Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) proposed to acquire shares in wireless partner Clearwire Corp. it doesn’t already own in a deal that the third-largest U.S. carrier says would cost about $2.1 billion.
Sprint, which owns more than 50 percent of Clearwire, is seeking to acquire shares at $2.90 each, or 5.5 percent more than the stock’s closing price in New York yesterday, according to a regulatory filing today. Sprint proposed to provide interim financing of as much as $800 million.
Sprint is getting an influx of cash from Japan’s Softbank Corp. (9984), which agreed to buy 70 percent of Sprint for about $20 billion. Sprint agreed to buy Eagle River Holdings LLC’s 4.5 percent stake in Clearwire in October for $2.97 a share.
Clearwire shares jumped 2.6 percent to $2.75 yesterday in New York. The stock is up 42 percent this year.
Sprint originally formed the Clearwire joint venture in 2008, relying on $3.2 billion in investments from Google Inc. (GOOG), Intel Corp., and cable companies such as Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. The idea was to build a national wireless network that could compete with Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. (T)
Clearwire never lived up to those ambitions, and the project has yet to break even. Along the way, partners such as Google and Time Warner Cable have sold their stakes for a fraction of their original value.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Friday, November 30, 2012
Windows 8 Sales Outpacing Previous OS
story first appeared on usatoday.com
Microsoft has stepped up to prove naysayers wrong on early Windows 8 adoption.
Tami Reller, the software giant's new co-chief of the Windows division, told a Credit Suisse investor conference in Arizona on Tuesday that Window 8 upgrades are outpacing Windows 7 in its first month.
Microsoft's long-term outlook as operating system leader has come into question as PC sales slacken amid a consumer frenzy over tablets and smartphones from the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon.com.
Windows 8 became available Oct. 26, but doubts about its extreme makeover raised uncertainty about its commercial appeal to big businesses. The Window 8 debut has required a major overhaul of both the software and company in a bid for mobile relevance.
This month, Microsoft reorganized its Windows unit that resulted in the departure of long-time veteran and Windows chief Steven Sinofsky.
Microsoft executives Reller and Julies Larson-Green were tapped to lead the division.
Microsoft has stepped up to prove naysayers wrong on early Windows 8 adoption.
Tami Reller, the software giant's new co-chief of the Windows division, told a Credit Suisse investor conference in Arizona on Tuesday that Window 8 upgrades are outpacing Windows 7 in its first month.
Microsoft's long-term outlook as operating system leader has come into question as PC sales slacken amid a consumer frenzy over tablets and smartphones from the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon.com.
Windows 8 became available Oct. 26, but doubts about its extreme makeover raised uncertainty about its commercial appeal to big businesses. The Window 8 debut has required a major overhaul of both the software and company in a bid for mobile relevance.
This month, Microsoft reorganized its Windows unit that resulted in the departure of long-time veteran and Windows chief Steven Sinofsky.
Microsoft executives Reller and Julies Larson-Green were tapped to lead the division.
Despite Opportunity, Women Still Under-represented in Engineering
story first appeared in usatoday.com
Back in the mid-1980s, Jeanine Swatton was in an all-girl band in Boston, belting out top-40 hits -- just like the then-popular band The Go-Gos.
The all-female band from the 1980s was iconic for making noise in the predominately male music industry. Years later, Swatton is trying to do the same with an all-female engineering team at her software start-up.
Her narrative is one of a supremely talented engineer and app writer who grew restless as the only woman engineer at previous employers.
It all makes perfect sense for Swatton, 40. Yet in an age of more early-stage tech companies led by women, and against a backdrop of demand for technical talent, female engineers remain a rarity.
Despite an influx of females among Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ranks, the computer-science field remains dominated by men. According to the National Science Foundation, women have plummeted from 28% of the graduates in computer sciences at U.S. schools in 2000 to 17% in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available.
Rani Borkar says there should be more female engineers. She is a general manager for Intel's Architecture Development Group who came to the U.S. from India in 1985 and has seen steady, if slow, progress.
The field's stunted growth, especially for women, is rooted in education. There just aren't enough kids weaned on the topic in high school and, before that, elementary school, says Gary May, dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Deborah Hillman, and IT Technician for a resort company offering discount vacation deals like Captiva Island Vacation Rentals since 2000, says she was lucky to get into the field when she did. Internet related work was lesser known at the turn of the century, which allowed more women to beat their male counterparts to those jobs.
Computer science is taught in a fraction of U.S. high schools. Only 2,100 of 42,000 were certified to teach advanced-placement computer science courses in 2011,and just 21,139 students took the AP exam.
Overall, some 120,000 engineering students graduate annually from U.S.colleges and universities each year -- a fraction of the nearly 1 million from China and India annually.
The urgency highlights the race in innovation for global economic supremacy. Engineers are considered among the most vital foot soldiers as companies vie for the business of consumers and businesses. Yet, for years, it's been a male-driven race.
According to Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer on Internet issues at Stanfor Law School, many boys start programming at a young age, and for a variety of reasons, girls do not.
