Far EasTone Telecommunications Co Ltd (遠傳電信), the nation’s third-biggest telecom operator, yesterday said it planned to offer its first phone running the Android system in the third quarter.
Far EasTone said in a press release it planned to introduce at least two mobile phones powered by Android, an operating system supported mainly by Google Inc.
The company declined to reveal the names of its Android phone suppliers.
Far EasTone’s announcement came just before the nation’s largest phone company, Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), along with HTC Corp (宏達電), launches its first Android phone, the HTC Magic, tomorrow.
HTC is the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones running on Microsoft Inc’s system and is also the first one to make Google phones, which it unveiled with T-Mobile in last September.
Meanwhile, Chunghwa yesterday said its board had approved a capital reduction proposal to better utilize the company’s assets and boost shareholders’ investment return.
Chunghwa said in a company statement that it planned to allocate NT$9.7 billion (US$287 million) from capital surpluses to issue about 969 million common shares. It will then cancel about 10 percent of its total capital shares, it said.
In addition, Chunghwa said it planned to pay a stock dividend of an additional 9 percent per common share following the cancelation. The company’s board agreed last month to distribute NT$3.83 in cash dividends per share. The proposals will be subject to shareholders’ approval on June 19.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
DIVIDED VIEWS: Although the Fed agreed on holding rates steady, some officials see no rate cuts for this year, while 10 policymakers foresee two or more cuts There are a lot of unknowns about the outlook for the economy and interest rates, but US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled at least one thing seems certain: Higher prices are coming. Fed policymakers voted unanimously to hold interest rates steady at a range of 4.25 percent to 4.50 percent for a fourth straight meeting on Wednesday, as they await clarity on whether tariffs would leave a one-time or more lasting mark on inflation. Powell said it is still unclear how much of the bill would fall on the shoulders of consumers, but he expects to learn more about tariffs
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS