Sprint Nextel Corp said the craze for tablet computers in the US, led by Apple Inc’s iPad, would temper as competition forces more than half of manufacturers to abandon the market in the next two years.
“You’ll probably have a good dozen players by the end of this year, and then in two years you’ll probably see just five that are really playing in the space,” Fared Adib, vice president of product development for Sprint, said in an interview in Barcelona yesterday.
Sprint, the third-largest US wireless service provider, will introduce the Research In Motion Ltd PlayBook tablet this year and is already selling the Samsung Electronics Co Galaxy Tab. The carrier has said it will begin selling a third tablet this year that will work on its fourth-generation network, offering faster Web browsing and video downloads.
A number of tablets are “essentially a phone operating system on a tablet,” rather than devices with software and features to take full advantage of the tablet format, Adib said.
He said that the Overland Park, Kansas-based carrier was considering other tablets that use Google Inc’s Android software, in addition to the Galaxy Tab.
The iPad accounted for 75 percent of global tablet shipments last quarter, research firm Strategy Analytics said. Android tablets captured 22 percent of the market.
Hewlett-Packard Co unveiled a tablet called the TouchPad this month that uses software acquired in last year’s purchase of Palm Inc. Dell Inc, which already sells Android tablets, said last week it also planned to unveil a tablet using Microsoft Corp’s Windows 7 operating system this year.
Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc introduced a tablet computer called Xoom last month that runs on Android. RIM’s PlayBook will use its own operating system.
“There’s going to be a period of intense competition and innovation” in tablets, Qualcomm Inc executive vice president Steve Mollenkopf said in Barcelona. “There will be some winners and losers on the operating system side.”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day