DreamWorks has teamed up with hardware manufacturer Fuhu to produce an Android tablet specifically for kids, which will be regularly updated with exclusive content from the animation studio.
The rise of mobile has given me so much: 24/7 connections with friends around the world, information exactly when I need it, the ability to track my fitness and health goals. Unfortunately, it’s also given me a complex about my giant sausage fingers and their constant inability to navigate the tiny keys on my smartphone’s slippery touchscreen. Sometimes I think I should have just bought a BlackBerry.
When I read about Haloband on their Kickstarter page, I felt like the Shanghai-based startup was speaking directly to me: “Everyone has trouble in locking and unlocking smartphones. The frequency usually hurts phones’ screen and keys, as well as our hearts. So we decided it’s time to do something.”
Haloband is a silicone wristband that is embedded with NFC chip and lets you operate your choice of functions by tapping your Android smartphone on your wrist. It’s also linked to a cloud account, which lets you save your ID as well as information you can send to other mobile devices. After setting up your wristband with the Haloband app, you can use it to unlock your phone, take photos or send emergency alerts, among other options. To get an idea of what Haloband can do, watch their hilarious Kickstarter video (“I’m from the future. If you scan my wrist, you can get my business card information. This is my information, from my wrist, on your phone. Because I’m from the future.”)
The project has already raised almost double its $10,000 goal on Kickstarter and its early bird specials are closed, but you can still select from several options, starting from just $25 for a black or white Haloband. Funding closes on Jan. 16 and the bands are scheduled to ship in February.
Haloband was developed by a Shanghai-based team that includes a former Intel engineer and focuses on NFC technology. They plan to release an open API so other developers can create their own Haloband apps and help smartphone users wrist easy (rimshot).
Polaroid isn't known as a technology vanguard, but it's showing a little forward thinking today with the launch of three budget tablets. The 7-inch Q7 (pictured below), 8-inch Q8 (above) and 10.1-inch Q10 all run Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box, ...
January 2nd is unofficially Email Overload Day, a productivity black hole born from the temptress crutch of overzealous vacation responders. You will get through this. You are strong.
To help you cope, we’ll arm you with an arsenal of helpful email tips, so that you can achieve inbox zero by the end of the day without having bought a raged-induced one-way ticket to the Amazon.
Keep It Brief, Go Mobile
Mathematical fact: the less you write, the more emails you can send. Emailing as much as possible from your smartphone forces you to keep messages super-short, and the “sent from my phone” signature exploits a delightful etiquette loophole that permits messages under 3 sentences.
Some messages, will, out of evil necessity, be long enough to need their own table of contents. But, you can bet your intern’s kidney on the fact that few people will have time to read and respond to anything longer than a few sentences on Email Overload Day.
Do us all a favor, keep it short. Even if you don’t like sending emails from a phone, replacing your desktop email signature with “sent from my phone” is a little white lie that will benefit all of humanity today.
Triage
You don’t need to answer every message today, but you also don’t want important email messages to get buried in the deluge of rapid responses.
My weapon of choice for email prioritization is Mailbox, “the best email management app you’ll ever use.” With Mailbox, users can set reminders when they want an unanswered messages to re-appear in their inbox. Scheduling and archiving messages is done with a simple, yet blazing fast interface of left or right swipes of the thumb. And, because most data is downloaded onto the phone first, you don’t have to keep waiting for the server to “load” different actions.
On desktop and Android, I also like Boomerang, another prioritization app that allows users to set reminders on unanswered messages.
Or, the for app-less, most email providers let users label emails. A tag like “waiting” is a good way to keep track of archived, unanswered messages or those that can be held off for the weekend.
Schedule Emailing Times, Maximizing Cognitive Productivity
I think I’m mildly addicted to my inbox; I often check it without even thinking. Instead of wasting your day with hair-trigger rapid responses, schedule time to email. Don’t even look at your inbox outside of these times.
Personally, I’m most lucid in the mornings, so I save my one hour email block for early afternoon. I also sporadically give myself 15 minute “email breaks” as a sort of mental rest between my actual work. I save mindless emails for nighttime, when I blunt the suffering of tedious messages while re-watching House Of Cards on Netflix.
