Jumat, 28 Februari 2020

Apple and Samsung dominate top selling phone lists for 2019 - The Verge

Apple produced the two top selling phone models in the world last year, the iPhone XR and iPhone 11, according to reports by Counterpoint Research and Omdia. The iPhone 11’s second place position was particularly impressive, given the phone was only on sale for just over three months in 2019. However, there were large disparities regionally, with a Samsung phone winning Europe, and an Oppo holding the top spot in China.

The disparity between the top sellers in North America and Europe is particularly striking. In the former, Apple completely dominated. Each one of the top five selling phones in the region was an iPhone, ranging from the budget iPhone 8 to the premium flagship iPhone 11 Pro Max. That’s not much of a surprise with Apple owning roughly 50 percent of the US marketshare. In Europe, however, Samsung’s mid-range A-series devices took the lead. The best selling phone in Europe was the Galaxy A50, and phones from the series made up three of the top five bestselling handsets (Apple’s made up the other two).

The top ten worldwide was similarly filled with Samsung and Apple handsets, though it’s interesting to see that none of Samsung’s flagship phones made the cut. Omdia and Counterpoint Research differ slightly on the exact models that were the top sellers though. Omdia reports that Apple had five models in the top ten, Samsung had four, and Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 7 took one. Meanwhile, Counterpoint Research says that six of the top ten phones were iPhones, three were mid-range handsets from Samsung, and the final handset was Oppo’s A5, which it says also took the top spot in China.

Counterpoint’s Research paints a bleaker image for Huawei, which it says didn’t manage to get a single handset into the top ten worldwide. The closest was the Huawei P30, which was the fifth best-selling phone in China, behind handsets from Oppo and Vivo.

That doesn’t mean Huawei did badly overall. All the analysts agree that the Chinese manufacturer was the second best-selling smartphone manufacturer in the world in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple for the first time, as its shipments increased between 2018 and 2019.

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2020-02-28 13:01:54Z
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Dear Apple: don’t let a trackpad turn the iPad into a Mac - The Verge

Good morning and congratulations on making it through another week. I had been planning on writing about some of the issues I had while writing my Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review — specifically my bafflement that Samsung is once again asking reviewers like me to be beta testers. It’s inconceivable that the company didn’t realize there were issues with the camera and also very strange that it didn’t so much as hint at a software update to me until the day before yesterday. I’ll say it again: never buy anything on the hope that future software updates will fix it. Wait.

But we covered it pretty well in The Vergecast coming out later today, so please give it a listen. Instead, to the surprise of absolutely nobody given my obsession with how companies are trying to get big-screen computers beyond the UX paradigms of the 1980s and 90s, I’m interested in an iPad rumor about a keyboard.

The news is simply that Apple is reportedly releasing an iPad keyboard with a trackpad later this year. It’s a good scoop from The Information. A good piece to read next is about something Jason Snell noticed in the iOS beta released earlier this month: better support for keyboard functions like modifier keys. A third thing to note is that Apple software boss Craig Federighi said, “If you like what you’ve seen us do with iPadOS, stay tuned, we’re going to keep working on it.”

If you’re wondering when this might happen, the Apple-o-sphere has all been working on the belief that Apple will be holding a Spring hardware announcement. There are too many rumored products to fit into one event, but a new iPad Pro and a new keyboard for it would definitely make the cut. Given all the recent tech event cancellations due to the coronavirus, however, Apple might be rethinking its plans right now.

In any case, I have many thoughts about the iPad — which you might have guessed since I’ve been writing about the iPad’s evolution as a computer so often over the past few years. I would love to speculate on the physical shape and design of the keyboard, but I think that’s better left until later, when we have a better idea of what it might look like.

Instead, I just want to point out that the iPad is an OS that is currently hostile to mouse input. I don’t mean that as a criticism, but I do think it’s just stating facts. I know there are people who have enabled the “AssistiveTouch” mouse feature, but what it mainly does is let you emulate your finger taps with a mouse. That means it’s not actually all that helpful with two things that mice excel at: tapping tiny UI buttons and working with text.

I’m on record as thinking that Apple’s recent attempts to improve text manipulation like selecting, copying, pasting, and even cursor placement are not very good. And since AssistiveTouch currently only supports acting like a finger, it doesn’t help.

I bring this up because I have a radical idea: what if the only thing trackpad support brings to the iPad is better text manipulation? I actually think that is the right move for Apple, at least to start.

With the new iPadOS last year, Apple was incredibly ambitious. It added all sorts of new ideas and interaction models to the UI, some of which were confusing. In my original review, I gave Apple credit for finally allowing the iPad to become complicated and I stand by that. But I also believe that it’s not intuitive because its features can’t be progressively learned over time — you basically have to watch or read tutorials, which is incredibly un-Apple-like.

I bring all this up because right now the iPad has a lot going on with its overall user interface and I sort of feel that the last thing Apple should do is add yet another variable to the mix. Unless Apple is planning its second major re-think of how we interact with the iPad in two years, it’s just too much of a burden to put on users.

Because, as I’ve said before, using a mouse is fundamentally a weird thing to do — it’s actually a level of abstraction beyond just touching the display. It only feels “intuitive” because so many of us learned to use one first, and because “desktop” operating systems do such a good job of progressively teaching you new skills as you use them. They’re consistent and learnable in a way the iPad’s more advanced features simply aren’t.

I don’t want Apple to fall back on the crutch of just using desktop OS paradigms to solve the iPad’s user interface intuitiveness problem. The last thing we should want is for the iPad to turn into a Mac. It’s on a different path and it would be a shame to have those ideas tossed out the window just so we can have more traditional windows on the iPad.

But I’m not anti-trackpad. I do think it would be a huge help for text selection and it would allow some app developers to create smaller touch targets on their apps. Plus, and this may be anathema to some, the iPad makes a lot of use of right-click style actions now (just long press to see them), and a trackpad could help with that too.

If you haven’t done so in awhile, go on and watch Steve Jobs’ seminal iPhone introduction. Pay special attention to how he talks about styluses and fingers. It’s easy to forget now, but the iPhone was a radical reinvention of user interfaces compared to what most people had used. Only a tiny sliver of apps on smartphones were designed to be used with a finger — shout out to SnapperMail, my favorite email app for the Treo and the subject of a wonderful 2003 Walt Mossberg review.

None of the smartphone operating systems before the iPhone were optimized for fingers, though. They all required a stylus or physical buttons to get around. The iPhone UI was revolutionary because it just had one button — the home button — and it was designed from the ground-up to be touched.

The iPad continued that legacy, just on a big screen. Adding a trackpad to that seems like a good idea, but I dearly hope it doesn’t take away from all the benefits we get from a purely touchscreen interface. We already have the Mac, the iPad doesn’t need to turn into one too.


Coronavirus

Facebook cancels F8 developer conference due to coronavirus concerns.

Plague Inc. pulled from the App Store in China amid coronavirus outbreak.

In late January, Plague Inc. saw a resurgence in downloads in China and became the country’s top paid iOS game. In response, Ndemic Creations released a statement reminding players that Plague Inc., while it was designed to be realistic and informative about how diseases spread, is just a game. It’s currently the top paid game in the US App Store. “We would always recommend that players get their information directly from local and global health authorities,” the company said in January.

Tim Cook says Apple is reopening factories as China gets ‘coronavirus under control’.

Health secretary Alex Azar won’t promise that a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable.

Coronavirus merch is somehow worse than I expected.

More from The Verge

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: shutter bug. Here’s my review. I hope Samsung bucks the trend of camera software updates usually not improving things.

Samsung called this phone the S20 instead of the S11 to indicate that it is the first of a new generation, and that might be too revealing. As impressive as the overall phone is, the camera often acts like a first-gen tech product with first-gen tech problems.

Robots aren’t taking our jobs — they’re becoming our bosses. Important, deep piece from Josh Dzieza. Well written and empathetic. Think of all the tiny moments of downtime you have during the day, the time where you’re just with yourself for a minute. AI tracking of workers is taking that away.

An Amazon worker in the Midwest described a bleak vision of the future. “We could have algorithms connected to technology that’s directly on our bodies controlling how we work,” he said. “Right now, the algorithm is telling a manager to yell at us. In the future, the algorithm could be telling a shock collar—” I laughed, and he quickly said he was only partly joking. After all, Amazon has patented tracking wristbands that vibrate to direct workers, and Walmart is testing harnesses that monitor the motions of its warehouse staff

It’s hard to care about other people’s feelings online. I love this essay from Bijan Stephen. Acting with empathy on platforms that reward snark is hard and you often end up looking painfully earnest. But do it anyway.

Vivo’s Apex 2020 concept has breakthrough cameras and an ultra-curved screen. As Sam Byford notes, this phone was supposed to be shown at Mobile World Congress. Hopefully Vivo seeds it to some people to play around with even though it’s never going to get released, because I would love to see the results of some independent tests of a proper optical zoom lens on a phone:

The Apex 2020’s telephoto lens, however, has actual moving lens elements that take it from 5x to 7.5x magnification. Vivo says the 16-megapixel module is just 6.2mm thick due to its periscope design, which allows it to fit inside the 8.8mm-thick phone.

Uber tweaks its app to improve those pesky pickups. This is a very smart idea, though it does mean that drivers’ phones will have their microphones turned on. If I were Uber, I would get an independent auditor to go through the code every now and then to verify that the only thing the microphone is doing is listening for the ultrasound.

Uber is also developing a new technology that uses ultrasound waves to automatically verify you’re in the right car, no PIN needed. The rider’s phone will send this ultrasonic signal to the driver’s phone to automatically verify the unique PIN. The company has said that technology should be ready to roll before the end of 2019.

Clearview AI’s client list includes 2,200 organizations spanning law enforcement to universities.

Peloton settles lawsuits over songs being used in fitness videos without permission.

AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile will be fined more than $200 million for selling customer locations, per report.

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2020-02-28 12:00:00Z
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Vivo Apex 2020 announced: Specs and features - Android Authority

Vivo Apex 2020

Vivo’s Apex line is the company’s yearly concept phone that showcases its most forward-thinking features. It started with the pop-up selfie camera and in-display fingerprint sensor in the original Vivo Apex concept phone we saw at MWC 2018. Last year, we saw a portless and buttonless phone in the Apex line. Now, we have a new concept phone from the brand: the Vivo Apex 2020.

Interestingly, this phone takes the two biggest innovations of each of the previous Apex phones and melds them together. The Vivo Apex 2020 features an in-display selfie camera, which means there’s no need for a notch, a display cutout, or even a pop-up camera. The lens itself lives under the glass making it so you never need to see it.

The Vivo Apex 2020 also has no ports and no buttons. If you want to charge it or transfer data to/from the phone, you’ll need to exclusively use wireless solutions. Thankfully, the Vivo Apex 2020 is capable of wireless charging speeds of 60W, which means it takes about one minute to charge each 100mAh of battery. Unfortunately, Vivo did not divulge how big the battery capacity is on this new Apex.

Related: The best phones with wireless charging

The Vivo Apex 2020 also has a gimbal-stabilizing main camera system on the rear. This means the whole module, not just the lens, gets stabilized by a mechanical gimbal. According to Vivo, this is 200% more effective than traditional OIS we see on most flagship smartphones and will make recording super-smooth video incredibly easy.

Finally, the camera also has a 5x – 7.5x optical zoom. This would mean you could, theoretically, achieve 7.5x zoom without any loss of image quality. That stabilizing gimbal will help keep your shot from getting blurry with that much zoom.

Vivo Apex 2020: Shut up and take my money!

This phone sounds very impressive, but don’t get your hopes up about buying the Vivo Apex 2020. Although the original Apex became the Vivo Nex and did see a commercial release, the 2019 entry in the Apex line only sort of became a real product as the Vivo Nex 3. The Vivo Apex 2020 physically exists — and we probably would have been able to see it first-hand if MWC wasn’t canceled — but it’s likely the device we see here won’t ever make it to market.

Perhaps, though, the Vivo Nex 4 will bring in aspects of this phone. We’ll need to wait and see!

More posts about Vivo

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2020-02-28 10:31:57Z
52780636530188

Vivo Apex 2020 announced: Specs and features - Android Authority

Vivo Apex 2020

Vivo’s Apex line is the company’s yearly concept phone that showcases its most forward-thinking features. It started with the pop-up selfie camera and in-display fingerprint sensor in the original Vivo Apex concept phone we saw at MWC 2018. Last year, we saw a portless and buttonless phone in the Apex line. Now, we have a new concept phone from the brand: the Vivo Apex 2020.

Interestingly, this phone takes the two biggest innovations of each of the previous Apex phones and melds them together. The Vivo Apex 2020 features an in-display selfie camera, which means there’s no need for a notch, a display cutout, or even a pop-up camera. The lens itself lives under the glass making it so you never need to see it.

The Vivo Apex 2020 also has no ports and no buttons. If you want to charge it or transfer data to/from the phone, you’ll need to exclusively use wireless solutions. Thankfully, the Vivo Apex 2020 is capable of wireless charging speeds of 60W, which means it takes about one minute to charge each 100mAh of battery. Unfortunately, Vivo did not divulge how big the battery capacity is on this new Apex.

Related: The best phones with wireless charging

The Vivo Apex 2020 also has a gimbal-stabilizing main camera system on the rear. This means the whole module, not just the lens, gets stabilized by a mechanical gimbal. According to Vivo, this is 200% more effective than traditional OIS we see on most flagship smartphones and will make recording super-smooth video incredibly easy.

