HTC plots a new tablet, revenue drops in October as iPhone effect strikes

HTC was recently ranked the number one smartphone maker by shipment volumes in the States eclipsing Apple and Samsung in the third quarter, but in October heaps of new products rolled out and among them the iPhone 4S, which eventually lead to a decline in HTC's global revenue for the month. The company recorded one of its rare drops in revenues, which stood at $1.46 billion, down 2.8% on the month.

Even though, HTC didn't directly point a finger at the iPhone, implicitly it was clear that the company expected the iPhone effect to hit it in October. One evidence for that it the fact that the Taiwanese lowered their Holiday quarter forecast while usually sales are the strongest then.

The company is offering high-end models across major US carriers, with the latest additions being the 4.3-inch 720p HTC Rezound, coming with a dual-core processor and all Android guts. The HTC Vivid is another heavyweight recently released by the company and it also offers the best of Android in a rectangular package and with a dual-core processor.

But the company is plotting a comeback in tablets, with a new slate expected to be launched next year. "It's a market we would like to try and test, to see whether we can make ourselves stand out and prevent a me-too product," CEO Peter Chou said.

Motorola RAZR now available in the UK, US is next

If you have been waiting for a sleek and powerful droid with a touch of Kevlar to hit the shelves, it's time to take out the checkbooks. The Motorola RAZR has just become available in the UK stores and you can get one right away.
The unlocked version of the smartphone costs about £455 after taxes, which seems about right for the kind of package you get.
If the SIM-free price is too steep for you, you may want to wait for O2 to release the Motorola RAZR later this month. The carrier will gladly subsidize the handset for you as long as you agree to sign a long-term deal.


It's yet unclear if the other major UK networks will be launching the Motorola RAZR, but it seems unlikely that they will miss on the hot droid.
The wait is almost over for our US friends too. Verizon said that it will be releasing the CDMA-loving DROID RAZR on November 11 at 11:11 AM
You can also pre-order the phone right now from Verizon's website. The phone will cost you $299 on a two-year contract and $649 without. If you pre-order you will even get the phone a day in advance, on November 10.

iOS and Android are rapidly taking over the portable gaming market

Since the inception of mobile gaming, Nintendo has been a dominant player in the market with multiple incarnations of its Gameboy and DS series. Late-arriver, Sony, also managed to garner success with the introduction of its PlayStation Portable, or PSP. It seemed unlikely that another player could even hope to rival these two giants, let alone significantly reduce their market share.





iOS and Android have done just that. Traditionally portable gaming software revenue was fueled by physical game purchases, often in the form of a cartridge or a UMD, for around $40 a piece. Now, that revenue stream is also being powered by digital downloads. Both Android and iOS offer a significant amount of high-quality, premium games for $0.99 as well as games which are distributed using the ‘freemium’ model, which is when a game is free to download but offers in-app upgrades and purchases for additional content.

Flurry, a mobile applications analytics company, released a report today that shows the distribution of U.S. portable game software revenue over the last three years. Even though iOS and Android games typically cost much less from a price per unit standpoint, they have managed to expand from comprising 19% of the revenue in 2009 to a whopping 58% in 2011. Conversely, Sony and Nintendo have dropped from 11% and 70% in 2009 to 6% and 36% in 2011, respectively.

This dramatic shift in revenue source has caused some to question whether or not Sony and Nintendo can remain viable in this space at all. Despite including a 3DS store with its latest portable system for digital downloads, poor sales caused the manufacturer to slash the retail price of the 3DS and now Nintendo is anticipating posting their first fiscal year loss in over 30 years. The PlayStation Vita, which is set to be released in the U.S. on February 22, 2012, will feature a reduced rate, digital download option for all of its retail games.

It is not all doom and gloom for these two companies. While the hardware and software distribution models seem to be failing, there is still a lot of interest and desire to play games that feature IPs from both companies. Only time will tell if classic franchises such as Mario, Zelda, God of War, and Uncharted, to name a few, will eventually make their way to Android and iOS devices or if Nintendo and Sony will continue to manufacture hardware and release IPs exclusively to their own devices.

ARM announces its new Mali-T658 GPU, Samsung signs up for 10x the Exynos performance

We know that ARM-based processors are unbeatable in the power consumption/performance ratio that is so important for mobile device, that is why there is barely a smartphone or tablet out there that is not powered by some ARM licensee, be it Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung or Texas Instruments.

As far as graphics go, however, ARM processors had to be paired with 3rd party GPUs in order to achieve an outstanding performance. Apple and TI, for example, use PowerVR GPUs, which are arguably the fastest out there, NVIDIA pairs Tegra with its mobile GeForce creation, whereas Samsung is using the stock ARM GPU architecture called Mali, in its Mali-400 version in the Samsung Galaxy S II with Exynos.

The ever restless chip designers at ARM, however, are determined to conquer that last bastion of performance for a full mobile bliss of their licensees, announcing the ARM Mali-T658, which promises 10x the performance of Mali-400 in the first Exynos. It is also specifically developed to work with the upcoming Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 families, which, combined in a big.LITTLE configuration, are expected to revolutionize the power/performance/price ratio once again come the next generation of chipsets.

A few companies have already signed up for the Mali-T658 monster, Samsung, Fujitsu and LG are among them. For the second version of Exynos Samsung promises up to 5x the graphics performance of the first edition, so it's more likely that it will be using Mali T-604, which was the previous best GPU architecture of ARM until T658 got announced.

It is more likely that we'll see Cortex-A15 products with Mali-T658 in 2013, rather than next year, but you never know with these accelerated development cycles nowadays. Samsung did promises a big.LITTLE Exynos to be developed in 2012, so Mali T-658 seems ripe to get in there too. Watch the T658 promo video below.

Siri finds its British voice

Ah, Siri! That humble personal assistant is your best voice guide when you want to know what's the weather like and when you ask it where to hide a dead body. In the UK, Siri's voice is known as Daniel. But if you want to dig deeper, you'd find that it's actually Jon Briggs, a British actor who was recruited by Scansoft, a company which later flowed into Siri-making Nuance, to record 5,000 sentences six years ago. Only recently he found out where the end destination for his work was.

Apple however knew and asked Briggs to remain silent on the topic of Siri:  “We’re not about one person,” Cupertino said. The actor and ex-tech journalist however pointed out that he never had a contract with the company and is now revealing the curious little details about the service.

“I did a set of recordings with Scansoft five or six years ago, for text-to-speech services,” says Briggs. “Five thousand sentences over three weeks, spoken in a very particular way and only reading flat and even. Then they go away and take all the phonics apart, because I have to be able to read anything you want, even if I’ve never actually recorded all those words.”

This very process yields the great voice recognition abilities of Siri. The system – as you've probably also noticed – gets what you say right even if you speak with a slight accent.

Don't get the wrong impression, though – the actor got paid a decent sum and is actually happy about the way Siri turned out. “I love Apple’s products and I think Siri is a game-changer,” he mentions. Briggs is also the voice for Garmin, TomTom, Jaguar, Land Rover, Audi and Porsche. Finally, he doesn't feel like changing the voice of Siri is something that is impossible, but if that's to happen, it will be more than just about the voice, it'll be about background. It seems that the actor's website collapsed under media attention, but give both source links below a shot for all the details.

Autocorrect keyboard bar discovered in iOS 5, software tweak enables it

In addition to the hidden panorama mode in iOS 5, another secret feature has been exposed by iOS enthusiasts just recently. An autocorrect keyboard bar similar to the one found on some Android devices has been discovered, which, as the name implies, can correct (and perhaps complete) words as you type on the virtual keyboard.

Since the autocorrect bar does not come on a factory-fresh iPhone or iPad, it might not be perfect yet. However, if you want to give it a try anyway, there is a way to enable it, and no jailbreak is required for the purpose. Here is how you do that:

1. Download iBackupBot
2. Backup your iDevice by using iTunes
3. Open iBackupBot, find the backup and load it
4. Find Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboard.plist and open the file. Press cancel if your software isn't registered and the file will open
5. Add the following code: KeyboardAutocorrectionListsYES 



 The hidden autocorrect keyboard bar in iOS 5

However, although it is nice having it, the autocorrect bar is not the most exciting feature that could be possibly added to iOS. On the other hand, the fact that hidden goodies pop-up every once in a while makes you wonder what else Apple has hidden inside its platform.

Adobe might stop work on its mobile Flash player, nixes 750 jobs too

Now that would be a sad day for democracy - sources "close to Adobe" have revealed that the company might stop its development of the mobile Flash player we all know and love on our Android devices, and the BlackBerry PlayBook. 

We don't know yet if that will affect the latest release that was expected to boost performance multiple times introducing a hardware-accelerated component called Stage 3D, because after the desktop version, Stage 3D was supposed to show up in Android Market, and never materialized. 

The sources have sent a statement, which Adobe is expected to post officially today, and it seems that the company will be focusing more on Adobe AIR and native apps done with it, as well as HTML5 work, rather than develop the Flash player further. 

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, and even if the player stays in its current state, it should be still good to bear the transitional period in which everyone moves on to HTML5.

