As a pioneering mobile device company, one would think that “mobile first” is a redundant call to arms for BlackBerry. And of course it is. By making that remark, Heins was offering a broader point about BlackBerry’s view of the mobile space. As he said later, “We believe in a single element of mobile computing: The one on your hip.”

It’s BlackBerry’s view that the smartphone is not simply a handset, but also a mobile computing engine that can drive the other devices we use during our daily lives — our entertainment systems, the tech in our cars and other connected peripherals. And it’s Heins’s opinion that there will soon be another disruption in mobile computing as the industry more broadly adopts that view.

“Mobile has become a fundamental part of our lives, and the next decade will see a major shift in how it impacts our lives,” Heins said. “It will be as monumental as the shift from wired to wireless.”

And BlackBerry is positioning itself to take advantage of it. Said Heins, “We will show the world that BlackBerry understands the mobile world better than anyone else.”

Big talk for a company still struggling to turn itself around. But that’s what these keynote events are all about — victory laps and optimism. And after a few years of floundering, BlackBerry does finally seem to be crystallizing its view of the space in which it competes and how best to succeed in it.

“Drilling down from desktop experiences and trying to fit them in the mobile space just doesn’t work,” Heins said. “People don’t want the desktop experience in a mobile device. Mobile devices need a mobile experience. Putting the desktop paradigm on them doesn’t work. Our only focus is mobile. We are the original mobile-first company.”

So that’s the big pitch. And now that Heins has made it, BlackBerry has to begin the difficult work of delivering on it. A daunting task when Apple and Google continue to so thoroughly dominate the mobile computing space. But BlackBerry has managed to hang on this long after the upheaval of 2012. Who’s to say it won’t scramble back.

“Some people told me last year that BlackBerry World would be the company’s last conference and my first and last time on the stage,” Heins said. “Well, I’m happy to say they were wrong. Not only are we still here, we are firing on all cylinders and we are definitely in the race.”

But not everyone listens. And it’s not just that one guy you see blatantly ignoring the flight attendent’s request. A new survey from the Consumer Electronics Association finds that 30 percent of people admit to at least occasionally forgetting to turn off a device, most often a smartphone.

What’s more, lots more folks admit that when they do turn off their device, they are really only putting it in “airplane mode,” which turns off the cellular radio but leaves the device on.

And, of course, that’s what people will admit to in a survey.

The poll comes as the Federal Aviation Administration is pondering whether to change its electronics policies. Oh, yeah, and FAA, you are already letting pilots use iPads in the cockpit, so let’s not pretend the Kindle in 32B is going to affect things.

“Airline passengers have come to rely on their smartphones, tablets and e-Readers as essential travel companions,” CEA Vice President of Technology Policy Doug Johnson said in a statement. “Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of passengers that are using electronic devices while traveling will help the FAA make informed decisions.”

The Seattle e-commerce giant has recently been developing a wide-ranging lineup of gadgets — including two smartphones and an audio-only streaming device — to expand its reach beyond its Kindle Fire line of tablet computers, said people familiar with the company’s plans.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This according to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who, in a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, claimed that current tablets suffer from a lack of PC features — features that Microsoft is delivering to them with Surface and Windows 8.

“With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device,” Gates said. “A lot of those users are frustrated. They can’t type. They can’t create documents. They don’t have Office there. So we are providing them something with the benefits they have seen that have made that a big category, without giving up what they expect in a PC.”

That’s the theory, anyway — though an unproven one at best. According to the latest data from research firm IDC, Microsoft shipped about 900,000 Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets in the first quarter of the year — enough to claim a 1.8 percent share of the tablet market. So if with Surface and Windows 8 Microsoft is finally giving consumers the tablet they really want, consumers haven’t yet realized it. Which is odd, because Microsoft is marketing them with a campaign estimated to cost about $1.5 billion.

You’d think that if a signficant portion of the tablet market really does want the more chimeric device Gates describes, Surface would be doing quite a bit better at market than it is currently. But it’s not. Not yet, anyway.

Perhaps that’s because consumer expectations for what a tablet is and should be have been set by the iPad, and Microsoft needs to change them — not an easy thing to do. Or perhaps it’s because Microsoft has misjudged the tablet market by viewing it through that aging, dusty PC-as-Alpha-and-Omega lens of which it’s so fond.

Gates’s remarks begin at about 7:20 in the video below:

Courtesy 2K Games

When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known.

And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol.

Although the WWI dogfighting game — scheduled to launch on May 9 — will be iOS-only, Meier acknowledged that “there’s certainly a logic into looking into other platforms and seeing what the possibilities are.” He caught up with AllThingsD on the phone recently to talk about how he sees the changing landscape of games.

CC BY-SA 2.0 Antonio Fucito

Sid Meier: The very early console games were very simple, twitchy hand-eye coordination games. And then, over time, strategy became okay to do on console. I think we’re going to go through a similar evolution with mobile, where initially the games are pretty casual and simple, but that’s not because of any restrictions in the platform or anything, it’s just that the market is gonna evolve and the audience is gonna evolve. There’s definitely a role for more strategy-oriented games on mobile.

And do you think that’ll go mainstream, or will that be a niche audience?

I think [strategy] is probably not going to be the predominant genre on mobile, but it will grow in the same way it has grown in the PC market and the console market. In a lot of ways, it’s more suitable to mobile than console because, on mobile, you could potentially be distracted, so you want a game that’s played at the player’s pace, and not at a pace that’s driven by the game itself — something you can start and stop, and put away for a while.

What about multiplayer? Depending on whom you ask, the future of multiplayer games could be asynchronous and turn-based, or all about playing live, either in the same room or on different devices anywhere in the world. Do you have a dog in the fight?

Since our game is turn-based, we chose to support two of those modes. One is the asynchronous mode, where you can have 10 games going on at the same time with 10 different people. The other mode, which we’re calling “hot-pad” mode, is where you’re playing on the same machine with the same player. Real-time multiplayer is suited to another type of game. I’m playing a lot of World of Tanks right now, and that works really well as a real-time multiplayer game. It might not work so well on mobile, where you might get a phone call, or maybe you’re traveling and you can’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to hang around until the end of the game.

What did you learn from the experience of heading up such a small team on Ace Patrol? Do you think you will do the same thing in mobile again?

I’ve enjoyed the small-team aspect — fewer meetings, and more time to actually work on the game. And I’ve learned really to kind of appreciate some of the unique features of the mobile platform: The touchscreen, the gestures, the swiping, the pinching. That tactile interaction between the player and the game really connects you more closely with what’s happening on the screen. We’re very impressed with just the raw horsepower of the platform. For a flight game, it’s fun to have a 3-D world to fly through … we actually weren’t sure whether we could do that when we started. Also, [we've learned] how many of our core strategy game elements that we’ve used on other platforms seem to work fairly well on iOS.

And that’s interesting because not all games are as mobile-friendly as others. Will Firaxis be doing more with turn-based games on mobile?

I think it works very well, yes. There are certainly some real-time games that work just fine. But the turn-based games that we’ve done, whether it’s Haunted Hollow or Ace Patrol or XCOM, later this summer, just all seem to be a natural fit for the mobile platforms. Is it part of our future? I think the answer is pretty assuredly yes. But we’re not giving up on PCs. They’re our bread and butter, and the new consoles are very interesting, but we definitely see mobile as a significant part of our future going forward.

What do you think about what Microsoft is doing with Windows? Obviously, they have the legacy title for being the home of PC gaming, and yet, in some ways, they’re making their main OS a lot more like a mobile operating system.

That’s a very interesting development. The PC market is splitting into tablet PCs and the traditional desktop PCs. These games that we’re doing cross over really nicely into tablet PCs or any kind of mobile format. That’s another reason why we’re looking really seriously at this market. I’m not sure what’s happening in the PC market, whether it’s going to go toward tablet or continue to be really strong in desktop. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Acer had planned to debut an RT tablet in the first quarter of 2013. But the company decided against it when Microsoft announced the Surface RT. “Originally we had a very aggressive plan to come out very early next year,” Acer President Jim Wong said of the company’s RT tablet last October. “But because of Surface … we are much more cautious. Originally our plan was Q1, but now I don’t think it will be earlier than Q2.”

Evidently, the ensuing months haven’t done much to convince Acer to bring a Windows RT tablet to market, because the company hasn’t launched one yet, and it continues to be cagey about its plans for doing so.

Speaking at a company event last Friday, Wong said Acer has decided against releasing a tablet running the current version of Windows RT, though it may build one for the next generation of the OS.

“The plan for an RT tablet is ongoing,” Wong said. “To be honest, there’s no value doing the current version of RT.”

Harsh words. But then, Windows RT tablet sales haven’t been all that hot. Certainly Acer isn’t missing out on much by taking a wait-and-see approach to the RT tablet market.

That was my first thought when I heard about Acer’s new Aspire R7 Windows 8 notebook.

Unveiled today at an event in New York, the Aspire R7 is a Windows 8 laptop, but its design is unique.

Part notebook, part all-in-one PC, part tablet, the machine features a 15.6-inch, 1,920 by 1,080-pixel touchscreen that’s mounted on an “Ezel” hinge so you can reposition the display to your liking. You can angle it to use it like a regular laptop, flip the screen over to watch movies, or lay it on top of the keyboard to use it like a tablet.

Acer also switched the location of the keyboard and trackpad: The trackpad is now located at the top of the laptop, with the backlit keyboard just below it. WTF, right?

Acer’s thinking is that you can simply angle the display right to the edge of the keyboard, and use the touchscreen rather than the trackpad to launch applications, click on items and so on.

I get what Acer was going for, but I’m not entirely sold on this design. There are still times where a trackpad might be more useful than a touchscreen, and having to reach over the keyboard to use it seems awkward and uncomfortable.

While PC manufacturers have been toying with these new hybrid designs of late, they come with compromises, and many times you’d be better off going with a standalone notebook or tablet. But I’ll reserve judgment on the Aspire R7 until I’ve actually used it in person.

As far as the guts of the machine, it has an Intel Core i5 processor, a 500 gigabyte hard drive, a 24GB solid-state drive and 6GB of memory. Ports include three USB ports, HDMI and an SD card reader.

The Aspire R7 will be available exclusively at Best Buy on May 17, with a starting price of $1,000. You can preorder one starting today.

In addition to the R7, Acer announced the 7.9-inch Iconia A1 Android tablet and the Aspire P3 Windows 8 Ultrabook convertible, a slimmed-down version of its Aspire V5 notebooks and Aspire V7 Ultrabook.

The new details about the decision to name Krzanich as the successor to retiring CEO Paul Otellini emerged in a brief report by CNBC’s Jon Fortt (video below) after he talked with Chairman Andy Bryant, who led the board’s search.

The joint pitch initially threw the board for a bit of a loop if only because it’s a highly unusual — and, one would presume, risky — move, in so delicate a matter as CEO succession at one of the world’s most influential tech companies. While the conclusion, at least as far as Krzanich goes, certainly appears to have been a predictable one — every Intel CEO since Andy Grove has been COO first — outsiders were still in the running until the very end.

Also a key selling point, though there are as yet no particulars about this, was Krzanich and James’ vision for pursuing the mobile market where Intel is as yet not participating significantly. Expect more noise on that subject once the pair starts their new jobs after May 16.

Samsung is planning to launch the new Galaxy-line tablet in June, according to a person familiar with the matter, adding to the seven-inch and 10.1-inch versions on the market.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

I’m ready to get a new system now, and choosing one is proving to be a difficult decision. Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii U are the most well-known and popular ones. But I don’t want to spend a lot of money, and I already have a Roku set-top box and DVD player, so I don’t necessarily need the entertainment aspects of those systems. What to get?

Enter Green Throttle. Started by one of the co-creators of the Guitar Hero videogame with two former Palm employees, Green Throttle is an app and game-controller solution that aims to turn your existing Android tablet or smartphone into a game console.

The only thing you have to buy is the Atlas game controller, which costs $40 and connects via Bluetooth. If your mobile device can be plugged into a TV for playing video, the company also sells bundles that include special cables for connecting to your HDTV. Meanwhile, the company’s free Arena application acts as the game center, where you can download titles and play games.

Green Throttle is more about enhancing the game-playing experience of mobile devices, rather than being a direct competitor to Xbox or PlayStation. And it succeeds in that goal. The controller allows for more precision and capabilities than a touchscreen. It’s also nice to be able to play games on a bigger screen. But there’s a big drawback, and that’s its lack of compatible games. There are currently fewer than a dozen games that work with Green Throttle, so it’s simply not worth buying right now — though it has potential.

