Samsung has introduced a new tablet, a new smartphone and a combination of the two – the Galaxy Note – at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin.
Samsung said the Note represented a new category with its 5.3in HD Super Amoled display, ignoring the fact that Dell has been unsuccessful with a 5in Android device – discontinuing the Dell Streak last month.
IFA predicts 2011 gadget growth
The claim of Berlin’s International Radio Show (IFA) to be the biggest consumer electronics show in the world is fiercely contested by the Consumer Electronics Association in America, which organises the better known CES in Las Vegas.
But this week’s IFA is certainly better attended as well as being better timed than its January counterpart in terms of gauging what sort of year the industry is having and revealing what are the likely best-sellers in the upcoming holiday season.
Reverberations from HP’s announcement that it intends to shed its PC business, the world’s biggest by volume, is being felt far and wide across the global IT industry. While no clear buyer has yet emerged, executives in the PC supply chain, analysts and even government officials are all trying to make sense of its impact.
Nowhere is this search for answers more urgent than in Taiwan, where much of the world’s PC supply chain resides. HP’s computers are assembled by Hon Hai, Quanta, Inventec and Wistron, all Taiwanese companies.
When Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, gave an interview to the Financial Times in March, he made some enigmatic remarks, writes Kathrin Hille in Beijing.
Asked about what he intended to do to make sure Baidu, China’s largest online search engine, would not lose out in the rapid rise of the microblogs in China, he said: “Baidu is not in the social media business.”
Majority of South Koreans’ data exposed
South Korean regulators said they are investigating the most massive loss of user data ever in the most wired country on earth.
Intel’s emerging opportunities
If worldwide shipments of PCs rose only 2.3 per cent in the last quarter, according to the Gartner research firm, what accounted for Turkey and Indonesia’s comparatively stratospheric growth of more than 70 per cent?
Paul Otellini, Intel chief executive, ran through the impressive figures from emerging markets during the chipmaker’s earnings call on Wednesday and Stu Pann, a vice president in sales and marketing, added some extra colour on Thursday.
To outside observers of China, the country’s internet seems to be powered by copies of Western online services – Baidu is known in the West as ‘China’s Google’, Renren is ‘the Chinese Facebook’ and Sina Weibo is a ‘Chinese Twitter clone’, writes Kathrin Hille in Beijing.
But those using and watching the Chinese internet know that many of the web platforms in the country with the world’s largest online population have little in common with the Western pioneers they borrowed the initial idea from. Now, a solid piece of research shows just how little.
Act one of Google’s spat with the Chinese authorities over censorship and government-backed hacking closed last year with Google partially retreating from the world’s most populous nation.
There was, however, still the unresolved issue of Google Maps, and act two of Google versus China may now be beginning with Google having submitted an application to Beijing to allow the service to remain in China.
It may not be quite as serious as the Federal Trade Commission’s anti-trust probe in the US, but Google is facing a fight with the regulators in Taiwan that has forced the internet giant to suspend all paid apps in Android Market on the island of 23m people.
At issue is Taiwan’s consumer protection laws, which require online retailers to give customers a seven-day period for getting a full refund on their purchases – much longer than the 15 minutes Google currently gives its customers.
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