Apple and Google: squaring up over smartphones?

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

In the world of smartphones, ARM is a pretty big deal. The Cambridge-based company produces the technology behind all of HTC’s current phones as well as devices from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung – and, crucially, the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It’s also one of the biggest and brightest lights in the British tech industry.

ARM works by licensing its designs to other companies, who then build the chips themselves: Apple designs its own chips based on ARM technology and then contracts Samsung to build them, for instance, and HTC uses Qualcomm to construct the chips in its own devices. Numerous other companies also exist to turn ARM’s blueprints into the power behind nearly every smartphone on the planet.

It looks as though Apple could be bringing more chip production in house, though. While there’s little chance of ARM being bought – CEO Warren East said yesterday that “nobody has to buy the company” – rumours are flying around that Cupertino has quietly purchased Intrinsity, a company which specialises in ARM processors. There’s the odd sliver of evidence to back this rumour up, too: several Intrinsity engineers quickly changed their employer status to Apple on networking website LinkedIn before reversing the switch.

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Akihabara Electric Town: the good, the bad, the simply bewildering

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

As listeners to the PC Pro podcast will know, I’m stuck in Tokyo thanks to a certain volcanic eruption. As listeners will also know, my colleagues have absolutely no sympathy for me, and for good reason: Tokyo is geek paradise, especially if you head on the metro to Akihabara Electric Town.

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Twitter: saving democracy from the newspapers

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

It was allegedly “The Sun wot won it” in 1992, after the Tories pulled off a victory the day after the tabloid ran a front page proclaiming: “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”.  (Although I faintly recall from my degree studies that more than half of The Sun readers surveyed after that infamous headline thought the newspaper supported Labour.)

The newspapers’ influence over elections has always been debatable, but what’s indisputable is that they’ve lost all control over this one. Not a single newspaper has thrown its weight behind the Liberal Democrats or Nick Clegg since his strong showing in last week’s leadership debate, but the party has seen an enormous swing in support.

The Liberal Democrats have dragged themselves level with the Conservatives and ahead of Labour in several polls, and the newspaper editors are incandescent. People are using their own minds, instead of doing as they’re told. Something has to be done.

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HTC Hero users let down, yet again

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

The HTC Hero was a phone that carried a huge weight of expectation open its loftily-named shoulders. Charged with dragging HTC – and Google’s Android operating system – further towards the mainstream, it was met with a shedload of positive reviews and thousands of happy customers.

It’s a shame that, nine months on from the Hero’s release, HTC appears to have abandoned its customers in favour of courting those that covet shiny new phones like the Desire and Legend.

The Hero currently runs Android 1.5; version 1.6 of the software made its debut last autumn but was itself canned thanks to a series of delays. Since then, owners have been eagerly awaiting Android 2.1, codenamed Eclair, which made its debut on the Motorola Milestone – known as the Droid in the US – back in January. The wait hasn’t baseless, either: HTC has spent months telling its customers that an update to the Hero’s firmware is just around the corner.

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PC Pro perfects the iPad

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

We like the iPad, but there are problems. It’s too heavy for a start, meaning that if you hold it for longer than five minutes your hand falls off. This is most upsetting, especially when trying to open a packet of peanuts on a long flight.

Watching a film or reading a book using the iPad is thus out of the question, which is a real shame because the iPad’s screen is cooler than a rainbow made of  Cornettos. However, where Apple failed PC Pro will succeed.

Taking on the mantle forsaken by Jonathan Ive and his design team, we’ve come up with a solution to the iPad’s problems that’s practical, yet stylish. Elegant, yet simple. A solution which blends seamlessly with the iPad experience to deliver an entirely new, entirely perfected iPad. We give you – the PCProiPad (we’re still working on the name).

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What kind of desktops PCs are you buying?

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

The decline of desktop computers seems to have been a running theme for the past few years: British buyers yearn for the days when every town had a successful PC builder named after it, and global firms sooner hold lavish launches for new laptops than the latest desktop machines.

Nevertheless, the desktop market was buoyed by good news, this week, as analyst IDC revealed that desktop PC sales in the first quarter of 2010 were up 24.2% on the same period in 2009. Couple that with the previous quarter’s impressive 15.2% growth, and it’s clear that huge numbers of desktop machines are being sold.

Contrast these figures with the first quarter of 2009, when the PC market shrunk by 7%, and – despite the naysayers projecting otherwise – it looks like the desktop market is in very good shape.

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What’s the point of Photoshop Extended?

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

The latest Photoshop CS5 has received near universal critical acclaim for its seemingly-magical image processing power and Photoshop CS5 Extended builds on that with even more extraordinary 3D functionality.

photoshop CS5 extended

But is the emperor wearing no clothes? Does anyone actually use the extended 3D functionality of Photoshop Extended?

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Should Gizmodo have named the iPhone loser?

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

It sounds like one of those lateral thinking puzzles.

Q. A man loses a phone in a bar and becomes an overnight celebrity. How?
A. When he’s an Apple employee and the phone in question is a prototype iPhone 4.

It’s indicative of the hysteria that surrounds Apple that even a man ploughing into a career cul-de-sac can become the subject of an unofficial Facebook page, uncountable column inches, and have his name printed on T-shirts.

There’s a lot of laughter on the web right now, though I doubt Powell’s joining in. Speculation suggests he’s going to lose his job, which is only right for the man who’ll go down in tech history as being responsible for the worst blunder in Apple’s PR history.

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Which HDMI cable should I buy?

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I finally ditched my aging CRT television at the weekend, and took the plunge on a 37in Samsung LCD. Very nice it is too. So nice in fact, that within hours I was gagging to hook up my laptop and start watching HD streams from the BBC iPlayer.

This, of course, required the purchase of a HDMI cable. So keen was I to get going that I didn’t want to waste time driving to a specialist AV retailer when there’s a Tesco superstore around the corner that sells such cables.

When I arrived at Tesco I was presented with a choice of two cables, both manufactured by Technika, both three metres long, both with gold-plated connectors, both claiming to be HDMI 1.3b compatible. The only difference I could discern was that one was clad in rubber, while the other was wrapped in nylon.  Oh, and the price: the rubber-sheathed cable was just north of £10 while the nylon-woven alternative was a shade over £30.

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Behind the scenes of Sony’s VAIO testing lab

Monday, April 19th, 2010

We were made to sign non-disclosure agreements, told to remove our cameras and phones, and forced to stand in an air chamber whilst air was blown into our every extremity. But then we were in. This is Sony’s top-secret area: the testing lab at its VAIO headquarters, based in Nagano Prefecture in the Japanese mountains, where all the company’s designs for new laptops are put to the test.

Fortunately, not all cameras were banned: as you can already tell, we were accompanied by a camera-toting Sony employee who I persistently annoyed by asking to “take a picture of this”. “Oh, and that”. “And could you take one of those too, please?” I think she may have said something rude about me in Japanese at one point.

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