With its Optimus 3D smartphone hitting the global market last month, LG Electronics Inc expects to ship 2 million units of the model, which boasts 3D features, by the end of the year, a company executive said yesterday.
“Compared with Apple, HTC (宏達電) and other players, we are slightly late in the smartphone market, but we will win share by launching models with killer applications and leading technologies,” Jackie Kim, mobile business director at LG Electronics Taiwan Taipei Co Ltd, told reporters during a product launch.
Bloomberg reported last month that LG had slashed its estimates for global smartphone sales by 20 percent to 24 million units this year, citing Park Jong-seok, head of the South Korean company’s mobile business division, after rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co continued to eat into the company’s market share.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
The 4.3-inch Optimus 3D runs on dual-core processors from Texas Instrument Inc and it offers users 3D gaming and other 3D entertainment options without the hassle of putting on clunky and uncomfortable 3D glasses.
HTC Corp is expected to start selling its first 3D model, the Evo 3D, in Taiwan later this month.
Meanwhile, LG said it would be launching its first tablet, the Optimus Pad, in Taiwan by the end of the month.
The tablet runs the Android operating system and has an 8.9-inch panel that comes with a dual-lens 3D camera that can take 3D stills and videos.
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
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
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],”
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