Content No-No’s
Now that you’ve got your thumbs warmed up, TED’s Chris Anderson has a few simple, effective rules for helping your lucky recipient respond efficiently
1. No need for mindless messages: “Great” ‘Cool” “Thx for ur note” aren’t usually necessary. Sometimes the best gift is silence.
2. Quash Open-Minded Messages: Collectively, let us ban the word “thoughts?” from email. Instead, ask a few, short pointed questions. If your recipient has other ideas, they’ll share. Open-ended questions are too mentally unwieldy
3. Separate Subjects, Separate Thread: Repeat, do not invite people to your birthday party on an email thread about a business contract. Each email should all be one general theme.
4. Slash CC’s: For reasons that scientists may never know, newly cc’d recipients often feel the need to unload every idea they’ve had in the shower in the text of their first message. If you CC someone, please make sure it’s necessary. If you’re new to a CC, sometimes silence is the best path to enlightenment.
5. Not All Messages Need A Body: I often send messages with just an email header. “Here at the bar”, “I’m headed to NYC, drinks monday @ 8?” all fit without a body.
6. No Header Teasers: Longer subject headers with context help your recipient prioritize your message. Your message isn’t Star Wars 7, it doesn’t need a teaser headline.
7. When In Doubt, Don’t Ask For A Call: You know what’s great about email? I never have to talk about the weather for the first 10 sentences of an email. Phone calls are laborious. When in doubt, handle it all over email. I often encourage recipients to tell me what they need over email, or at least give them the option: “happy to continue convo by email.”
Overflow-Proof Your Mailbox
If you’re a Gmail user, Priority Inbox is a gift from the digital gods. The optional Priority Inbox feature algorithmically tags messages that are important, and filters chain messages and spam into a separate folder. It takes about a week to learn your habits, but, now, for the most part, I only deal with important messages that are directed to me.
For non-Gmail users, set up a separate email account for websites. I have an entirely separate account for any website or group that could possibly sell my email to a marketer or give it out to a stranger. Rarely will I ever enter my personal email on a website. Whether I’m buying plane tickets, responding to an e-invite, giving money to a charity, joining a sports team, or signing up for a new app–they all go to the same email account.
Ok. You can do this, Champ. You will reclaim this week with your sanity intact. Stretch your thumbs, put on your brevity hat, and, crank up some heart-thumping euro-techno beats. You are an email machine.
[Image Credit: Bryce Durbin]
This morning, online advertising network Chikita released a short report detailing the changes it saw in the tablet space after Christmas compared to the period directly before. The report shows a small decline in Apple’s tablet dominance, strong momentum for Amazon, and perhaps surprisingly, second highest in-class growth for Microsoft’s Surface line of devices.
What Chikita found is that Microsoft’s Surface tablets picked up 0.5% usage share in the United States and Canadian tablet markets during the post-Christmas period. Assuming that more consumer-friendly tablets are gifted in the holiday period than business-facing devices, we can assume that Microsoft moved more Surface 2 devices than Surface Pro 2 devices at Christmas.
This data therefore affirms the other market indications that the Surface 2 tablet hybrid is selling well.
Why are we looking so closely for data of this sort? The simple answer is that the Surface project remains so nascent, and yet so important for Microsoft’s future as an OEM and platform (that thing called Windows) that we need to track its pulse as closely as possible.
Microsoft will provide us with a single Surface figure when it reports its calendar fourth quarter earnings: revenue. But that blunt statistic will only get us so far. That Microsoft picked up 0.5% usage share in the period to land at 2.3% indicates that as a percentage of its total share, this holiday was big for it, even if its total share gain pales compared to Apple’s dominance.
Amazon picked up 0.6% usage share in the period, on what Chikita calls the Kindle Fire’s “remarkable run to the top of the Android tablet marketplace.” Amazon ended the period with 9.4% usage share.
Usage share of course is not directly commensurate with market share.
With the help of Amazon, Android continues to outpace Windows handily, but there was a minor change of the guards that is worth nothing:
Microsoft’s Surface lineup also continued its impressive year end run. Surface users generated more tablet traffic than all Google Nexus tablet users following the holiday, making Microsoft the fourth-largest source of continental tablet Web traffic should it maintain the lion’s share of this latest share growth.
Of course, Nexus devices are only one part of the Android tablet ecosystem.
Looking at the above broadly, innovation by partners is helping keep Android growing, while Windows claws market share from tablet leaders. That Apple is shedding minor share in the face of the twin challenge is not surprising.
