s also a nice new swipeable interface for browsing venues, plus discount offers appearing within listings (from Starbucks at first, with more to come). Also, some Waze-like features: accident reports and live rerouting. And, a tablet version for both iOS and Android. But none of it is ready yet. Will be out this summer.

An interface preview of the new desktop Google Maps UI shows that they’ve gotten rid of the uninformative map pins in favor of labels shown directly on each place. The big idea: “The map is the user interface.” Maps are personalized based on users’ history (like Google Now), so they can each navigate via their own landmarks and find related places and nearby streets each time they click.

A new transit schedule viewer looks a lot like Hipmunk. Users can also submit “photo spheres” from their phones by capturing a big multidimensional photo all around them. Also, here’s a mindblower: When you zoom out, the view of the Earth shows clouds in real time. And you can zoom all the way out to the Milky Way.

This isn’t released to the public yet, but you can sign up to check it out at maps.google.com/preview.

Larry Page appears onstage, a surprise given he just explained his vocal cord paralysis condition publicly yesterday. He has a message for developers: Technology is amazing.

Page is having a bit of a Bono moment. He explains the arc of Google’s vision: Technology should do the hard work, so people can live their lives. “I think we’re all here because we share a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to change people’s lives and help the world.”

Page says he wants to build great things that don’t exist, so press comparisons to competitors are overdone. “Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero-sum.”

Progress displaces the past, Page notes. “I’m sure people in the future will think we’re just as crazy as we think people in the past were, having to do hunting or farming all the time.”

And to that end, recruiting young people to care about science is important. Page explains that Google participated in the upcoming movie “The Internship” as a way to market computer science.

And now something even less expected: Page takes audience questions. First up, predictably, is Robert Scoble. Page notes that he didn’t need to see Scoble’s picture of himself in the shower wearing his Google Glass. Point for Larry.

Page answers a question about the potential of a Web-based operating system for mobile; he’s disappointed about the industry state of warring platforms, saying, “The software you write should run everywhere easily.”

How does Google protect freedom, asks a woman from Colombia. It’s difficult and important, says Page, but transparency is key.

About fiber, Page says increasing capacity increases the potential for doing interesting things. Beyond gigabits, the next step is low-latency connections.

Meanwhile, Google stock is trading above $906, with the company’s market cap passing $300 billion.

On Glass production, Page isn’t willing to say much of anything specific. He says it’s about making users happy. He loves using it with his young kids.

Page’s advice for a kid: Try to cut deep to the real issues. The power grid and manufacturing, not incremental stuff. Asking how far are you off the raw materials cost helps you think about the longer view.

Here’s Mike Isaac’s story on Page’s appearance.

12:19 pm: Just going to add in a timestamp here to note this has been ridiculously long.

Page extends his positivity riff into limitations. He says he doesn’t just want to inspire computer scientists, he also wants lawmakers who understand technology. There should be something in the world like Burning Man, Page says, where technologists can have safe places to experiment on the effects of what they build without deploying them into the normal world.

On healthcare, Page says the main problem is regulatory issues around keeping medical information private. He says he got tons of emails after writing about his vocal cord condition yesterday. “After disclosing, I feel I should have done it sooner. Why are people so focused on keeping medical history private? The answer is insurance companies. That makes no sense. We should change the rules around insurance so they have to insure people.”

Page endorses a question about getting more women into tech, and he says that cheap smartphones are key to global social development.

Page goes offstage as it’s announced that Billy Idol is the evening I/O performer. Meanwhile, nobody has the strength to stand given they haven’t had nutrition or water since dawn. What I mean to say is, it’s finally over.

Talking Mobile With Two of Facebook's Key Chat Heads (Full Dive Video)

Ina Fried — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:00:27 +0000

Facebook Home has come under attack both for not doing enough and for taking over too much of an Android phone.

But the folks behind Facebook’s mobile project say that, like many engineering efforts at the company, the goal was to get out a product that did a set of features, and then tweak things from there.

Speaking at the recent D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer and Cory Ondrejka talked about how Home came to be, and also hinted that the software could soon span areas beyond the home screen and messaging, with photos and dialing among the areas of interest.

Facebook also used the appearance to announce the arrival of the Chat Heads feature for the iPhone.

In the wake of the challenges that Facebook Home has faced, it’s worth taking another look at where Facebook’s top executives say they plan to take the product from here.

[ See post to watch video ]

Former Nokia Workers Aim to Make Android Seaworthy With Rugged New Phone

Ina Fried — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:27 +0000

After seeing his third smartphone die during a three-month sailing trip in 2010, Heikki Sarajarvi decided that there had to be a better approach.

“I was so fed up,” Sarajarvi said. “I can’t be the only one who is destroying these smartphones doing completely normal things.”

He talked to other sailors and found that they were having similar issues. It wasn’t even about getting the phone wet, he said. Salty sea spray alone was ruining the phones.

So the ship builder and onetime Nokia consultant connected with some other workers at the Finnish cellphone company and set up his own company, Adaia. Of the company’s 16 employees, about half are former Nokia workers.

After two years of toiling, the company has a working prototype for its first product — a rugged Android phone with both cellular and satellite connectivity for texting and email — and for summoning help in an emergency.

Adaia’s phone won’t be out until next year, and it probably won’t be cheap. Sarajarvi said it will cost more than a high-end smartphone, but less than the four cellphones he had to buy.

Adaia partnered with BMW Group’s DesignworksUSA on the design, inspired by a topographical map.

“Dualism is the key characteristic of the design,” said Laurenz Schaffer, the president of the BMW Group-owned design firm, which has worked on phones dating back to the Nokia 5100 series. “It had to support an extreme, active lifestyle in the outdoors, as well as be appropriate to use in an executive meeting.”

Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn't Serious About Music Subscriptions

Peter Kafka — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:55:20 +0000

Yes, Google plans to launch a subscription music service this week, via its Google Play store.

And, yes, Google still plans to launch a separate subscription music service later this year, via its YouTube site.

Make sense? Of course not.

It makes lots of sense for both YouTube and Play, which was built for Google’s Android devices, to sell music subscriptions.

YouTube is the world’s biggest free music service, which could make it a fantastic funnel for a Spotify-like paid offering, which can also help solve some problems with the music labels.

And if you’re going to have the world’s dominant mobile platform, then you ought to be the one selling music subscriptions that work on it, because that could help your customers stick to that platform. No sense in handing that feature over to Spotify, which works fine on iPhones and Kindles, too.

And something that knitted Android and YouTube together — combining a mix of free, paid, mobile, audio and video — could be great.

But that’s not what we’re going to see this week.

Music folks I talked to today expect the Google Play version to be paid-only — no free teaser tier, like Spotify has — and without any features that will set it apart from rivals.

And when YouTube launches its service — as best as I can tell, talks with the Big Three labels are all but completed — that service will likely run parallel to, but not connected with, the Play version. Which means none of the free music that people can get on YouTube will help sell Play subscriptions.

This set-up supposedly stems from former Android boss Andy Rubin’s insistence on controlling his own fiefdom (“Andy and [YouTube head] Salar Kamangar couldn’t be in the same room together,” said a music executive who has worked with both of them). But now we’re in the Sundar Pichai era, and he said he’s all about peace and love.

I’ve heard people in and outside of Google suggest that at some point down the line the two services could be knitted together. After all, just because something gets announced at Google I/O doesn’t mean it will show up. And getting something out there before it’s fully baked is standard operating procedure for Google.

But music subscriptions are an old idea that still really haven’t caught on in a big way. Spotify has six million paying customers worldwide, but its backers concede that it’s still a long way from mainstream. And none of its competitors are even close to those numbers.

If Google really wanted to make subscriptions work, instead of simply offering them as a feature most people won’t use — like the music store it opened up in 2011 — it ought to take the time to get this one right the first time.

Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.

Bonnie Cha — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:02:58 +0000

This year’s Google I/O developer conference is shaping up to be a very different show from last year’s spectacle.

The company has downplayed expectations ahead of the event, saying that it will shift the focus back on developers and services rather than new hardware products and a new operating system.

We’ll find out exactly what’s in store tomorrow, when Google I/O 2013 officially kicks off with a three-hour keynote. But, before that, we thought this would be a good time to take a look back at what has happened since the last I/O.

At times resembling an action flick more than a developer conference, Google I/O 2012 was most memorable for the outrageous Google Glass demonstration and hardware announcements. But with all that hype comes some disappointment.

Google Glass

Skydivers, rooftop bikers and rappellers — that’s how Google first introduced Google Glass to the world. This wearable computer allows users to take pictures and video, get directions and search the Internet by voice. At the time of the conference, U.S.-based attendees could preorder an early version of the futuristic glasses for only (!) $1,500.

Google has since been holding developer events, and the glasses have been making the rounds at high-profile showcases and with some tech bloggers. In an interview with NPR last weekend, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company has shipped about 2,000 units to developers. However, there is still no release date for the device. If you just can’t wait, you can always make your own.

Nexus Q

Looking to take on Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in the battle for the living room, Google introduced its media-streaming device, the Nexus Q, at I/O last year. The bocce-ball-sized unit allows users to wirelessly stream Google Play content to a TV or home theater system, and there was much praise when Google announced that it would be manufactured in the U.S. But Nexus Q — or at least this first attempt — turned out to be a nothingburger.

A mere month after its debut, Google postponed the Nexus Q indefinitely after getting initial feedback from users saying they wanted the device to do more. The company said it would work on making the product better, but we have yet to see any updates. And we won’t be hearing about it at this year’s conference.

Nexus 7

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet fared much better. Launched in mid-July, the Asus-built tablet stood out in a sea of Android tablets with its affordable $200 price tag, without skimping out on features or quality. AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg called it a winner in his review, and said it was the toughest challenger to the iPad yet.

It’s difficult to know just how well it did, since Google does not release sales figures. But at one point Asus said sales were approaching one million units a month. The Nexus 7 is due for a refresh, but we may not see it till later this summer.

Android Jelly Bean

More of an incremental upgrade than a major overhaul, Android Jelly Bean 4.1 brought such enhancements as improved text and speech input, the ability to share photos between phones via NFC and more detailed notifications. Jelly Bean also introduced Google Now, a smart personal assistant app that provides information based on your location, search queries and other personal data. Just last month, a version of Google Now was released for the iPhone and iPad.

As of May 1, around 28.4 percent of Android devices were running Jelly Bean, which is slightly more than those running the previous version, Ice Cream Sandwich (27.5 percent). Still, a plurality (38.5 percent) of Android phones are running Gingerbread, which is two versions behind Jelly Bean. At I/O 2011, Google announced the Android Upgrade Alliance to help improve the rate of updates, and while things have gotten better, these numbers show that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Google Compute Engine

Looking to take on Amazon in another battleground, Google announced its Compute Engine cloud-computing service at the conference last year. In an effort to get more businesses to run their applications on servers in Google’s data center, the company said its new service offers 50 percent more computing power per dollar than its rivals. Google Compute Engine was released in limited preview at the time of I/O, but last month Google opened up the service to anyone who signs up for its Gold support program, which starts at $400 per month.

BlackBerry Messenger on iPhone and Android: A Big Move Made Too Late?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:15:36 +0000

There’s a fair bit of news coming out of BlackBerry’s BlackBerry Live 2013 keynote this morning — the unveiling of the new Q5 Qwerty phone and the first point release update of BlackBerry 10 for the Z10. But the biggest news of all concerned BlackBerry’s plans for its popular messaging platform, BlackBerry Messenger. At long last, the company is taking the service cross-platform.

Come summer, BlackBerry will release BBM as a standalone app. Initially, it will be targeted at Apple’s iOS 6 and Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and above, and will provide a basic feature set. But CEO Thorsten Heins said the company intends to flesh it out further in the months that follow.

“We’re committed to making the BBM experience on other platforms as fully featured as we can,” Heins said. “We’ll start with messaging and groups, but we’ll add voice and screen share later on. … BB10 is such a strong platform that we are confident it can become an independent messaging solution.”

A big move, far too long in coming.

Arguably, BlackBerry should have done this years ago. BBM is a tentpole feature of the company’s OS, and remains in wide use today. As Heins observed this morning, the service has about 60 million users, who send and receive some 10 billion messages every day — about half of them are read within 20 seconds of receipt. That’s a big installed base with serious engagement.

Sadly for BlackBerry, some strong cross-platform messaging solutions emerged during the years that it withheld BBM from iOS and Android. WhatsApp, which recently appeared at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference, is bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users. The company’s daily message tally: Eight billion inbound and 12 billion outbound. Then there’s Kik. And Apple’s iMessage, which, despite its problems, is pretty popular.

That’s not to say that BBM is going to have a tough time making inroads on iOS and Android, just that it would have had a far, far easier time of it a few years ago.

Nvidia Details Shield, Its $349 Android Game Console

Ina Fried — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:00:08 +0000

Nvidia on Tuesday offered more details on Shield, its $349 Android-based game console.

The console is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chip and also packs “a console-grade controller,” a five-inch, high-def multitouch display, speakers, Wi-Fi and the Jelly Bean flavor of Android. It also has 16 gigabytes of memory, GPS, Bluetooth, HDMI output, microSD storage slot and a headphone jack.

“These pieces, put together by a company full of gaming fanatics, add up to an amazing new open platform gaming portable,” Nvidia said. “It’s the best way to play Android games. And because it’s an Android device, it works with both Tegra-optimized and regular Android games — as well as Android apps.”

On top of that, Nvidia also said Shield includes a “beta” feature that will allow the streaming of games from a PC.

