US wireless carrier Sprint Nextel and Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電) announced plans on Thursday to release a touch-screen mobile phone next month powered by Google’s Android software.
The HTC Hero will be the second mobile phone to use the open-source operating system developed by the Internet giant, which has been trying to secure a foothold in the highly competitive smartphone market.
Google and US wireless carrier T-Mobile released the first so-called “Google Phone,” the T-Mobile G1, which is also manufactured by HTC, in October of last year.
Sprint said the HTC Hero would be available in stores from Oct. 11 and cost US$180 with a two-year service agreement.
Sprint already offers the much-hyped Palm Pre, released earlier this year, and the HTC Hero will be competing in a crowded US market against devices such as Apple’s iPhone and the Blackberry from Canada’s Research in Motion.
Microsoft this week also announced that its handset partners around the world will offer new smartphones next month featuring an upgraded version of its Windows Mobile operating system.
The HTC Hero includes built-in Google mobile services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube and access to thousands of applications built on the Android platform.
The HTC Hero also features a 5.0-megapixel camera and camcorder, Wi-Fi capability and GPS.
“Android provides to consumers the same Internet services they have become accustomed to on their desktop PC,” said Andy Rubin, vice president of mobile platforms at Google.
“[This] is an important milestone for our customers and the US wireless industry,” said Kevin Packingham, senior vice president of product development for Sprint.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts