Author: Brad Reed

Google chairman says Facebook Home is ‘what open source is all about’

Android users may not like Facebook Home very much, but Google chairman Eric Schmidt sounds like an enthusiastic supporter. During AllThingsD’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday, Schmidt called Facebook’s Android overlay “fantastic” and said it was a creative tweaking of the operating system that was “what open source is all about.” Schmidt’s endorsement of Facebook Home is particularly interesting because there has been speculation that Google would clamp down on third-party Android overlays in the future so it could keep its own services such as Gmail and YouTube at the center of the Android experience. But if Schmidt’s comments are any indication, then Google may be more welcoming of software overlays such as Facebook Home than many had assumed.

April 16, 2013
Google’s Schmidt teases Motorola’s upcoming phones as daily Android activations reach 1.5 million

Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday teased Android fans by saying that Motorola is working on a “phenomenal” set of new devices that he’s describing as “phones-plus,” implying that they have some special new features added to them that current smartphones don’t offer. Schmidt, who made his remarks about future Motorola projects at AllThingsD’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference, declined to offer any further details about what “phones-plus” would entail, but it’s a good bet that they’ll be more than just high-end smartphones with cutting-edge specs.

Continue reading…

April 16, 2013
Android malware infections found to have tripled in 2012

Anyone developing malicious software for mobile devices has set his or her sights almost exclusively on Android at this point. Mobile security vendor NQ has found that Android devices infected with malware grew from 10.8 million in 2011 to 32.8 million in 2012, meaning that the total number of infected devices tripled year-over-year. NQ also found that almost 95% of malware detected in 2012 was designed specifically for Android devices, meaning Google’s mobile operating system is by far the No. 1 target for would-be cybercriminals.

Continue reading…

April 15, 2013
MetroPCS board unanimously approves new T-Mobile merger terms

The merger between T-Mobile and MetroPCS is very close to getting official now that Deutsche Telekom’s revised offer has led some major shareholders to drop their objections to the deal. MetroPCS announced on Monday that its board of directors had unanimously approved the new merger terms and said that the revised deal “significantly improves the value of the proposed combination for MetroPCS stockholders” while adding that the proposed merger “is in the best interest of all MetroPCS stockholders.” The MetroPCS merger is the linchpin of T-Mobile’s strategy to expand its operations in the United States since the prepaid wireless carrier already offers LTE services in several major metropolitan markets. MetroPCS shareholders are scheduled to vote to approve or reject the merger on April 24th.

April 15, 2013
Facebook Home gets slew of 1-star reviews on Google Play

If early reviews are any indication, Google doesn’t have to worry too much about Facebook Home winning the hearts and minds of Android users. Facebook Home’s Google Play page shows that roughly 47% of Android users have given the new software just one star so far, while another 14.5% have given it two stars. Taken together, 61.5% of Google Play users so far have given Facebook’s newest Android software a below-average rating and Facebook Home’s overall rating on Google Play stands at 2.3 stars. Among other things, negative reviewers complained that Facebook Home “hid most of my other apps,” that it had “no support for my other widgets” and that it “made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours.”

April 15, 2013
PC margins expected to sink further as vendors engage in race to the bottom

You know the PC industry is in trouble when bearish analysts are criticizing themselves for not being pessimistic enough. StreetInsider points us to new research from Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore, who says that his earlier “relatively bearish estimate” for PC sales in 2013 “is already looking too high.” With Dell looking to exit the traditional PC business and go private, Whitmore thinks the company will enact aggressive price cuts that will further erode margins on personal computers and will force vendors to “compete for scale in a structurally declining market.” Whitmore thinks this will take a particularly hard toll on HP, which saw its PC shipments decline by more than 23% year-over-year in Q1 2013.

April 15, 2013
Spring iPhone sales could be further ‘depressed’ by later-than-usual iPad launch

With Apple increasingly unlikely to release a new version of its iPad until the fall, at least one analyst is worried that it will spell trouble for sales of the iPhone 5 this spring. Per Barron’s, R.W. Baird analyst William Power projects “a sharper fall-off in iPhone sales due in part to heightened competition, and the lack of a March/April iPad refresh to depress this year’s sequential comparison relative to a year ago” when Apple released its third-generation tablet. Power’s remarks come amid reports that Foxconn earnings have been hurt by “disappointing” iPhone 5 sales over the past couple of months despite the fact that the iPhone 5 has been the best-selling smartphone in the world since its launch last fall.

