AllThingsD » PC

Microsoft, PC Industry Will Need Windows Upgrade Offer More Than Ever

Ina Fried and Lauren Goode — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:20:54 +0000

As expected, Microsoft will offer those who buy a new PC in the coming months the ability to get a heavily discounted upgrade to Windows 8.

The news was reported by CNET earlier this month, with additional details, including the cost, trickling out in recent days. Our sources confirm that Microsoft will offer $15 Windows Pro 8 upgrades to those buying a new PC with Windows 7 Home Basic or higher.

Redmond has offered these kinds of coupons with the past several releases, so it is not a shocker.

But with Windows 8 coming this fall — possibly as late as November — and with current license sales slowing, and Microsoft losing share to both Macs and iPads, the upgrade program could be even more important this time around.

Redmond and the PC makers are hoping that the promise of a guaranteed and easy upgrade will convince back-to-school shoppers to stick with Windows, rather than head to the competition.

The upgrade program is important for another reason: Microsoft needs Windows 8 to get off to a fast start in order to convince developers to write new Metro-style apps that only run on Windows 8. Getting more Windows 7 users on the new operating system would help that cause.

A big change this time around is how the program will operate. In the past, Microsoft has been the driving force behind the cheap upgrades, but the company left it up to computer makers to handle the specific pricing, timing and fulfillment. With Windows 8, Microsoft will handle all of those items, sources say.

Microsoft declined to comment on its upgrade program plans.

The other piece of preparing for Windows 8 is what is taking place on the hardware side. Windows 8, with its Metro user interface, is tailor-made for touch devices, though it will also work with a keyboard and mouse.

So far, this summer’s laptop offerings are punched-up versions of the same PCs that have been on the market for months, with upgrades to Intel’s Ivy Bridge chip line, and PC makers all trying to put their stamp on the trend toward thinner, lighter laptops.

Lenovo has announced more consumer-friendly versions of its business-minded ThinkPad laptop. Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, has expanded its Ultrabook line and has slapped the term “Sleekbooks” on another set of new laptops that fall into the ultra-thin-and-lightweight category but have innards that don’t meet Intel’s specifications for Ultrabooks. Sony’s new Ivy Bridge-equipped Vaio laptops will be made with lightweight materials, include larger displays, and offer optional accessories such as an extended battery.

But PC makers will clearly be gearing up for Windows 8 so that they can start pitching the new operating system as soon as it is ready.

This fall, some hardware makers will introduce convertible PCs that function as both tablets and laptops, as noted here, or will add things like touch sensors to existing displays, in order to bridge the two operating systems.

One company that has already announced a Windows 8 laptop is Lenovo. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January of this year, the China-based PC maker showed off the IdeaPad Yoga, a laptop with a 10-finger touchscreen and a full range of motion at the hinge so when fully folded it turns into a 13.3.-inch tablet.

Overall, one can expect a lot of Windows 8-ready machines to be part of the back-to-school lineups. But expect most PC makers to hold off on design overhauls for the Windows 8 launch.

HP's Whitman to Shed More Light on the Future, Including Job Cuts, Today

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:30:20 +0000

Hewlett-Packard will report its quarterly earnings today after the close of regular trading in New York, and there’s a lot riding on what its senior executives, especially CEO Meg Whitman, will have to say.

The consensus among Wall Street analysts calls for HP to report sales of $29.92 billion and a per-share profit of 91 cents. And, for the most part, analysts are expecting HP’s results to be in line with expectations, if maybe a little light on sales.

One possible curveball, however, is Europe. Given HP’s exposure to the faltering markets on that continent, about which Dell complained in its earnings report yesterday, HP could conceivably see its results hurt more by Europe than by Dell.

Europe accounts for 37 percent of HP’s revenue, making it the most heavily exposed there among the large IT vendors. “The increasing uncertainty and resulting macro weakness in Europe will likely act as an ongoing headwind to growth,” wrote analyst Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities in a note to clients Tuesday.

But the big item on the agenda will be HP’s plans for restructuring, and how many jobs may be lost. As AllThingsD reported last week, HP is contemplating a restructuring that could see as many as 30,000 jobs eliminated, including 5,000 through voluntary retirements. What’s unclear is over what length of time these jobs will go — I’ve been told by sources that this is a key detail, and it is likely to be a fairly long period of time.

The reductions would be the latest in a long, painful sequence of cuts for HP that began years ago. Whitmore notes that HP chopped 50,000 jobs over the course of five years under the tenure of former CEO Mark Hurd. “We suspect HP will position this cost cutting as ‘cut to reinvest’ — an interesting strategy considering HP has been restructuring for the past decade,” Whitmore writes.

Whatever restructuring Whitman puts on the table, Whitmore expects it will help HP maintain its prior guidance — it expects to finish the year with a per-share profit north of $4.00 — but it’s still not going to be easy. Summer PC demand is expected to be soft, and the lack of a tablet strategy isn’t helping. Demand for corporate PCs will likely be a rare bright spot, but just barely.

In printers, the relatively weak results of printer concerns Canon and Lexmark don’t exactly imbue the market with confidence that the trend of sliding profits and sales in HP’s printer operation, recently combined with the Personal Systems Group in a sweeping reorganization announced last month, is anywhere close to being reversed.

One thing to watch for — and something about which Whitman has hinted in the past — is SKU reduction. An SKU is industry lingo for “stock-keeping unit,” and it refers to specific models and makes and packages of a given product. Consumer printers — and, in fact, printers in general — would be an obvious place to cut back on the number of models offered to the market, and it would be perfectly in line with Whitman’s prior messages emphasizing simplicity and streamlining HP’s approach to the market. While I don’t expect Whitman to go on at length about this subject, it’s the sort of thing she may touch on as she hones the “simplicity” message.

What not to expect: One big bomb dropped all at once, outlining the sum total of Whitman’s long-term strategy for HP — one she has already admitted will take a long time to implement. The fact is, it’s a big job, probably one of the biggest in all of the corporate world, and so it’s necessarily coming out in pieces. Today’s piece will be a big one.

A Scanner for All Seasons

Lauren Goode — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:00:14 +0000

Every year, come tax season, I curse myself. I might write about all things digital, but when it comes to receipts and important documents, my record-keeping is analog amateur hour.

So this year I’m getting serious about scanning. Fortunately, there are plenty of portable scanning options out there, ranging from mobile apps to wand-like scanners.

This week, I set out to determine whether an app or a pocket-sized scanner with receipt-management software can really do the job of a larger scanner. I tested three options: The smartphone app JotNot Scanner Pro by MobiTech 3000, PlanOn’s tiny SlimScan SS100 scanner and Xerox’s new wand-shaped Mobile Scanner.

The JotNot Pro app uses the iPhone’s camera to capture images of documents. And after five days of testing, it became apparent that the app was great on the go, but I wouldn’t use it to scan tons of files. The SlimScan scanner’s size was attention-grabbing, but the device and its software were problematic for me. Despite its larger size and $250 price point, the Xerox scanner was my top pick, because of its fast scanning and its wireless connectivity via an Eye-Fi card.

[ See post to watch video ]

I began the scanner tests with JotNot Pro for iPhone, which was updated late last year and costs $1.99.