In his acceptance speech after being re-elected, President Obama stressed the need for more college-educated engineers in the U.S., both men and women -- a major meme of his administration the past few years.
The administration has made it clear it intends to reform immigration for 11 million people who are here illegally, but offered no guidance on whether it intends to increase the cap on H1-B visas so more foreign workers can bring their engineering skills to the U.S. "The U.S. is still the cradle of innovation," says Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who wants to boost the annual U.S.graduate total by 10,000.
Several programs are filling the void. The CodeEd.org program teaches computer science to middle-school girls in low-income areas. Another, CodeHS.com, is about to launch a crowd-funding campaign to get computer science in every high school. Smith, the nation's first women's college to have an engineering school, graduated its first such tech class in 2004.
Catering to women, companies such as IBM have for decades targeted career development and work-life programs.
While one in seven engineers is female, according to a 2011 report by the Department of Commerce, Intuit is attempting to buck the trend. Of the 121 software engineers it hired upon college graduation since June, 47 were female -- or more than one in three, says Intuit CTO Tayloe Stansbury.
And for the first time in its more than 30-year history, Microsoft's Windows unit is led by two women -- Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller -- who served under Steven Sinofsky, who is leaving the company.
Underscoring the push, Jack Dorsey's Square plans to host Code Camp, an interactive experience for female engineers at the company's San Francisco headquarters Jan. 9-12.The conference includes mentorship sessions with Square leaders, developer workshops and networking opportunities.
The grassroots programs have paid dividends, slowly ushering in a new wave of women.
There are others who have arrived by a different path. She doesn't have a formal degree in engineering, but Caitlin Johanson is one of Core Security's white-hat hackers (her official title is technical support and training manager).
As a child, instead of playing with building blocks, she tinkered with an IBM PS/2 personal computer. Johanson says. From high school, she jumped into freelance coding.
Self-described "bad ass" Vivian Kam is an extreme biker, motorcyclist and hockey-playing software engineer at Complete Genomics.
An uphill climb
Twenty years ago, there was a lot of energy around computer sciences , according to Erin Cech, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University.
But the current computer climate has excluded females, for the most part.
From 2000 to 2011, there was a 79% decline in the number of first-year undergraduate women interested in majoring in computer science, according to data supplied by the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
Tracy Chou, a 25-year-old software engineer at Pinterest, couldn't shake feelings of "imposters' syndrome" at Stanford University, where she didn't feel up to par with the computing skills of male students with more technical expertise.
Of course, building an ecosystem takes time -- often, years. Only 20% of the chief information officers at Fortune 250 companies are women.
Dorothy Nicholls, vice president of Kindle for Amazon.com, says we need to rethink how we teach math to girls. She taught her 3-year-old daughter how to add by counting pieces of Skittles and chocolate.
Yahoo sent ripples throughout the business world, however, with the hiring this year of new CEO Marissa Mayer, a trained engineer who oversaw several major projects at Google, including Maps and the search engine homepage. "Marissa changed the game," says Sally Salas, principal group program manager for Microsoft's Bing Experiences team.
What's more, there are ample growth areas within tech for women -- project managers, business analysts and Web developers -- that do not require computer science degrees, says Matthew Caruso, recruiting director for Atrium Technology, a national staffing firm.
Lisa Pavey, 49, vice president of engineering at Vyatta left the UK because she believed there were no more opportunities for upward mobility. She moved from her native country in 1996 to head up Sun Microsystems' networking group.
Discrimination exists in the Silicon Valley workplace, she acknowledges, which forced her to leave one tech employer. But she says the threat is more in attitude than in physical harassment.
Home-grown engineers
The most direct path to a career in engineering may actually start at home, say several women.
Sophia Chung, 31, a software engineer at Facebook, says her exposure to the field at an early age through her father, a math professor at Johns Hopkins, and two older sisters, both of whom majored in the field and now work in tech enabled her to pursue engineering as a young adult.
The MIT graduate's affinity for tech took her to Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Arts and Google, and she is now heavily involved in events such as a recent hackathon sponsored by ESPN to get more women to participate in technology.
SugarCRM's Tretikov immigrated to New York from Moscow at 16 after the Soviet Union collapsed in the mid-1990s. She learned English as a waitress, and was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned majors in computer science and art. Her father is a mathematician, her mom, a filmmaker.
For some, the career path can be circuitous.
Duana Stanley, 30, a back-end engineer at SoundCloud, studied psychology and neuroscience at the University of Melbourne before artificial intelligence "sucked" her into computing. As a kid, medicine and law were her first two career choices.
Dina Hilal, vice president of product at ad-tech company BlueKai, says a computer-science degree is not a prerequisite to jobs in technology. She majored in international studies and journalism.
Increasingly, Swatton and others are redefining normative boundaries.
Kimber Lockhart co-founded a company, Increo Solutions, to call the shots and circumvent the gender gap. It was acquired by cloud-storage services company Box in 2009 for an undisclosed amount.
While braggadocio may have worked in college, the real world calls for exceptional coding and collaborative skills.