Samsung is unveiling the Galaxy Camera 2 today, its second take on the idea of a truly smart point-and-shoot. Like its predecessor, the Galaxy Camera 2 runs Android, has wireless connectivity, and is operated primarily through controls on a large, 4.8-inch touchscreen. It's still designed around making photos easy to share and edit using Android apps, but this time around, Samsung is promising a camera that can take even better photos in the first place — potentially making up for one of its predecessor's weakest points.
Samsung isn’t off to a great start for 2014 – during its first full day of trading of the new year, it lost 4.6 percent of its stock price value, which amounts to a more than $8 billion drop in market value, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The drop is likely attributable to increasing lack of confidence from investors in Samsung’s ability to continue to grow its mobile business.
Outlook for the company’s upcoming quarterly results are good – analysts estimate that they will see an increase in profit derived from their mobile business, which is the big powerhouse at the company when it comes to driving earnings. But that increase will be off the pace from the previous quarter, and the fear is that in general Samsung’s ability to continue to see increasing gains in its mobile business has come to an end.
The problem for Samsung comes from a number of different developments in the mobile market over the past year. First, there’s the fact that smartphone penetration at the top-end of the market is now pretty wide-reaching, meaning there’s theoretically much less opportunity to sell high-end devices than there might have been previously.
There’s also ample price pressure making its way into the world of smartphone sales. Google’s Nexus devices continue to set examples for high quality hardware at lower, contract free prices, and now Motorola is also offering extreme value for money with the $179 Moto G, and the just-reduced Moto X at $399, a price drop made permanent earlier this week. To compete with Google and the Google-owned Motorola on price, Samsung would inevitably find margins on its products to be lower than usual since the budget devices become more important, driving down mobile profit overall.
Samsung held a conference designed specifically to address the concerns of analysts and investors back in November last year, where it tried to reassure its backers and market watchers that it had the right plans in place to continue growth. Despite that, investors seem unconvinced: stock price was mostly flat coming out of that event, and both for the last day of 2013 and now the first day of 2014, price has dipped considerably.
Let’s be real here: there’s a decent chance that you picked up a new smartphone at some point during the holidays, so you’re off the market for at least a little while longer. As it turns out though, you may have been better off waiting a bit.
In a show of New Years magnanimity (or, you know, a ploy to push more units) Motorola has slashed the prices of its sans-contract Moto X — a fully-customized 16GB model for any carrier will now only set you back $399 rather than the $499 it would’ve originally cost. Sadly, those of you with a woodgrain fetish will still have to pay a premium for those newly-available bamboo backs — $100 to be precise.
Does this ultimately mean you should pick up a Moto X over, say, a Nexus 5? Not necessarily — much as I love what the new Motorola is up to these days the Nexus is still my pick for Android device of the year — but it’s a little heartening to see a big name manufacturer is working to reduce the gap between on and off-contract device pricing for high-end smartphones. If anything, it’s that pricing precedent that seems most interesting here. Between this price cut and the introduction of the wallet-friendly Moto G back in late November, Motorola is positioning itself as a player that can deliver new remarkably solid (and in the X’s case, remarkably thoughtful) smartphone experiences at prices that can seem outlandishly low compared to most competitors.
But where does Motorola go from here? Will it be stuck playing the price game from here on out? It’s possible, but maybe that was the plan all along. CEO Dennis Woodside has mentioned multiple times in the past that he wanted Motorola to deliver cutting edge tech at reasonable prices, and I personally took the Moto G as an affirmation of desire. By slashing the price of its flagship device though, Motorola may be testing the waters to see if it can feasibly move its future products with similarly low price tags. If so, Samsung and rest of the low-cost smartphone leaders really need to keep on their toes.
After initially launching in August at $579, Motorola's well-received Moto X is getting a permanent price drop to $399 on any carrier without a new contract. That's slightly higher than the $349 deals that Motorola intermittently offered (with some difficulty) in the run-up to the holidays, but it's still a great deal considering that the Moto X is almost universally regarded as one of the best Android smartphones currently available. The $399 price includes Moto Maker — that is, you can get a bespoke Moto X designed to your tastes — but does not appear to include the recently introduced bamboo-clad "natural" option, which runs an extra $100.
The new pricing puts the Moto X in more direct, permanent competition against Google's...
