Acer has kicked of its IFA 2014 campaign with the launch of the Liquid
Z500 smartphone. The Taiwanese handset giant stressed that the handset
is targeted at the music lovers and is an 'affordable' 5-inch Android
smartphone.
The
Acer Liquid Z500 will be available starting September 15, though the
company has not revealed the launch markets, and will retail at EUR 149
(approximately Rs. 12,000).
Some of the highlighted features
teased by the company include 5-inch display (unspecified resolution);
an 8-megapixel rear camera; metallic textured design; CD quality music
playback, and 8.65mm thickness.
Acer Liquid Z500 will be available in three colours namely - Aquamarine Green, Sandy Silver, and Titanium Black.
In addition to the Liquid Z500, the company also announced Europe availability of the Acer Liquid Jade.
The
Acer Liquid Jade was launched at Computex and comes with dual-SIM support runs on Android 4.4
KitKat. It features a 5-inch IPS 'Zero Air Gap' display with a 720x1280
pixel resolution and a Gorilla Glass 3 screen.
The Liquid Jade is
powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6582 processor that is coupled
with 1GB of RAM. The smartphone features 8GB of built-in storage that is
expandable by microSD card (up to 32GB). The Liquid Jade features a
13-megapixel rear camera with an f/1.8 aperture, 0.3 second autofocus,
and 1080p HD video recording. It also features a 2-megapixel
front-facing camera. In terms of connectivity options, it offers 3G,
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth, Micro-USB, A-GPS, and a 3.5mm audio jack.
Microsoft is taking a stand over email ownership and privacy
as the US govenrment continues to
demand the company hand over email
data stored in an Ireland datacenter.
Microsoft initially
had until July 31 to hand over the email data, but a court extended the
company's deadline so it could work on an appeal.
Failing that, Microsoft has simply refused to comply, stating that doing so could set a dangerous precedent on a global scale.
No wonder tech companies like Apple, Cisco and others have thrown their support behind Microsoft in this battle.
Responsibility
"This
case could have important implications outside the US. Other
governments could demand emails held in datacenters outside their
jurisdiction," Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch wrote in a
Microsoft blog post on August 27.
He
cited a law passed by the British government earlier in August that
lets it force tech companies to provide email data no matter where it's
stored. "This would include emails stored in the US by Americans who
have never been to the UK," he wrote.
Microsoft's current
stance on email privacy is a huge improvement over its previous one.
Maybe we should have put more faith in the company when it said earlier
this year it would no longer read users' emails, even if it suspects
they're stealing from it.
"Microsoft
is committed to delivering meaningful privacy protections that build
trust with our customers, and we know how much you value the contents of
your email," Lynch wrote.
He continued, "We believe your
email belongs to you, not us, and that it should receive the same
privacy protection as paper letters sent by mail - no matter where it is
stored."
A judge has given the US government and Microsoft until September 5 to reach an agreement before the court forces a resolution.
It’s been nearly four years since Microsoft first released Windows
Phone, and what it has gotten after manysmartphone market share of less than 3%. And that number has been going down, not up.
millions of dollars in
development and marketing costs, plus its $7.2 billion acquisition of
Nokia, is this: a worldwide
Ask any smart businessperson whether that investment is a good one, and
you’ll get a straightforward answer: no. Over at Microsoft, though, they
think differently. Rather than abandoning Windows Phone, they’re
doubling down and making an even bigger bet on the struggling smartphone
operating system. A company with Bill Gates’ DNA will never willingly
admit defeat, but in this case it may be time to do just that and
instead hitch its mobile wagon to Android.
The numbers explain why this might be the best option at this point. They’re not pretty. The latest figures from Strategy Analytics
show Windows Phone with only a 2.7% worldwide share of the smartphone
market in the second quarter of 2014, compared to an 84.6% market share
for Android and 11.9% for iOS. That 2.7% figure is down from 3.8% a year
earlier. And even that understates how badly Windows Phone is doing. In
the second quarter of 2014, shipments of all smartphones were up 27%
compared to a year previous — but Windows Phone shipments fell in that
year, from 8.9 million devices in the second quarter of 2013 to 8
million devices in the second quarter of 2014.
Windows Phone is struggling in the world’s two largest smartphone
markets, the U.S. and China. For May, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech found,
its market share was 3.8% in the U.S., down from 4.7% a year previously. And in China, it was a barely measurable 0.6%, compared to 3% a year earlier.
By any measure, Windows Phone has been headed in the wrong direction.
Earlier this year, Microsoft seemed poised to adopt a backup plan that
would keep it in the mobile game even as Windows Phone tanks. As it was
preparing to acquire Nokia, the handset maker released a line of low-end
Android phones called the Nokia X, aimed at the developing world.
Though the phones don’t run a Microsoft OS, they do carry Microsoft
services, such as Skype, Outlook.com and OneDrive. That would allow
Microsoft to make money on the services the phones carry, in the same
way that Google makes money on any of its services that other Android
phones carry.
Nokia was still ostensibly an independent company at the time, but is it
possible that it decided to release Android phones without the blessing
of its soon-to-be owner, Microsoft? That doesn’t seem likely. And it’s
worth noting that after the acquisition was finalized, Nokia released a
new generation of the phones, the X2. It looked like a smart move, given
those disastrous Windows Phone numbers.
On the other hand, it could be that Microsoft just never knew what it was doing when it bought Nokia.
Because in mid-July, Microsoft abandoned the experiment and instead
doubled down on its bet on Windows Phone. It announced that it would
sell low-cost Windows Phones and kill off the X2 line. The brief
flirtation with Android was over.
This looks like an outrageously bad move. It’s not just that Windows
Phone is going nowhere. It’s caught in a death spiral. Apps sell phones,
and developers have been leery of developing apps for Windows Phone
because of its low market share. As the market share drops, even fewer
developers are willing to develop for it. Because of that, consumers
stay away, which leads to less market share, which leads to fewer
developers devoting resources to it.
Android, meanwhile, has more of a lock on the worldwide smartphone
market than ever. So it may well finally be time for Microsoft to
abandon Windows Phone and instead fully embrace Android using the Nokia X
model: build Android phones with Microsoft services on them such as
Outlook.com, Bing, Skype and OneDrive. Doing that might be a blow to
Microsoft’s ego. But it could prove to be a big lift to its bottom line.
The Azure DocumentDB NoSQL service was built by Microsoft in response
to user requests for a fully mananged database that provided query and
transactional capabilities at scale, Microsoft officials said. Microsoft
is not open-sourcing Azure DocumentDB, but the company will submit the
client-library software development kits for it to the open source
community, officials said.
Azure DocumentDB is meant to bridge NoSQL's document database
functionality with the transactional capabilities of relational
databases. The DocumentDB service natively supports JSON documents and
makes available programming libraries for a number of languages and
platforms, including .Net, Node.js, JavaScript and Python.
The new Azure search service uses the open source Elasticsearch distributed
search technology as its underlying full-text search engine. The Azure
Search service will make available some of the Elasticsearch features
but still be a Microsoft-managed service. The target audience for this
service isn't end-users doing web searches; instead, it is web and
mobile application developers looking to incorporate full-text search
into their applications, according to Microsoft officials.
"With Azure Search developers can easily provision a search service,
quickly create and tune one or more indexes, upload data to be indexed
and start issuing searches," Microsoft officials explained in a blog
post. The service will allow developers to integrate search into new or
existing applications that are usable from any platform or development
environemnt, officials said.
Microsoft also is making Apache HBase clustering support for Azure
HDInsight (Hadoop on Azure) generally available as of today, August 21.
"The cloud first, mobile first world has a new breed of apps that run
on multiple devices, providing multiple experiences on each device. All
this contributes to big churn in the data model that's kept in the
cloud," Rengarajan added.
The HTC One M8 for Windows marks a new tack Microsoft
hopes will lead to greater popularity for Windows Phone. The basic idea:
Let handset makers reuse high-end Android hardware.
Microsoft
vice president of engineering Darren Laybourn shows off the new HTC One
M8 for Windows Phone at an event in New York City in August 2014,
CNET/Sarah Tew
Rival Android could be the cavalry coming to the rescue of Windows
Phone, in Microsoft's latest maneuver to advance its smartphone
operating system.
The underlying notion is this: Microsoft wants
to make it easier to introduce devices that use the Windows Phone
software. That was the message delivered this week's announcement of the
HTC One M8 for Windows Phone.
Specifically,
Microsoft has tweaked its Windows Phone 8.1 software so that hardware
makers can lean on the hardware and reference designs they're already
using to build devices for Android-based phones in order to build a
Windows Phone device.
"We wanted handset makers like HTC to be
able to leverage their engineering investment and provide them with a
real choice," said Darren Laybourn, vice president of engineering for
Microsoft in an interview following the launch of the HTC One M8 for Windows. "We feel the software should be the differentiator and not the hardware."
Microsoft has struggled to convince hardware partners to make phones
running the Windows Phone operating system in what has turned into a
chicken-and-egg scenario. Device makers don't want to dedicate resources
to building a Windows Phone because there are so few customers. But
without the devices -- especially iconic ones that offer cutting edge
components and technology -- the operating system will never gain
popularity among customers.
Management knows that Microsoft's
mobile ambitions are doomed if it can't break that pattern. The solution
depends on finding a way to get device makers other than Nokia, whose
handset operations Microsoft acquired earlier this year for more than $7 billion, to build high-end smartphones using Windows Phone.
"Ideally, I'm sure that Microsoft wants HTC, Samsung and others to
produce exclusive designs for their software," said Ross Rubin,
principal analyst at Reticle Research. "But I think they recognize the
market reality now. And they're willing to let dedicated hardware go to
get more high-end Windows Phone smartphones on the market."
Switching strategies
Microsoft's Laybourn said the company
had begun tweaking the Windows Software to adapt to different hardware
designs even before starting work with HTC. For instance, Windows Phone 8.1, launched in the spring,
offers redesigned software keys that strip away the old hard buttons on
the bottom of the device, replacing them with "soft keys" that pop up
at the bottom of screen.
He said there are now 14 devices in
Microsoft's reference design program expected to wind up as real
products in the next six months. Some will use Android hardware designs
reconfigured slightly to work with the Windows Phone software.
This strategy makes sense for handset makers. Previous versions of
Windows Phone forced them to build hardware from scratch. In addition
to supporting two reference designs, which means handling two separate
component supply chains, it also meant developing separate marketing
budgets for each device.
For a company like HTC, which is already struggling to keep up with the massive marketing budgets of Apple and Samsung,
this is a huge barrier. Being able to leverage the existing brand
recognition of the HTC One series of devices and being able to market
both an Android and a Windows Phone version of the latest flagship
device in that family can save the company millions in marketing
dollars.
"HTC has never been able to compete on marketing
spend," Rubin said. "So optimizing the opportunity to build on the
marketing it has already done with the Android version of the One M8
makes a lot of sense."
What's more, the designs and
specifications used to build Android devices are often a generation
ahead of what's used in Windows Phone devices, Rubin added. This allows a
company like HTC to build a truly high-end smartphone with the latest
specifications.
Jason Mackenzie, president of HTC Americas, said
during the presentation of the new device on Tuesday that the HTC One
M8 for Windows marked "the first time a smartphone manufacturer has
launched an iconic device on multiple operating systems without making
any compromises."
HTC President of Americas Jason Mackenzie introduces the HTC One M8 for Windows in New York City in August 2014.
CNET/Sarah Tew
In an interview, McKenzie acknowledged that it was difficult to build a
flagship phone around the previous versions of Windows Phone. And he
said that when it came to the overall Windows Phone line-up, he saw a
gap.
"When you look at all of the available Windows Phones,
there isn't a real premium smartphone that matches what's offered on
Android," he said. "When we're announcing a flagship device, it's on
Android."
But he said that HTC feels it's important to give
consumers more choices. And even though Microsoft's Windows Phone market
share is just that tiny, 2.5 percent sliver, Mackenzie said that it's
wise to keep it as an alternative to Google Android.
Still, in
spite of a relationship with Microsoft that dates back to the old
PocketPC and the original Windows Mobile smartphones, HTC had not introduced a new Windows Phone since the fall of 2012. Part of the reason for the lag was Microsoft's relationship with Finnish device-maker Nokia, Mackenzie said. A year ago, Microsoft announced its plans to buy Nokia for €5.44 billion, or $7.2 billion.
"We were waiting to see how the relationship would take shape," he
said. "Then there was the acquisition and a regime change at Microsoft.
We weren't sure what their strategy was going to be."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer left his post in February and was replaced by Satya Nadella.
After months of speculation about Microsoft's intent, Nadella's plans
for the former Nokia unit and for Windows Phone more generally are
coming into focus. Last month, the company announced it will be laying off 18,000 employees,
most from Nokia. The decision suggests that Microsoft won't rely on
only Nokia hardware to drive its mobile strategy. The company still
needs partners, like HTC.
"Microsoft needs someone else to build
the hardware other than relying on the in-house Nokia," said Roger
Entner, lead analyst at Recon Analytics.
Maribel Lopez, head of
Lopez Research, agrees. She said that Nokia makes beautiful phones but
it will take much more to broaden "ecosystem support" for Windows Phone.
"And that's what Microsoft needs to make Windows Phone a success," she
said. "It needs to get the benefit of scale with parts and processors
to lower the cost to make these phones."
