Microsoft Corp is gearing up to grab a share of the highly competitive smartphone operating system (OS) market with its partner in the sector, HTC Corp (宏達電), launching two new phones yesterday that run its latest Windows Phone platform.
The two HTC phones — the Titan and the Radar — are scheduled to hit the shelves at the end of this month. The price of the 4.7-inch Titan is NT$18,900 (US$623), while the 3.8-inch Radar will cost NT$13,900.
Microsoft Taiwan general manager Davis Tsai (蔡恩全) said the company is confident that Mango, the latest upgrade of the company’s Windows Phone OS, has a good chance of challenging Apple Inc’s iOS over the next three years.
Mango’s new features have grabbed market attention. The improvements include threads, which allow users to switch between text, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger within the same conversation, and deeper social network integration, which means Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds are now integrated into contact cards and users can see updates from all their contacts in one stream under the “What’s New” tab.
In April, researcher Gartner forecast that Google Inc’s Android OS would have the largest market share during the next four years, rising to 49 percent in 2015 from 23 percent last year.
Apple’s iOS was predicted to grow to 17 percent from 16 percent, while Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS would grab 19.5 percent in 2015 from 4.2 percent last year.
In June, IDC predicted that Microsoft would hold a 20.3 percent market share in 2015.
Taiwanese app developers have started to position themselves to ride the growth of Windows Phone.
“You see shadows of the iOS on Android and these two are more app-driven platforms, while Mango gives you a complete user experience, such as in terms of navigation direction,” said Izero Lee (李明哲), chief operating officer of KKBox Inc, Taiwan’s largest online music service provider.
KKBox has updated its app in Traditional Chinese for subscribers of Windows Phone’s app store, Windows Marketplace.
The music provider, which debuted its music service in Japan in June, is testing a Mango-based app for launch in that market by early next year, Lee said.
KKBox is also promoting its app on Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store.
Hu Hsueh-hai (胡學海), marketing managing director at Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), said it is in talks with Microsoft Taiwan to bundle its own app store, called Hami, into Windows Marketplace, in a move that would offer Hami to a larger audience.
Microsoft Taiwan said offerings in its Marketplace are set to soar to 100,000 apps by the end of next year, from the current archive of almost 35,000 apps.
“Our application store will be the fastest growing of them all,” said Cathy Yeh (葉怡君), Windows client business group director.
There are more than 200 apps developed by Taiwanese firms on Marketplace and e-reading, music services and games apps are popular among Taiwanese users, she said.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained