In most of the countries surveyed, relatively few people (median of 34%) have access to a desktop computer, laptop or tablet in their household. The exception is Lebanon, where a majority of adults (57%) say they have access to such a device. As with most other measures of technological connectedness, those who are younger and more educated are generally more likely to have access to a computer or tablet at home.
The Nexus still has some way to go to challenge Apple's dominance of the tablet market, but it's certainly doing better than most Android slates that -- despite often impressive technology -- have generally failed to sell in great quantities.
Samsung Likely To Fail In Its Goal Of Tablet Dominance
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With Apple expected to unveil the next version of the iPad early next month, I worry that I'll feel like a kid on Christmas who weeks before found the unwrapped presents hidden in the closet. googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); ); I'm concerned there won't be any surprises, that I already know all there is to know about it. Here's hoping that Apple proves me wrong. While company officials have declined to comment about the new iPad on the record, specifications for the device have been widely reported in the press. The iPad 3, as it's been unofficially dubbed, is expected to have a screen with twice the resolution of the first two models. It's expected to have a faster processor, likely one with 4 cores, and 4G network capability. It also will almost certainly have an improved graphics processor to make all the images on that high-resolution screen look pretty and move smoothly. Oh, and it might have a new camera, if recent pictures that surfaced supposedly depicting the back case of the iPad 3 are any indication. I'm not dismissing these upgrades. The high-resolution display that Apple put into the iPhone 4 and its successor looks stunning compared to the ones used in older models. I'm sure the one in the next iPad will be similarly impressive. Processor upgrades are generally a welcome addition, because they enable new features and new kinds of applications. And the front- and rear-facing cameras on the iPad 2 are awful; I'd love to see those upgraded. I'm not going to argue that Apple needs to make radical changes to the iPad. The device has been a runaway success, dominating the tablet market since the first version launched. The tablets that tried to go head-to-head with the iPad - such as Research in Motion's PlayBook, Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad and Motorola's Xoom - all failed to knock it from its perch. While Amazon's Kindle Fire is gaining fans and Windows 8 tablets represent another potential challenge, there's little indication that either represent a real threat to Apple's dominance. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(); So my plea for novelty is mainly selfish; I'd like to see something I didn't expect. The upgrades in the next iPad either have been long expected or represent logical, incremental changes. Either way, they're nothing to get worked up about. So what would get me excited? Here are a few possibilities: -An iPad mini. The iPad and the iPhone are great devices, but neither of them is ideal for reading books or taking notes. The iPad's a bit too heavy and the iPhone's a bit small. I'd like to see Apple make a device that's right in the middle, that's about the same size as the Kindle Fire or one of the e-book readers. I know that Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs said that size just doesn't work for a tablet, but the success of the Kindle Fire and the millions of e-book readers Amazon and other companies have sold argues against that. -A lower price. The iPad seemed to be a bargain when Apple released it at $500. But with devices like the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet priced at $250 or less, the iPad is looking ever more pricey. And let's face it: Many folks can't afford to pony up $500 for an iPad. Here's where a smaller iPad could help. A smaller size and a smaller, lower-resolution screen would cost a lot less to make than the current version, allowing Apple to offer a low-price model. -Handwriting recognition. I know, I know: Jobs believed that companies that shipped a tablet with a stylus "blew it" in terms of design. I'm not arguing that the iPad should be transformed into a Windows-style pen-based tablet instead of one that responds to fingertip input. But I'd love to be able to take notes on an iPad or iPhone while out on assignment or even in the grocery store. Unfortunately, the on-screen keyboard is too slow and an external keyboard too unwieldy. Some apps let you write with your fingertip or an optional stylus, and some recognize handwriting, but only within that particular application. I'd like to see the feature available within some of the devices' native applications, such as notes and reminders. This feature would be something of a back-to-the-future play for Apple. The Newton, Apple's first tablet-like device, included handwriting recognition that was widely mocked for the poor job it did. But the technology has come a long way since then. -Siri. When I first tested it, I loved the speech recognition service Apple built into the iPhone 4S. It's since lost some of its charm; due to network problems or other reasons, I could only get it to work about half the time I used it after I initially tested it. Still, when it works, Siri is very cool. It can make searching for information on the iPhone much easier than having to find and launch a particular application. So, I'd love to see the iPad be able to use it too. (c)2012 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by MCT Information Services
The 12.2-inch Samsung Galaxy Pro tablet at the heart of the Prodigi Connect is a full-featured Android device. It's powered by a 1.9 GHz. Quad A15, and 1.3 GHz. Quad A7 processors, and ships with Android 5.0 (Lollipop) installed. The unit includes 32 GB of storage, plus a microSD slot, should you need more. The camera is an 8MP unit with LED flash. Networking features include dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, and Bluetooth. There's also a GPS receiver and accelerometer. HumanWare says the tablet provides up to 12 hours of battery life. Your experience will vary, and using the camera and LED light for magnification are likely to reduce battery life. Reviews of the Galaxy Note Pro do praise its battery's longevity.
