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