Technology Ramblings

This post is only about 2 months late but back at the end of July IDC posted their Quarterly Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker Report. The top 5 remain in the same order with Samsung 1st followed by Huawei, Apple, Xaiomi and Oppo... Huawei is still growing very rapidly with 58.7M units shipped and a 17.6% market share - so they are slowly closing in on Samsung who saw some unit growth to 75.5M units and a 22.7% market share. Apple continues to struggle - Q2 2019 showed a 18.2% decline in unit sales to 33.8M units with a 10.1% market share... At the same time #4 Xaiomi sold 32.3M units and #5 Oppo 29.5M units - so it is very possible that both of these OEMs could surpass Apple in the coming year.  I'm not sure they will do it in 2019 as Apple always has a monster Q4..but it's coming If the 3 Chinese firms Huawei, Xaiomi and Oppo had a real presence in the US - I would suspect they would all be bumped up at least 1 place.  Combined the 3 sold some 120.5M units or 36% of th

MS today held their fall hardware event in NYC with several interesting releases and announcements. First the Surface Pro was refreshed to Core i10 and a new Surface Pro X was announced that utilizes a jointly developed ARM processor with Qualcomm called the SQ1 with a 13" screen, LTE support and "flat pen" that can be stored in the keyboard.  Think of it as a more next gen Surface Go. Next was the Surface Laptop 3 which is now available in both 13.3 and 15" models with or without the Alcantra fabric keyboard.  The 15" utilizes the AMD Epyc CPU. All of the above units are available for pre-order today and begin shipping on or about Oct 22.  Most likely - all will come with Windows 10 1909 release on them But the show stoppers were definitely the two dual screen (don't call them foldable) devices the Neo and Duo. The Neo is a dual screen device with 2 x 9" screens.  It will utilize the next gen of Intel CPU/Graphics and has both a magnetically

IDC published their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile phone tracker data yesterday and we've seen a change that I predicted last year. Samsung still holds the #1 spot shipping 71.9M units an 8.1% drop from 2018. Huawei took over the #2 spot in Worldwide shipments with 59.1M units shipped a 50.3% increase over 2018.  Which is actually quite amazing considering the restrictions in the US market and the recent bad press with 5G.   Apple dropped to 3rd with 36.4M units shipped a drop of over 30% from 52.2M units in Q1 of 2018. The 4 & 5 spots include the other Chinese OEMs with Xaiomi in #4 and Oppo/Vivo effectively tied at #5. Total shipments for Q1 were 310.8M units a drop of 6.6% from 332.7 in 2018 - which is the 6th consecutive quarter of volume drops.  This to me indicates a plateau that has been reached in the smartphone market. IDC indicates that many buyers are holding on to their phones longer - so not doing the typical 2 - 3 year refresh.  And while there is a contin

So I switch back and forth between multiple desktop OS and recently have been exercising Linux Mint 19.1 "Tessa" on a 5 year old Dell Inspiron 3647 desktop. The first question with Linux distros in my mind has always been can you utilize it as a daily driver and be able to perform all of the tasks that you would normally.   In my case it's an emphatic yes.  The OS is extremely fast even on an 4th gen Core i3 with 8GB of RAM and Intel graphics.  Compared to Windows 10 running on the same system it's night and day. The Cinnamon UI version is very intuitive to navigate and feels very natural.   While MS does not support a Linux version of Office - the distro includes the LibreOffice suite and to be honest the quality of the Office365 Web experience has gotten to the point where you have to question the need to install Office at all.    With that said - there are  two MS apps I use that are not part of our corporate E5 O365 subscription - Visio and Project.  And so

Here we are again nearing the semi-annual release of the latest Windows 10 version called 19H1.   I'm currently running the latest 18351 build on two devices - a 2-in-1 laptop and an Intel NUC and to be honest - there's not a ton to get excited about or report on.   Sure there's some continued improvement to Settings, Menu, Pen based apps, game support, multi-language, and really important stuff like emojis (really ?).   But will you really notice a huge different from the 1809 release ?   In a word - No. The big question will be can MS get 19H1 out the door cleanly and without the PR nightmare they experienced with 1809 and file deletions.   I will have to say that they have improved the update process in that for both my test machines they can prep, download, install and apply a new build in under an hour.  But that's on newest generation Intel Core i5 CPUs with 16GB of RAM and NVMe.  But in comparison to my Pixelbook it's still a joke - where I see a n

Its been a while since I've posted anything in regards to the Smartphone and PC markets - so here's how we finished up 2018. Smartphones have continued their decline as Q4 showed the 5th consecutive quarterly decline in sales.  Q4 2018 ended up at 375.4M units according the IDC Mobile Tracker down some 4.9% from 2017's 394.6M units. For all of 2018 Smartphone sales were slightly over 1.404B units a 4.1% decline from 2017's 1.465B units.   The top five OEMS are Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Oppo and Xaiomi.    On the PC side Q4 2018 saw a decline of 4.3% to 68.6M units vs 2017's 71.7M units and for all of 2018 - PC sales saw their 7th consecutive year of unit sales decline to just 259.3M units vs 262.6M units in 2017 according to Gartner - a 1.3% decline.  The consolidation in this market continues as the big three Lenovo, Dell and HP now sell some 63% of all PCs.    And while MS has seen increasing unit sales of their Surface line in recent years - in the US MS ho

I provide monitoring and repair services to a number of properties for folks - so automation capabilities have become a big deal. Depending on any one customers budget and interest - I install security, lighting, HVAC, irrigation & water mgmt, pool and garage devices.  The goal typically is to A) provide some visibility into the general state of home and B) control key functions that can save the property owner money. Here is what I've been installing recently and my experiences with them. Security Typically for me a two vendor solution - Arlo for cameras and Nest for Smoke Alarms, Door Bell and Security system.   I chose Arlo over Nest for cameras primarily due to the battery support with Arlo allowing placement just about anywhere.  While Nest cameras are very good - their reliance on a physical power connection really limits your deployment options.  With Arlo the cameras are good, its easy to set up and the cost is reasonable.  I often buy base + camera bundles fr