Finally, the camera also has a 5x – 7.5x optical zoom. This would mean you could, theoretically, achieve 7.5x zoom without any loss of image quality. That stabilizing gimbal will help keep your shot from getting blurry with that much zoom.

Vivo Apex 2020: Shut up and take my money!

This phone sounds very impressive, but don’t get your hopes up about buying the Vivo Apex 2020. Although the original Apex became the Vivo Nex and did see a commercial release, the 2019 entry in the Apex line only sort of became a real product as the Vivo Nex 3. The Vivo Apex 2020 physically exists — and we probably would have been able to see it first-hand if MWC wasn’t canceled — but it’s likely the device we see here won’t ever make it to market.

Perhaps, though, the Vivo Nex 4 will bring in aspects of this phone. We’ll need to wait and see!

More posts about Vivo

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2020-02-28 09:31:45Z
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Kamis, 27 Februari 2020

Spotify launches iOS app update with new shuffle play button, action rows, improved cover art - 9to5Mac

Spotify is out today with an update to the design of its iOS app. The latest release brings a new shuffle play button, easy to use action rows, and cover art for track rows. You can now also follow artists, heart playlists, and more.

Spotify highlighted three of the new changes in a press release today:

It’s bigger. It’s bolder. It’s better than ever. No, we’re not talking about some artist’s new sound, but about the refreshed look that iOS users will enjoy on Spotify mobile starting today. Both Free and Premium subscribers will benefit from a more streamlined, easy-to-use interface with fresh designs to actionable icons that will make playing your favorite song or playlist as simple as the tap of a button.

Here’s how the new shuffle play button, action row buttons, and cover art in track rows look:

The new shuffle play button makes it easy to start streaming music at random with one tap and the new action row buttons will show up in “the central part of the screen” for easy access.

Plus, the new row is your one-stop-shop for everything you’ll ever want to do one-handed—the experience is much more adaptive and responds to the size of your device.

And cover art has made its way to the track row view:

We’re now showing a track’s cover art in all views except “Album” view. This will make it easier than ever to navigate the app and find familiar songs. Plus, we’ll highlight songs you’ve already “liked” by showing the heart icon next to the track name.

The new design for iOS is rolling out for users today and also includes “bolder, brighter images,” the ability to heart playlists, and follow artists. Spotify is a free download from the App Store.

Read more on Spotify:

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Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:

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2020-02-27 15:00:00Z
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The Raspberry Pi 4 gets more RAM for $35 - TechCrunch

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has updated its flagship model, the Raspberry Pi 4. It’s still the same awesome tiny single-board computer with a lot of connectors. But the entry-level device now comes with 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB of RAM for the same price of $35.

The foundation says that RAM prices have been dropping lately, so it has become cheaper to build Raspberry Pi devices with more RAM. If you want more RAM, you can still buy a 4GB model for $55 — the price hasn’t changed.

If you’re using a ton of 1GB models for your industrial projects, you can still buy the old 1GB model for $35. This way, it doesn’t create compatibility issues or you don’t have to split your fleet of Raspberry Pi devices between 1GB models and 2GB models. But makers and hobbyists should definitely buy the 2GB over the 1GB model from now on, as it’s the same price.

As the Raspberry Pi Foundation is approaching its eighth birthday, it is looking back at the evolution of the Raspberry Pi. The original Raspberry Pi also cost $35, but it is drastically more powerful today.

In eight years, you get a 40x CPU performance increase, 8x memory increase, 10x input/output bandwidth increase and there’s a Wi-Fi chip. This isn’t just a tiny computer to play around with. You can now do a ton of stuff with a Raspberry Pi, and even replace your desktop computer if you mainly use it for web browsing and basic tasks. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold 30 million devices so far.

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2020-02-27 15:33:06Z
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The $35 Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with double the RAM - Engadget

Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi is celebrating its eighth birthday, and it's come a long way in those eight years. Since launching its very first computer back in 2012, the company has sold more than 30 million units. Every year since has brought a newer version with higher specs and better processing power, with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B arriving in 2019 with 40 times more speed than the humble original. Now, thanks to falling RAM prices, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts can get their hands on the 2GB device for $35 (around £35, depending on where you buy it) -- which is the same price as the very first version from eight years ago.

The Pi 4 2GB cost $45 at launch. Compared to the original, though, it has eight times the memory, 10 times the I/O bandwidth, four times the number of pixels on screen and dual-band wireless networking. As the company notes, thanks to inflation, $35 in 2012 is equivalent to nearly $40 today. So effectively you're getting all these improvements, and a $5 price cut. This is a permanent price cut,though, with the 1GB version remaining at $35, so opting for the larger memory variant is pretty much a no brainer.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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2020-02-27 12:09:37Z
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