The stage is set
Microsoft and HTC executives met in January at the Consumer
Electronics Show to discuss the two companies' relationship. It quickly
became clear that the two sides could work together to bring the new
Windows Phone 8.1 to existing Android hardware being used on HTC's
flagship device.
Laybourn said that Terry Myerson, Microsoft's
executive vice president of operating systems, met with HTC CEO Peter
Chou. But the dialogue quickly included the rest of the leadership teams
from both companies -- including executives from Verizon Wireless.
Laybourn said that Microsoft didn't see a gap per se at the high end of
the Windows Phone market. But it was also clear that Microsoft needed to
attract more handset makers and make it easier for them to deploy the
operating system.
Meanwhile, Verizon saw the same gap in hardware that HTC saw.
"We realized at the end of 2013 that when we were selecting devices
for the 2014 lineup that there were gaps in the market for Windows
Phone, particularly at the high end," Jeff, Dietel, vice president of
marketing operations at Verizon Wireless said in an interview.
Jeff Dietel, a Verizon executive, at HTC's event in August 2014 to launch the HTC One M8 for Windows.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Verizon currently sells the Nokia Lumia
Icon and the Nokia Lumia 928. Dietel acknowledged these are great
devices, but he said the HTC One franchise is in a different category
among Verizon subscribers.
"HTC has been more synonymous with
material fit and finish, as well as just really good design," he said.
"Nokia offers terrific hardware, but HTC is just more established in the
US in terms of momentum."
He added that Verizon customers
really wanted more choices when it came to smartphones. Not only did
they want more hardware choices among Android devices, but he said
customers want more software choices, too.
While HTC and Verizon
have harped on this notion that consumers are clamoring for more
choices, one could argue that they are actually being served well enough
by Google Android and Apple iOS, which combined account for 96.4
percent of the market, according to IDC. What is more likely is that
handset makers and the carriers themselves like having more choices.
"Windows Phone has a niche audience," Reticle Research's Rubin said.
"But what it comes down to is that handset makers like having a hedge.
They are uncomfortable being beholden to Google or Apple. They want to
keep their options open."
With this latest effort and thanks to
efforts by Qualcomm, which has also worked closely with Microsoft to
make sure its processors can run on both Windows phone and Android
handsets, it could be easier and more cost effective to build devices
for each platform using the same hardware.
"There's been a lot
of talk throughout the years of creating a dual-boot phone, which is
essentially a single device that can run Android or Windows," Laybourn
said. "So it's not like we had an epiphany about all this. But we did
see an opportunity, and we did the work to make it possible."
Asked if he expected more high-end devices to come out that use the same hardware as Android phones, Laybourn chuckled.
s summer winds down, Weekend Reading delivers stories on a project
that helps diabetes patients, a profile on the chief technical officer
of Microsoft’s Cloud and Services organization, the debut of the HTC One
(M8) for Windows smartphone and Steve Ballmer stepping down from the
Microsoft Board of Directors.
A new pilot project, in conjunction with Health Choice
Network, will provide Windows Phone devices to diabetes patients to help
them better manage their care. Microsoft and pre-paid wireless leader TracFone announced Thursday a better way for underserved and high-risk populations to access and keep up with their care, on the go. A profile on Dave Campbell, Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft’s Cloud and Services, uncovers why he’s disruptive.
And by that, we mean how one of the company’s elite corps of Technical
Fellows can be considered transformative, tearing something down to
create something new and better.
Dave Campbell
Tuesday, we saw the debut of the HTC One (M8) for Windows. It’s the first device to ship in the U.S. with the Windows Phone 8.1 Update,
will be available exclusively through Verizon Wireless online and in
stores. It comes loaded with features such as Cortana, Live Folders and
Action Center. It’s made from a single block of aluminum, and has a
5-inch Super LCD3 1080p HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
A profile on teenager Alejandra Tristan,
who has a rare genetic disorder that made it impossible to use a mouse
or computer, revealed how Windows 8 has helped transform her life. Tristan suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS),
which makes her joints fragile and loose. With its customizable design,
enhanced accessibility features and touchscreen, Windows 8 has helped
Tristan reclaim her studies, her friends and her voice. She writes
research papers by gently touching the on-screen keyboard and dictates
notes using speech recognition software. When she works on vocabulary
words, she uses digital notecards.
.png "English"){kind=small}
Acer has kicked of its IFA 2014 campaign with the launch of the Liquid
Z500 smartphone. The Taiwanese handset giant stressed that the handset
is targeted at the music lovers and is an 'affordable' 5-inch Android
smartphone.
