BERLIN -- These days, tech giants are no longer content to own your pocket -- they want to dominate your wrist too. French firm Alcatel has lifted the lid on its new smartwatch, a colourful offering that touts 2- to 5-day battery life.
Tough tech
The Go Watch is, Alcatel asserts, waterproof, dustproof and shockproof, which makes it more durable than most of the smartwatches currently on the market -- on paper, at least. That could make it a solid choice for sporty types looking to keep an eye on incoming texts while scaling mountains, or just those who have a history of accidentally dropping gadgets into the sink.
The Go Watch is white by default, but a range of front casings and wristbands will be available, should you want to liven it up a little. Once it's connected to your phone, the Go Watch puts extra information on your wrist, notifying you about incoming texts, calls and emails as well as the weather.
Mood measurer
One intriguing feature is the power to trigger what Alcatel calls an emotional pulse measurement. Essentially, the watch collects data from its heart rate sensor, accelerometer and gyroscope, then puts a graphic on screen that attempts to sum up your emotional state. Examples include graphics that tell you it's time to eat, time to love and so on.
In our hands-on time we didn't find the mood-measuring feature to be consistent, so this app definitely feels like it's meant as a bit of fun, rather than offering any serious metrics or analysing your emotions in any meaningful way. A note of caution -- we found some of the icons for the various mood graphics were a little raunchy or crude. Alcatel said it would be reviewing the inclusion of these before the watch goes on sale, and planned to remove one particularly suggestive icon we spotted during our hands-on time, but that's something to look into if you were going to buy this product as a gift for a child, for instance. Once the Go Watch has measured has decided what mood you're in, you can then share this to social networks or set it as the watch's wallpaper, should you please.
Plays nice with Android and iOS
The Go Watch is compatible with both Android and Apple smartphones, so chances are it'll work with your mobile of choice. This would have been a more interesting feature if not for Google's recent news that it's making its Android Wear smartwatch platform compatible with iOS, which immediately broadens the choice for iPhone owners considering a wrist-borne gadget.
The fact that the Go Watch is running its own operating system, rather than Android Wear, also means it won't have as many apps available as other smartwatches. That's not good news, but more encouraging is that Alcatel's promising 2-5 days of battery life, which is longer than many smartwatches manage.
There's no word on a release date or price yet, but stay tuned.
In just a few short days, on September 9, Apple will introduce new iPhones, and if it follows its usual playbook, they'll be called the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus -- and be available for sale in many countries around the world by the Friday after next.
As an "S" model, we can expect the 2015 iPhones to maintain the same basic design as their 2014 predecessors, while incorporating some decent changes under the hood: a faster processor (definitely), a better camera (almost certainly) and a Force Touch screen that borrows some Apple Watch tricks(rumored).
Unfortunately, one thing that probably won't change is how much storage the entry-level iPhone 6S will have. Leaked images on 9to5mac back in July purported to show the new iPhone's logic board with a new Toshiba flash memory module that, according the site, has 16GB capacity. (While such images should always be approached with skepticism, author Mark Gurman has an excellent track record, and the images are convincing.) And more recently, 9to5mac and other Apple enthusiast sites have been citing unnamed sources saying a 16GB iPhone 6S and a 16GB iPhone 6S Plus are done deals.
In other words, it's looking more and more like a step up to a 32GB baseline isn't going to happen. And that's a problem.
The problem with 16GB
For the last several iPhone cycles, Apple has equipped the entry-level versions of its flagship phones with 16GB, charging $199 in the US with a two-year contract or "carrier financing." The price for the unlocked version -- and in many cases the real price to you and me in the end -- is $649.
Last year, when Apple moved to the iPhone 6, it did away with the 32GB version that was previously occupied the middle range of the iPhone 5/5S and earlier lines. Now you can buy the 64GB iPhone 6 for $749 (or $299 on contract) -- $100 more than the 16GB version. (Tack on another $100 if you want to go to the larger iPhone 6 Plus in any of these same capacities.) For anybody who was familiar with the limitations of owning a 16GB iPhone or iPad, that 64GB model -- or the step-up 128GB -- was the iPhone to get.
The fact is 16GB of storage space just doesn't cut it anymore. Once you shoot a bunch of pictures and videos, download a couple of graphically intensive games and a bulky app or two (Google Maps) and store some music on your phone, you start to hit the limit.
In moving to iOS 9 this fall, Apple announced it would dramatically reduce the size of its iOS updates (from around 4.6GB to 1.3GB) and trim the size of apps in general through a new feature called app thinning. But iOS 9 will still take up some space in the phone's flash storage (I have a 64GB iPhone 5S, with 54.2GB "used" and only 1.7GB "available," which means about 8GB is devoted to iOS resources).
That will help owners of existing iPhones to free up additional storage space, but 16GB is still 16GB, and you'll use it up faster than you think, particularly as file sizes for photos and video grow as their resolution increases. In fact, rumor has it the next iPhones may feature 4K video capture -- videos that offer four times the resolution of standard 1080p HD shots.
Minimal storage means maximum profits
So why not bump the entry-level iPhone up to 32GB? After all, most flagship Android smartphones -- such as the Samsung Galaxy S6/S6 Edge, HTC One M9, LG G4 -- now start at 32GB. And some of them even still feature expandable storage.
The simple answer is profit margin.
According to IHS, an analytics firm that does teardowns and estimates bills of materials for iPads, iPhones and other products, going from 16GB to 32GB of NAND flash memory would've cost Apple around $10 in September 2014 -- so probably even less almost a year later, with prices for memory drifting downward. Yes, that's a significant sum when you consider that, according to those aforementioned teardowns/bill of materials estimates, it costs Apple around $200 to build an iPhone 6 and $215 to build an iPhone 6 Plus.
Better yet -- for Apple anyway -- it costs you $750 to buy the 64GB iPhone 6, which conservatively costs Apple about $20 more to make than the 16GB version. From a margins standpoint, the 64GB and 128GB iPhones are by far more profitable, so Apple doesn't really want you to buy a 16GB iPhone.
And the numbers show that Apple's plan to push consumers to the more expensive models is working. The average selling price for an iPhone in the final quarter of 2014 (when the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus first debuted in bulk) was $687. By comparison, the average selling price of an Android phone during the same period was less than half -- just $254. That's the primary reason Apple is the most valuable company in the world even as Android phone manufacturers struggle to make a profit.
It's time for a change
With numbers like that, I get it. This whole 16GB thing is working for Apple in a big way. The company is printing money, and many consumers are all too happy to pay the extra $100 or $200 to step up to the more capacious models.
It's even easier now that the carriers in the US are largely transitioning to a post-contract world, and letting you spread payments across a 24-month period. In that scenario, the jump from a 16GB iPhone to a 64GB model costs you just $4 more. Skip a latte or two each month, and the upgrade "pays for itself."
So, it could be argued that there's "no good reason" to buy the entry-level 16GB iPhone.
And yet people do. They just can't resist buying the cheapest of anything, even if it isn't in their best interest. In some cases, it may be businesses that are purchasing several units for their employees and want to save money while limiting what their employees can do with the phone (it's for business not personal use, so you shouldn't be playing games or shooting videos of your kids).
And, to be sure, the low-capacity phones are important in developing nations, where products are even more price-sensitive. Consider the iPhone 5C, currently Apple's entry-level $450 phone (it's supposedly going away soon, with the 5S replacing it as the entry-level model). The 2013 product got the requisite $100 price drop when the newer iPhone 6 line was released last September, but -- for the newly more affordable 2014 model that's still being sold -- Apple chopped the internal storage from 16GB to an even paltrier 8GB. That's barely enough to fit the operating system, at least pre-iOS 9.
There's also the argument that local storage is less important now that everything is online. That's where Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller is coming from when, defending the existence of 16GB iOS devices on The Talk Show, a podcast hosted by noted Apple pundit John Gruber. He says that the hope is that cloud services like iCloud and Apple Music will enable the most price-conscious customer to "live in an environment where they don't need gobs of local storage..." (Go to 52:00 mark of the video to see Schiller's full response to Gruber's 16GB iPhone question).
I'd be fine with that if Apple Music and iCloud storage beyond 5GB were free. But they aren't. So the equation gets even more cynical. You're selling a cure for a disease you created yourself. And that's just not right.
But that probably won't stop Apple from giving us new 16GB iPhones on September 9.
While Samsung devices dominate the global smartphone market, Apple's iPhone continues to rule the US.
Apple continues to outshine its arch rival Samsung in the US smartphone market.
For the three months ended July, Apple remained in first place in the US with a smartphone market share of 44.2 percent, up from 43.1 percent for the prior three months, ComScore said on Thursday. Over the same time, Samsung's share dripped down to 27.3 percent from 28.6 percent.
Apple and Samsung have long been duking it out for the position of top dog in the smartphone market. On a global basis, Samsung has typically held first place over the past few years and continued to rule over Apple in the second quarter, according to IDC and Gartner. However, Samsung's smartphone market share and sales have been on a decline for almost two years now.
Samsung's Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have so far failed to bump up sales, leading to Samsung's seventh straight drop in quarterly earnings for the second quarter. The company has been hit by tougher competition from Chinese vendors such as Xiaomi and Huawei on the lower end and by Apple on the higher end. One issue is that Samsung's premium phones continue to sell at a premium price tag. Another is that larger-screened phones are no longer the domain of Android players such as Samsung. Apple joined the big-screen game last year when it unveiled its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, with display sizes of 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, respectively.
Among the other top smartphone players tracked by ComScore, LG came in third place with a US market share of 8.7 percent, followed by Motorola with 4.9 percent and HTC with 3.5 percent. In the US, Apple and Samsung have a lock on the smartphone market just as they do globally, leaving little but scraps left over for the other vendors.
Among mobile operating systems, Google's Android software still holds the lead in the US, though Apple's iOS has been catching up. For the three months ended July, Android bit off a 51.4 percent slice of the market, down slightly from 52.2 percent during the previous three months. Over the same time, iOS grabbed its 44.2 percent share, up from 43.1 percent.
Microsoft is looking to Windows 10 as a possible white knight. Already available for PCs and tablets and slated to roll out to mobile phones later this year, the new Windows operating system will try to bring together different devices into one single ecosystem with similar apps and other features. The hope is that someone who runs and likes Windows 10 on their PC or tablet may be more inclined to buy a Windows 10 phone.
Another smartphone player facing tough times is BlackBerry, whose US market share for the three months ended July dropped to 1.3 percent from 1.5 percent. The company continues to introduce new phones with the goal of attracting consumers who like the classic BlackBerry style, but so far those devices have failed to catch on. BlackBerry will purportedly try a different tactic to woo smartphone buyers with the release of its Venice phone, which reports say will be able to run Android instead of the BlackBerry operating system.
Is public transit navigation coming alongside iOS 9?
It's cool to hate on Apple Maps. After all, it hasn't had the most sterling track record since its 2012 launch. But come WWDC 2015, the navigation app could finally receive an update that gives city-dwellers another reason to take the app for a spin: transit navigation.
In a rumor reported by 9to5Mac, Maps could get a big update alongside iOS 9that adds navigational support for public transportation. If you ride a train, bus, or hop onto the subway to get to and fro, this could mean that you'll need one less app in order to get to where you need to be.
It's hard to say if Apple can win back those that left its app behind for Google Maps or any other navigation app. But if Maps actually does receive this much-needed update, Apple can finally get started trying to chip away at Google's dominance in the mobile navigation space.
Here's everything we (think we) know about what Apple will announce atWWDC 2015