Sometimes, it just takes self-motivation and thick skin, says Tamar Yehoshua, 47, director of product management for search at Google.
That's what piqued the interest of Yehoshua's two children, both of whom have the engineering bug. Yehoshua's daughter, Shir, 21, just got job in engineering at Google. Her son Ron, 17, plans to major in computer science in college
Back in the mid-1980s, Jeanine Swatton was in an all-girl band in Boston, belting out top-40 hits -- just like the then-popular band The Go-Gos.
The all-female band from the 1980s was iconic for making noise in the predominately male music industry. Years later, Swatton is trying to do the same with an all-female engineering team at her software start-up.
Her narrative is one of a supremely talented engineer and app writer who grew restless as the only woman engineer at previous employers.
It all makes perfect sense for Swatton, 40. Yet in an age of more early-stage tech companies led by women, and against a backdrop of demand for technical talent, female engineers remain a rarity.
Despite an influx of females among Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ranks, the computer-science field remains dominated by men. According to the National Science Foundation, women have plummeted from 28% of the graduates in computer sciences at U.S. schools in 2000 to 17% in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available.
Rani Borkar says there should be more female engineers. She is a general manager for Intel's Architecture Development Group who came to the U.S. from India in 1985 and has seen steady, if slow, progress.
The field's stunted growth, especially for women, is rooted in education. There just aren't enough kids weaned on the topic in high school and, before that, elementary school, says Gary May, dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech.
Deborah Hillman, and IT Technician for a resort company offering discount vacation deals like Captiva Island Vacation Rentals since 2000, says she was lucky to get into the field when she did. Internet related work was lesser known at the turn of the century, which allowed more women to beat their male counterparts to those jobs.
Computer science is taught in a fraction of U.S. high schools. Only 2,100 of 42,000 were certified to teach advanced-placement computer science courses in 2011,and just 21,139 students took the AP exam.
Overall, some 120,000 engineering students graduate annually from U.S.colleges and universities each year -- a fraction of the nearly 1 million from China and India annually.
The urgency highlights the race in innovation for global economic supremacy. Engineers are considered among the most vital foot soldiers as companies vie for the business of consumers and businesses. Yet, for years, it's been a male-driven race.
According to Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer on Internet issues at Stanfor Law School, many boys start programming at a young age, and for a variety of reasons, girls do not.
In his acceptance speech after being re-elected, President Obama stressed the need for more college-educated engineers in the U.S., both men and women -- a major meme of his administration the past few years.
The administration has made it clear it intends to reform immigration for 11 million people who are here illegally, but offered no guidance on whether it intends to increase the cap on H1-B visas so more foreign workers can bring their engineering skills to the U.S. "The U.S. is still the cradle of innovation," says Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who wants to boost the annual U.S.graduate total by 10,000.
Several programs are filling the void. The CodeEd.org program teaches computer science to middle-school girls in low-income areas. Another, CodeHS.com, is about to launch a crowd-funding campaign to get computer science in every high school. Smith, the nation's first women's college to have an engineering school, graduated its first such tech class in 2004.
Catering to women, companies such as IBM have for decades targeted career development and work-life programs.
While one in seven engineers is female, according to a 2011 report by the Department of Commerce, Intuit is attempting to buck the trend. Of the 121 software engineers it hired upon college graduation since June, 47 were female -- or more than one in three, says Intuit CTO Tayloe Stansbury.
And for the first time in its more than 30-year history, Microsoft's Windows unit is led by two women -- Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller -- who served under Steven Sinofsky, who is leaving the company.
Underscoring the push, Jack Dorsey's Square plans to host Code Camp, an interactive experience for female engineers at the company's San Francisco headquarters Jan. 9-12.The conference includes mentorship sessions with Square leaders, developer workshops and networking opportunities.
The grassroots programs have paid dividends, slowly ushering in a new wave of women.
There are others who have arrived by a different path. She doesn't have a formal degree in engineering, but Caitlin Johanson is one of Core Security's white-hat hackers (her official title is technical support and training manager).
As a child, instead of playing with building blocks, she tinkered with an IBM PS/2 personal computer. Johanson says. From high school, she jumped into freelance coding.
Self-described "bad ass" Vivian Kam is an extreme biker, motorcyclist and hockey-playing software engineer at Complete Genomics.
An uphill climb
Twenty years ago, there was a lot of energy around computer sciences , according to Erin Cech, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University.
But the current computer climate has excluded females, for the most part.
From 2000 to 2011, there was a 79% decline in the number of first-year undergraduate women interested in majoring in computer science, according to data supplied by the National Center for Women & Information Technology.
Tracy Chou, a 25-year-old software engineer at Pinterest, couldn't shake feelings of "imposters' syndrome" at Stanford University, where she didn't feel up to par with the computing skills of male students with more technical expertise.
Of course, building an ecosystem takes time -- often, years. Only 20% of the chief information officers at Fortune 250 companies are women.