April 15, 2013
Samsung Galaxy Note III may ditch plastic for better build

One of the most common criticisms of Samsung’s hugely popular Galaxy line of devices is that they use plastic cases that are less durable and of lower quality than the aluminum builds of the iPhone 5 and the HTC One. One of SamMobile’s sources says that the company is taking this criticism to heart, however, and is considering upping the build quality for its next Galaxy Note “phablet” because it is supposedly “worried” about the perception that it uses second-rate materials. While this news would be welcomed by many Samsung fans, there are some reasons to doubt whether Samsung will really ditch plastic going forward. In the first place, the plastic builds make Samsung devices much easier to mass produce than rival devices and the high yields help Samsung achieve better economies of scale. Second, the average consumer has given precisely no sign that he or she cares about plastic builds since the notoriously plasticky Galaxy S III sold around 40 million units in 2012.

April 15, 2013
Verizon backs up BlackBerry, says Z10 returns aren’t high at all

BlackBerry executives were furious last week when they accused Detwiler Fenton analyst Jeff Johnston of making “materially false and misleading” claims about returns of the BlackBerry Z10 outnumbering total sales. Barron’s points out that BlackBerry got some key help late last week when Verizon issued a statement affirming that “after 14 days, quality performance [of the BlackBerry Z10] has been in line with other smartphone launches.” This backs up a statement made by BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, who said that “sales of the BlackBerry Z10 are meeting expectations and the data we have collected from our retail and carrier partners demonstrates that customers are satisfied with their devices.”

April 15, 2013
T-Mobile says early iPhone 5 sales have been ‘gangbusters’

Good things have come to T-Mobile customers who have had to wait for the iPhone to finally arrive at their favorite carrier. Per AllThingsD, T-Mobile CMO Mike Sievert claims that the carrier had a “gangbusters” first day of iPhone 5 sales with “lines out the door… at nearly all of our almost 3,000 stores nationwide.” Sievert went on to say that the lines outside T-Mobile stores show that consumers “want the iPhone 5, and they are voting with their feet that they want it from T-Mobile.” T-Mobile is expected to get a boost from finally getting the iPhone on its network this year, with one analyst projecting that the carrier will sell around 3.4 million iPhones in 2013.

April 15, 2013
Twitter’s new music app gets limited release to select celebrities

Everyone seems to following be Pandora into the music discovery business these days and Twitter has decided getting into the game by releasing its own music app on Friday. There’s just one catch, however: As AllThingsD writes, Twitter is only making the app accessible to select “influencers” such as Ryan Seacrest before making it available to the non-famous portion of the public. The music app apparently “suggests artists and tracks to users based on a number of personalized signals, including the Twitter accounts a user follows on the microblogging service” and will let users “listen to clips of music from inside the app, using third-party services like iTunes and SoundCloud.” AllThingsD says that the music app will likely be released for all users some time next week.

April 12, 2013
The Pirate Bay gets booted out of Greenland in less than two days

Things haven’t been going very well for The Pirate Bay recently ever since the notorious file-sharing website had to scrap its plans to shift hosting responsibilities from the Swedish Pirate Party to the Norwegian Pirate Party after a local copyright enforcement group threatened the Norwegian Pirate Party with a lawsuit. In a recent desperate attempt to find a host, the site tried migrating to servers in Greenland, but now The Register reports that The Pirate Bay has been booted out of Greenland less than 48 hours after settling down on its frozen tundra. Apparently Greenlandic telecom company Tele-Post “decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” which put a quick end to the website’s adventures in the enormous northern landmass. We have no idea where The Pirate Bay will go next for a home but it wouldn’t surprise us if the site really did give North Korea a try at this rate.

April 12, 2013
Google offers to label its own properties in searches to settle EU antitrust case

To settle charges that it’s artificially boosting its own properties in search results, Google is offering to let consumers know that it’s the company behind Google Shopping. The Guardian reports that Google has made a settlement offer to European antitrust officials in which the company says it will “label results where its own properties, such as YouTube or Google Shopping, appear in listings when people perform searches.” The Guardian notes that this concession is unlikely to satisfy critics who claim that Google is pushing down rivals’ products to promote its own services, since the offer would do nothing to change the rankings in search results. Google skated in a similar investigation in the United States when the Federal Trade Commission found it didn’t violate American antitrust law late last year.