I was at a conference last week, accumulating business cards and receipts, so it was a good opportunity to test the app. After I snapped a horizontal photo of a business card, the app immediately found the edges of the card and cropped the image. Then it processed the image, and the text in the final file was clear and easy to read. I did this with receipts as well.

JotNot Pro let me enhance each file before processing it, whether it was a hard-to-read receipt or a file with lighter text; and I could also adjust the contrast or add a timestamp to the files.

Next, I shared the files. I had the option to email the files, print or fax them, open them in compatible apps, such as DropBox, or copy them to DropBox, Evernote, Box and Google Docs. JotNot Pro can also easily convert the saved files into PDFs.

I was impressed with all of the options packed into the JotNot Pro app, and would continue using a mobile app to scan when I have my phone and no other options. But for high-volume scanning, I wouldn’t rely solely on an app.

I had high hopes for the SlimScan, but it didn’t deliver. The SlimScan SS100 is a super-thin, credit-card-sized device that launched last month and currently lists on Amazon.com for $106. It claims to store up to 600 scanned images before you have to dump the files off of it, and its expected battery life is 200 to 300 scans per charge.

It confused me from the start. The SlimScan has five tiny unmarked buttons, and I had to read the instruction manual to figure out which one was the power button, which is never a good sign. I had to dig my nail into each button to press it down. When I removed the bottom portion of the stainless steel device to start scanning, I felt like I might break it.

I found that with the SlimScan, I had to have a slow, steady hand as I was rolling the device across a file, or the images wouldn’t scan properly. The first few images I scanned were cut off or missing lines of text as a result of this.

PlanOn’s software for the SlimScan, which is installed straight from the device, was confusing at first as well. The software doesn’t work on Macs, so in order to test it I installed the software on a laptop running Windows 7.

I initially had some trouble transferring files from the scanner to the SlimScam file-management system. The PlanOn software on my laptop would only recognize the files when I renamed them with a JPEG extension. It turned out I needed to install an additional software component in order for SlimScan to convert the files to readable files, and PlanOn suggested I upgrade the software running on the actual scanner as well. According to SlimScan, any SlimScan software earlier than version 4.3 needs to be updated, and my SlimScan was running version 3.8.

After I managed to import images of receipts, business cards and a portion of a book cover, I had the option to move the info to Contacts and export it to Outlook, among other things. Some of the scanned data from business cards didn’t transfer over to Contacts, though optical-recognition software often isn’t 100 percent accurate.

The $250 Xerox Mobile Scanner launched in January, and is comparable in size to the mobile scanner made by The Neat Company, which has been making digital filing and scanning products since 2003. The Xerox scanner can be set up to wirelessly share images, too.

The scanner is 11.5 inches by 2.75 inches by two inches, and weighs 1.5 pounds. Its expected battery life is 300 scans per charge. Like the SlimScan, it isn’t fully compatible with Macs, though Xerox says a Mac utility will be available soon. The Xerox scanner has ports in the back for a flash drive as well as an SD card, so you can scan directly to those, then transfer the files to your computer.

Getting set up to transfer files from the Xerox via Wi-Fi was a bit of a process. First, I inserted an Eye-Fi card, which comes with the scanner, into my laptop, and signed up for an account online. Then I moved the Eye-Fi card to the back of the scanner. I had to temporarily disable other nearby wireless networks so I could “train” my devices to use the Eye-Fi card as a wireless hotspot.

I also had to download a Xerox app for my smartphone if I wanted the files to wirelessly transfer to my phone.

But after all that, I was a scanning machine. The Xerox device scanned all of my business cards, receipts and documents well — and quickly. And files transferred seamlessly to both the Xerox mobile app on my phone and my Eye-Fi dashboard on my laptop. From there, I could email the files or share them with more than 25 productivity, social networking and picture sites.

If the Xerox app itself took photos, it would be the perfect mobile app companion to the hardware. The Xerox mobile scanner may be expensive and slightly less portable — and it probably won’t make tax season any more fun — but for scanning lots of documents and easy file transfers, it gets the job done.

Tablets Quickly Becoming the Portable PC of Choice

John Paczkowski — Fri, 04 May 2012 11:01:49 +0000

If tablet shipments continue to trend the way they have been, they’ll grow more than fivefold in as many years.

That’s the latest forecast from NPD DisplaySearch, which anticipates a massive uptick in tablet adoption over the next few years, one that will ultimately vault the device’s market share over the PC’s. The research outfit figures tablet shipments will grow from 81.6 million units in 2011 to 184.2 million in 2013 — significantly more than the 168.9 million NPD had originally predicted.

And by 2017, NPD expects them to hit 424.9 million units, exceeding notebook PC shipments — for the second year in a row.

The key drivers of that explosive growth: The tablet’s rapidly evolving feature set, and increased investments in the tablet supply chain, as consumer interest in other device categories cools.

“So far in this relatively young product category, the tablet PC market has been dominated by Apple and has tended to include a number of competing products that are similarly configured to the iPad,” says NPD DisplaySearch’s Richard Shim. “However, as the market matures and competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground, we expect the landscape to change dramatically, giving consumers more choices, which will drive demand for more devices.”

More choices in hardware, perhaps. But not so much in operating systems.

Over the next five years, NPD sees the tablet market dominated by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, with some small inroads made by Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows RT. By 2017, the firm sees iOS with a 50.9 percent share of the market, Android with a 40.5 percent share, and Windows with a 7.5 percent share.

Are Macs More Secure?

Walt Mossberg — Wed, 02 May 2012 04:25:00 +0000

Apple claims Macs to be more secure than Windows PCs. In the light of recent malware attacks on the Mac platform, there are several articles on the Web questioning this claim. What is your take on this matter?

Macs aren’t invulnerable to malicious software. No computer is. But the people who produce viruses and spyware have traditionally focused on Windows—and still do, primarily. There have indeed been a couple of recent instances of malware that spread among some Macs in the real world. But bear in mind that, despite the steady growth in Mac sales, Windows still powers the vast majority of the world’s PCs, and, because of that, there are hundreds of thousands of malicious programs targeting it, versus just a handful of known ones for the Mac.

So, my take on this is that while Mac users must be careful where they surf, and Apple will have to step up its game against these attacks, an unprotected Macintosh is still, in daily use, far less likely to become infected than an unprotected Windows PC. How users handle this depends on their habits and their tolerance, both for risk, and for the downsides of constantly running security software, which can sap resources and be annoying. I advise all Windows users to run such software. But I see it as optional for Mac users, at least today. Time will tell if that changes.

Do you know of any apps that work well with dictation on older iPhones?

One that I have used successfully is Dragon Dictation from Nuance. The same company makes an Android app called FlexT9, which I haven’t tested, that includes dictation, among other features. Both apps work on a wide variety of models.

I love my BlackBerry for the ease of emailing and maintaining my schedule but not for accessing the Internet. I am a T-Mobile customer. Is there any device that has the good features of the BlackBerry and also easily and comprehensively accesses the Internet?

T-Mobile offers a wide range of Android phones that include very good Web browsers and typically have two email apps: one for Gmail and one for all your other email accounts. They also have calendar apps.

Overall, I prefer these smartphones to current BlackBerrys and find the email experience fine. But people who are used to the BlackBerry for email—especially corporate email—sometimes complain that email on other devices isn’t as fast. This is partly because BlackBerry email is routed through a proprietary system. I’d advise asking friends or colleagues with newer T-Mobile Android phones about their email experience.