Dorothy Nicholls, vice president of Kindle for Amazon.com, says we need to rethink how we teach math to girls. She taught her 3-year-old daughter how to add by counting pieces of Skittles and chocolate.
Yahoo sent ripples throughout the business world, however, with the hiring this year of new CEO Marissa Mayer, a trained engineer who oversaw several major projects at Google, including Maps and the search engine homepage. "Marissa changed the game," says Sally Salas, principal group program manager for Microsoft's Bing Experiences team.
What's more, there are ample growth areas within tech for women -- project managers, business analysts and Web developers -- that do not require computer science degrees, says Matthew Caruso, recruiting director for Atrium Technology, a national staffing firm.
Lisa Pavey, 49, vice president of engineering at Vyatta left the UK because she believed there were no more opportunities for upward mobility. She moved from her native country in 1996 to head up Sun Microsystems' networking group.
Discrimination exists in the Silicon Valley workplace, she acknowledges, which forced her to leave one tech employer. But she says the threat is more in attitude than in physical harassment.
Home-grown engineers
The most direct path to a career in engineering may actually start at home, say several women.
Sophia Chung, 31, a software engineer at Facebook, says her exposure to the field at an early age through her father, a math professor at Johns Hopkins, and two older sisters, both of whom majored in the field and now work in tech enabled her to pursue engineering as a young adult.
The MIT graduate's affinity for tech took her to Hewlett-Packard, Electronic Arts and Google, and she is now heavily involved in events such as a recent hackathon sponsored by ESPN to get more women to participate in technology.
SugarCRM's Tretikov immigrated to New York from Moscow at 16 after the Soviet Union collapsed in the mid-1990s. She learned English as a waitress, and was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned majors in computer science and art. Her father is a mathematician, her mom, a filmmaker.
For some, the career path can be circuitous.
Duana Stanley, 30, a back-end engineer at SoundCloud, studied psychology and neuroscience at the University of Melbourne before artificial intelligence "sucked" her into computing. As a kid, medicine and law were her first two career choices.
Dina Hilal, vice president of product at ad-tech company BlueKai, says a computer-science degree is not a prerequisite to jobs in technology. She majored in international studies and journalism.
Increasingly, Swatton and others are redefining normative boundaries.
Kimber Lockhart co-founded a company, Increo Solutions, to call the shots and circumvent the gender gap. It was acquired by cloud-storage services company Box in 2009 for an undisclosed amount.
While braggadocio may have worked in college, the real world calls for exceptional coding and collaborative skills.
Sometimes, it just takes self-motivation and thick skin, says Tamar Yehoshua, 47, director of product management for search at Google.
That's what piqued the interest of Yehoshua's two children, both of whom have the engineering bug. Yehoshua's daughter, Shir, 21, just got job in engineering at Google. Her son Ron, 17, plans to major in computer science in college
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Apple iPad Mini Review
story first appeared on usatoday.com
Science fiction version: Mad scientists inside Apple's ultra-secretive lab plunge a recent iPad into boiling stew. What emerges is a near identical but considerably smaller and lighter tablet.
Figure Apple relied on more conventional (if no less secret) lab behavior in designing the iPad Mini that reaches stores Friday. But no matter how the downsized tablet came to be, the natural question is how it differs from its bigger sibling and rival tablets with similar-size small screens, such as the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, Barnes & Noble Nook HD, and Google Nexus 7.
The smaller form changes the way you approach the tablet. I've never hesitated to travel with the bigger iPad. It's terrific for reading, watching movies and playing games on an airplane — but given a choice, before a road trip I would now more likely grab the little guy. It's the right size for immersing yourself in a novel. Held sideways, it's simple to bang out an email with your fingers. Battery life is excellent
A tour of the Mini reveals the usual home button on the bottom front, power button and headphone jack on the top, and volume controls on the side. Front and rear cameras are on either side, just like on the bigger iPad. You're greeted by the customary home screen layout with icons for Safari, Mail, Videos and Music parked at the bottom of the display.
You can even exploit the Siri voice assistant. And the Mini runs iOS 6, the latest iteration of Apple's mobile operating system software.
But it is the multitude of apps — 275,000 optimized for the tablet are available in the Apple App store— coupled with Apple's formidable iTunes ecosystem for music, movies and TV shows that represents a major reason why the iPad, big or small, is still the tablet to beat.
That is not to say that the Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD, and Nexus 7 don't pose strong alternatives to the iPad Mini. Those tablets have starting prices of $199 that undercut the $329 starting price of the Mini that has Wi-Fi only and 16 gigabytes of storage.
Amazon, for one, already is running ads comparing Kindle Fire HD with the Mini — bragging about the Fire's impressive high-definition screen and its stereo speakers. The speakers on the Mini are mono. And its screen, though nice, does not afford the beautiful, super-crisp "retina displays" on the latest larger iPads, iPhones or Macintosh computers. But the Kindle is heavier and has fewer apps.
(Update on Wednesday: Amazon is no longer running the ad. Apple confirms that the Mini does indeed have stereo.)