This might have been forced by cost-cutting initiatives, since we doubt Adobe earns much from its mobile Flash player but development hassles. The company said that it will let 750 people go during the restructuring, focusing on digital media and marketing. Music to our ears was the announcement that it will deepen the development of "touch-based" apps for tablets, which means that excellent Photoshop-on-a-tablet demo it showed won't go to waste. 

Adobe expects this restructuring to cost it up to $94 million, mainly for severance pay. The company will be briefing financial analysts on the decision today, so stay tuned for more news from the Adobe camp.

Ericsson predicts 5 billion mobile data users by 2016

We all know that mobile is big business and that usage is exploding all around the globe, but Ericsson decided to put some numbers on just how crazy it's all going to get. The company has a number of predictions based on its Traffic and Market Data report, which point to mobile data usage increasing quite a lot in just the next 5 years.

Ericsson is annoyingly vague about how it came up with the data, citing nebulous "measurements" which were "recorded over several years". That doesn't help us in believing the predictions, but the numbers themselves are pretty intriguing. Ericsson is predicting that mobile data subscriptions will jump from approximately 900 million today to almost 5 billion subscriptions in 2016, and that is a count of subscriptions, not subscribers, which would be crazy given that there will be only about 7.5 billion people on the planet in 2016. 

Not so surprising, Ericsson is also predicting that mobile data traffic will increase 10-fold by 2016 mostly due to more and more streaming video. Although, given that Ericsson is predicting that mobile data subscribers will be increasing about 5-fold, a 10-fold increase in traffic isn't too bad. Another prediction which states that mobile users living on 1% of the land on Earth will be driving 60% of the traffic. This is because Ericsson predicts that by 2016, 30% of the world's population will live in urban areas. So, it seems fairly reasonable that those living in cities will have the fastest connections and be able to push the most data. 

Although we'd like more transparency about how this data was generated, we certainly wouldn't be surprised if it all comes true. And, we expect the PhoneArena community to be generating its fair share of mobile data usage to make it happen.

The quad-core HTC Edge leaks, has monster specs

The first quad-core smartphone has leaked out, folks. We are still fresh off the first benchmarks of the NVIDIA Tegra 3 and, now, we have the HTC Edge, reportedly featuring the same monster CPU, to lust after.








Each of the four Tegra 3 cores of the HTC Edge will be clocked at 1.5GHz. A gig of RAM will be at your disposal, along with 32GB of built-in memory. The device will offer a 4.7" screen with HD resolution.

An 8MP camera unit with f/2.2 lens, capable of capturing 1080p videos will be present as well. Bluetooth 4.0 is expected on board, along with the rest of the usual connectivity. The HTC Edge will, reportedly, be only capable of 21Mbps HSDPA network speeds. We will, however, be seriously surprised if we don't see an LTE version of this beast.

In the software department, we can be all but certain to see Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box. A number of new HTC content services are also expected.

The HTC Edge is expected to hit the market in late Q1, or early Q2 of next year. We are still to find out where are we going to see it go first.

Motorola DROID RAZR display up at some Verizon locations

You know that the Motorola DROID RAZR is coming with the constant airplay that the new television commercial is getting (with an ad that once again shows none of the phone's features except that it apparently can slice a light pole in two) and the new display that is up at many Verizon stores. The display shows a metallic arm similar to the one that you get to wield in the "DROID extraction" game, holding the RAZR sideways, showing off how thin this phone really is.


A sign reminds you that the actual launch is coming 11:11am on 11/11. By now, you should have come to the realization that the 11's represent two thin  Motorola DROID RAZR units standing next to each other. Luckily for Big Red, November is the 11th month of the year because 10 or 12 wouldn't quite work.

In addition to the display, it seems that some Verizon locations might even have a demo unit for the manager and his favorite reps to play with in the back of the store the customers to check out while at the store. We are not referring to those dummy units that have a printed label to represent the screen, but an honest-to-goodness working model that lets you load up PhoneArena so that you can check the browser.

Some Verizon stores already have a display up for the Motorola DROID RAZR

If you decide to blow off work on Monday morning (Sorry Mr. Smith, it's the flu. I'll take care of the Henderson account tomorrow) or take a detour and forget to do the shopping (nothing wrong with 3 month old turkey slices, hon. The dogs? Let them fend for themselves) so that you can check out the new Verizon flagship for yourself, let us know what you think about the Motorola DROID RAZR in the comment box below. For those that can't slip away to visit a Verizon location, we're just days away from the 11:11 11/11 launch. And in case you've forgotten, the phone is $299.99 with a signed 2-year contract.