Headline news from Microsoft



Android up 13%, iOS down 7%, BlackBerry down 81% … and Windows Phone up a massive 52%


First of all, basic percentage theory says all percentages in a given statement must add up to 100% or some numberical BSing is going on .....

Well, it IS a statement from Microsoft about Microsoft and it is driven by sales figures provided by Microsoft so perhaps a wee little bit of BS'ing is to be expected.

Microsoft has just spent millions on advertising their notebook and phone systems and even more $$$ on training sales associates at the various carriers on how to pitch their products to the best advantage.

(and to be sure millions more will be spent as Christmas approaches)

Microsoft currently has the millions to spend to tell you how wonderful they are, but eventually them nasty old factual actual facts do tend to creep into the picture.

Them nasty old factual actual facts department    ..... and please note that the sales figures that are available are sorta old & out of date, too.



This last numberical based, completely "unspun" table simply says that Microsoft shipped twice as many phones in this same quarter this year than last year, and they have shipped 4.1% of the total number of US phones shipped so far for this rolling quarter of this year.  

These are not even the full first quarter 2013 figures ......  they roll in December of last year.

So, at the very very start of this year Microsoft was taking share from Blackberry (Rim) and Symbian (Nokia), who are busy going obsolete as we speak.   Android was taking clearly taking share from Apple, which is more significant.  

Why worry about phones?  

Phones are currently driving the technological curve in a relatively open pathway that makes all sorts of neat new gadgets come popping out of the woodwork.

Apple, who USED to be the largest market share holder in phones lost their Steve Jobs and has gone "dead at the helm" for over a year now --- and they have lost their lead in phone space accordingly.  

Now this is bad for all of us as the 800 pound gorilla used to drive change at a furious pace, but since the gorilla's head died the gorilla jest ain't doing very much any more.  

(and neither is anybody else, apparently)


We have still not seen the new products for the various players that should be driving their Christmas sales efforts for this year.  If the new products do not come out soon in large shippable volumes then Christmas season may be sorta dull this year.

Some hope for Apple lovers everywhere .....   Job's last project was to do with reinventing TV

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/511091/apples-next-innovation-tv/

And them Chinese cut rate cheapie tablet guys, why is it that we think that they are getting relatively more important?  

Because the Rockchip RK 3188 28nm A9 quad core chipset is getting less & less expensive -- yep that is the one that is currently populating all the new low end cheapie tablets (at a very respectable 1.6 to 1.8 ghz per core speed).  These new generation $150 tablets are not performance slouches by anybody's guesstimation, they beat out a Tegra 3 fairly easily on all fronts.  

Good video resolution, good viewing angles, good capacitive touch screen performance -- they have finally come of age.   The RK 3188 quad core beats the Tegra 3 chipset on the benchmarks by a 25% margin and it costs half as much -- with as good or better video performance on actual devices with same-same screen resolutions.

So, the cheapie 7 & 8 inch tablets at Walmart offer a true near premium experience at less than half the cost of the high price name brand processors/tablets sitting next to them -- and they are getting cheaper and better supported all the time.

Walmart sells them by the skidillions, so you know they must work OK or Wally would drop them like a hot potato as Wally pays close attention to return rates, yes they do.





Read the graph and note which segment (clearly, it is the tier 3 suppliers) which is currently experiencing the biggest growth.   Repeat sales are still working for the tier 3 guys as when your tablet only costs $125 and you drop it & bust it, you go get you another one.  

Drop your IPad 1 or 2 and do you run out and buy an IPad 3 ???   Heck no, unless you are mind-locked on IOS so badly you can't comprehend anything but Apple products.   These are the folks who buy cases and insurance policies on their carriables.

Tablets for young kids almost 100% comes out of this tier 3 category.   Nobody is going to give a $400 IPad to a young kid for them to go trash it.


==========   What will happen next year  ==========


Premium tablets, to justify the big price difference, must have a new generation chipset in them that really does something drastically better/faster than the old stuff from 6 months to a year ago could do.

Right now that big performance gap for the premium price stuff just isn't there -- so the cheapie Chinese guys are seeing a hayday of being able to do a near match on performance and features at a really significant cost savings.   They are building a BUNCH of tablets right now and they have sales outlets in Walmart, Kmart and Sears etc. etc. that can move a bunch of them.  Folks are starting to lose their fear of the tier 3 products sold by Walmart, as they know Wally will take it back if it doesn't work.

Now, how about this little trick-- there is an app now to overclock the current generation 28nm RK 3188's main processors to 1.94mhz each and zip up the 4 graphics cores from 400 to 600 mhz.   This is a 40% increase in main processor performance and they say the video bump is actually testing out closer to double up.  You have to run a little bitty fan blowing on the processor when doing this, but now you got you a really cheap item that OUTPERFORMS the high priced stuff.  

Crazy stuff, really.    What will open up the flood gates in the next 6 months is Linaro is going to bake full RK3188 chipset support into the Linux kernel and then you will see lots of little linux PCs popping up all over the place, running full featured Ubuntu right out of the box.


========


The old style PC big box builders & enthusiasts understand this sort of stuff and some of the old PC guys are glomming on to this new frontier.

Look to see "small server boards" become all the rage for the old power tower PC guys as your very first AMD server boards will be out next year that will host 8 to 16 separate CPU modules that will each carry 4 cores per CPU.   That is a LOT of computing power .... in a very small package.



Briefcase Supercomputers is what the boys are starting to call them ....