Prices for the Wi-Fi-only Mini climb to $429 for 32GB and $529 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + Cellular models, available later in the U.S. from AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, command $459, $559 and $659, respectively. (The unit I've been testing for a week is Wi-Fi only.)
To be sure, the 7.9 inch display on the Mini, vs. 9.7-inches for full-size iPads, gives you a lot less screen real estate to play with. But at a shade under 0.7 pounds and 0.28-inches thick, the paperback-size Mini is 53% lighter and 23% thinner than the newest iPad. It is just wide enough that I was not able to stash it in one inside sport jacket pocket but was able to slip it into another. Compared with the 7-inch screens on some of Kindle, Nook and Nexus devices, though, the iPad Mini is 35% roomier.
Sitting in a cramped airline seat, or lying in bed, I found reading on the Mini to be a generally a more pleasurable experience than reading on the full-size iPad. But though you can now more easily hold a Mini with one hand, I still tended to use two.
Speed: Inside, the iPad Mini has an Apple-designed dual core A5 processor, a version of which powered the iPad 2. But I did detect some sluggishness. At the same time that I was downloading some content in the background, it took several seconds for the screen shots I captured on the device to land in the Photos app. I've never experienced the delay on a bigger iPad.
Cameras: The iPad Mini has two good cameras, including one on the front for doing FaceTime video calls, and a rear 5-megapixel camera that can capture 1080p high-definition video. The quality of FaceTime is related to your network connection, so even in a Wi-Fi environment, I sometimes lost sight of the person at the other end of the call.
Battery life: On the Wi-Fi model, Apple claims 10 hours of battery life while surfing the Web, watching video or listening to music. I was well on my way to confirming that. Nine hours into my test with Wi-Fi on, brightness at 75% and a video playing, I still had about 25% of juice left. But I cut my test short because of a power outage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Apple promises about an hour less battery life on the cellular models.
Connectors: Like the new iPhone 5, and fourth generation iPad announced last week, the Mini makes use of Apple's new Lightning connector. Unless you purchase adapters, you may not be able to use the Mini on some older accessories. Speaking of accessories, Apple has designed a handsome $39 iPad Mini Smart Cover (in one of 6 colors) that magnetically aligns itself to the tablet. It's made with a microfiber lining that Apple says keeps the screen clean.
But in the absence of a USB connector or SD card slot, you'll need pricey $29 Lightning adapter accessories to connect the Mini to a digital camera or to insert a memory card from your camera into the tablet. On older iPads with a 30-pin dock connector camera kit, you got both connectors for $29.
The big picture on the small iPad: Despite a few quibbles and strong competitors in the space, the Mini is a splendid choice for folks who held off buying an iPad because it was too large or too expensive.
Science fiction version: Mad scientists inside Apple's ultra-secretive lab plunge a recent iPad into boiling stew. What emerges is a near identical but considerably smaller and lighter tablet.
Figure Apple relied on more conventional (if no less secret) lab behavior in designing the iPad Mini that reaches stores Friday. But no matter how the downsized tablet came to be, the natural question is how it differs from its bigger sibling and rival tablets with similar-size small screens, such as the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, Barnes & Noble Nook HD, and Google Nexus 7.
The smaller form changes the way you approach the tablet. I've never hesitated to travel with the bigger iPad. It's terrific for reading, watching movies and playing games on an airplane — but given a choice, before a road trip I would now more likely grab the little guy. It's the right size for immersing yourself in a novel. Held sideways, it's simple to bang out an email with your fingers. Battery life is excellent
A tour of the Mini reveals the usual home button on the bottom front, power button and headphone jack on the top, and volume controls on the side. Front and rear cameras are on either side, just like on the bigger iPad. You're greeted by the customary home screen layout with icons for Safari, Mail, Videos and Music parked at the bottom of the display.
You can even exploit the Siri voice assistant. And the Mini runs iOS 6, the latest iteration of Apple's mobile operating system software.
But it is the multitude of apps — 275,000 optimized for the tablet are available in the Apple App store— coupled with Apple's formidable iTunes ecosystem for music, movies and TV shows that represents a major reason why the iPad, big or small, is still the tablet to beat.
That is not to say that the Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD, and Nexus 7 don't pose strong alternatives to the iPad Mini. Those tablets have starting prices of $199 that undercut the $329 starting price of the Mini that has Wi-Fi only and 16 gigabytes of storage.
Amazon, for one, already is running ads comparing Kindle Fire HD with the Mini — bragging about the Fire's impressive high-definition screen and its stereo speakers. The speakers on the Mini are mono. And its screen, though nice, does not afford the beautiful, super-crisp "retina displays" on the latest larger iPads, iPhones or Macintosh computers. But the Kindle is heavier and has fewer apps.
(Update on Wednesday: Amazon is no longer running the ad. Apple confirms that the Mini does indeed have stereo.)
Prices for the Wi-Fi-only Mini climb to $429 for 32GB and $529 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + Cellular models, available later in the U.S. from AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, command $459, $559 and $659, respectively. (The unit I've been testing for a week is Wi-Fi only.)