April 12, 2013
Bing found to retrieve five times as many malicious websites as Google

It seems that taking the Bing Challenge could make your computer more vulnerable to malware. PCMag reports that a new study from German independent testing lab AV-Test has found that searches conducted with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine retrieve five times as many malicious websites as searches conducted with Google. After studying around 10 million search results from each search engine, AV-Test found that Bing retrieved 1,285 malicious links while Google retrieved just 272 malicious links. Both Google and Bing were still vastly safer than Russian search engine Yandex, which returned a total of 3,300 malicious links out of 13 million search results studied.

April 12, 2013
No bottom seen yet for PC sales plunge

This has been a pretty bad news week for Microsoft and we should probably expect a lot more of them going forward. Barron’s points us to a new note from Merrill Lynch software analyst Kash Rangan, who thinks that PC sales haven’t come close to bottoming out yet. In fact, Rangan estimates that “if roughly 50% of consumer PCs (20-25% of total) represent low-end devices which are at risk of cannibalization by tablets, then PC units need to decline by 20-25% to get to trough growth.” While this will certainly be a trying time for Microsoft and its OEM partners, Ragnan sees things stabilizing after consumers are through switching out tablets for new PCs because Microsoft still has a “stable and nicely growing enterprise business.”

April 12, 2013
Microsoft’s Android antitrust complaint called ‘an attack on open source’

When a Microsoft (MSFT)-led group called Fairsearch Europe filed an antitrust complaint against Google (GOOG) and its Android platform this week, it didn’t merely say that the company was rigging its search results to benefit its own products. Instead, it went a step further and said that Google was unfairly promoting Android to device manufacturers by making it free to use, while also accusing the company of employing “predatory distribution of Android at below-cost.” Ars Technica’s Timothy Lee finds this sort of attack on Android to be very dangerous on Microsoft’s part since it seemingly isn’t just attacking Google but the entire nature of open-source software.

Continue reading…

April 12, 2013
BlackBerry will ask regulators to investigate analyst who made false return rate claims

BlackBerry (BBRY) is very unhappy with Detwiler Fenton analyst Jeff Johnston. The company is accusing Johnston of making false claims about BlackBerry Z10 return rates in the U.S. and it plans to ask regulators in both the United States and Canada to launch a formal investigation into the matter. Johnston on Thursday claimed that “key retail partners have seen a significant increase in Z10 returns to the point where, in several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before.” BlackBerry Chief Legal Officer Steve Zipperstein says that these claims are “materially false and misleading” and says that they were “deliberately purveyed for the purpose of influencing the markets.” BlackBerry’s full press release is posted below.

Continue reading…

April 12, 2013
Why Lenovo has been the only OEM to weather the great PC collapse so far

The Wednesday IDC report on the disastrous state of the PC industry had one very interesting tidbit that many overlooked: Namely, that while companies such as HP (HPQ) and Acer (2353) saw their shipments collapse by more than 20% year-over-year, Lenovo (LNVGY) actually held steady and experienced no decline in shipments. According to Businessweek, there are a couple of reasons for this: First, Lenovo has been targeting its sales toward emerging markets such as Brazil and its native China, where demand for new PCs is higher than in the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea. Businessweek also says that Lenovo “makes almost one-third of its products in house, which helps it innovate and get those innovations to the market more quickly” while also allowing it “to rely less on factories that are also making computers for its competitors.” Having completely flat growth may not be ideal for most businesses, of course, but in the 2013 PC market, holding your ground is something of a miraculous triumph.

April 11, 2013
Biggest MetroPCS shareholder changes course, now supports T-Mobile merger

Deutsche Telekom’s latest effort to sweeten its offer to MetroPCS (PCS) shareholders has apparently done the trick as Bloomberg reports that MetroPCS’s biggest shareholder has now tentatively come out in favor of its merger with T-Mobile. Paulson & Co., the hedge fund founded by famous investor John Paulson, said on Thursday that it “intends to vote for the merger as restructured” now that Deutsche Telekom has upped its offer, although the firm said it still needs “to review the revised proxy statement before making a final decision.” With Paulson likely to drop opposition to the acquisition, though, it seems that the final hurdle to MetroPCS and T-Mobile merging is about to be cleared.

April 11, 2013
Judge slams Apple, Google for using lawsuits as ‘a business strategy’ that has ‘no end’

The plethora of patent suits filed by or against Apple (AAPL) and Android vendors over the past couple of years has driven many judges to angry tirades. Now, U.S. District Judge Robert Scola has joined this elite club by slamming both Apple and Google (GOOG) for allegedly abusing the patent litigation system. Bloomberg reports that Scola issued an order on Wednesday that lambasted the two companies for allegedly having “no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute” and of “using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end.”

Continue reading…

April 11, 2013