Apple iPad users have been busy downloading apps

Since the launch of the original iPad in April 2010, three billion apps have been downloaded for the hit tablet, ABI Research announced today. It took the iPhone years to hit the 3B mark, ABI said, while it took the iPad a year as well as a half. In contrast, the market researcher said, 440 million apps downloads so far for Android tablets.

The difference in downloads further illustrates the supremacy that the iPad holds in the tablet marketplace, where its rivals have fought each other for the place of distant second place. The difference is also mainly due to the larger library of applications obtainable on the iPad. As of the third district, there were 120,000 iPad exact apps in the App Store, ABI thought.

“Discounting all persons apps that were originally developed for Android smart phones, Android motionless trails greatly at the back the iPad in terms of its tablet app contributions,  said ABI psychoanalyst Lim Shiyang.

The dissimilarity is bleak . A study taken by NPD in November found sales of one.2 million units of non-Apple tablets from January in October. Apple, in comparison, shipped 11.1 million iPads in the prior quarter.

Of coursework, the roll out of Android tablets is getting started.The revise did not include Amazon s Kindle Fire  which has established to be a popular holiday gift article.

The move to Android four.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich, could also help tablet sales, since the operating method is intended to permit apps to be simultaneously built for both the smartphone & tablet.

ABI expects Android app downloads to finally overtake the iPad, as Android smartphone sales have long surpassed the iPhone.Annual app downloads for Android smart phones are expected to punch 58 billion by 2016 compared with 27 billion for the iPhone.

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Some of IBM’s distinguished engineers might need to review the laws of thermodynamics.

The computing giant today announced its “IBM five in 5″ predictions of expertise developments in the next years. The most provocative is mind reading, to understand brain disorders, or where sensors will be able to translate people’s thoughts in to actions, such as operating a computer.

The least believable perhaps is the idea that homes will be powered by human motion. In a video on its “People power comes to life” prediction, an IBMer says “you will be able to power your house with the energy you generate yourself.”

In a web record post relating this conditions IBM then makes the leap to harvesting the power of the thoughtful Seldom intelligence that it is unrelated to micro vigor harvesting, the power of the oceanic is almost limitless.

How will this occur? IBM says the reply is so called parasitic power compilation, where energy is harvested in to a battery in the assignments of bicycle riding or even from the water flowing from side to side a home’s pipes.

Piezoelectric materials can actually draw energy from vibration. There’s a mass of efforts to harness energy from this effect, including subway pavements & sneakers that hold tiny sensors. So this is expertise with actual potential. But think about the scale of things.

As much as I’d like to agree with IBM’s prognostications, I’d like to offer a dose of reality, which has to do with something IBM knows a bit about: scale.

Tidal & wave power is also viable expertise with the potential to supply plenty of millions of homes in the U S. other than it is not innumerable.

The standard U S. home consumes over 11 million watt-hours a year. You’d need a whole lot of energy-harvesting sensors, each drawing a tiny stream of wattage, to “power your house. Some day rapidly you could accuse your iPod or perhaps even your laptop computer, but except they go on extreme energy diets, this type of  people power” won’t jog a house.

Here’s an idea of the way it stacks up against consumption: University of Cambridge professor David MacKay modeled how much energy is obtainable from tidal & wave power in the U K., which is blessed with substantial hydrokinetic resources. They estimates that wave power in the U K. offers fifth the potential of wind power & that wave energy is about tenth of what the U K. consumes driving cars.

& don’t forget, most things don’t operate in the time scale of Moore’s Law when it comes to energy. There’s already wave & tidal energy devices generating power & delivering it in to the grid. But the development technique to bring this expertise to scale spans plenty of years, given the technical & financial challenges (new energy technologies are more pricey than fossil fuels) & the necessity to assess the environmental impact.

So enjoy IBM’s thought-provoking predictions–but know that, as plenty of energy specialists point out, transitions in the energy technique are measured in decades even with multiple technical advances. Ultimately, predictions are supposed to be provocative, & if IBM got us all to think about the potential of “waste energy,” then the company got at least that right.

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Yesterday RIM posted noteworthy declines in revenue and profit in the fiscal third quarter, and provided a lackluster predict for the following period. More importantly, executives admitted that their next generation phone, running on the Blackberry 10 stage, wouldn’t come out until late next year a blow to those who had pinned their hopes on RIM enlargement a comeback in the next few months.

After an evening of processing the reports, analysts came out and savaged the corporation.

Management remnants in complete denial of the situation and we believe the company could start losing funds and burning cash by the end of next summer,  said Pierre Ferragu, an psychoanalyst at Sanford Bernstein, in a investigate note.

Robert  w. Baird analyst William authority said RIM’s U S. business was  in plummet.

RIM shares recently cut down $1.70,or,11.2 % to13.43 dollar.

Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis & Jim Balsillie together insisted that their plan to transition to Blackberry 10 will ultimately set them in a better position downward the line. In the intervening time, the company plans to spend more on promotions, publicity and special offers to keep the Blackberry brand alive and yields moving.

Balsillie warned, though, that the added promotional action would further cut into earnings next year.

It’s also indistinct how effective that promotional effort. RIM fired a main salvo this summer with the open of multiple products. Aside from the flagship daring, none of the other phones have in truth made much of a dent in the market.

Given the utter number of smart phones that start on each year, if a device doesn’t come out with a beat, there’s little hope of sales picking up in the weeks and months after. So even if RIM throws money and publicity at its product lineup, it may be ineffective alongside the horde of new phones coming out over the next slight months.

Likewise, while RIM’s BlackBerry 10 phone finally comes out, it will vie against a next generation iPhone, likely motorized by LTE, an army of high-end Android phones, as well as an selection of Windows Phone devices. Lazaridis said the company is waiting for a dual core, LTE integrated chip to come out in the middle of next year; products with quad core chips are already coming out for early on next year.

While RIM remains dedicated to the PlayBook tablet basically its only lifeline to the future Blackberry 10 platform analysts are disbelieving. The company was able to move its tablets only after momentous discounts, which brought the tool down to $99 for RIM workers, and $199 during Black Friday specials. RIM can’t carry on to take a enormous loss on each device, yet it can’t vie on the high end against the iPad.

We are still unconstructive on RIM’s position as we see little room to slice out a profitable niche between lower priced rivalry such as Amazon’s $200 Fire and Apple’s iPad management,  said Ittai Kidron, an psychoanalyst at Oppenheimer.

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T-Mobile USA and Nokia said today they will sell the Lumia 710, marking Nokia’s push to re-enter the US. marketplace in a actual way.

With the Lumia 710, priced at $49.99 and available on January 11, Nokia and T-Mobile are going after consumers who own a basic cell phone, but have been hesitant to upgrade to a more complicated smartphone. The companies believe the low price of the handset, lower-priced data, and easier-to-use Windows Phone operating system will help people ease their way into a more sophisticated mobile device.

It will mark the first Nokia Windows Phone to hit U S. shores. For T-Mobile, the more affordable device should help it sway smartphone newbies and more budget-conscious subscribers at a time when its highest-tier customers leave for carriers offering a better selection of phones.

“This is the right product to go after the 150 million feature phone users in the country,” said Chris Weber, head of Nokia’s North America business, adding that figure is twice the size of the current smartphone base.

T-Mobile considers the Lumia 710 a hero phone–industry jargon for its flagship device–for the post-holiday period starting in January. Andrew Sherrard, senior vice president of handset marketing for T-Mobile, said the Lumia 710 would be prominently displayed in its stores, and that Windows Phone smartphones would become a larger share of the carrier’s overall portfolio. He said the phone would be ideal for consumers who are watching their wallets a bit more closely after the holidays.

Nokia plans on a significant marketing campaign for both the Nokia brand and the Lumia 710, Weber said. While he didn’t disclose specifically how much Nokia would spend, he said it would be “in the neighborhood of what it takes to be successful,” and added it would pour money into marketing, sales incentives, and better presence in retail outlets.

The other vendors haven’t done a good job of communicating the benefits of Windows Phone, something Nokia hopes to fix by highlighting some of the specific advantages and uses of the Lumia 710, Weber said.

Still, the launch represents a tiny bit of a lackluster start for Nokia’s large U S reboot. The Lumia 710 is not Nokia’s high-end device; it is the mass-market phone that doesn’t stand out for its design or specs. Its launch partner, T-Mobile, is the fourth-largest national carrier in the U S , and has seen its momentum slip over the past year, partly due to the distraction of trying to save a takeover by AT&T. At $49.99, the phone could be a lovely deal, but could also get lost in the shuffle amid post-holiday discounts of other higher-profile devices.

Nokia may be saving its bigger gun, the Lumia 800, for of the giant carriers. CNET reported on Monday that Nokia is testing an LTE variant of the Lumia 800 with Verizon and AT&T, and it is believed that AT&T will announce the Lumia 800 as a device at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The Lumia 710 features a three.7-inch LCD display with “ClearBlack” expertise, which Weber said works better in sunlight. It also has a one.4-gigahertz Qualcomm processor, 512MB of RAM, a 5-megapixel camera, and 8GB of storage. Like other Windows Phone devices, it comes with 25GB of storage on Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service. The phone will be able to tap in to T-Mobile’s fast network, although it won’t be able to accomplish the higher speeds that the Samsung Galaxy S II or HTC Amaze 4G can get.

Weber said Nokia designs to have a broad range of products, including higher-end devices and different carriers, out in the U.S. Sherrard declined to comment on whether T-Mobile had the choice of selling the Lumia 800.

“For that cost, those are excellent specs,” Weber said.

To set it apart from other Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 710 will come preloaded with the navigation service Nokia Drive, a special ESPN app, and Netflix, among other apps. Nokia is planning to offer concierge services to help new customers with setting up their devices and figuring out news ways to make use of them.

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Imagine adding stunning lighting to a picture after you took the picture.

A camera developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise could get you there. But first, let’s talk speed: This distinctive camera can track the movement of individual packets of light, or photons, by capturing one trillion frames per second.

The high-speed imaging system allows researchers to capture how light scatters across an object in fine detail. It opens up the chance of doing three-dimensional ultrasound scans with light, testing for defects in the work of manufacturing, and giving consumer-grade cameras the ability to overlay light after a picture is taken.

Although it is still a aim, MIT Media Lab associate professor Ramesh Raskar says the imaging system could let a consumer with a small flash take studio-quality pics.

With our especially swift imaging they can in fact examine how the photons are traveling throughout the world.  And then they can recreate a brand new picture by generating the illusion that the photons started somewhere else,” Raskar said in a statement.

Capturing how human being photons spring back around a scene and travel inside an object does not come contemptible. The ultrafast camera makes use of $250,000 of equipment, including a titanium sapphire laser and a streak camera adapted for high-speed photography. Normally used to choose the chemical composition of a material, a streak camera is an array of 500 sensors each triggered to capture light one trillion times per second.

The cameras let off light in merely dimension but then a rotating mirror takes metaphors from diverse perspectives. That creates a large amount of knowledge that then needs to be analyzed and compiled to generate a video of the movement of light over or inside an object.

“Because they can see those photons, they could use them to look inside objects–for example, for medical imaging, or to identify materials,” said MIT Media Lab postdoctoral associate Andreas Velten.

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There are two common outcomes when companies exchange a complicated proprietary project into open source software. One is that a vibrant community of contributors grows up approximately the project, expanding its skills, enlargement its popularity, and making it into a better component of a broader technology package.

The other is that the scheme, tossed over its sponsor’s transom, sinks beneath the waves.

I think HP would like the first upshot based on Chief Executive Meg Whitman’s high hopes: “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open-source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.But I be expectant the second is extra probable.

HP tried shopping WebOS approximately, but finding the options unappealing, bet on a less conventional direction. But here’s the big deterrent tale that leads me to my pessimism.

That operating system began as a proprietary task, but Nokia and its backers, presumably seeing the sustained success of the Linux project, took it in the open-source direction. It was too small, too belatedly, although. Developers weren’t interested sufficient in building Symbian.

So still if HP tries to keep WebOS as an  actively developed in commission system for tablets, for example, it can be open source in name only. It would not be the initial time somebody threw a gathering and nobody came.

WebOS did not have a magnificent future in any case. HP acquired WebOS with its $1.2 billion Palm purchase last year, but short lived CEO Leo Apotheker decided to ditch WebOS and the mobile devices it powered. When Whitman take over  she determined to review the company’s options, and HP make known the plan today subsequent to weeks of reflection.

HP’s promise to keep developers vigorously working on WebOS sounds more like the plan for the Linux-based MeeGo OS that Nokia pushed aside in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone: The operating scheme now merely has an “opportunity to significantly improve applications and Web services for the next generation of devices.Thatis not the kind of declaration that tells developers they require to divert any of the attention already devoted to iOS, Android, and possibly Windows Phone, Windows8, and Blackberry 10.

There are other unlock sourcing failures  too. Sun Microsystems switch Star Office into the open source OpenOffice.org but the system base was messy sufficient and the developers calculating enough that stranger were repelled. The project muddled along for years, prodding Microsoft Office merely as far as opening up its file formats. It was only when Oracle acquired Sun and ran roughshod in excess of the project that some developers cared sufficient to fork the code base and try to beat off on their own with LibreOffice.

After that, prophesy washed its hands of the affair and foisted it on the Apache Software Project, which oversees a lot of open source projects. IBM leftovers involved, but OpenOffice.org does not have bright forecast. Sun s Java and Solaris open source projects were equally burdened.

AOL got farther while it created Mozilla to open-source Netscape’s once-proprietary browser. But it took more than half a decade of work before Firefox clawed its way to relevance, and that only happened with a satisfied Microsoft that parked Internet Explorer.

It’s possible WebOS could fuel some natural, grass roots mobile OS project especially given WebOS’ Web-like app programming model but the mobile OS teams at Apple, Google, and Microsoft are about as far from dormant as is possible right now.

Why ever would a corporation want to release a once-valuable asset as open-source software that anyone can use for free of charge? Or for that substance, contribute resources to an open source project at all?

