Large-screen smartphones — often called phablets — have been getting a lot of attention lately. But so far, the devices make up only a tiny portion of the global mobile market, according to a new study.

Flurry, a mobile analytics company, found that of the 200 most popular device models used worldwide in February, 2 percent had screens of 5 inches to 6.9 inches, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Note. The vast majority of mobile users — 69 percent — opted for models with 3.5-inch to 4.9-inch screens, such as Apple’s iPhone, the company said.

Does that mean phablets, which blur the lines between phones and tablets, are a fad?

“This kind of category is in its infancy, and we are seeing success in Samsung,” Teri Daley, vice president of public relations for Samsung Telecommunications America, said in an interview. “Our sales numbers give us confidence in the category.”

Original post is Are Phablets a Fad? Flurry Report Looks at Screen Size by Tech Blog.

Courtesy HTC Corporation

The new HTC One will be the first to feature the HTC UltraPixel Camera.

It was supposed to be the feature that makes HTC outshine Samsung Electronics and Apple. Instead, the complications of producing a camera with what the company calls UltraPixels has forced HTC to delay the roll-out of its HTC One smartphone.

The UltraPixel Camera is so new, so special, so unique, that it’s so, so, so difficult to make, HTC Chief Marketing Officer Benjamin Ho told reporters in Taipei yesterday. “It can’t ramp up so quickly,” he said of the camera sensor specially designed and produced for the Taiwanese company.

Well, it could — but then there’d be a trade-off on quality, he continued, taking a gentle dig at Apple’s problems with some pre-scratched iPhone 5 units.

The HTC One, unveiled in February, was originally supposed to begin shipping in early March. Now, it’s set to arrive on shelves this week in just three markets, the U.K., Germany and Taiwan, before hitting the big time across Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific next month. As recently as a week ago, HTC execs were holding onto the tale that because they were working with suppliers to boost output, the product would launch on time this month.

The cornerstone of the device is this UltraPixel Camera, which HTC says has larger pixels and an aperture that lets in 44 percent more light than the iPhone 5. That means it’ll take better pictures in low-light conditions.

Unfortunately for HTC, producing such a sensor can be ultra difficult.

For Ho, who is tasked with rebuilding a battered brand, the choice to delay was the lesser of two evils: start shipping and risk having some faulty units tarnish the product’s reputation; or delay shipments and face a possible miss on quarterly guidance, a likely decline in credibility, and an assured loss of lead time over Samsung’s Galaxy S4.

Of course, that may not have been the marketing exec’s choice to make, though he speaks as if it was. After all, Ho has only been in the job for less than three months.

Ho’s confession that the HTC One will be delayed was coupled with another admission: that it can’t afford to waste its marketing budget on a less-than-perfect device and risk complaints from customers. Last quarter, HTC fell within a whisker of recording its first operating loss ever. That’s forcing HTC to keep a tight rein on spending in the face of huge marketing campaigns by Samsung and Apple.

Ho, with few guns in his arsenal, is keeping his powder dry until the time comes to launch an assault. Were it to fire up its marketing engine without a solid product to drive, HTC’s operating numbers could easily fall into the red — and that would be more than a headache.

Original post is HTC’s UltraPixel Cameras Are Becoming an Ultra Headache by Tech Blog.

Samsung made itself the brand to beat in the crowded smartphone space by backing Google’s Android software –- 96 percent of the South Korean company’s shipments ran on the platform. Now, it’s planning a high-end smartphone powered by Intel-backed open-source platform Tizen.

The new phone, out as soon as August, is good news for those geeks and independent-minded consumers of the tech zone who are crying out for open-source gadgets. Maybe less so for Apple and Google, who face another challenger in the battle to dominate the platform for global mobile communications.

But Samsung had best beware. Growing competition from Samsung as a maker of high-end smartphones has already turned Apple from its most-valuable customer to an increasingly bitter rival. Does Google’s move into handsets after last year’s acquisition of Motorola put the writing on the wall for that relationship too?

Samsung’s efforts to lessen its reliance on Android by designing its own software Bada – “the sea” in Korean – haven’t yet produced a credible alternative. Nor have phones powered by Microsoft’s OS. Enter Tizen.