Write to Walt at mossberg.@wsj.com.

Despite Crackdowns, Sina Still Winning the Weibo Game

Loretta Chao and Josh Chin — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:23:27 +0000

Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo may be in the midst of its most aggressive crackdown yet following an explosion of political rumors among users, but it is still beating Tencent in the microblogging race in China, according to a McKinsey & Co. report released this week.

According to the report, social networking is becoming a more important means of communication and information gathering in China, where 36% of PC users said social media sites are their favorite source of content. Chinese users spend an average of 46 minutes per day on social media sites, the report says, while users in the U.S. and Japan spend 37 minutes and seven minutes on the sites per day, respectively.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Musings on Malware (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:28:57 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

CrowdStar No Longer Developing Social Games for Facebook

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:00:41 +0000

CrowdStar’s CEO Peter Relan said in an interview that the longtime social games maker is no longer developing for Facebook.

Instead, the company is focused on building games for smartphones.

“We are maintaining the old games, like Happy Aquarium, but we don’t build new Facebook PC games any more — we are 100 percent focused on mobile,” Relan said.

Last year, he said, 90 percent of the company’s revenues came from Facebook, but he predicts that this year 90 percent will come from mobile.

CrowdStar’s decision to leave Facebook is bad timing for the social network it as nears its public offering.

A platform must have both a lot of applications and a lot of users in order to be successful, but if the perception is that the platform can be profitable only for a few, developers will go elsewhere. Today, the reality is that Zynga dominates the charts and makes far and away more money than anyone else. Meanwhile, fledgling developers are seeking financial alternatives.

Founded in 2008, the Burlingame, Calif., company was one of the first to feed off of Facebook’s social graph, which allowed companies to endlessly post messages on players’ walls to get the word out about their games. Since those viral channels were shut down, Crowdstar has had a difficult time keeping up with social game leaders, such as Zynga, Electronic Arts, Wooga and King.

A year ago, the company raised its first round of funding totaling $23 million, but since then, its games have slipped in the rankings as its focus has shifted to mobile. Today, it attracts fewer than 8 million monthly users, down from 29 million a year ago, according to AppData.

Since then, said Relan, they have discovered an attractive audience on mobile, consisting of females age 13 to 30 who are not interested in sitting in front of a PC or a console to play games. “They are very mobile and communications-oriented,” he said.

For example, Crowdstar’s Girl franchise, including Top Girl, Social Girl and Modern Girl, has collectively hit 20 million downloads across both iPhone and Android. Modern Girl alone surpassed two million downloads within three weeks of its launch.

The Girl franchise includes role-playing games where users dress up avatars and are judged on their outfits as they walk the runway.

Relan said Zynga has done a good job serving the females, aged 35 and over, who grew up on PCs and enjoy playing games online. But the slightly younger demographic is looking for a different kind of game play on a different platform. Relan said they still will leverage the Facebook platform on mobile.

The decision to pull away from Facebook on the PC is new since the company announced a three-prong strategy in October that included Facebook games, mobile games and an emphasis on Asia.

Relan said that even if the company weren’t targeting a niche that gravitated toward mobile, he’d still be wary of developing games for Facebook. That’s because he believes the audience for Facebook games has plateaued or started to decrease.

“If I was going after an older audience, I might focus on tablets,” he said.

Sound Kick: Solid Sound, but a Shaky Speaker

Lauren Goode — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:00:50 +0000

Speaker systems used to imply large towers, mountains of components, spaghetti-like piles of wires, and lots of listening to Pink Floyd to gauge sound quality. On the portable end, there was the boombox, clenching your cassette tapes in its teeth while you boosted it on your shoulder.

Today there are wireless, Bluetooth-enabled speaker docks that are smaller than a shoebox and allow you to play thousands of tracks from a single mobile device. Since I’m not really an audiophile, a speaker that works with my iPhone and gives good sound is good enough for me. But even some of those cost a few hundred dollars. That’s where Soundfreaq’s Sound Kick might come in handy.

This new portable Bluetooth speaker, which has an expandable chamber that pops out in the back for fuller sound, hits the market today at $99. It’s available exclusively through Target stores and through Soundfreaq’s Web site, to start. The Los Angeles-based company says the device will be available on Target’s Web site in a couple weeks; it will eventually be sold through other mass retailers, as well.

After five days of using the Sound Kick, I preferred its sound over that of its main rival, the best-selling $200 Jambox speaker. But the Sound Kick is a bit wobbly when standing upright, and isn’t nearly as portable as the compact Jambox, making it a tweener when it comes to being both an at-home dock and portable speaker.

The Sound Kick works with a variety of Bluetooth-friendly devices, including iPhone, Android phones, BlackBerry, iPad and some laptops. And unlike the Jambox, it has a USB port for charging devices while you’re playing music or audio.

Made of plastic, with a steel-coated front grill, the Sound Kick is a rectangular-shaped device weighing 1.6 pounds and measuring 10.5 inches by 4.2 inches. When closed, its thickness is actually the same as the Jambox; when the extra sound chamber is extended, the device is 2.5 inches wide.

Like some of Soundfreaq’s other products, it has smooth, indented, touch-sensitive buttons for adjusting volume and controlling music tracks. The speaker is available only in black, though Soundfreaq plans to introduce carrying cases in a variety of colors.

[ See post to watch video ]

To test the sound quality of the speaker, I connected both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 via Bluetooth, then set my entire music library to shuffle on my iPhone, which means some audio files would be higher-quality than others. (This was also a good reminder that I’ve downloaded some really bad music in the past. And I can probably ditch the Christmas tunes when it isn’t the season.) I also played Pandora Internet radio songs from an app on an Android smartphone. I set the volume on my phones to around 75 percent, and the Sound Kick’s volume was at about two-thirds of its capacity.

The songs playing through the Sound Kick easily filled the small living room of my apartment at mid-to-high volume levels, without losing quality or starting to sound harsh. Some songs sounded tinnier than other, but that likely had to do with the music files themselves rather than the speakers.

Soundfreaq says the Sound Kick provides optimal sound quality through two techniques: The extra chamber on the speaker set, and a digital-enhancement button, called the UQ3 button. The pop-out chamber in the back is meant to help the resonance of the acoustics of the speaker, while the digital enhancement gives the listener the impression that the speakers inside the dock are spaced further apart, more like surround sound.

When I pressed the UQ3 button, some songs did sound fuller, with stronger bass. With other, more layered songs, instrumental sounds that had previously taken a backseat to the vocals got a slight boost.

Otherwise, the digital enhancements weren’t that noticeable to me. I also watched videos from “The Daily Show” on the iPad, and patched the audio through the Sound Link speaker. Since mobile phone and tablet speakers can be relatively weak, I liked the added oomph I got from the Sound Kick. But when I pressed the UQ3 button, it had little to no apparent impact on the sound quality.

The Sound Kick outputs at a higher decibel level than the Jambox does — 92 decibels, compared to the Jambox’s 85 — but this is a way to measure the amplitude of sound, and is not an indication of better quality. Basically, the Jambox’s amplitude peaks at a lower level than the Sound Kick’s does.

The Sound Kick has a lithium-ion rechargeable battery that the company says should last approximately seven hours with an iPhone 4 or iPod Touch connected via Bluetooth, with the volume turned up 66 percent. During my test, I had the speaker turned up to around two-thirds of maximum volume, and the battery lasted about eight hours.

But there were a few things about the Sound Kick that lowered its grade for me. Unless you have the back portion of the speaker fully extended, the Sound Kick won’t power on at all. Also, while I liked the touch buttons, I sometimes accidentally stopped a music track or jacked up the volume when I was moving the speaker around.

Unlike the Jambox, the Sound Kick isn’t a two-way Bluetooth speaker, so when my iPhone rang during testing, the Sound Kick wouldn’t patch my calls through the speaker.

The Sound Kick’s biggest design problem is that it didn’t feel very stable. The extra speaker space makes the device back-heavy, so when I propped it upright, it fell back; when positioned at an angle — as it’s supposed to be for better sound — it tipped over if I bumped my arm against it. Soundfreaq says that when it’s in the “kicked” position, the Sound Kick should be stable, but in the event that the speaker is knocked over, its steel front grill is meant to protect it from scratching or breaking.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive speaker dock with good sound quality that works with mobile devices and could be considered portable in a pinch, you might want to consider the Sound Kick. But, as I’m planning for my next couple trips, I realize I’m more likely to take something like the Jambox with me during travel. It’s just that much easier to carry around, also has good sound and acts as a two-way speaker, whether in the conference room, car or at home.

Did PC Sales Just Bounce Off the Bottom? Not Quite.

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:37:43 +0000

It wasn’t so long ago that if you had asked the folks at the tech research house Gartner about their predictions for PC sales in the first quarter, they would have hit you with a pretty gloomy scenario: Sales, Gartner said, would fall by 1.2 percent.

It turns out they did nothing of the kind. In fact, PC sales grew by almost 2 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Perhaps that’s not saying much. Last year, you’ll remember, was nothing less than the second-worst year for sales in the history of the PC industry after 2001 — except at Apple, which, no surprise, turned in its best year for Mac sales ever. Perhaps it might have been more realistic to predict a bounce-off-the-bottom moment.

Anyhow, here’s what Gartner saw and what its analysts think about it:

Europe and the Middle East did better than expected and grew by almost 7 percent. Asia was below expectations and emerging markets slowed down generally.

Also, the hard drive supply problem brought on by the floods in Thailand didn’t cause nearly as many problems as some had expected. As Gartner’s Mikako Kitagawa put it: “In general, the hard-disk drive supply shortage had a limited impact on PC supply during 1Q12. There was a moderate impact on selected markets, such as low-end consumer notebooks and the white-box market in selected regions. Still, low PC demand was able to mask the tight hard drive supply overall.”

So who led the market? Look at the tables. Worldwide market is first:

Lenovo grew the most, boosting its shipments by more than 28 percent, and was strong in the EMEA market, where growth was higher than expected generally. Dell underperformed, Gartner says, and saw declines in Asia year over year.

And now the U.S. market:

Overall, as you can see, the market declined by 3.5 percent. Dell’s share fell by nearly 4 percent, while HP and Apple grew. Acer’s share fell by an eye-popping 25 percent and change.

Not a bounce, at least not as far as the U.S. is concerned.

I'll Take "PC Disruptors" for $500, Alex. (What Is "a Tablet"?)

Lauren Goode — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:37:55 +0000

More evidence pointing toward tablets disrupting the PC industry: According to a new Forrester Research survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults, 35 percent of tablet owners say they use their laptops less frequently since getting a tablet, while 45 percent have no plans to buy an e-reader now that they own a tablet. The television set is faring better, however, with just 12 percent of those surveyed saying they use their TV less frequently since getting a tablet; likely because 85 percent of tablet owners cop to using their tablets while watching TV.

HP Envy Spectre 14: A Premium Ultrabook, at a Premium Price

Lauren Goode — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:00:04 +0000

Over the past six months in the personal computing world, there has been much ado about Ultrabooks — thin, lightweight laptops with Intel-determined technical specifications that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air. Windows PC makers like Dell, Lenovo, Asus and Acer have all introduced Ultrabooks, and Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer maker, has gotten into the game as well.

This week, I’ve been testing the HP Envy Spectre 14, a glass-covered laptop that falls into the Ultrabook category. The Envy Spectre hit the market in February, and the base model currently retails for $1,400.

I liked the Envy Spectre. It’s eye-catching, lighter than the laptop I usually carry, and zippy in terms of its processing power. But compared to other Ultrabooks, it’s heavier and more expensive. It’s really more of a premium product, rather than an ultra-light laptop. Also, there were a couple elements of its design, such as the fact that it wasn’t tapered and the lid was hard to open, that might prevent it from being my main laptop squeeze.

[ See post to watch video ]

The Envy Spectre 14 is 20 millimeters thick — just over 0.79 inches — and has a 13.3-inch-wide body with a 14-inch-diagonal LED-backlit display. It weighs just shy of four pounds. In comparison, the Dell XPS 13, which AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg recently reviewed, is, at its largest point, 0.71 inches thick and just under three pounds. The 13-inch MacBook Air, which at its largest point is 0.68 inches thick, also weighs in at 2.96 pounds.

Despite its thickness, the HP Envy Spectre 14 is an attractive laptop. Its aluminum body is covered with Gorilla Glass, the thin, chemically-strengthened glass that makes up the displays of many smartphones and tablets. The glass is layered over three areas of the laptop: The lid, the 1600 by 900 pixel display screen and the palm rest. The trackpad is coated with chemically etched glass, which gives it slightly more traction than the cool-to-the-touch, super glossy Gorilla Glass.

The glass is scratch-resistant — I threw my keys into my laptop bag a few times, and the laptop wasn’t scratched — but it’s definitely not smudge-resistant. As with my smartphone and iPad, it was only a matter of time before the Spectre was covered with cloudy fingerprints. Fortunately, HP has included a protective case with the laptop.

The Spectre comes with a 128 gigabyte solid-state drive, 4GB of memory, runs Windows 7 and is powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, with the option to upgrade to a faster i7 processor for an extra $200. For an additional $300, you can also get a 256GB solid-state drive.

When I fired up the Envy Spectre for the first time, I noticed how quickly it booted up and how fast it was compared to my regular laptop, a fully loaded MacBook Pro. I downloaded iTunes, purchased a new album, installed a new Web browser and ran multiple Web pages at once, including a video-streaming site; even with all that going on, the Envy Spectre didn’t seem to slow down at all.

HP claims 9.5 hours of battery life with the Envy Spectre, provided that the user has the laptop set to HP’s recommended power-saving settings. In my test of the Spectre, which involved turning off power savers and setting the display to full brightness, connecting to Wi-Fi, playing an iTunes playlist nonstop and running an email application, the battery lasted just over five hours. With more normal usage, I estimate you’ll get about an hour more.

After a week with the Envy Spectre, there were a couple of elements of its design that bugged me. The first is that it’s actually difficult to open. There’s a barely-there lip on the lid of the laptop, and every time the device was shut, I had to dig my nails around the edges to pry it open.

I also noticed that the Envy Spectre’s screen doesn’t recline as far back as some other laptop screens do. This laptop has a dropped hinge so the bottom of its display butts up against the keyboard, physically preventing it from going back further. I compared the Spectre to an Asus Ultrabook and even a MacBook Pro, and both laptops opened up wider than the Spectre does. For users who prefer a wide range of motion with their laptop screens, this could be a drawback.