There can be fine reasons. One of them is discouragement your competitor. If you can build a vibrant community around a free product that your contestant charges for, you can steal a little of that competitor’s thunder.

Yahoo, for model, supports the Apache open source Hadoop project that competes with Google’s in-house equivalent, MapReduce, for analyzing mammoth data sets. Yahoo may not have vanquished Google, but Hadoop is catching on widely and reducing Google’s competitive benefit by making it easier for rivals to match its abilities. yet Microsoft is acceptance Hadoop.

So might open-source WebOS exert some stress on the incumbent mobile operating systems? I do not think it likely.

That is because the key to relevance in the OS world is apps. An operating system still can be useful to command slot machines, electronic billboards, and factory-floor robots. Old  school phones had all they wanted a dialer, address book, and text messaging border. But if you want your OS to shape the future of mobile devices, you need an OS that lets people have fun games and post status updates. WebOS, open source or not, lacks that hold up.

After Google release Android version foundation code, academics, Amazon, CyanogenMod programmers, or third tier device makers go under their teeth into it and build their own versions of the in service system.

It’s true that it is not a terribly communal attempt, though. Only after Google is finished planning and developing Android inside does it release the source code. Android3 x aka Honeycomb, never yet completed it to the open source state. Google is not violating any licenses, but it is not showing much attention in sharing control over Android.

maybe WebOS will shame Google into letting some others into the Android party, especially if an open-source WebOS becomes a fruitful proving ground for new mobile technology that shows Google that Android could advantage from a broader perspective.

I would not gamble on it, although. And even if it does, that is pretty small solace for HP.

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Samsung could hit Apple to market with a tablet packing a high resolution display, as the two sour rivals vie to be the first on the block with a next gen tablet.

Sammy,s flap, running Google,s Ice Cream Sandwich would have an 11.6inch display that is barely larger than a 10.1inch design because of a redesigned bezel, according to a statement at BGR.

But most prominently, it would use an eye popping 2,560×1,600-pixel resolution display, putting it in the similar league as Apple’s upcoming iPad 3, which is predictable to sport a Retina Display.

Needless to speak, that makes for a radically different manufactured goods. Not that diverse, say  than moving as of a laptop with a 1,366×768 pixel screen to one boasting 1,680×1,050 pixel resolution. And if Samsung gets to market first, that would be a unique spirited advantage, the sketch of the Apple brand notwithstanding.

Samsung has been rather transparent about its plans, in fact. In a press release previous month, the Korean corporation said that its next generation 2GHz Exynos processor is designed specially to drive high resolution tablet displays.

The Exynos 5250 is designed particularly for elevated ending tablets. In particular, the Exynos 5250 design was architected to produce  to an industry leading 2,560×1,600 (WQXGA) present,” Samsung thought. And Samsung, by the way, builds those high-res displays, as well.

All of this should turn into clearer at either CES 2012 in January or at Mobile World legislature in February.

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AT&T is it seems that making good on its promise to cut back on speeds for heavy information users.

Posted by tech aficionado site CultofMac, a text message sent by AT&T to such a user says that “Your data practice is among the top 5 %of users. Data speeds for the relax of your current bill cycle may be abridged.

The data restraint policy comes as no revelation. AT&T had announced rear in July that it would strangle speeds for grave data users starting on October 1. The policy affects only subscribers who immobile have an unlimited data plan. Those with limited data strategy who go away over their allotment are simply charged for the additional data.

AT&T has not made it clear how a great deal data you do need to gobble up to appear in the top 5 %, but the carrier has said that such users put away around 12 times more data than the average customer.

Responding to CNET’s demand for comment, an AT&T spokesperson promised to present further details on its data policy.

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• Sprint offers the most data beat for the buck
• iPhone to help AT&T grip record smart phone sales this quarter

News that the strategy is being implemented comes at a time when AT&T is seeing increased sales thanks in huge part to the iPhone 4S. The corporation announced yesterday that it expects to reach a new record of more than6.1million smart phones sold in the fourth quarter. AT&T activated more than 1 million fresh iPhones in just the first five days of the device’s start on in October.

The corporation isn’t just counting on the iPhone to boost business. AT&T just released its newest 4G LTE Android phone, the LG Nitro HD, as it tries to erect up its LTE network.

But as business  rises, so does data procedure. J.P. Morgan estimates that the average iPhone user will put away around 800MB of data for each month. That’s not far-off from the average non-iPhone user predictable to grab around 825MB every month.

AT&T has itself been dinged in the past for its sluggish and sporadic network presentation, especially amongst iPhone users. Though it’s struggled to perk up its system over time, the company still seems to be facing an climbing battle, certainly in terms of purchaser service and purchaser perception.

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