Jobs, of course, had an answer to all this: a "thermo-nuclear" legal war that would keep clones off the market. Yet nearly two years after Apple first filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung, and six months after it won a huge legal victory over its South Korean rival, Apple's chances of blocking the sale of Samsung products are growing dimmer by the day.Indeed, a series of recent court rulings suggests that the smartphone patent wars are now grinding toward a stalemate, with Apple unable to show that its sales have been seriously damaged when rivals, notably Samsung, imitated its products.That, in turn, may usher in a new phase in the complex relationship between the two dominant companies in the growing mobile computing business.Tim Cook, Jobs' successor as Apple chief executive, was opposed to suing Samsung in the first place, according to people with knowledge of the matter, largely because of that company's critical role as a supplier of components for the iPhone and the iPad. Apple bought some $8 billion worth of parts from Samsung last year, analysts estimate.Samsung, meanwhile, has benefited immensely from the market insight it gained from the Apple relationship, and from producing smartphones and tablets that closely resemble Apple's.While the two companies compete fiercely in the high-end smartphone business - where together they control half the sales and virtually all of the profits - their strengths and weaknesses are in many ways complementary. Apple's operations chief, Jeff Williams, told Reuters last month that Samsung was an important partner and they had a strong relationship on the supply side, but declined to elaborate.As their legal war winds down, it is increasingly clear that Apple and Samsung have plenty of common interests as they work to beat back other potential challengers, such as BlackBerry or Microsoft.The contrast with other historic tech industry rivalries is stark. When Apple accused Microsoft in the 1980s of ripping off the Macintosh to create the Windows operating system, Apple's very existence was at stake. Apple lost, the Mac became a niche product, and the company came close to extinction before Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996 and saved it with the iPod and the iPhone. Jobs died in October 2011.Similarly, the Internet browser wars of the late 1990s that pitted Microsoft against Netscape ended with Netscape being sold for scrap and its flagship product abandoned.Apple and Samsung, on the other hand, are not engaged in a corporate death match so much as a multi-layered rivalry that is by turns both friendly and hard-edged. For competitors like Nokia, BlackBerry, Sony, HTC and even Google - whose Motorola unit is expected to launch new smartphones later this year - they are a formidable duo.THE WAY THEY WEREThe partnership piece of the Apple-Samsung relationship dates to 2005, when the Cupertino, California-based giant was looking for a stable supplier of flash memory. Apple had decided to jettison the hard disc drive in creating the iPod shuffle, iPod nano and then-upcoming iPhone, and it needed huge volumes of flash memory chips to provide storage for the devices.The memory market in 2005 was extremely unstable, and Apple wanted to lock in a supplier that was rock-solid financially, people familiar with the relationship said. Samsung held about 50 percent of the NAND flash memory market at that time."Whoever controls flash is going to control this space in consumer electronics," Jobs said at the time, according to a source familiar with the discussions.The success of that deal led to Samsung supplying the crucial application processors for the iPhone and iPad. Initially, the two companies jointly developed the processors based on a design from ARM Holdings Plc, but Apple gradually took full control over development of the chip. Now Samsung merely builds the components at a Texas factory.The companies built a close relationship that extended to the very top: in 2005, Jay Y. Lee, whose grandfather founded the Samsung Group, visited Jobs' home in Palo Alto, California, after the two signed the flash memory deal.The partnership gave Apple and Samsung insight into each other's strategies and operations. In particular, Samsung's position as the sole supplier of iPhone processors gave it valuable data on just how big Apple thought the smartphone market was going to be."Having a relationship with Apple as a supplier, I am sure, helped the whole group see where the puck was going," said Horace Dediu, a former analyst at Nokia who now works as a consultant and runs an influential blog. "It's a very important advantage in this business if you know where to commit capital."Samsung declined to comment on its relationship with a specific customer.As for Apple, it reaped the benefit of Samsung's heavy investments in research and development, tooling equipment and production facilities. Samsung spent $21 billion (23 trillion won) on capital expenditures in 2012 alone, and plans to spend a similar amount this year.By comparison, Intel Corp spent around $11 billion in 2012, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) expects to spend $9 billion in 2013.But component expertise, cash and good market intelligence did not assure success when Samsung launched its own foray into the smartphone market. The Omnia, a Windows-based product introduced in 2009, was so reviled that some customers hammered it to bits in public displays of dissatisfaction.Meanwhile, Samsung publicly dismissed the iPhone's success."The popularity of iPhone is a mere result of excitement caused by some (Apple) fanatics," Samsung's then-president, G.S. Choi, told reporters in January 2010.Privately, though, Samsung had other plans."The iPhone's emergence means the time we have to change our methods has arrived," Samsung mobile business head J.K. Shin told his staff in early 2010, according to an internal email filed in U.S. court.Later that year, Samsung launched the Galaxy S, which sported the Android operating system and a look and feel very similar to the iPhone.STANDOFFJobs and Cook complained to top Samsung executives when they were visiting