To be sure, the 7.9 inch display on the Mini, vs. 9.7-inches for full-size iPads, gives you a lot less screen real estate to play with. But at a shade under 0.7 pounds and 0.28-inches thick, the paperback-size Mini is 53% lighter and 23% thinner than the newest iPad. It is just wide enough that I was not able to stash it in one inside sport jacket pocket but was able to slip it into another. Compared with the 7-inch screens on some of Kindle, Nook and Nexus devices, though, the iPad Mini is 35% roomier.
Sitting in a cramped airline seat, or lying in bed, I found reading on the Mini to be a generally a more pleasurable experience than reading on the full-size iPad. But though you can now more easily hold a Mini with one hand, I still tended to use two.
Speed: Inside, the iPad Mini has an Apple-designed dual core A5 processor, a version of which powered the iPad 2. But I did detect some sluggishness. At the same time that I was downloading some content in the background, it took several seconds for the screen shots I captured on the device to land in the Photos app. I've never experienced the delay on a bigger iPad.
Cameras: The iPad Mini has two good cameras, including one on the front for doing FaceTime video calls, and a rear 5-megapixel camera that can capture 1080p high-definition video. The quality of FaceTime is related to your network connection, so even in a Wi-Fi environment, I sometimes lost sight of the person at the other end of the call.
Battery life: On the Wi-Fi model, Apple claims 10 hours of battery life while surfing the Web, watching video or listening to music. I was well on my way to confirming that. Nine hours into my test with Wi-Fi on, brightness at 75% and a video playing, I still had about 25% of juice left. But I cut my test short because of a power outage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Apple promises about an hour less battery life on the cellular models.
Connectors: Like the new iPhone 5, and fourth generation iPad announced last week, the Mini makes use of Apple's new Lightning connector. Unless you purchase adapters, you may not be able to use the Mini on some older accessories. Speaking of accessories, Apple has designed a handsome $39 iPad Mini Smart Cover (in one of 6 colors) that magnetically aligns itself to the tablet. It's made with a microfiber lining that Apple says keeps the screen clean.
But in the absence of a USB connector or SD card slot, you'll need pricey $29 Lightning adapter accessories to connect the Mini to a digital camera or to insert a memory card from your camera into the tablet. On older iPads with a 30-pin dock connector camera kit, you got both connectors for $29.
The big picture on the small iPad: Despite a few quibbles and strong competitors in the space, the Mini is a splendid choice for folks who held off buying an iPad because it was too large or too expensive.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Education Use of Apple iPad Growing
Story first appeared on Bloomberg News
Julie Garcia handed Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPads to students in her seventh-grade pre-algebra class on a recent morning before showing the pupils how to use the tablet to graph data, hunt for correlations and record how-to videos.
A math instructor at Innovation Middle School, Garcia is one of the first to use some of the more than 25,000 iPads the San Diego Unified School District bought from Apple this year.
Garcia said it is the "cool factor" as she looks over the room of students tapping energetically on tablets.
For districts around the country, though, it’s the price as much as the cool quotient that could draw them to a new, smaller version of the iPad that Apple will unveil tomorrow at an event in San Jose, California. Apple has long been a leader in education, and schools began embracing the iPad soon after its 2010 debut. Yet as fiscal budget shortfalls crimp spending all the more, schools in growing numbers are warming to the handheld devices as an alternative to more expensive laptops.
Now schools, as well as consumers, are about to get another big price break: The smaller iPad may cost as little as $249, according to Barclays Plc. That compares with $499 to $829 for the current iPad.
Beyond the school market of course, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook will use the device to try to widen Apple’s lead over Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. and fend off a more recent threat from Microsoft Corp. in the market for tablets, which NPD DisplaySearch predicts will more than double to $162 billion by 2017. Cook will unveil an iPad with a 7.85-inch screen diagonally, people familiar with its development said in August. The current iPad has a 9.7-inch screen.
iPad Shift
Yet Apple executives plan to make a point of highlighting the iPad’s educational capabilities at tomorrow’s event, according to a person with knowledge of the planning. Little wonder. Education spending on information technology, including hardware, was about $19.7 billion in the 2010-2011 period, according to the Center for Digital Education.
Educators’ bet on tablets mirrors a trend in the broader consumer-electronics market, where consumers are buying iPads instead of traditional personal computers. PC sales in K-12 fell 8 percent in the U.S. last quarter, the third straight decline, Gartner said.
James Ponce, the superintendent of the McAllen Independent School District in Texas said they are moving away from desktops and laptops to tablet devices.
School Sales
The education push is part of a strategy put in place under co-Founder Steve Jobs, before the iPad was introduced in 2010. While Apple has a history of selling Mac computers to schools, the company realigned its education sales force to emphasize iPads, a person familiar with the changes said.
Innovation Middle School has traditionally used Lenovo Group Ltd. (992) computers because Macs are too expensive, said Harlan Klein, the school’s principal.