“This is just sort of a safety net,” said Doh Hyun Woo, an analyst for Seoul-based Mirae Asset Securities. “But if Google dominates the market just like Microsoft did in the PC market with more than 90 percent share, it may prove the total opposite,” with Google possibly holding this over Samsung’s head.

The big question for Samsung and Google – and Apple, too – is whether consumers learn to live with multiple operating systems, or whether one comes to dominate and the rest are left to wither (who remembers Betamax?).

Watch this space for developing open-source news.

Original post is Samsung Braces for Next Battleground With Google by Tech Blog.

The Korean tech company brought in Broadway performers for a mammoth production at New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall, which seats about 6,000. The hour-long spectacle was broadcast in Times Square, where chairs were set up for people to watch a talented young boy tap dance and actors crack lame jokes. Oh, and there was also a new phone.

The Galaxy S4 is being generally well-received by gadget hounds. It’s packed with whiz-bang features you can show off at the dinner table, like movies that automatically pause when you look away, taking photos using both cameras at the same time, and hand gesture controls.

The Samsung executives on stage at the event did their best Apple-marketing shtick to play up the Galaxy S4′s specs. The 5-inch screen is “unbelievably sharp,” said Ryan Bidan, a director of product marketing at Samsung Telecommunications America. “It’s mind-blowingly thin.” And the “polycarbonate” case (that means plastic) is strong and “simply amazing,” said J.K. Shin, the head of Samsung’s mobile unit.

That’s about where the similarities end. Sure, Apple has had Coldplay and John Mayer perform songs live at its events, but Samsung upstaged Apple with unapologetic extravagance.

“I don’t recall ever seeing a full orchestra for when an Apple executive took the stage,” Michael Gartenberg, a Gartner analyst who watched the Samsung event and has attended numerous Apple conferences, said in an interview. ”If the Apple philosophy is ‘less is more,’ then Samsung’s is ‘more is more.’”

The corny gags and skits — sandwiched between dense recitations of technical specifications — didn’t go over well with the armchair critics on Twitter. But the tourists in Times Square and the people watching the live-stream video at home got a free taste of something vaguely resembling Broadway. As many as 462,000 people tuned in to watch the official stream, according to the YouTube page, and that’s not counting those following the live blogs and other videos.

Samsung spent $401 million on marketing its phones last year in the U.S. alone, while Apple spent $333 million, according to ad research firm Kantar Media. By taking over Radio City and Times Square tonight, Samsung shows it’s not about to slow down. And no matter how lame the actual performance was, the company got what it wanted.

“This was not a subtle product launch,” Gartenberg said. “There’s no doubt that everyone is paying attention to Samsung.”

Original post is Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Launch Was From Another Planet by Tech Blog.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is getting a new phone. In fact, she’s buying almost 10,000 of them, for something in the neighborhood of $31 million.

This summer, the German government will get the first of about 9,600 hack-proof handsets. The government last year asked tech companies for bids on supplying phones to let ministry workers, diplomats, and other officials send and receive classified documents and make secure calls.

On Mar. 6, the government said the tender had been won by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems unit and Secusmart, a security specialist in Dusseldorf. The devices will cost about 2,500 euros each, according to a March 12 report in Manager Magazine.

Secusmart says it is using Blackberry handsets for its phones. The company says it worked on the device for about a year and will start supplying the government in July. A mobile application security company in Hanover, mediaTest digital, will supply a secure internal app store for the devices.

“Secure phones used to be anything but sleek and smart,” said Hans-Christoph Quelle, Secusmart’s managing director. The device “will offer all amenities of a modern smartphone that can be used privately and at the same time, it will be secure enough for Ms. Merkel. That’s the first time this has been achieved.”

T-Systems says it started with phones from Samsung Electronics and added software that allows users to switch between private and secure work mode without having to restart.

Quelle predicts the trend will catch on. “We’re talking to governments around the world, and they all want the same thing: A secure phone that’s user-friendly,” Quelle said.

Original post is Forget the Batphone. Here Comes the Merkelphone by Tech Blog.

But what happens if you forget to charge it?

“At least now, if I don’t charge my phone, I can still go home,” Vittorio Colao, chief executive officer of Vodafone Group Plc, told reporters in Barcelona today at the Mobile World Congress, where attendees were encouraged to use their NFC devices to get into seminars and pay for snacks.

Battery life isn’t the only challenge. The technology has been constrained as carriers, handset makers, retailers, credit card companies and banks try to come to an agreement on the best platform to market the technology.

On that front, Visa Inc., the world’s largest electronic payments network, said today it has teamed up with handset maker Samsung Electronics Co. to provide a financial program to enable handsets to be used like a credit or debit card. Visa’s PayWave application will be a standard feature on Samsung’s NFC-equipped devices.

“The Visa-Samsung global alliance is a first of its kind between a leading NFC handset manufacturer and payment network that is paving the way for the implementation of large-scale mobile payment programs,” the companies said in a statement.

No doubt, features and applications will help pave the way for broad adoption of the digital wallet. But if the charging issue isn’t resolved, users of the technology may find themselves stranded at the wrong end of their subway line or without money to pay for lunch.

Until that’s addressed, consumers may want to carry around both wallets for now.

Original post is Paying With Your Digital Wallet? Don’t Forget to Charge Your Device by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP Photo

Lee Jae Yong's rise to Samsung's vice chairman and heir apparent was a long time in the making.

Samsung unveiled its upcoming flagship product yesterday: Lee Jae Yong. He’s the son of company chairman Lee Kun Hee, the billionaire who transformed the former fish exporter into Asia’s largest consumer-electronics company.

Yesterday’s promotion of Lee Jae Yong to vice chairman signals his role as successor to his 70-year-old father, my colleague Jungah Lee reported in Bloomberg News. The elder Lee is chairman.

Even with the Lee family’s iron grip over the South Korean tech giant, engineering a next-generation business leader is no small endeavor. The development process was two decades in the making.

In 1991, Lee Jae Yong joined Samsung Electronics, serving as a vice president of strategic planning and then as chief customer officer. If the latter title sounds kind of made up, well, that’s because it kind of is. The position was created for him and disappeared when he dropped it in 2008 — a period when the Lee Jae Yong project was in jeopardy. His father stepped down as chairman after being charged with tax evasion, taking the son down for a while, too.

On Dec. 15, 2009, Samsung Group seized on an opportunity to revive the succession plan. The company created a new role within Samsung Electronics for a chief operating officer (at least that title was believable) and installed Lee Jae Yong. He was also named executive vice president.

The timing of the management shakeup, when the television and phone maker was thriving, seemed odd. But pushing him into the spotlight just as Samsung Electronics had solidified market dominance had a side benefit. “He can take credit for the company’s financial success,” Kim Sun Woong, head of the Center for Good Corporate Governance, an independent think-tank, told Bloomberg Businessweek then.

Two weeks after the younger Lee’s return to the empire, which accounts for one-fifth of its homeland’s gross domestic product, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak pardoned the elder Lee’s crimes. Three months after that, he was chairman again. Later that year, his only son was promoted again, to president.

Samsung is a dynasty, like it or not (and many in South Korea do not). Lee Kun Hee inherited the group from his father, who founded it in 1938. Now, with the tax scandal behind him and his son’s role seemingly assured, there is one major threat for the nation’s wealthiest man to deal with: the others in his family. His older brother and sister are suing him for at least $850 million worth of Samsung Group shares.

Original post is How Samsung Is Developing Its Next-Generation Leader by Tech Blog.

Now my colleagues Jun Yang and Kyunghee Park have authored “The Curious Case of Samsung’s Missing TVs,” a great read on how a couple of missing TVs hold clues to the multibillion-dollar corporate espionage business that makes Danny Ocean’s rag-tag team look like petty pickpockets.

South Korea, which counts Samsung as its chief exporter, estimates foreign theft of its corporate secrets cost it $82 billion in damages in 2008. In Taiwan, legislators are drafting tougher laws on IP theft with stricter penalties for cross-border espionage, after a Chinese rival allegedly stole secrets from panel-maker AU Optronics. Meanwhile, in India, 35 percent of companies engage in stealing secrets to gain an edge.

While it hurts the boffins coming up with the innovations, the good news for Hollywood is that as the heists continue, there’ll be no shortage of fodder for sequels.

Original post is Hollywood’s Next Heist Flick Should be Set in Suwon by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

A customer inspects mobile devices at a kiosk selling Samsung products in Ambience Mall in Gurgaon, India.

Foxconn doesn’t like to be compared with Samsung.

