Technology Ramblings

On April 19, as Intel announced their Q1 2016 earnings, they also announced a major restructuring that impacted some 12,000 workers and a new focus in 4 key areas.. Cloud - Datacenter "Things" - so Client and IoT Memory & FPGA 5G Networking Intel also confirmed that all of the above will continue to be influenced by Moore's Law - which has been the driving force at Intel since it's inception. Intel has been promoting their Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) for Cloud/Datacenter for some time as well as their various HPC and GPU offerings in that space.  For Intel I think they are safe in this space for now.  The ARM SoC manufacturers have so far not been able to penetrate at any scale. In the Memory & Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) market, this focus to me is on storage.  In the next 5 years, SSD will be the only real storage, so both the Memory itself and the processing (FPGA) that manages capabilities like encryption, de-duplication, compression,...

IDC recently posted Q1 2016 Smartphone sales and there were some big shake ups in the top 5. Overall Q1 2016 Smartphone Sales were relatively flat with 334.9M units sold vs 334.4M in 2015 a very most 0.2% gain. But the big changes came in market share and the emergence of a new players in the top 5. Samsung is still #1 worldwide and sold 81.9M units - a 0.6% decline from 2015 and it's market share percentage dropped 1/10th of 1% to 24.5.  Sales of the new Galaxy S7 which started in March were very strong - so I expect a strong Q2 from Samsung. As I documented in an earlier post #2 Apple saw a dramatic decline of 16.3% in unit sales, selling 51.2M units in Q1 versus 61.2M in 2015.  Apple's market share also dropped 3% from 18.3% to 15.3%. Huawei maintained it's 3rd place with 27.5M units sold, a 58.4% growth over the same period in 2015 and experienced a 3% growth in market share from 5.2% to 8.2%.   The dramatic change happened in positions 4 & 5 where the...

Just 4 days after the release of Windows 10 Build 14328 for PC and Mobile, MS released build 14332 to Fast Ring Insiders for both platforms. MS did add one new feature with Cortana search support for Office365, but the primary focus of this build was the beginning of what MS is calling Bug Bash.   As I stated with 14328 - the Redstone 1 branch is effectively feature complete - so the focus between now and the schedule release of "this summer" which I expect will be July is to fix bugs that testers find.   To that end is the bug bash campaign that MS announced.  This involves a number of "quests" for testers to exercise certain features and provide feedback.  To me this will be an ongoing thing. For example MS did fix the Connected Standby bug that was causing BSODs on my Dell Venue 8 Pro.  So I can comment positively on that fix. MS included with the announcement a laundry list of bug fixes that can found with the announcement at https://blogs.windows....

On April 26 - Terry Myserson of MS wrote an internal memo to major customers and partners confirming Microsoft's commitment to Windows on Mobile devices. Since it's release in 2010, the "modern" version of Windows phone has struggled to gain market share and runs a very distant 3rd to Android and iOS with less than 2% market share worldwide. Through Windows Phone OS releases 7, 7.5, 8, 8.1 and now 10 and a very botched partnership, then acquisition of Nokia's Devices division, the noise has been getting louder and louder regarding the death of Windows phone.  There have even been rumors of MS moving to Cyanogen as a base OS. The most recent MS quarterly results called out an excessive inventory of new the Lumia 950/950XL models which I called lame duck models back in November 2015 when there were announced and recommend not buying.   I was even further surprised by the release of the 550 and 650 models which while nice entry/mid level phones don't suppor...