The new iPad comes at a critical time for Apple. Its shares have dropped 13 percent since reaching a record on Sept. 19, two days before the company released the iPhone 5. Sales of the smartphone have been constrained by supply constraints. Apple is also facing fresh competition in tablets from Microsoft (MSFT), which on Oct. 26 will release the Surface, its first foray into hardware. Apple had about 70 percent of the market in the second quarter, compared with Samsung Electronics Co., which had 9.2 percent, and Amazon’s 4.2 percent, according to IHS ISuppli.
Courting Educators
To woo educators, Apple’s sales staff meets regularly with school administrators and procurement officers across the U.S. The company has sales staff assigned to work with schools in particular regions of the U.S., and pays for district officials to visit Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, to learn about new products.
The company will need to set the new iPad’s price right to woo cash-strapped districts.
Vineet Madan, a senior vice president at McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP) education unit said there would be a real aggressive uptake in the K-12 market when tablets get into the $200-$300 range.
To save money, San Diego’s school district bought iPad 2s after Apple dropped the price of that model when the newest version was introduced earlier this year.
Training Teachers
Drawing on funds raised through a voter-approved bond measure, the district spent about $370 on each iPad, which comes pre-loaded with various educational applications, Browne said.
Besides budgetary constraints, a major challenge for schools is training teachers and managing all the new equipment and software. If a teacher wants to use an iPad math application, synchronizing a classroom of devices and monitoring all the students’ work can be time consuming. In San Diego, a team of eight employees helps train teachers and manage new technology.
Touch Screens
In southern Texas, Ponce of the McAllen Independent School District reached out to Apple soon after the district decided to get away from buying laptops and desktops, which he said were expensive to maintain and unappealing for many students. Apple was at the table helping craft the district’s strategy for integrating technology in classrooms, he said.
The work resulted in McAllen buying about 25,000 iPads, paying Apple about $3.5 million a year as part of a financing deal the district worked out with Apple. About half the district’s technology budget is now going to Apple, Ponce said. Students are using iPad applications to test for vocabulary, make presentations and compile class notes.
While some teachers have resisted the new technology, many are adapting because they see students are increasingly fluent with touch-screen-based technology, said Courtney Browne, a technology resource teacher at San Diego Unified School District.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
iPhone Production Did Not Slow Due to Employee Issues
Story first appeared on usatoday.com.
Foxconn Technology Group denied on Saturday that production was affected at a Chinese factory that makes Apple's iPhones, although both state media and an overseas labor watch group said some workers halted production lines on Friday, apparently over higher quality control standards.
New York-based China Labor Watch reported that 3,000 to 4,000 workers at the Foxconn plant in the central China's Zhengzhou city went on strike Friday over increased quality control demands and having to work during an extended national holiday.
The official Xinhua News Agency, quoting a spokesman for the management committee of the Xinzheng Comprehensive Bonded Area where the plant is located, said some production lines were halted Friday when workers persuaded quality inspectors to skip work to show their dissatisfaction over higher quality standards.
In a written statement issued Saturday, the Taiwan-based electronic manufacturer Foxconn said production at the Zhengzhou plant continued without interruption. It denied any strike or work stoppage.
Foxconn said there were two isolated, small-scale disputes between production line workers and quality assurance personnel on Monday and Tuesday, but it added that they were quickly addressed. It did not specify what issues had caused the disputes but said immediate measures were taken to resolve the problems, including adding production line workers.
Xinhua said some workers were unhappy when Apple strengthened quality inspections of the iPhone 5 following consumer complaints regarding aesthetic flaws in the phone. In the Xinhua report, the spokesman — who was not named — characterized the incident as a worker-management dispute instead of a strike and was unable to provide a specific number of workers involved.
China Labor Watch said several iPhone 5 production lines at the factory were paralyzed after the workers found the new quality control demands difficult to meet and went on strike. The group said the workers also were angry about being forced to work through China's National Day Golden Week holiday, which ends Sunday.
The iPhone 5, the latest in the line of the smartphones, debuted in September.
China Labor Watch said the Foxconn workers were required to work during the eight-day holiday from Sept. 30 to Oct. 7 to meet the production demand of iPhone 5.
Foxconn said its employees in China who worked during the holiday did so voluntarily and were being paid three times their normal pay, in accordance with Chinese labor law.
China Labor Watch said workers also beat quality control inspectors, who carried out their own work stoppage after management ignored their complaints.
According to China Labor Watch, Apple and Foxconn had imposed stricter quality standards regarding indentations and scratches on the frames and back covers of the iPhones but did not provide workers with proper training to meet the new demands.
Apple could not be reached immediately for comment.
In late September, a brawl involving 2,000 workers broke out at Foxconn's factory in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, highlighting chronic labor tensions in a country that prohibits independent unions.
Labor activists have said the rollout of the iPhone 5 has led to longer working hours and more pressure on workers.
Monday, September 10, 2012
The Complexity of Flatscreen Options
Original article appeared in USA Today
Options for flat-screen viewing today involve more than where you'll put your new television after you buy.
The glass coating on plasmas usually makes them more liable to glare in a well-lighted space -- not that LCDs are immune, since many of them ship with glossy screen finishes that look terrific in a darkened showroom but can double as a mirror in a living room.
You'll also have a smaller selection of plasma TVs: Most manufacturers either don't sell them at all or ship far more LCD models. Samsung, for instance, lists 29 Samsung LED sets and five conventional LCDs but only nine plasmas, while LG offers 39 LEDs and LCDs against 12 plasmas; Panasonic is the one exception, with its plasma sets easily outnumbering LCDs and LEDs.
Plasmas also weigh more than LCDs, which can make mounting one on a wall slightly more complicated. But contrary to what you might hear, plasma sets don't automatically use more electricity than LCDs or suffer from "burn-in" that leaves ghosts of network logos visible on their screens.
And in return, plasma can delivers deeper blacks and faster response times -- meaning you're less likely to see credits or a news ticker blur as they scroll -- although years of steady improvements in LCD technology have chipped away at those advantages.
Increasingly affordable LED panels -- starting last year, NPD found that they made up more than half of all LCD production --get much credit for that.
Light-emitting diode backlights are brighter than the fluorescent lamps in older LCDs and allow for a more responsive display. High-end sets can also turn off some LEDs to further darken areas of the screen -- although when I've talked to display experts, they counseled that it was still possible to get a subpar set even with LED technology. And LED backlights don't incorporate the trace amounts of mercury found in fluorescents.
(Don't confuse LED with OLED, a much newer technology that allows ludicrously thin screens at an absurd expense. It has looked great in demos at trade shows like CES in Las Vegas or last week's IFA gathering in Berlin, but it also costs as much as ten times more to make.)
So for a TV in a sunny living room, I'd get an LED with a matte screen finish. For a media room or some other place where the TV will be the main attraction, I'd consider plasma as well. For anything smaller than 40 inches, LED or LCD would be my only option.
Tip: "DLNA" can link your phone to your TV
If you have a "connected" TV that runs Web apps like Amazon and Netflix, that set probably also supports a standard called DLNA, short for Digital Living Network Alliance. And if you have an Android phone, that probably speaks DLNA too. (The iPhone and iPad do not.)
In that case, you may then be able to share photos, videos and music from your phone to your TV as long as both devices are on the same home network; the phone's storage will appear on the screen as if it were a USB flash drive plugged into the set.
Individual TVs and Android models can hide DLNA support in various places, but determining how is another article entirely.
Options for flat-screen viewing today involve more than where you'll put your new television after you buy.
The glass coating on plasmas usually makes them more liable to glare in a well-lighted space -- not that LCDs are immune, since many of them ship with glossy screen finishes that look terrific in a darkened showroom but can double as a mirror in a living room.
You'll also have a smaller selection of plasma TVs: Most manufacturers either don't sell them at all or ship far more LCD models. Samsung, for instance, lists 29 Samsung LED sets and five conventional LCDs but only nine plasmas, while LG offers 39 LEDs and LCDs against 12 plasmas; Panasonic is the one exception, with its plasma sets easily outnumbering LCDs and LEDs.
Plasmas also weigh more than LCDs, which can make mounting one on a wall slightly more complicated. But contrary to what you might hear, plasma sets don't automatically use more electricity than LCDs or suffer from "burn-in" that leaves ghosts of network logos visible on their screens.
And in return, plasma can delivers deeper blacks and faster response times -- meaning you're less likely to see credits or a news ticker blur as they scroll -- although years of steady improvements in LCD technology have chipped away at those advantages.
Increasingly affordable LED panels -- starting last year, NPD found that they made up more than half of all LCD production --get much credit for that.
Light-emitting diode backlights are brighter than the fluorescent lamps in older LCDs and allow for a more responsive display. High-end sets can also turn off some LEDs to further darken areas of the screen -- although when I've talked to display experts, they counseled that it was still possible to get a subpar set even with LED technology. And LED backlights don't incorporate the trace amounts of mercury found in fluorescents.
(Don't confuse LED with OLED, a much newer technology that allows ludicrously thin screens at an absurd expense. It has looked great in demos at trade shows like CES in Las Vegas or last week's IFA gathering in Berlin, but it also costs as much as ten times more to make.)
So for a TV in a sunny living room, I'd get an LED with a matte screen finish. For a media room or some other place where the TV will be the main attraction, I'd consider plasma as well. For anything smaller than 40 inches, LED or LCD would be my only option.
Tip: "DLNA" can link your phone to your TV
If you have a "connected" TV that runs Web apps like Amazon and Netflix, that set probably also supports a standard called DLNA, short for Digital Living Network Alliance. And if you have an Android phone, that probably speaks DLNA too. (The iPhone and iPad do not.)
In that case, you may then be able to share photos, videos and music from your phone to your TV as long as both devices are on the same home network; the phone's storage will appear on the screen as if it were a USB flash drive plugged into the set.
Individual TVs and Android models can hide DLNA support in various places, but determining how is another article entirely.
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