Founder and Chairman Terry Gou has gone out of his way to tell audiences how the world’s biggest assembler of electronics is better and can defeat its South Korean rival on multiple fronts. He’s even readied more than $1.6 billion on a deal with Sharp to achieve that end. (The companies are still hammering it out.)

Now, two years after Foxconn found itself in the public eye over worker conditions, Samsung is joining the Taiwanese company under that same bright, hot spotlight of worker reform. Underage labor, unsafe conditions and forced overtime were among the allegations China Labor Watch made in September.

Samsung, the world’s largest maker of TVs and mobile phones, followed up with a four-week audit of 105 suppliers, which it conducted itself the same month. The results? While it didn’t find any examples of child labor, it did find “several instances of inadequate practices,” including suppliers fining workers for lateness and absences, the company said on Monday. Those issues should, in theory, be solvable through stricter enforcement of existing standards.

It also discovered something that Foxconn, Apple’s chief supplier, had already learned: Excessive overtime exists in China, and it’s very hard to stop.

“Continuing to cut overtime has been a key challenge,” Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo said back in August, when the Fair Labor Association issued a report as part of Apple’s membership in the group. Woo said “getting overtime is not an obligation but a privilege workers would actually like to have.”

Samsung acknowledged the problem of cutting overtime, saying it aims to eliminate hours beyond legal limits by the end of 2014. That’s more than two years away, an indication of how tough it may be to achieve that goal.

It also shows just how much Foxconn and Samsung, when under the same spotlight, have in common.

Original post is A Spotlight Foxconn Is Willing to Share With Samsung by Tech Blog.

Photograph courtesy of Beats Electronics

Played at a high volume, the Pill has much less distortion than the Jambox.

Ever since its release, Jawbone’s Jambox has set the standard for grab ‘n’ go mobile-device speakers. Now it has a new competitor: the Pill from Beats Electronics, purveyors of the ubiquitous Dr. Dre-endorsed stereo headphones.

It’s an interesting time for Beats, which is controlled by Dre and celebrated music producer and executive Jimmy Iovine. Earlier this year, Beats began to unwind its successful partnership with Monster Cable, which had manufactured and distributed its products. Meanwhile, Taiwanese cell-phone maker HTC briefly took a majority interest in the company, only to sell back much of it.

Now Beats is charting its own course, with the Pill as one of its early post-Monster product-line extensions. (The company is also releasing a new set of noise-canceling headphones called Beats Executive to take on Bose.)

The Pill has a lot in common with the Jambox. They both cost $199, are colorful and are compact and light enough to toss into a computer bag or suitcase.

They also both use Bluetooth to wirelessly stream music, video soundtracks and game sound-effects for those times when you just want to listen out loud. And each can double as a two-way squawk-box for calls on your smartphone.

While pairing a Bluetooth speaker to your mobile phone or tablet isn’t especially hard, the Pill boasts a feature that’s supposed to make it even easier: a Near-Field Communication chip. Just tap an NFC-equipped phone to the speaker, and you’re ready to go.

That’s the theory, anyway. When I went to pair it with a Samsung Galaxy S III, I got one of those gloriously geeky “unknown tag type” Android error messages. Turns out the feature only works with a tiny fraction of devices that both have an NFC chip and are running the latest “Jelly Bean” version of Android.

But I had no problem pairing it with the Galaxy — as well as an iPad and iPhone — using plain old-fashioned Bluetooth.

The Pill also differs with the Jambox in a couple of key areas. The biggest one is sound.

The Pill — so named for its tubular shape — has four drivers, as opposed to the two on the Jambox. And played at high volume, it has much less distortion than the Jambox. If you really want to crank things up, this is the Bluetooth speaker for you.

On the other hand — and somewhat oddly, given its parentage and Beats’s reputation for thumping, insistent bass in its headphones — the Pill is a little light on the lower end of the sonic spectrum. In fairness, bass is really hard to do in a package this small. But it’s one of the Jambox’s strong suits.

Those issues aside, the sound quality of the Pill was very good for casual listening, and I could easily see making use of it, say, in a hotel room where I want to watch a movie without wearing headphones, or listen to my own music while getting ready in the morning.

Not to mention blasting it loud enough to wake the people in the next room.

Original post is Beats Moves From Headphones to Listening Out Loud — Really Loud by Tech Blog.