But there were aspects of the hardware that I liked. The LED-backlit keyboard is a nice touch, and the keys had a velvety feel to them. The keys also have proximity sensors that sense when the user has stepped away from the laptop for an extended period, dimming the backlighting and acting as a minor battery-saving mechanism. While some people are used to function keys performing common shortcuts — such as F5 for refreshing a Web page — I liked that the Spectre’s function keys adjusted display brightness and controlled music playing.

There’s an easy-to-access volume-control wheel on the right-hand side of the keyboard. This is part of HP’s Beats product, offered in select computers, which is supposed to produce better-sounding audio. While Beats audio isn’t going to replace the sound system in your home or apartment anytime soon, the music tracks I listened to through the laptop sounded fuller with Beats, especially when heard through headphones.

Unlike the MacBook Air, the Envy Spectre comes with an expandable built-in Ethernet port, along with two USB ports, an HDMI port and a Mini Display port.

There are also some other sweeteners that HP threw in with the Envy Spectre 14, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements (which photo and video hounds will appreciate), a two-year warranty for the price of one year and a two-year Norton AntiVirus software package.

I would recommend the HP Envy Spectre 14 — but as a premium laptop, not as an Ultrabook. For consumers who want a super slim, lightweight laptop, there are options with similar technical specifications that weigh in at under three pounds and cost less.

A PC by Any Other Name

Bo Kim — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:01:59 +0000

People argue about, are we in a post-PC world. Why are we arguing? Of course we’re in a post-PC world, but that doesn’t mean the PC dies. That just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to these other things. But it’s still general computation.

– Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former technology chief

How Will PCs Sales Grow in 2012? Sloooooowly.

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:00:35 +0000

The worldwide business of PCs is still growing but it’s growing a lot slower than it used to, says the market research firm Garnter, in a forecast out today.

While 368 million units — the number Gartner reckons will be sold this year — seems like an awful lot, it amounts to growth of only 4.4 percent over 2011. The economy — Europe is still weak amid ongoing sovereign debt problems, plus supply chain troubles brought on by the flooding in Thailand where most of the world’s hard drives are made — is weighing the market down, Gartner says.

What will save it? Windows 8 and Ultrabooks, but not before 2013, when Gartner says to expect sales of 400 million PCs. They might stimulate renewed interest among consumers and businesses. But it’s hard to say.

What about Apple’s iPad and other tablets running Android eating into PC sales? There’s no question that they do. But that impact is relative: Gartner last sized up the scope of the tablet market last fall, and pegged it at 64 million units in 2012, which is probably conservative, seeing as how Apple sold 15 million iPads in the fourth quarter of 2011.

What has often happened with forecasts like this is that chipmaker Intel gets batted around a bit in a negative way, as financial analysts work the forecasts into their own expectations for the stock. If PC sales are slowing, the thinking goes, then Intel, which supplies most of the world’s PC microprocessors, will no doubt suffer.

Intel has tended to do well despite these forecasts, and cites growth in certain developing markets, like Brazil, India and Russia, where Gartner and other research firms have more limited visibility, as keeping demand for its chips growing.

Gartner tries to address that point in a summary of its forecast: Emerging markets will be key to driving growth, says its analyst, Ranjit Atwal, and most of the growth in the PC business will come from these countries through 2016. But the upshot is that if all you can think about is buying a new iPad and not a new PC, you’re not exactly alone in the world.

Big Fish Scoops Up Mobile Casino-Game Maker Self Aware Games

Lauren Goode — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:02:02 +0000

Casual-gaming company Big Fish has acquired mobile social game developer Self Aware Games, makers of Card Ave: Casino, and its parent company, Social Concepts, in a cash-equity deal of an undisclosed amount. The acquisition comes as more gaming companies are exploring opportunities in gambling-themed games and U.S. states weigh the legalization of Internet gambling. Seattle-based Big Fish, which has more than 2,500 games in its catalog and 45 million game downloads per month, saw revenue north of $180 million in 2011, the company said.

Cloud-Paging Start-Up Numecent Emerges From Stealth, Spins Off Gaming Unit Approxy (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:59:19 +0000

When you think about the way cloud computing works, there’s a progression to it, which, when taken to a logical extreme, looks a little like this: First your data migrates to the cloud and you interact with it via software that runs locally on your own machine. Then your applications go to the cloud and you run full-featured software via a browser. This is the classic software-as-a-service approach.

Now, there are lots of X-as-a-service plays in the IT world, and one of them is the desktop-as-a-service approach, where everything you need for a workaday PC can run on a virtualized server in the cloud, and all the user sees is a keyboard, mouse and screen. It’s efficient, easier and less costly to support than desktop PCs. But? You need to fully license every instance of software you use, in much the same way you would with an old-school desktop. And then there’s always the latency that comes from delivering something via the pipes, which are never quite fast enough, no matter what you do.

But what if you could deliver a full computing experience — operating systems, applications, gaming, the whole enchilada — virtually? Two weeks ago, I saw a demonstration of just such a service that kind of blew my mind. And today the company behind it, Numecent, is coming out of stealth mode and also announcing a spinoff.

First, let’s cover the basics: Numecent is a start-up run by Osman Kent, the onetime CEO and co-founder of 3Dlabs, the company that in the 1990s more or less started the graphics processor industry, which Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are the leaders of today. The company has a bunch of undisclosed investors, but last month TechCrunch reported that it had raised $2 million in a series A that was part of a larger $10 million funding round. I’m told there are 107 individual shareholders in the company.

So what does Numecent’s Technology do? It calls its technology “cloud paging,” and in its corporate literature it takes pains to explain that it is nothing like “pixel streaming,” a technique in which applications, mostly games, run on a cloud server and deliver the experience of the game — literally the pixels of a gaming environment — to a PC over the Internet. This is essentially how OnLive, a gaming outfit, works.

The fundamental problem here is that while the cloud is good for streaming linear content like movies and music, where one bit follows logically after another, it’s less good at nonlinear stuff, like applications. One bit doesn’t necessarily follow in a logical order from another, because users jump around from one process or feature to another. So if you’re trying to run a software application via the cloud, you can run into trouble pretty easily if it’s a processor-heavy program.

Cloud paging, as best I understand it, uses the Internet to transmit x86 chip instructions — basically telling the Intel or AMD processor in a PC what to do remotely. What this allows is something Numecent describes as “friction-free” computing. What that means in practice is that you could run any application on your local system from the cloud, in an almost-instant, on-demand manner. And when you’re done using it you just shut it down and your local system is left more or less untouched. When you’re done using it, it’s as if the software had never been on your PC.

Numecent’s cloud-paging scheme breaks software up into small pieces, called “pages,” that can then be pushed out dynamically. The user’s machine creates what’s called a virtual memory management unit, which handles the job of requesting the pages that are delivered. Connections between the client machine and the server are also strongly encrypted.

The end result, the company says, is a reduction by as much as 60x in deployment and delivery time of applications. And there’s also nothing to maintain. When the user is done using the virtual application or machine, there’s nothing left on the client machine.

Let’s say you’re a part-time graphic designer who works for a company only two days a week. The company would normally have to pay for you to have Adobe Creative Suite installed on the machine you use. This can easily run a few thousand dollars. But if you could check it out for a few hours and run it on a cloud server, with the same features and the same native speed, as though it were installed on your local system, it would cost your employer a lot less.

Central to all this are 10 patents that Numecent has on its cloud-paging technology. I’m told that these are battle-tested patents, and that Microsoft and Citrix Systems are among its licensees.

The same experience can be applied to games. Most games worth having can be bought from download stores today, but they’re huge and take a lot of time to download and then install. What if you could just play whatever game you wanted, pay for the time you use it, and then stop paying when you’re done? That’s sort of the idea behind Approxy, a spinoff that Numecent is launching today, as well. Yavuz Ahiska, another 3Dlabs alum, is taking it out of Numecent, and plans to offer a white-labeled cloud gaming service that gaming companies can license. Approxy is described in a lot more detail in the video (below) that Numecent shared with me exclusively.

Numecent’s plan is to essentially spin out different companies that put its cloud-paging technology to work in different contexts.

Approxy from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

For Backup, You've Got a Friend, Family or Cloud

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:05:55 +0000

Nothing elicits such a strong case of technology guilt as asking other people if they back up their computers. Eyes dart toward the ground. Excuses are made. The subject is quickly changed.

As many people know or quickly find out, backing up a computer can be a painfully slow process. This week, I tested a computer-backup system that requires minimal effort and works in the background to automatically back up files: CrashPlan. This appropriately named program is made by Code 42 Software, a Minneapolis-based company.

[ See post to watch video ]

CrashPlan works with all types of operating systems and lets users back up to remote servers in the cloud and/or other computers or hard drives, like another PC they own or one belonging to a good friend or family member (as long as they give permission). The system also sets no restrictions on file size.

On a typical home Internet connection, the backup process to a CrashPlan remote server could take several days or even weeks for a first-time backup. (After that, backups are much faster and happen unnoticed.) The first-time backup for one of my laptops with about 46 gigabytes of data had been running almost continuously for three days when I filed this column on Tuesday. After the initial backup, regular backups won’t take nearly as long. CrashPlan has a mobile app that works on Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Android and Windows Phone 7, allowing remote access to backed-up files.

The free version of CrashPlan enables a daily backup to other computers and hard drives but not to Code 42’s remote servers. The subscription-based CrashPlan+ will back up to the remote servers as well as other computers or hard drives. It can back up as often as once a minute and lets users choose what data to back up where.

CrashPlan’s straightforward user interface clearly shows what your data are doing and where they are being stored.

CrashPlan+ comes in three payment plans, each with its own tiered rates — from a month-to-month option to a four-year subscription. For each of the three plans, the four-year subscription is the least expensive at $70, or about $1.50 a month per computer for up to 10 gigabytes of data; $140 or $3 monthly per computer for unlimited storage; and $288 or $6 monthly for up to 10 computers and unlimited storage. The company offers a free 30-day trial.

I got started by downloading the software to my MacBook, creating an account and starting the initial backup. A scan of my data took a few minutes before the actual backup began. Using my Verizon DSL connection over Wi-Fi, the estimates of how long it would take changed dramatically by the second. I saw estimates of as much as 17.5 days and as little as 6.6 hours.

I also downloaded CrashPlan onto my office Windows PC, which has a fast, hard-wired Ethernet connection. I logged into my account and opted to back up a folder of photos that was roughly 16 gigabytes. The estimate for this backup was a little over one day, though I didn’t adjust CrashPlan settings to get the fastest transfer on this PC. In a simple menu, I could opt to back up the Windows PC to my MacBook as well as to remote servers — or just to the MacBook alone. On my MacBook, I made sure to adjust the settings to get the fastest speed possible for my giant backup.

Code 42 CEO Matthew Dornquast said the worst-case scenario speeds are initially displayed, but that these adjust down as time goes on. In my experience, the initial estimates didn’t change much.

CrashPlan backs up your newest files first on the assumption those mean the most to you, and it encrypts all files, so file names can’t be read on remote servers or backup computers. I liked CrashPlan’s straightforward user interface because it clearly showed me what my data were doing and where it was being stored. A section labeled “Destinations” let me choose where data was backed up and options included “CrashPlan Central” (remote servers), “Friend,” “Another Computer” or “Folder.” A section labeled “Files” showed exactly what was being stored; in my case, this meant 285,930 files. An “Inbound” section showed any computers that were using my computer for backup.

A CrashPlan mobile app is available on a Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android phone.

In settings, users can opt to be emailed or even sent direct messages via Twitter that tell them the latest backup status. This is helpful if you’re only backing up to, say, one other PC in your house and that PC fails to back up.

In addition to over-the-air backups, CrashPlan users with a lot of data, very little patience or both may want to try an alternate option. For $125 (including shipping both ways) and a monthly fee for remote storage, the company will send a one-terabyte hard drive that can be loaded with data and mailed back. Once that huge block of data is initially stored on remote servers, regular backups won’t take nearly as long.

To get data back, a “Restore to Your Door” feature will send you a hard drive filled with your data so you can load it onto a new computer. This also costs $125 (with shipping both ways) and the monthly cost of remote storage.

Compared with competitors, CrashPlan fares well. For example, CrashPlan doesn’t limit upload or download speeds, while Carbonite limits upload speeds for large amounts of data after a certain amount has been backed up, further slowing the process. Mozy supports external drives, but this backup is deleted if the drive is disconnected or turned off for more than 30 days. CrashPlan keeps the backup indefinitely, waiting for the drive to be reconnected.

Email katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Activision CEO Hirshberg Says His Call of Duty Is to Take Creative Risks

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:11:40 +0000

Activision Publishing’s CEO Eric Hirshberg said as the maker of the most successful first-person shooter, Call of Duty, it was a risk bringing a children’s game to market.

But he said Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, which attempts to bring physical toys to life through videogames, has been worth it.

“It was scary,” he said. “But if you truly have a breakthrough idea, then you have to have the confidence to treat it as one because they don’t come around very often.”

To be sure, the game was a major deviation from the company’s war-based roots.

It melds physical toys with videogames by using a “portal,” which is plugged into the game console. Once a Skylanders toy is placed on the portal, the character transports into the game and comes to life on the screen.

In 2011, the game was the tenth-best seller after launching in October, and was the only title to make the list that wasn’t a sequel. Additionally, it was the only kids game.

Hirshberg appeared this morning as the keynote speaker at DICE, an annual videogame summit held in Las Vegas.

His speech, titled “The Eric Hirshberg Experiment,” addressed how he has a nontraditional background as a CEO, but that Activision Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick saw the usefulness of his creative background. Rather than being a trained operations or finance manager, Hirshberg is a marketing type who is more likely found drawing and bringing a sketch pad to meetings.

“There are other creative CEOs, but they generally founded the companies, like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs,” he said. “But if creativity is at the core of your business, maybe it should be at the core of how they make decisions.”

Skylanders is just one case in point.

To make it the best experience possible, Hirshberg said they delayed the game’s launch by a year and spent the time getting the toys right, so they could compete side by side with characters developed by Pixar or Disney.

They also spent time making sure the game could work across platforms, so kids could play it at any of their friends’ houses regardless if they had a PC, Xbox, Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Wii.

As a result, every decision resulted in taking on more risk and spending more money.