Today for the first time Apple reported that iPhone sales dropped year over year.  And this was not a small drop off but some 16% from 61.1M units in Q2 2015 to 51.1M in Q2 2016.  And while Apple normally experiences a seasonal drop in sales from their Q1 (Oct/Nov/Dec) to Q2 (Jan/Feb/Mar) - this was much more than I think most folks expected. The drop was also across the board with iPad Sales dropping 19% and Mac sales dropping 12%.  Apple made more revenue in its' services categories - so AppleCare, ApplePay, iTunes, etc than it did selling Macs. In some ways the Mac drop was to be expected as the entire PC industry saw and 11.6% decline in Q1 of 2016.  iPad sales have been struggling the last few years and I don't think the new models are going to change that trend. Apple's overall revenue dropped some 19% from 58B to 50.5B in a year over year comparison.  So while still a very large revenue stream and some 2.5 times more than Microsoft - who ...

Recently a gentleman over at Windows Central named Jason Ward wrote a 3 part article entitled "Smartphones are Dead".   You can find the article here: http://www.windowscentral.com/smartphones-are-dead-part-iii-how-microsoft-apple-and-google-are-preparing-shift In his articles Mr Ward discusses three keys points... Current Smartphones are really Mini-Tablet Computers MS's approach to the "Mini-Tablet" How MS, Apple and Google are working to support the next compute paradigm On the first point, I couldn't agree with Mr Ward more.  I have felt for years that the modern "Smartphones" are in fact computers and should be treated as such.  Even in the pre-iPhone days when MS ruled the space with Windows CE based devices from HTC, HP and others - it was my hope that "smartphones" would be designed and built by what I describe as Tier 1 hardware vendors like HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc and that like PCs you...

On April 22 MS released Windows 10 Build 14328 for both PC and Mobile.  As I stated in an earlier post the Mobile release was just 2 days and 1 build number from the 13427 build that added the Messaging Everywhere beta While the update installed fine on all my machines, my Dell Venue 8 Pro is experiencing intermittent BSODs around what appears to be a known issue with "connected standby" on connected devices.  Luckily a workaround was published with some reg hacks.  The post wasn't well publicized so here it is.. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_install/connected-standby-causing-buchecks-workaround/0d1007c4-5a0b-46f0-8c77-b8aa33554ea5?tm=1461337112248&auth=1 With 14328 - MS added the final features to the Redstone 1 or Anniversary edition branch that was announced at Build and that was Ink and an improved Notifications capability. Additionally however we did get an updated Start Menu which added all apps to the tiles area...

Over April 20 - 22 MS released two new builds of the Redstone branch for Windows 10 Mobile 14327 & 14328.. The big addition was the Messaging Everywhere Beta - so the ability to send/receive text messages from your Phone and PC.  This was included with 14327. So a little more on how this actually works.  On the Receive side - the PC messaging app is now sync'd with your phone - if they share the same Windows ID.   So any message you receive on your phone automatically shows up in the PC app as well. In fact it will show up on any all devices you have that your are logged into with the same Windows ID.   The one comment I will make is that the initial sync is not very good.  MS only uses month/day and so you will suddenly see messages that are a year old. mixed in with recent ones.  Additionally there is no sort capability - but you can search.  Additionally there is only a conversations style view - not a true chronological view.   So so...

On April 12 IDC released their preliminary Q1 2016 PC sales numbers for both Worldwide and US sales. Worldwide - PC sales declined 11.6% to 60.5M units down from 68.4M in Q1 of 2015. That is a faster rate of decline than the 10.5% decline in 2015. Across the big 5 - Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple and Asus declines ranged from 2 to almost 11%. The remaining vendors saw declines of nearly 20%.   In the US - there was a smaller decline of 5.8% to 13.6M units down from 14.4M in 2015.   What is interesting is that the battle here in the US is about market share.   Some vendors like Dell, Lenovo and Apple saw market share growth ranging from 5% - nearly 22% while others like HP saw a significant decline of 14%. Similar to Worldwide numbers - the "Others" category saw a significant decline of nearly 25%.   What this means to me is that the PC market is consolidating - meaning many of the smaller "whitebox" vendors are failing and that the big 5 will be taking share from t...

Today - Microsoft released Windows 10 Mobile Build 14322 to Fast Ring Insiders. Only one of my Nokia Lumia devices qualifies to get Redstone / Anniversary builds - a Lumia 735.  The download and installation both went smoothly. There is a huge list of bug fixes in 14322.  You can look at the official list here  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/04/14/announcing-windows-10-mobile-insider-preview-build-14322/ Build 14322 includes the largest number of new features I've seen so far for Windows 10 Mobile on the Redstone branch. I'll touch on a few of them... First was a big change and flexibility for both notifications and quick actions.   Notifications are now consolidated to not show a source icon next to each and grouped.  Notifications are also now expanded and can include photos and can also be prioritized so that the most important ones show first. Quick actions are now customizable in both what is included and in what order they ap...

At both the Microsoft Build Conference and the F8 FaceBook Developers Conference - you heard a lot about Bots tied to apps like Skye and Messenger and this approach being a new opportunity for both developers and business to generate new revenue streams and that Bots will be part of mainstream messaging within the next 5 years. So first off - what is a Bot ? A Bot is app which allows an end user in apps like FaceBook Messenger or Skype to use a text based interaction with a company to do everything from order flowers, reserve a hotel room or car or restaurant table, buy a plane ticket, etc, etc.   Versus a traditional Mobile app - which a user needs to download, install, create an ID for, etc - they now send a text to company to initiate a transaction and on the backend - advanced capabilities like AI Natural Language processing, Machine learning, etc., interpret the message and then begin a dialog to help complete the transaction.  The transaction can be all text o...

As I've written about many times - we are in the post PC era.  Today new mobile devices run Hexa / Octa Core processors - have 2 - 4GB of RAM and some can support upwards of 256GB of storage.   Think about that for a second.  In many cases that is more powerful than the PC or Laptop that you may have bought just a few years ago. With more and more apps available for everything from buying a cup of coffee to performing enterprise business functions-  for some - their mobile devices are their primary compute device. But the reality is - many folks still also use or carry a laptop and/or tablet around as well as their phone. So you end up with multiple compute devices.   The challenge with just utilizing a mobile device is that sometimes you A) need to be able to use a larger screen and B) use a traditional keyboard.  Sure there are casting solutions out there like Chromecast, etc - but they are more focused for media playback than day to day usage a...

On April 6, MS released Windows 10 Build 14316 for PC.  MS did not release an Mobile update - so my expectation that both versions would be consistently released through the remainder of the Redstone 1 branch has already be broken. As announced at the Build 2016 conference - the Redstone 1 branch is now referred by MS as the Anniversary release with an expected production release of late July 2016. Beginning with 14316 - several of the new Windows 10 features that were presented at Build began to show up - they include Bash for Windows 10 - a Linux Subsystem and BASH shell co-developed with Cannonical the supporters of Ubuntu Linux.   Updated Cortana with Cross Device Features Updates to Edge Browser with improved Extension Support Skype UWP App - with Updated Emojis Universal Dark Color Theme New Connect App for Continuum support Virtual Desktop Improvements New Update experience - for new builds Updated Battery Settings  MS also announced that coming ...

Back in 2012 the world was introduced to the Raspberry Pi - a $35 computer based on Broadcom System on a Chip (SOC) technology.  It was originally produced for the education market to provide a cheap platform to allow kids to learn about computing.   Since that time it has become a standard for the "maker" community - those folks that turn Raspberry Pi boards into everything from Media Servers to routers to their desktop.   Raspberry Pi has become wildly successful with over 8M boards sold.  While originally designed for some Debian Linux distros called Noobs and Raspbian with Python, you can now install Ubuntu Snappy or Mate as well as Google's Brillo and even Windows 10 IoT Core edition. With a combination of USB, Wired and Wireless Networking, HDMI, GPIO and audio ports as well as SD card storage - you can turn utilize this little board to serve all sorts of roles.    One thing that the Raspberry Pi really demonstrates is the evolution in chip ma...