Cupertino. Apple expected, incorrectly, that Samsung would modify its design in response to the concerns, people familiar with the situation said.Apple's worst fears were confirmed with the early 2011 release of the Galaxy Tab, which Jobs and others regarded as a clear rip-off of the iPad.Cook, worried about the critical supplier relationship, was opposed to suing Samsung. But Jobs had run out of patience, suspecting that Samsung was counting on the supplier relationship to shield it from retribution.Apple filed suit in April 2011, and the conflagration soon spread to courts in Europe, Asia and Australia. When Apple won its blockbuster billion-dollar jury verdict against Samsung last August, it appeared that it might be able to achieve an outright ban on the offending products - which would have dramatically altered the smartphone competition.But Apple has failed to convince U.S. judges to uphold those crucial sales bans - in large part because the extraordinary profitability and market power of the iPhone made it all but impossible for Apple to show it was suffering irreparable harm."Samsung may have cut into Apple's customer base somewhat, but there is no suggestion that Samsung will wipe out Apple's customer base, or force Apple out of the business of making smartphones," U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh wrote. "The present case involves lost sales - not a lost ability to be a viable market participant."Samsung, meanwhile, came under pressure from antitrust regulators and pulled back on its effort to shut down Apple sales in Europe over a related patent dispute.A U.S. appeals court recently rejected Apple's bid to fast-track its case, meaning its hopes for a sales ban are now stuck in months-long appeals, during which time Samsung may very well release the next version of its hot-selling Galaxy phone.THE WORLD IS OURSThe legal battles have been less poisonous to the relationship than some of the rhetoric suggests."People play this stuff up because it shows a kind of drama, but the business reality is that the temperature isn't that high," said one attorney who has observed executives from both companies.Still, the hostilities appear to have put some dents in the partnership. Apple is likely to switch to TSMC for the building of application processors, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs, Sanford Bernstein and other firms. But analysts at Korea Investment & Securities and HMC Securities point out that Apple will not be able to eliminate Samsung as a flash supplier because it remains the dominant producer of the crucial chips.Apple declined to comment on the details of its relationships with any one supplier.Meanwhile, both companies are deploying strategies out of the other's playbook as they seek to maintain and extend their lead over the pack.Samsung has developed a cheeky, memorable TV ad that mocks Apple customers, and dramatically ramped up spending on marketing and advertising, a cornerstone of Apple's success. U.S. ad spending on the Galaxy alone leaped to nearly $202 million in the first nine months of 2012, from $66.6 million in 2011, according to Kantar Media.For its part, Apple is investing in manufacturing by helping its suppliers procure the machinery needed to build large-scale plants devoted exclusively to the company.Apple spent about $10 billion in fiscal 2012 on capital expenditures, and it expects to spend a further $10 billion this year. By contrast, the company spent only $4.6 billion in fiscal 2011 and $2.6 billion in fiscal 2010.But Apple and Samsung retain very different strategies. Apple has just one smartphone and only four product lines in total, and tries to keep variations to a bare minimum while focusing on the high end of the market.Samsung, by contrast, has 37 phone products that are tweaked for regional tastes and run the gamut from very cheap to very expensive, according to Mirae Asset Securities. The company also makes chips, TVs, appliances and a host of other products (and its brethren in the Samsung Group sell everything from ships to insurance policies).Apple devices are hugely popular in the United States; Samsung enjoys supremacy in developing countries like India and China. Apple keeps its core staff lean - it has only 60,000 employees worldwide - and relies on partners for manufacturing and other functions. Samsung Electronics, part of a sprawling "chaebol," or conglomerate, that includes some 80 companies employing 369,000 people worldwide, is far more vertically integrated.It is those differences, combined with the formidable strengths that both companies bring to the market, that may render quiet cooperation a better strategy than all-out war for some time to come.Said Brad Silverberg, a former Microsoft executive who was involved in the Mac vs. Windows wars, "Apple had learnt a lot of lessons from those days."if ( fe_check_is_mobile() == true ) jQuery("googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1435909828675-0'); );").insertAfter(".runningtext p:eq(1)"); create_vuukle_platform('2e5a47ef-15f6-4eec-a685-65a6d0ed00d0', '1072176', 0, 'archive', 'Steve Jobs' worst nightmare, but Apple Inc and Samsung are 'frenemies' for life - The Financial Express'); if( false == fe_check_is_mobile() ) document.write(''); else document.write('');var addthis_config = "data_track_addressbar":false;var addthis_share = "passthrough": "facebook": "app_id": 1672404616366149, "redirect_uri": "https:\/\/www.financialexpress.com\/archive\/steve-jobs-worst-nightmare-but-apple-inc-and-samsung-are-frenemies-for-life\/1072176\/?fe_share=fb" , "twitter": "via": "FinancialXpress" ;googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1467717901670-0'); );googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1467717901670-7'); );Tweets by FinancialXpress googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1467717901670-2'); );googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1467717901670-3'); );googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1467717901670-8'); );googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1467717901670-9'); );
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