Last night, Skylanders was voted as the most outstanding innovation in gaming as part of the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, which are decided on by members of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

“We knew a lot of things had to go right — the core to that was bringing the toys to life. We knew that was magical, and if we got it right, it would have huge potential,” Hirshberg said. “We had the whole package. We had a great game and a great story and then pushed with all of our might with a big marketing plan.”

Yesterday, Activision reported fourth-quarter results, reporting well above its internal guidance and Wall Street analyst expectations, driven by extremely strong sales of Call of Duty, but also strong sales of Skylanders as well as, plus stable subscriber figures of its online game, World of Warcraft.

Additionally, the NPD Group said yesterday that the Skylanders toys were a top-selling accessory in January. It said that the toys were the highest-ranking item last month, and that collectively, Skylanders accessories represented 22 percent of all accessory sales.

For sure, Hirshberg has early successes to point to, but the experiment is ongoing.

For iPad and Mobile Devices, a 'Port' out of the Norm

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:04:27 +0000

The pocket-size USB flash drive has become nearly ubiquitous in the PC world, for moving files among machines and for adding extra storage. But it can’t be used with most tablets because they lack standard USB ports.

[ See post to watch video ]

Now, there’s a special, modified, pocket flash drive that works as usual with PCs and Macs, but can transfer and stream files to popular mobile devices without standard USB ports, such as Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and many other Android devices. Its secret: It has built-in Wi-Fi to beam the files to and from tablets and smartphones wirelessly. It can even stream files like videos to many devices simultaneously.

The AirStash drive with removable SD memory card

It’s called the AirStash and is made by a tiny company called Wearable Inc., and distributed by Maxell Corp. It’s available at Amazon.com and a few other retailers for $150 for an 8 gigabyte model, which can increase the storage capacity of a base iPad by 50 percent. An AirStash model with 16 gigabytes is $180.

The AirStash is a clever device that solves a genuine problem, though not without some issues. In my tests, it worked as advertised, without crashing or exhibiting bugs. But it’s pricey and has one big drawback: When a device is connected to the AirStash via Wi-Fi, it can’t be connected to the Internet. The company plans a fix for that as early as next month.

The AirStash looks like other USB flash drives, except a bit wider. Its storage is provided by a removable SD memory card that pops into the bottom edge. You can substitute your own larger card. In fact, you can swap in the memory card from your camera and beam your photos.

This product is aimed at the iPad and iPhone, and the company has a free app for those products that makes it easy to manage and view the files on the drive. But its wireless file transfers also work, via the Web browser, on non-Apple devices, even computers. And the company plans an Android version of the app.

A typical way to use the AirStash would be to first plug it into your computer like any flash drive and copy onto it photos, documents, videos, podcasts or songs. Then remove it from the computer and press a small button on the front of the AirStash that turns on its Wi-Fi network. Next, you connect your iPad to this network, launch the AirStash app and all the files on the drive show up.

The AirStash app allows an iPad to wirelessly import photos from the drive.

The AirStash app allows an iPad to create a new directory on the drive, below.

From the app, you can view documents, play songs, watch videos, view photos or listen to podcasts. On a non-Apple device, there’s no special app, but you can still access the content on the drive. You just link up to the AirStash Wi-Fi network, launch your Web browser and go to airstash.net. A page appears with a list of the drive’s contents.

AirStash performed some feats I found impressive. In one test, I was able, from about 75 feet away, to flawlessly watch three movies stored on the AirStash at the same time on three devices. I had “Inception” playing on an iPad, “The King’s Speech” playing on a Kindle Fire and “Star Trek” playing on a Dell laptop. I stress, none of these movies was stored on the devices—all were stored on the AirStash.

In another test, I was able to watch a movie on an iPad, play a song on an Android-based Motorola Droid and read a PDF file on a Mac, simultaneously. Once again, all these files were stored on an AirStash drive 75 feet away.

The AirStash can beam material to as many as eight devices at once, except for video, where the limit is three devices. It can beam the same video to three devices at the same time. A parent could use one AirStash to provide different videos to each of three kids during a drive in the car.

Wearable, the maker of the AirStash, boasts it works in both directions: You can also write files to the AirStash from a device like an iPad. Technically, this is true. For instance, from the AirStash app, you can export photos stored on an iPad or iPhone to the drive.

But several iPad apps for viewing or editing documents, which the company says work with AirStash, require a geeky setup process, and I couldn’t get them to send edited documents back to the drive.

There are some other limitations. For instance, on non-Apple devices, the Web interface is rudimentary, and on the Kindle Fire, music can’t be streamed from the AirStash.

Finally, unlike most other flash drives, the AirStash has a battery to power its Wi-Fi. The company claims up to seven hours of continuous battery life between charges, and while I didn’t do a formal test, the battery life seemed good to me. You can recharge the device either through a standard USB wall charger, like those that come with cellphones, or by plugging it into the USB port of a computer. In the latter case, the Wi-Fi capability can’t be used while charging.

If you’re pining for easier file transfer or expanded storage on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile device without a standard USB port, the AirStash might be the ticket, albeit an expensive one.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Apple Sold More iPads Than HP Sold PCs

John Paczkowski — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:05:20 +0000

Here’s a metric worth noting: With the monstrous quarter it reported today, Apple surpassed Hewlett-Packard in PC sales and revenue. Apple sold 15.4 million iPads and 5.2 million Macs in its first quarter. That’s more than 20 million personal computing devices. HP’s PC sales for the fourth quarter were 14.7 million, according to Gartner. Which means Apple’s iPad sales alone surpassed HP’s PC sales, as Apple Insider first noted.

Now, to be clear, Gartner’s figure doesn’t include the ill-starred TouchPad. But sources familiar with HP’s build plans say the initial TouchPad order came in somewhere between 1.8 million and two million units. So, even if HP had sold every TouchPad it built, it wouldn’t have matched Apple.

There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!

Kara Swisher — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:26:06 +0000

Just as the annual Consumer Electronics Show kicks off this week, according to a report from the NPD Group: Consumer electronics sales during this past holiday period dropped six percent from last year.

That should be some not-so-welcome news for the vendors at the Las Vegas gadget confab, which is seeking to show off new wares to excite said consumers.

Those offerings had better step it up, from a look at the NPD Weekly Tracking Service, which noted that the decline was coming off another decline from a year ago.

While 2011′s drop was not as bad as 2010′s, it’s not the right direction, although the tally did not include some of the more explosive device categories being prominently featured at CES, such as tablets.

Said NPD: “Total consumer technology sales (excluding cell phones, tablets, e-readers, and video games) fell 5.9 percent to around $9.5 billion for the 5 weeks ending December 24, a slight improvement over the 6.2 percent decline in 2010.”

Sales of personal computers and televisions fell 4 percent, with flat unit volumes.

“2010 was the first year in quite awhile where the real drags on the core CE marketplace were not TVs and PCs,” said Stephen Baker, VP of industry analysis at NPD, in a press release. “Revenue for those two segments outperformed while the rest of the market dropped by more than 7 percent. The accelerated rate of decline in older technology categories such as DVD, GPS and MP3 players put a ceiling on how well the industry could perform during the holiday.”

Consumers did snap up flat-panel TVs, with screen sizes of 50 inches and higher rising by 32 percent in unit sales.

And the rocky 3-D TV business also grew by more than 100 percent, with TVs with “3D capability accounting for more than one in every five dollars spent on TVs during the holiday.”

Also up: Home theater systems (10 percent) and stand-alone streaming devices (65 percent).

