Apple's latest New York store, it's 4th, in the Upper West Side district
Before kicking off the “meat” of his keynote i.e. introducing Apple’s iPad tablet, CEO Steve Jobs started with an update on his company’s latest achievements.
250 million iPods sold since 2001;
284 retail stores;
50 million visitors went to Apple’s retail stores last quarter;
Apple opened its 4th store in New York City;
App store: 140,000 apps and 3 billion downloads in 18 months;
Apple has a “run rate” of $50+ billion a year.
A last figure, that gives Steve Jobs the bragging right to claim the #1 spot as the world’s largest mobile devices company.
Selling more mobile devices – iPods, iPhones and Mac laptops – than Sony (camcorders, walkmans, cell phones…), Samsung and Nokia!
Later in his presentation, Jobs added the following numbers:
75 million iPod touches and iPhones sold so far. Meaning 75 million customers that already know how to use the iPad!
The AppStore has 125 million active accounts with credit cards all ready for one-click purchases
Finally, Apple sold 12 billion products through its AppStore and they’re ready to take orders from iPad customers buying music, videos, ebooks and more!
California’s energy standards for flat-panel televisions are the toughest in the world, requiring a 33 percent efficiency improvement by 2011 and a 50 percent gain by 2013.
Critics complain they will stifle innovation and raise prices for televisions affected – those 58 inches and smaller.
Ultra thin, energy efficient LED TVs might benefit from the California standards
But manufacturers such as Samsung disagree. About three quarters of the televisions on store shelves already meet the 2011 standards and about 25 percent pass the 2013 ones.
Samsung says it produces some of them. “We’re already there today,” says Scott Birnbaum, vice president in the company’s LCD business. “We’re not intimidated by these standards.”
An array of new technologies will help manufacturers keep pace with the market changes. The result is an acceleration in innovation, says Birnbaum.
For instance, Samsung is working to further reduce the power demands of LCD backlights with fewer bulbs, more transparent optical screens and transistors with wider apertures. It also is deploying technology to dim areas of the screen that don’t need the most intensive light – such as nighttime skies. Backlights can consume as much as 60 percent of a set’s electricity.
Yet the Golden State’s market is likely to see significant changes in the next several years. Plasma screens, which use more energy than LCDs, will probably see slowing sales. At the same time, more efficient LED will capture a greater share of the market, despite their higher price.
LEDs already are a fast growing segment, says Birnbaum. The bright pictures and micro-thin designs are a powerful draws.
Consumer electronics giant switches printer cartridge program from FedEx
Samsung had been working with FedEx.
Starting last week, it switched its allegiance. The consumer electronic giant said Tuesday that consumers are now able to recycle spent printer cartridges through the U.S. Postal Service.
The four-year old recycling program is free. Just print a postage label from the Samsung Website, enclose the old cartridge in the box the new one comes in and take it to a post office.
The aim is to keep cartridges out of landfills – and to create an environmentally sustainable business.
If IDC's bearish forecast materialises, then more Flash memory makers will have to declare bankruptcy
For a change, research firms agreed to disagree in forecasting the emergence of the solid-state disk (SSD) drive market.
During a panel hosted today at the Flash Memory Summit conference in Santa Clara, Calif., small technical research firm Forward Insights blasted its larger competitors (including IDC and Gartner) for their hockey-stick-like projections of the SSD market.
But first, to set the stage, IDC research manager in hard-disk drive (HDD) components and solid-state disk (SSD) drives Jeff Janukowicz said he expects the SSD market to reach $3 billion in sales next year, compare to $733 million in 2008 and less than a billion dollar this year.
IDC’s forecast will lead Flash memory makers to bankruptcy
A bearish growth that for Janukowicz will be mostly driven by enterprises adopting SSDs to improve the performance and lower the consumption of their data centres and by early-adopters in the PC market like gamers in the desktop segment or executives’ laptops.
Here’s a video excerpt of Janukowicz remarks:
Great outlook, right?
Well, not really according to Forward Insights President Greg Wong who thinks that this kind of hyper growth can not be done in a profitable way.
“If you take a look at the industry right now, profitability is a big challenge for everybody. So where will they get the money to invest and expand at the big growth rate that you see here [pointing at competitors' forecasts]… wether its through technology migration, plus 3-bits per cell, plus 20% CAPEX. That’s what you need to achieve those rates that [competitors] are predicting for next year. If you believe that it’s feasible, then I guess you’ll have to use their projections… And even if demand is quite strong next year, where will they get the cash?,” explains Wong.
A more prudent sentiment that was echoed during the conference by Sandisk CEO Eli Harari and Samsung vice president of memory marketing Jim Elliot.
In this video excerpt Wong explains his opposing arguments to the explosive growth of the Flash memory market:
Objective Analysis believe SSDs will never reach prices of HDDs
In his presentation at the Flash Memory Summit today, Objective Analysis principal Jim Handy was quite optimistic on the future of the NAND flash memory market; for the near term.