Green Throttle works with any device running on Google’s Android operating system, version 4.0 or higher. I tested it on the Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD, and setup was relatively painless.

After turning on the Atlas controller and downloading the Arena from the Google Play Store, I went to the app’s settings menu to connect the controller. The pairing process took some time, though. Normally, when I connect a Bluetooth headset or keyboard to a smartphone or tablet for the first time, the whole process only takes a couple of minutes.

With Green Throttle, it took at least a few minutes for both tablets to find the Atlas controller. Enough time had elapsed that I thought something might be wrong, but eventually I got a prompt to connect to the controller, and I was up and running shortly after that. Fortunately, once paired, reconnections were almost instantaneous.

The controller is similar to the ones used with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s powered by two AA batteries (included in the package), and there are two joysticks, a directional pad, X, Y, A, B buttons, and two trigger and two shoulder buttons on the top edge of the controller. The power, start and back buttons are located in the middle. All the controls were within easy reach, and provided good feedback — not too stiff or mushy-feeling.

The user interface of the Green Throttle Arena game hub is pretty straightforward. There are four tabbed sections you can peruse: Home, My Games, Recommended and Settings. The latter is self-explanatory. Home features the latest Green Throttle news, recent games and featured games. My Games is where you’ll find all your downloaded titles, while Recommended surfaces editors’ picks.

A couple of things were missing: One is a search feature for looking up specific titles; the other is the ability to look for games by type, such as action, puzzle, sports and so on. Green Throttle says it will add both functions in the future.

For now, this isn’t a huge issue, since there aren’t that many games. Games must be built to work with the Atlas controllers, so you can’t use them to play titles you’ve already downloaded from the Google Play store.

Currently, there are only eight available titles from the Arena game store, with six c. Green Throttle said it is adding one or two new games to the store every week, and more than 500 companies are using its software to build titles for the system, including a few well-known console game developers.

I tried all eight titles. Most are casual or retro-style arcade games. Given the limitations of a mobile device’s hardware (computing and graphics power, memory, etc.), you won’t find any really complex or graphics-intensive titles, compared to dedicated game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation, or even the Razer Edge gaming tablet. So, if you’re looking for big-name titles like Assassin’s Creed III or BioShock Infinite, this isn’t the system for you.

Instead, you get games like Coral Combat, a Space Invaders-type game that takes place underwater, or FishTails, a racing game where you have to collect as many coins as possible while dodging obstacles. There are also multiplayer games like Crystal Swarm, where you can team up to kill alien bugs. I played the game with a friend, using the Kindle Fire HD hooked up to my Samsung TV.

They’re all worth a try (most games are free, but APO Snow costs $1.99, and Gunslugs costs $1.49), but given their simple nature, I wasn’t drawn to play them on a regular basis, with the exception of the snowboarding game APO Snow, and Blocks Party.

Performance was smooth. Also, having a controller with physical buttons made it easy to navigate through the games and accomplish moves.

Final score: Green Throttle takes the mobile gaming experience to the next level in an affordable way, but it’s not worth it until it beefs up its game selection.

Update: Shortly after this review was originally published, Green Throttle announced six new games for the Arena app, including The Bard’s Tale and Duke Nukem 3D.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130425/green-throttle-takes-a-few-mobile-games-to-the-living-room/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130424/all-eyes-still-on-mobile-as-zynga-earnings-approach/ http://allthingsd.com/20130424/all-eyes-still-on-mobile-as-zynga-earnings-approach/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:47:10 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=315068 The adage is tired at this point — the tech industry is shifting to mobile, and everyone knows it.

Thing is, that still doesn’t change the harsh truth for companies braving the huge, often uncomfortable transition to the mobile world after years of building a business on the Web.

That’s the perfect way to describe Zynga — which reports earnings today after the bell — the social gaming company smack in the middle of a long, slow trudge toward creating a “mobile first” business. (Sound familiar? Just ask our friends over at Facebook, and the many PC makers whose market is drying up in front of their eyes as tablets and smartphones eat their lunch.)

For Zynga, the reality is that even if the company can pull it off in the long run, it’s not going to be so pretty in the short term. As of Wednesday morning, the Street’s consensus expects Zynga to post a loss of four cents per share on revenue of $209.8 million.

Still, some analysts remain optimistic — if not today, then for the future. “While Zynga faces a challenging transition as it looks to diversify from Facebook to Zynga.com and mobile, we think trends in core Web franchises such as FarmVille and Zynga Poker are stabilizing and the advertising segment improves from the shift toward mobile games,” said J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth in a research note.

The company hinted at some strides made last quarter in the mobile space, breaking out for the first time its number of monthly active users on mobile devices. As of the last earnings report, nearly one-quarter of Zynga’s roughly 300 million monthly active users play Zynga’s games on mobile devices. That’s about 72 million people, and not bad for a company in transition.

One other bullish area for analysts is something Zynga has pushed hard into recently: Real-money gaming. The company launched two of its titles in the United Kingdom on the first of this month, and plans to push out more in the coming year. Zynga is pretty much stuck overseas with real-money gaming for now, as current U.S. law keeps the company from letting stateside users gamble online.

Again, while that may prove another promising revenue stream eventually, it’s still off in the future.

“For Zynga, any hope for real, sustainable top-line growth likely rests primarily on opportunities in on-line gambling — opportunities that are at least a year away,” Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia wrote in a research note.

We’ll be on the call this afternoon to see how Zynga’s mobile efforts are going — perhaps the company is doing better in the short term than analysts expect. Or perhaps not.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130424/all-eyes-still-on-mobile-as-zynga-earnings-approach/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130423/nuances-swype-android-keyboard-finally-hits-google-play/ http://allthingsd.com/20130423/nuances-swype-android-keyboard-finally-hits-google-play/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:05:05 +0000 Bonnie Cha http://allthingsd.com/?p=314899 Looking to getting its product into the hands of more people, Nuance Communications announced today that its Swype virtual keyboard for Android will be available from the Google Play store starting Wednesday. The introductory price is 99 cents, and there’s also a free 30-day trial version.

Swype, which first debuted on the Windows Mobile-based Samsung Omnia II back in 2009, allows users to type words by dragging their finger from letter to letter in one continuous motion.

Till now, Swype was only available preinstalled on select smartphones, or to users who signed up to be part of the beta program.

Now, any Android smartphone or tablet owner can get it, and the latest version of Swype accommodates all types of users, from swipers to traditional typists and even those who want to dictate text.

Swype already offered next-word prediction based on context, but now it includes new features to make the keyboard smarter and more accurate. A Smart Editor function suggests edits based on the entire sentence.

There’s also an opt-in Living Language cloud service, which Nuance has been testing since October, that automatically updates the keyboard’s dictionary on a daily basis with trending words and phrases. It even supports more than 20 dialects.

During a preview meeting with AllThingsD this week, Aaron Sheedy, vice president of mobile product at Nuance, gave the example of adding “Tsarnaev” to the dictionary after last week’s tragic Boston Marathon bombings. Sheedy said these “hot words” are determined by crawling websites and looking at terms being used by its Living Language subscribers.

The service also backs up and syncs your personal dictionary, so it doesn’t have to relearn words and phrases even if you switch devices.

For users who prefer to peck at the keys, a function called Smart Touch studies how one’s fingers are interacting with the screen to learn his or her typing habits. If it sees that someone is tapping between the A and S keys and usually wants S, Swype will automatically adapt so that S is selected each time (when it makes sense).

Swype also offers a dedicated Dragon dictation button for those times when it’s more convenient to dictate a message. In order to use this, however, you need to have Nuance’s Dragon Mobile Assistant app.

Nuance, which is known for its Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software, acquired Swype in October 2011 for $102.5 million, and has been making updates to the keyboard app throughout. The company said that it finally decided to release Swype on Google Play after “incredible consumer demand” from the users of its beta program.

But of course, getting Swype in front of more people will also help it take on its main competitor, SwiftKey, which currently sits atop the paid apps list on Google Play.

In February, SwiftKey released a version of its keyboard that incorporated swipe gesture support similar to Swype’s. But Sheedy believes Swype’s multi-modality, accuracy and support for more languages will help set it apart from the competition.

It will be interesting to see where the two keyboards are at when Nuance CEO Paul Ricci hits the stage at the 11th D: All Things Digital conference in late May.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130423/nuances-swype-android-keyboard-finally-hits-google-play/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130423/my-look-at-arms-healthy-sales/ http://allthingsd.com/20130423/my-look-at-arms-healthy-sales/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:51:08 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=314586

As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130423/my-look-at-arms-healthy-sales/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130422/financial-crimes-topped-state-sponsored-hacking-incidents-in-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20130422/financial-crimes-topped-state-sponsored-hacking-incidents-in-2012/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:37 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=314492 2012 was a year for cyberwar. Government officials and lawmakers talked about it a lot; different countries were found to be engaging in it, some attacking, some defending, some doing a certain amount of both.

But even so, for all the talk about cyberwar, it didn’t come close to eclipsing the amount of financially motivated crime that took place in the digital realm, a new study by telecom giant Verizon has found.

In its ninth annual survey of data breach investigations, which will be formally released tomorrow, Verizon found that old-fashioned financial motivations accounted for 75 percent of computer security incidents. State-sponsored attacks accounted for 20 percent. And, as you might expect, the victims are the organizations that move or hold a lot of money: Financial organizations were targets 37 percent of the time, followed by retailers (24 percent) and manufacturing, transportation and utilities (20 percent).

The study’s sample size included 621 confirmed data breaches and more than 47,000 reported computer security incidents in 27 countries and territories. Verizon has been gathering the data for nine years, and now has records encompassing 2,500 data breaches and 1.2 billion compromised records.

Attacks by outside entities accounted for the majority of breaches, while only 14 percent were attributed to insiders and 1 percent to business partners; 71 percent of breaches targeted user devices and 54 percent were aimed at servers. Perhaps most troubling: Two thirds of the breaches reported required a month or more to discover.

The benefit of a study like this is that it happens at all. Since most large companies and organizations aren’t usually willing to disclose when they’ve been attacked — most have — and suffered a breach that actually cost them some money, it’s rare to see this sort of trend data gathered up in one place.

One interesting thing I noted as I scanned the report. For all the security-related anxiety that seems to have arisen during the two years or so around the “bring your own device” trend in the enterprise — where employers let workers use their personal smartphones or tablets or notebooks to access corporate networks — there seem to have been practically no BYOD-related security incidents. As one sidebar in the report put it:

“The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is a current topic of debate and planning in many organizations. Unfortunately, we don’t have much hard evidence to offer from our breach data. We saw only one breach involving personally-owned devices in 2011 and a couple more in 2012. We’ll keep watching.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130422/financial-crimes-topped-state-sponsored-hacking-incidents-in-2012/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130418/a-pen-based-tablet-with-a-premium-price/ http://allthingsd.com/20130418/a-pen-based-tablet-with-a-premium-price/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:00:13 +0000 Bonnie Cha http://allthingsd.com/?p=313359 Shopping for a tablet with a stylus may stir up memories of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 is nice, but too big to hold comfortably in one hand, and the Galaxy Note II is easier to hold, but has a display that’s too small for optimal use with its stylus. At long last, the Galaxy Note 8.0 is just the right size, except for one feature: Its not-so-fairy-tale-like price tag.

Like the rest of the Samsung Galaxy Note series, this Android tablet features a built-in stylus and special apps and features that allow you to jot down handwritten notes and sketches, or use it like a mouse when browsing websites. It’s a handy productivity tool that does plenty of other things. Plus, the eight-inch screen is large enough for using the stylus comfortably, though it’s compact enough to hold in one hand.

But, at $400, it’s pricey compared to other tablets in this size range. Apple’s iPad mini, which has a 7.9-inch screen, costs $329, and Google’s Nexus 7, which has a seven-inch screen, is even cheaper at $200 (all prices are for the 16 gigabyte models). Both are solid tablets, though neither includes a stylus.

If the Galaxy Note 8.0 were about $100 less, I’d recommend it without hesitation, but at its current price, only get it if you really want the stylus functionality. Otherwise, the iPad mini and Nexus 7 are better buys.

The Galaxy Note 8.0 measures 8.3 inches tall by 5.3 inches wide and 0.3 inch thick in portrait mode. Constructed largely from plastic, it weighs less than a pound, but it doesn’t feel fragile or cheap. The back is slick, and I wish it had a textured surface like the Nexus 7.