Nvidia, which first announced its Project Shield effort in January, said it will take orders starting today for those who had been getting email updates on the effort, with general public orders to begin May 20. It will ship in June and will be sold at Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers.

Shield is not alone in seeing the opportunity to combine console gaming and Android. The chipmaker is joining a growing field of Android-based game consoles, which includes the Kickstarter-backed (and now venture-backed) Ouya and the GamePop from BlueStacks.

Netflix Still Eats a Third of the Web Every Night; Amazon, HBO and Hulu Trail Behind

Peter Kafka — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:00:00 +0000

For the last three years, Netflix has accounted for a third of the Internet traffic zipping into North American homes every night.

But Web video competitors like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. So is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead?

Not really, said Sandvine, the broadband service company that tracks Internet usage.

A Sandvine report out this morning pegs Netflix’s share of prime-time “downstream” traffic delivered over “fixed networks” — that is, wires and pipes — at 32.3 percent. That’s just a hair down from the 33 percent estimate it provided last November.

Meanwhile, Sandvine said Amazon and HBO have seen their share of traffic hold steady, as well. Sandvine said Amazon dropped from 1.75 percent to 1.31 percent, and that HBO dropped from 0.5 percent to 0.34 percent. But that’s not a lot of movement either way.

The one service that did leap a bit is Hulu, which is up from 1.1 percent to 2.41 percent.*

Bear in mind that these numbers do include data transmitted from a home network, via Wi-Fi, to iPads, iPhones, Android tablets, etc. And that Sandvine said this kind of “home roaming” accounts for a whopping 20 percent of traffic now, up from 9 percent a year ago.

But Sandvine also tracks streaming traffic to mobile devices over wireless networks. And here it said that Netflix has made a move from 2.2 percent of downstream traffic to 4 percent in the last 12 months. YouTube, though, is still dominant: If you’re on the go, and you’re watching a moving image, there’s a very good chance you’re seeing something hosted by the world’s biggest video site.

So what does any of that mean? Short answer: Netflix is streaming more video than ever — it added at least two million American users between measurements, and likely many more — but so are its competitors. So its lead is staying more or less the same. Sandvine said the average Internet household uses about 18 gigabytes of broadband a month — up from 10GB a year ago.

Still here? If so, you’ve probably read Ashlee Vance’s excellent Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the engineering that lets Netflix move all those bits into your house. If not, you should definitely read it now.

* Sandvine researcher Dan Deeth notes that the numbers his company provided last fall were collected in the first two weeks of September, which means that Hulu wouldn’t have had access to a batch of new TV shows from its broadcaster partner/owners. The numbers in today’s report were collected in the first two weeks of March, which means Hulu would benefit from new programming that ran during February sweeps; Netflix would have also benefited from any surge in “House of Cards” viewers.

At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS

Ina Fried — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:03:11 +0000

There will be plenty of talk about Android at this week’s Google I/O developer conference.

But expect to hear more talk about what the company has been doing to improve its suite of Android services than about big changes to the operating system itself.

“It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system,” Google’s Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Wired. “Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.”

It makes sense that Google is investing a lot in its services that ride on top of Android — and for three main reasons.

First of all, it is these services, rather than Android itself, where Google makes its money.

Second, when Google invests in Android, those are investments that benefit anyone using Android, from loyal partners such as Samsung and HTC to those that heavily modify the operating system such as Amazon and many Chinese phone makers.

Pichai was charitable toward all of the Android efforts, even those such as Amazon that take Google’s work and go in a different direction.

“Under the rules of the license, Amazon can do that,” said Pichai, who now runs Android in addition to his previous duties overseeing Chrome OS. “In general, we at Google would love everyone to work on one version of Android, because I think it benefits everyone better. But this is not the kind of stuff we’re trying to prevent. Our focus is not on Facebook Home or Kindle Fire.”

The third reason why Google can benefit more from updating its services is that such improvements don’t need the same kind of blessing from hardware makers and carriers. With operating system updates needing support from both the device maker and operator, it can take months for devices to get the latest Android OS update, if they are updated at all. Services, by contrast can be updated much more quickly.

Pichai noted that updates remains an area that needs improvement.

“We are thinking about how to make Android handle updates better,” Pichai said in the Wired interview. “We see ways we can do this. It’s early days. We’re talking with our partners and working our way through it. We need time to figure out the mechanics, but it’s definitely an area of focus for me and for the team.”

And just because Google isn’t treating developers to a big new version of Android at I/O doesn’t mean that 2013 won’t see the tasty follow-up to Jelly Bean.