But those increases did not stem the overall negative tide.

For other sectors, here’s the damage to holiday revenue in percentage change from 2011 dollars spent:

Blu-ray players: Down 17 percent.

Camcorders: Down 42.5 percent.

Digital picture frames: Down 37.5 percent.

GPS: Down 32.6 percent.

HDD: Down 25.1 percent.

Mice and keyboards: Down 7.1 percent.

MP3 players: Down 20.5 percent.

Multifunction printers: Down 9.9 percent.

Point-and-shoot cameras: Down 20.8 percent.

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Vizio Jumps Into PC Fray

Ian Sherr — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:57:53 +0000

Vizio Inc., which shook up the market with inexpensive high-definition televisions, now wants to become a computer manufacturer.

The Irvine, Calif., company, which ranks as one of the top sellers of televisions in the U.S., plans to show a line of thin laptop computers and all-in-one desktop PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

At CES, Control Your Computer Screen With Your "Gaze"

Lauren Goode — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:15:06 +0000

At last year’s D9 conference, Sweden-based Tobii demonstrated cool eye-tracking technology that enables users to control a PC without hands.

At next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Tobii plans to show off how its interactive eye-tracking software, called Gaze, works with Microsoft’s Windows 8 Metro interface.

Gaze would go in a compact rectangular device — smaller than the current 8-inch Tobii IS-1 tracker — that sits below the laptop screen and tracks a user’s eye movement using sensors built into the bar. You activate Gaze by tapping the trackpad once, and Gaze takes a few seconds to find your pupil and calculate the point of gaze using mathematical algorithms. An imaginary “head movement box” is created to delineate a range of motion in which you can still move your head and have the device track you.

In terms of precision, Tobii says the sensors measure within a quarter-inch of the tile or icon you’re looking at. For smaller icons or small text, Gaze still allows a user to navigate the cursor using the laptop’s trackpad, by pressing their fingers down on the pad instead of tapping it once.

Here’s a video showing how it works on Windows 8:

Gaze could, theoretically, work on tablets, too. But Tobii business development manager Anders Olsson says that tablet interaction is so smooth to begin with — with capacitive touch within an arm’s length of the user — that tablets don’t need much improvement. It’s boring old laptops that could use a boost.

“Gaze takes away the whole intermediate step of having a mouse or even using touch technology,” Olsson said in an interview. “We see this as an important innovation because, compared to tablets, laptops feel very ancient right now, in terms of user experience.”

While eye-tracking tech like Gaze could make sense for TV viewing as well, given the growing interest in gesture technology, Olsson said Tobii’s technology isn’t quite up to speed for TV. In fact, it could be a couple more years before Gaze hits the mass market.

Tobii doesn’t plan to sell Gaze directly to consumers, but will work with electronics manufacturers to ship on laptops. While the company says it is in talks with computer makers and electronics manufacturers, it hasn’t officially partnered with anyone, including Microsoft, for the development of Tobii Gaze (although Microsoft is expected to show Tobii eye-tracking demos at its CES booth, as well).

Eye-tracking technology isn’t new, but until now it has been used primarily in niche markets, as a tool for people with severe physical disabilities, or for psychological researchers who monitor eye movement to determine cognitive abilities.

Tobii has been around since 2001, and currently holds 13 patents in the area of eye-tracking tech.

(Image credit: Flickr/Mike Garza)

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IBM Predicts Home Electricity From Your Bike, Mind-Reading Computers

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:29:37 +0000

There’s something about the reflective, year-end state of mind that causes tech companies and institutions (and pundits) to make predictions about what they think is plausibly in our near future.

One example is the annual tech prediction by analyst Mark Anderson, which I wrote about last week. Another is IBM’s recurring “Five in Five” series, wherein Big Blue looks at the unfolding technology landscape and predicts what innovations are still just this side of “gee whiz” today, but will be commonplace within five years.

Think back to what we were doing in 2006, and how far things have come in that short period of time in terms of consumer and enterprise technology. The iPhone existed only as an Apple prototype. Facebook had just opened itself up to the population at large, beyond just college and university students. Twitter was just getting started. And a tablet was a not-terribly-popular PC design.

As you’ll see, some of these five predictions aren’t exactly mind-blowing, especially if you pay attention to general technology trends. Over the past decade, you’ve probably already heard predictions saying that computer passwords will go away and be replaced by biometrics of some kind, whether in the form of fingerprints or voice authorization or some part of your eyeball. Also: Junk mail I actually want? That one I’ll believe when I see it. However, I really like the “think to call” idea, which sounds like a super speed-dial.

Anyhow, here are IBM’s predictions for stuff we’ll see by 2016, and a video explaining them in a little more detail:

You will make your own energy: Anything that moves has the potential to create energy. Your running shoes, your bicycle and even the water flowing through your pipes can create energy. Advances in renewable energy technology will allow individuals and scientists to collect this energy and use it to help power our homes, offices and cities.

You will not need a password: Your biological makeup is the key to your individual identity, and soon, it will become the key to safeguarding it. Each person’s unique biometric data such as facial definitions, retinol scans and voice files will be composited through software to build your DNA-unique online password. You will be able to log into your mobile phone or have access to an ATM machine by simply speaking your name or looking into a camera.

Mind reading is no longer science fiction: Scientists are researching how to link your brain to your devices, such as a computer or a smartphone, so you just need to think about calling someone and it happens. Scientists have designed headsets with advanced sensors to read electrical brain activity that can recognize facial expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and thoughts of a person without them physically doing anything.

The digital divide will cease to exist: In five years, the gap between information haves and have-nots will narrow considerably due to advances in mobile technology. Growing communities will be able to use mobile technology to provide access to essential information and better serve people with new solutions such as mobile commerce and remote healthcare.

Junk mail will become priority mail: Think about how often we’re flooded with advertisements we consider to be irrelevant or unwanted — it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem spam is dead. Systems will be able to filter and find only the data that’s important and relevant to you and will bring you the information without you having to ask for it.

Loading Photos Into the Kindle Fire

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:38:34 +0000

How do I load family pictures into the Kindle Fire that I just bought for my 94-year-old mother?

One of the weaknesses of the Fire is that it is heavily tied into Amazon’s cloud services, and, unlike Google or Apple, Amazon doesn’t have a cloud-based photo service. There are a number of work-arounds for getting photos into the Fire. Here are two. In my tests of the Kindle Fire, I found that the simplest method was to plug it into a laptop using a special USB cable (not included) and drag photos onto the Fire from the laptop. You also can save photos to the Fire that are attached to emails received on the device, but I found this didn’t always work.

Do you have any guidance about all-in-one touch-screen desktop PCs for the holiday buying season?

I haven’t reviewed these in a long time, but take a look at Hewlett-Packard’s latest TouchSmart models, which seem well-equipped and start at $600, after various discounts. Note: I don’t know how well the touch screens on these PCs, or any others currently on the market, will work with the upcoming Windows 8, due out next year.

I have an Asus Transformer tablet and want to get Swype on it. How can I get it?

Swype, which is an alternate keyboard for Android devices that works by letting you swipe your fingers across letters, typically comes preloaded on devices, rather than being installed by users like a typical app. The product’s site, at swype.com, shows how you can tell if your device came with it. If not, you can try installing a beta version by going to beta.swype.com.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.