The eight-inch touchscreen has a resolution of 1,280 by 800 pixels. By comparison, the Nexus 7 has the same resolution, but the iPad mini’s display has a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels. Looking at the same photos in a side-by-side comparison, I found that the Samsung showed the brightest colors, while the Nexus 7 had the sharpest image quality. The latter is due to the fact that the Nexus has a smaller seven-inch screen, so there is less space between its screen’s pixels. Still, viewing videos and reading text on the Galaxy Note 8.0 was an enjoyable experience.

Above the display is a 1.3-megapixel camera, and there is a five-megapixel camera on the back. A microSD card slot is located on the left side for expanding memory — something the iPad mini and Nexus 7 do not offer.

The stylus — or S Pen, as Samsung calls it — is located in the bottom-right corner of the tablet. Once you remove it from its holder, the tablet automatically launches a window with options for creating various kinds of notes and cards using Samsung’s S Note app, such as meeting notes, diary entries and birthday cards.

One of the functions of the S Note app is the ability to convert handwritten notes into text. I was particularly eager to try this out, since I often take written notes during meetings, but have a hard time reading my scribbles later.

I used it for a work meeting and, unfortunately, the handwriting-to-text transcription wasn’t very accurate. For example, I wrote, “redefining phonebook experience on mobile device,” and S Note translated it to, “Pedufiung phonebook experience on mvhih device.”

If I wrote slowly and more precisely, the accuracy improved, but I don’t usually have the luxury of time when taking notes as someone is talking. And even though S Pen allows you to record audio at the same time as you’re writing, I didn’t feel comfortable using the Galaxy Note 8.0 as my main note-taking device.

There are aspects of the tablet and stylus that I found very useful. For example, by using the button located near the bottom of the S Pen, you can generate an automatically drawn outline around a photo, map or anything onscreen to clip and save to a note.

The preloaded Polaris Office Suite also allows you to annotate Office documents using the stylus, and it was a great way to get some work done on the go. I emailed a copy of this column to myself, and, while waiting for a friend at a cafe, I used the Galaxy Note 8.0 to call out some changes I wanted to make to the story.

In addition, the Galaxy Note 8.0 offers a multi-window feature where you can have two apps opened at once. This functionality is limited to about 20 apps, including the Web browser, music player, email, Facebook and YouTube. It was handy to be able to view my email in one window and check my calendar right beside it to see if I was free for an appointment.

Samsung ships the tablet with several other apps, including Group Play for sharing photos and documents between devices, the Paper Artist drawing app and Samsung’s new video service WatchOn. I tried them out for curiosity’s sake, but I can’t say I’d use them on a regular basis. The Galaxy Note 8.0 runs on the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system with Samsung’s customized user interface.

Overall, I found performance to be smooth. I experienced little to no delay when launching and switching between apps. Unfortunately, battery life isn’t quite up to snuff with the competition.

In my battery tests, where I set the screen’s brightness to 75 percent and played a video in a continuous loop with Wi-Fi and email running in the background, the Galaxy Note 8.0 lasted eight hours before needing a recharge. The iPad mini lasted 10 hours and 27 minutes, while the Nexus 7 offered 10 hours and 44 minutes.

With the Galaxy Note 8.0’s built-in stylus and integrated apps, Samsung had a chance to set itself apart from the competition. But an expensive price limits its appeal. Unless you really want the S Pen capability, the Nexus 7 or iPad Mini is the better choice for now.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130418/a-pen-based-tablet-with-a-premium-price/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/amid-pc-sales-slide-all-eyes-on-intels-quarterly-results/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/amid-pc-sales-slide-all-eyes-on-intels-quarterly-results/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:28:12 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=312382 When the chipmaker Intel reports its quarterly results today after markets close in New York, no one is expecting especially good news, nor much of a positive outlook.

Intel shares have traded lower since last Thursday, when the market research firms IDC and Gartner said they had tracked one of the largest year-on-year declines in sales of personal computers since records have been kept. Intel is the largest supplier of microprocessors to PC manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple, and it’s hard to see how much good news it can possibly bring to the table today.

Analysts are expecting Intel to report a profit of 41 cents per share on sales of $12.6 billion, and missing either would be seen as more or less proving that the PC market is in a state of permanent decline. So would a weak outlook for the current quarter, for which analysts currently expect earnings of 40 cents on $12.9 billion in sales.

There are other aspects to Intel’s business. It has a healthy data center business selling chips for use in servers, but out of more than $53 billion in sales last year, $34 billion, or more than 61 percent, was in its “client,” or PC, unit, while the data center group accounted for about $10.7 billion.

In the past, Intel executives have quarreled with the analyst firms, and said it was seeing more promising conditions in emerging markets. Indeed, in prior years there has been a disconnect between the dour pronouncements of Gartner and IDC and the peppier market conditions that Intel would later describe in its financial results in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. In more recent quarters, the differences between their views have narrowed.

Aside from PCs, Intel has some new ideas that it hopes will kick its data center business into a higher gear. And it certainly has higher hopes about selling more chips for use in phones and tablets, but as yet they’re only hopes. It also plans to launch a TV product later this year.

Aside from the numbers, expect some questions — and maybe even some answers, but probably nothing conclusive yet — about the search for a replacement for CEO Paul Otellini. The smart money says the choice will be an internal one (here’s a rundown on the contenders), though there’s a slim chance that Intel’s board might be in the mood to surprise everyone and name an outsider. But don’t bet any money you can’t afford to lose on that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/amid-pc-sales-slide-all-eyes-on-intels-quarterly-results/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/microsofts-woes-raise-stakes-for-windows-blue/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/microsofts-woes-raise-stakes-for-windows-blue/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:45:46 +0000 Shira Ovide http://allthingsd.com/?p=311324 With hope fading that Microsoft Corp.’s new Windows 8 software will reignite computer sales, attention is already shifting to the company’s next big effort to regain relevance: Windows Blue.

Microsoft has yet to formally define the software project. But Windows Blue is expected to mark a major change in the company’s development methodology, replacing major launches of products every several years with frequent updates of features in operating software and applications such as Office.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/microsofts-woes-raise-stakes-for-windows-blue/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/a-pocket-size-solution-for-enjoying-more-entertainment-on-the-go/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/a-pocket-size-solution-for-enjoying-more-entertainment-on-the-go/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:00:58 +0000 Bonnie Cha http://allthingsd.com/?p=310759 Tablets and smartphones have made it easy to stay entertained during your travels. You can fill up a device with music and movies to enjoy on the road, but you might find yourself having to pick and choose what to load because you don’t have enough space left on your iPad or Samsung Galaxy S III. Will it be the latest season of “Mad Men,” or “Game of Thrones”?

HP says you can have both.

This week I’ve been testing the HP Pocket Playlist ($130), a portable storage drive with built-in Wi-Fi that can stream DRM-free (non-copyright-protected) video, music and photos to up to five devices via an accompanying app.

Designed for those with large media libraries and for families who want to share content, this smartphone-size accessory has 32 gigabytes of total storage, so it can hold roughly 16 full-length movies, 7,600 songs or 10,000 photos. You can even use a service called PlayLater to record streamed content from services like Hulu and Netflix, then store it on your Pocket Playlist to watch later without an Internet connection.

The Pocket Playlist worked fairly well in my tests, and it’s a sleek solution if your smartphone or tablet doesn’t have an option for expandable storage via a microSD slot. But if you have an extra-large media library and are looking for more than 32GB of extra storage, you’ll have to look elsewhere, like the Seagate Satellite with 500GB of storage ($150), or the Kingston Wi-Drive, which you can get on sale for around $120 for the 64GB model and $170 for the 128GB model.

Smooth and polished like a pebble, the Pocket Playlist measures 4.65 inches long by 2.36 inches wide by 0.35 inch thick, and weighs 2.2 ounces. While it’s another device to pack and carry on your travels, it’s smaller and thinner than the iPhone 5, so it’s easy to throw in a backpack or purse.

There are only three controls on the device: A power button, a USB/Wi-Fi toggle switch, and a WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) key, which allows you to connect to a network and enable data encryption for security.

The easiest and fastest way to get media files onto the Pocket Playlist is to connect it to your computer via the included USB cable. (Be sure the toggle switch is set to the USB setting.) Once plugged in, it shows up as a USB drive, and then you can drag and drop files to the device. I added a bunch of music from my iTunes library, and several MP4 video files to the Pocket Playlist with no problem.

In addition, I added several recorded TV shows from PlayLater. PlayLater is a software service from MediaMall Technologies Inc. that allows you to record online video from a network’s website and streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video. Once recorded, you can watch them later on your computer or your iOS or Android device without an Internet connection. The company likens the service to a DVR for online video.

It’s a neat service, and MediaMall says everything is legal. But the software only works on Windows for now, and it’s a pay service, with subscriptions starting at $20 for a year.

With it, I was able to record recent episodes of “Saturday Night Live,” “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Mindy Project.” Also, after entering my Netflix login and password, I recorded some episodes of “The Walking Dead.” Much like your DVR at home, recordings happen in real time, so a 30-minute TV show takes 30 minutes to record. Once that’s finished, you can drag and drop your saved files to the Pocket Playlist.

Before you’re ready to play, you will need to download the free HP Pocket Playlist app from the iTunes or the Google Play Store. The Pocket Playlist is compatible with Apple’s iOS devices and smartphones and tablets running Android 2.3 or higher. I tested it out on the iPhone 5, fourth-generation iPad, Nexus 7 tablet and Nexus 4.

Connecting the Pocket Playlist to your smartphone or tablet is easy. First you need to switch the connection source from USB to Wi-Fi using the toggle button on the right side. Then, you will need to go into your smartphone or tablet Wi-Fi settings and choose PocketPlaylist as your network.

Once I did all that, I launched the app and found all my transferred files organized by folder — music, video, photos. Within each folder are sub-folders to help you find content by category. For example, under “music,” songs are also categorized by album, artist and genre.

The Pocket Playlist worked as advertised, and I was able to stream music and video to all four devices at once. I only ran into one issue during my testing: While streaming the same video to the iPhone, iPad and Nexus devices, I noticed that playback was a bit choppy on the Nexus 4.

I also brought along the iPad, Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 on an hour-long road trip up the California coast over the weekend, and passed them out to my friends like party favors. They each selected different videos to watch, and no one reported any issues with performance.

HP estimates battery life at up to five hours, depending on the type of file that is being streamed and the number of streamed devices. In my battery tests, I streamed MP4 video files to two devices (iPad and Nexus 4), and the Pocket Playlist lasted four hours before needing a recharge. A car charger is included in the box.

If your smartphone or tablet is at capacity and you don’t want to cull your media library to make room for more, the HP Pocket Playlist offers a slick way to carry and enjoy those extra files. It’s also a great way to keep the peace on family vacations.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/a-pocket-size-solution-for-enjoying-more-entertainment-on-the-go/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130410/microsoft-plans-7-inch-tablet/ http://allthingsd.com/20130410/microsoft-plans-7-inch-tablet/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:27:03 +0000 Lorraine Luk, Shira Ovide and Eva Dou http://allthingsd.com/?p=310976 The personal computer business is at a crossroads, and Microsoft isn’t sitting still.

The software giant is developing a new lineup of its Surface tablets, including a seven-inch version expected to go into mass production later this year, said people familiar with the company’s plans.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130410/microsoft-plans-7-inch-tablet/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130328/razer-edge-gaming-tablet-short-lived-fun/ http://allthingsd.com/20130328/razer-edge-gaming-tablet-short-lived-fun/#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:00:48 +0000 Bonnie Cha http://allthingsd.com/?p=307310 Much like other hobbies, videogames come with their own set of equipment. Instead of a baseball bat, gloves and cleats, you’ve got game controllers, headsets and keyboards. There are even gaming laptops, and now, you can add tablets to the list.

This past week, I checked out the Razer Edge, a Windows 8 tablet designed specifically for PC gaming. Created by a San Diego-based company named Razer, the base model starts at $1,000 and runs up to $1,450 for the Razer Edge Pro model, which gets you more memory and a faster processor (that’s the version I tested). At those prices, it’s more than other Windows 8 tablets on the market, including the higher-end Microsoft Surface Pro, which runs between $899 and $999.

It’s definitely too much for the casual gamer. If you’re only into titles like Angry Birds or Temple Run, you’re fine sticking with your smartphone or regular tablet, while players of more traditional gaming consoles might be better served by the Nintendo 3DS or Sony PlayStation Vita.

So, who is the Razer Edge for, and what makes it different from other tablets?

Starting with the first question, the Razer Edge is for PC gamers looking for a way to play games on the go. Up until now, the only solution was gaming laptops, which are often large and heavy, so this offers another option.

For playing games, the company has designed an interesting accessory dubbed the Gamepad Controller. It costs an extra $250, and allows you to dock the tablet into this tray-like device and maneuver through games using the Gamepad Controller’s built-in handles and gaming buttons.

There’s also a $100 Docking Station that allows you to connect it to an external display or HDTV and play as you would with a gaming console such as the Xbox 360. The company will release a keyboard dock later this year if you want to convert it into a laptop (pricing has not yet been announced).

One other thing that makes the Razer Edge different from other Windows 8 tablets is the inclusion of a dedicated graphics processor from Nvidia. This gives the tablet an extra power boost to handle all the various images and animations found in games, and lessens the workload of the main Intel processor, so you can enjoy zippy performance.

The gameplay is pretty impressive, with smooth performance, even on graphics-intensive games. But the Razer Edge also comes with a number of compromises. It doesn’t have the highest-resolution screen, and battery life peters out after a couple of hours.

For a tablet, it’s also quite large. It measures 10.9 inches wide by seven inches tall by 0.8 inch thick, and weighs just over two pounds. The iPad, by comparison, is 9.5 inches wide by 7.3 inches tall by 0.3 inch thick, and weighs 1.44 pounds. It only becomes more unwieldy when you dock it to the Gamepad Controller, which I’ll talk more about later.

The Razer Edge features a 10.1-inch, 1,366 by 768-pixel touchscreen. It’s not the sharpest display on the market (the Surface Pro has a 1,920 by 1,080-pixel touchscreen), and it’s a fingerprint magnet. But I was able to play games and watch videos without problem. Also, when connected to an HDTV, games can be displayed in high definition.

The touchscreen is responsive, but most of the games aren’t optimized for a touchscreen, so you need some kind of controller. Otherwise, you’ve just got a really expensive and clunky Windows 8 tablet.

I used the Gamepad for most of my testing. A lock system keeps the tablet securely in place when docked into the Gamepad. Both the left and right handles feature joysticks and rear trigger buttons. There are also four arrow keys on the left, and A, B, X, Y buttons on the right. All the gaming controls should be familiar to anyone who has used a console controller, but since they’re farther apart, it might take some getting used to.

You can download games from online services like Valve’s steam, which will come preloaded on the tablet. You can also get titles from EA’s Origin storefront. I checked the first-person shooter game Crysis 3 ($60) from EA, and Codemaster’s Dirt Showdown ($30) racing game from Steam.

For Dirt Showdown, it was pretty easy to maneuver my car using the various controls. The handles vibrated every time I hit other cars or landed after a jump. Razer told me that if a game is built to use the tablet’s accelerometer, you can simply tilt the tablet left or right to move in a direction, which I think is useful for these types of racing games.

That said, the tablet is almost four pounds with the Gamepad attached, so I can’t imagine wanting to hold it front me for long periods of time. Most of the time, I had the tablet resting on my lap or a desk.

Crysis 3 ran fluidly, and despite the lower-resolution screen, the graphics still looked good. The amount of sound the tablet produces is also impressive.

The tablet tends to run hot, though, even after just a few minutes of play. But the bigger issue is battery life.

The Razer Edge has an estimated battery life of one hour when playing games, and 3.5 hours as a regular tablet, which I found to be true in my testing. Once I’m into a game, I tend to play for hours at a time, and having to find an outlet after just 45 minutes of playing Crysis 3 was annoying. It’s a big problem for a product that’s designed partly as a portable solution. If I had been on a cross-country flight, I would have had a dead tablet on my hands.

Razer offers an extended battery pack that adds another two of hours of game play, but that will run you another $70.

Given the short battery life and price, it’s hard to recommend the Razer Edge right now. But if Razer can resolve these issues, I think it will be a versatile and great mobile solution for PC gamers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130328/razer-edge-gaming-tablet-short-lived-fun/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20130325/a-look-ahead-at-gdc-its-mobile-vs-consoles-in-fight-for-game-developers-attention/ http://allthingsd.com/20130325/a-look-ahead-at-gdc-its-mobile-vs-consoles-in-fight-for-game-developers-attention/#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:00:32 +0000 Eric Johnson and Bonnie Cha http://allthingsd.com/?p=306203 If San Francisco appears to be even geekier than usual this week, there’s a reason: The annual Game Developers Conference is taking over the Moscone Center today through Friday.

AllThingsD will be there keeping an eye on two questions in particular: How is the business of mobile games changing, and how are the makers of consoles and other physical media responding to mobile’s ascendance?

This year’s conference also promises to at least touch on the growing relevance of women in the gaming community, and will also highlight the gap between small independent games studios and the larger legacy companies that are finding different degrees of success in staying relevant as their industry continues to expand and fracture.

If you only read one gaming statistic this week, let it be this one: In a pre-conference survey, GDC 2013’s organizers found that 58 percent of gaming professionals attending either last year’s conference or this one plan to release their next game on smartphones or tablets. That’s a tad greater than commitments to the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s next console, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U and Wii combined, which together garnered “next game” pledges from 56.5 percent of developers.

Nevertheless, interest in gaming hardware is still strong, particularly for established consoles and for the Android-based consoles Ouya and GameStick, both of which bested the next Xbox and the PlayStation 4 when those same survey respondents were asked what platforms most excited or interested them.

Stay tuned for more!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130325/a-look-ahead-at-gdc-its-mobile-vs-consoles-in-fight-for-game-developers-attention/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20130321/surprise-surprise-a-lot-of-people-especially-women-really-like-free-to-play-games/ http://allthingsd.com/20130321/surprise-surprise-a-lot-of-people-especially-women-really-like-free-to-play-games/#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:53:51 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=305717 With this year’s Game Developers Conference around the corner, it’s open season for industry-commissioned studies of who’s playing what and why. Just this morning, we learned that having a better phone screen makes gamers more likely to drop money on in-app purchases.

Now a new demographics report is out from Frank N. Magid Associates that says a few things of interest: A lot of Americans play games (duh), a lot of them play games on smartphones, women are leading the console-to-smartphone shift and free-to-play games are hogging the spotlight away from traditional pay-to-play games.

None of these facts may seem like earth-shattering revelations to those of you who play a lot of games and may have had a small role in effecting these changes. But Magid VP of Research Bob Crawford, who organized the survey of gamers in December 2012, said they’re newer than you may realize.

“This wasn’t a topic of discussion even last year [at GDC],” Crawford said.

But you can bet this year will be different. The schedule for next week’s conference includes some 24 sessions solely about smartphone and tablet games, and 27 sessions about the design and business of free to play. The latter group is part of an entirely new segment of the conference created for this year.

And while the popular perception of gamers may still skew toward young men, the industry seems to be paying more and more attention to the importance of women in all the growing categories of smartphone, tablet and social gaming: Five of the planned GDC “advocacy” sessions this year are centered on gender issues.

A few quick takeaways from the Magid study, which was commissioned by Visa-owned digital payments platform PlaySpan:

• Thanks to smartphones, about 80 percent of those surveyed play games.
• When asked to pick their preferred gaming platform, 35 percent of respondents picked consoles vs. 34 percent for smartphones and 11 percent for tablets.
• However, broken out by gender, that same question found that men strongly prefer consoles, while women strongly prefer smartphones.
• The study estimates that 110 million people are playing more free-to-play games than they were a year ago, while only 13 million people are playing more pay-to-play games.
• Men spend nearly three times more than women do on the virtual goods found within free-to-play games.

This dead-simple chart communicates the most important factoid here:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130321/surprise-surprise-a-lot-of-people-especially-women-really-like-free-to-play-games/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130319/look-what-happens-when-you-give-a-teenager-a-tablet/ http://allthingsd.com/20130319/look-what-happens-when-you-give-a-teenager-a-tablet/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:00:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=305051 Apple? Android? Amazon?

Whatever. You folks bought a lot of tablets of last year. A new survey from Deloitte reports that 36 percent of Americans (or, at least, 36 percent of Americans who take online surveys) say they own a tablet. That’s up from 13 percent a year ago.

And once you have a tablet, you use it. Especially to watch movies. Though it turns out that if you have a tablet you’re more likely to watch movies everywhere, on every device, than a non-tablet owner.

And kids these days! Deloitte says that a fifth of “trailing millennials” — 14-to-23-year-olds — say they’re watching TV shows on their tablets. That’s up from just 2 percent a year ago. But tablets still aren’t ubiqitous among that set — they’re more likely to watch their shows via smartphones, game consoles, computers or plain old TV sets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130319/look-what-happens-when-you-give-a-teenager-a-tablet/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130318/slowing-china-shipments-push-pc-market-from-bad-to-worse/ http://allthingsd.com/20130318/slowing-china-shipments-push-pc-market-from-bad-to-worse/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:10:11 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=304505 Research firm IDC has published its latest take on the state of the personal computer market, and depending on how you look at it — and where you work — it appears to be a case of going from bad to worse.

Slower-than-expected shipments in China brought on in part by the timing of the Chinese New Year holiday, plus government budget reductions, cut into sales in January and February, the firm said. The market is now expected to decline by 7.7 percent, which is 2 percentage points worse than previously expected. And it could get still worse. The firm won’t rule out a further drop into a double-digit percentage decline before a possible recovery mid-year.

The latest assessment comes only a few days after IDC released figures showing unabated growth in the market for tablets, which have been cutting into PC sales for years now.

Also, IDC’s dour outlook on PCs doesn’t mention the sales of Apple’s Macs. As it happens, another research firm, NPD, today put out its latest look at Mac sales, and they’re up by 14 percent year on year for January and February. One reason, said analyst Gene Munster of PiperJaffray in a research note to clients today, is that Apple has firmed up its supply of iMacs. Tight supplies knocked shipments down by about 700,000 units in December, Munster said. Even so, Munster expects Mac sales overall to trend down by about 5 percent in the first quarter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130318/slowing-china-shipments-push-pc-market-from-bad-to-worse/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130315/is-the-ipad-ready-for-a-challenge-in-the-enterprise/ http://allthingsd.com/20130315/is-the-ipad-ready-for-a-challenge-in-the-enterprise/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:03:26 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=303927 We’re coming up on the third anniversary of Apple’s release of the iPad, and looking back, one of the bigger surprises about it has been its strength in the enterprise. As CEO Tim Cook points out nearly every time he speaks in public, most companies in the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad for use by their employees. And numerous enterprise software companies, among them SAP and Oracle. And numerous cloud software companies — Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite, to name only three — all support it.

But is that a permanent state of affairs? There is at least one analyst who has decided that it isn’t. Patrick Moorhead — a former executive with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices who now runs his own research shop called Moor Insights and Strategy — has published a new white paper arguing that if ever there was a moment when the iPad’s dominance in the enterprise might face a challenge, it’s now.

Moorhead bases his argument — one that is admittedly hard to swallow, given the current state of play — on a few comparisons of the iPad to the Dell Latitude 10, Hewlett-Packard’s ElitePad 900, and the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, all of which run Windows 8. (Hold on, Apple fanboys, you’re going to hate this.)

First, the three Windows tablets have user-replaceable batteries, and can support extended-life batteries, giving them a longer useful battery life versus the iPad’s 10 hours.

Second, they’re all more readily expandable than the iPad, boasting more ports and connectors and memory-card slots.

Finally — and this is probably the most important factor — they all natively support the many management tools and security services that come with Windows machines in the enterprise, things like credential managers, VPN clients, BitLocker, Active Directory and scads of other things that IT managers are already used to dealing with in their Windows-centric offices.

“Once iPads are secured and deployed, they need to be managed,” Moorhead writes. “For PCs, most enterprises have already adopted Microsoft’s SCCM … Windows InTune or another tool they’ve been using for years. Anything additional for use with iPads adds investigation and research time, test, training and deployment resources.”

Do CIOs and IT managers like it when new things support their existing infrastructure? Sure they do. But their opinions are less relevant these days.

Don’t forget the entire BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend that has rocked the enterprise in the last three years, and seems almost entirely created for the iPad. Recent research has found that at least 81 percent of consumers use their own devices at work. It’s a trend that established itself from the earliest days of the iPad: The first anecdotes about corporate iPad concerned CEOs who bought them and asked their IT managers to make them work with their work email accounts.

For Dell, HP and Lenovo to make a dent in the iPad’s dominance of the enterprise, they would have to reverse that trend. Not easy, that, though they will try. For companies seeking to tamp down the BYOD tide, these Windows tablets may make sense. Maybe. Maybe not.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130315/is-the-ipad-ready-for-a-challenge-in-the-enterprise/feed/ 0