Flash memory market business to remain viable until 2011
Handy pointed to current product shortages and price stability that will probably last until 2010-2011 due to growing demand combined with production and capital investments cutbacks; which is music to the ears for the 5 Flash memory makers left (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk, Toshiba) in the market which are still recovering from their deep losses in 2008.
Looking at SSDs, Handy believes this market is ripe for consolidation; which will go from the 171+ Flash-based drive makers of today to just a handful. “Remember that there were 282 companies that used to make disk drives before the market consolidates to about 5 today,” recalls DISK/TREND founder Jim Porter.
Handy also expects SSDs to stay weak in the PC market due to higher costs compare to hard-disk drives and the upcoming launch of Braidwood, the codename for Intel’s update of its Turbo Memory technology, a flash-based caching technology that should improve disk access performance which is scheduled to be featured on mainstream motherboards in 2010.
To add insult to injury, Handy doesn’t see a price crossover between SSDs and HDDs… actually this may never happen.
Samsung has climbed abroad the global warming bandwagon. But the Korean conglomerate hedged its do-good initiative to protect the bottom line.
The electronics and semiconductor maker set out commendable goals for cutting greenhouse gases from its manufacturing plants. It said it would slash emissions by 50 percent in the five years through 2013. It also said it would reduce the carbon impact of its products by 84 million tons.
Samsung ties eco-manufacturing initiative to sales, not overall emissions
But then it backed away from the manufacturing targets – explaining that its reductions would vary depending on sales.
Global warming of course is the environmental crisis threatening the world’s climate (and indirectly its animal and plant life). Corporations with true altruism are stepping to up reduce emissions of gases, such as carbon dioxide, just as the administration of Barack Obama reverses the head-in-the-sand approach of George Bush.
But in Samsung’s case, the reductions will be made on a “financial emissions intensity basis,” whatever that is. In plain language, the company appears to have based its reductions on sales levels, not overall emissions.
To the company’s credit, it said in a Monday press release it would invest 5.4 trillion Korean won in the manufacturing and product efforts. But then why dent the initiative with the “per-sales” restraint? Unfortunately global warming is coming whether sales increase or decrease.
The “technology collaboration” announced today between Intel and Nokia was a non-event.
On the call earlier today, both companies executives including Intel ultra-mobile guru Anand Chandrasekher who refused to talk about specific products, saying it was too premature, and only referring to some future “new class of devices.”
Furthermore, Nokia’s devices chief Kai Oistamo reiterated that the Intel deal “has no impact on our long-term relationship with ARM suppliers.” So why bother really?
Nokia and Intel to combine mobile Linux systems
But what we know however is that this “new class of devices” will run a Linux mobile operating system – probably a combination of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin – on top of a low-power Atom chip coming up next year.
“A new class of devices” that sounds very much like a netbook or a Mobile Internet Device (MID) in Intel’s lingo, to me!
Even Intel’s decision to license Nokia’s 3G data modem technology for its chips sounded like old news. Last month Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini said in an analyst briefing that Nokia’s modem technology will be used in Moblin.
So why so much noise, for so little or actually no news? Probably to remind people that unlike ARM-based competitors like Freescale, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung or Texas Instruments, Intel does not have a low-power enough chip for the “ultra-mobility” space yet!
Several of high-tech’s largest players are hoping the new Palm Pre will be a raving success.
Surprising design choices give Palm Pre a potential market advantage
These firms – Texas Instruments, Sony, Samsung, Qualcomm, Elpida and Cypress Semiconductor – are major suppliers of components to the new smart phone, according to a teardown of the product.
The dissection by iSuppli uncovered a number of surprising design choices that offer the Pre a potential advantage over Apple’s iPhone – as well as higher costs.
For instance, the Pre uses an advanced polysilicon LCD display from Sony that produces higher resolution and faster response times than conventional LCDs. But the screen comes with a higher price: $21, as estimated by iSuppli.
The phone also uses 2 gigabits of SDRAM memory capacity, twice as much as the iPhone 3G. Suppliers of the chips include Elpida, the market’s number two SDRAM manufacturer.
Also in the Palm Pre is a premium choice of flash memory from Samsung, though Palm could use other suppliers as well. The eMMC MoviNAND flash from Samsung offers higher performance. It also costs more: about $17 a phone.
ISuppli’s teardown found a baseband processor from Qualcomm, an applications processor from Texas Instruments and a touch-screen controller from Cypress Semiconductor.
The average price for 40-inch and larger LCD flat-panel televisions rose 3 percent in April as manufacturers sought to improve profitability by delivering more fully featured products.
Samsung introduced several back-lit LED models
The increase runs counter to long-standing trends that for years have brought lower prices to the market. It also appears to contrast with the current consumer desire to spend less, not more, on discretionary items.
According to iSuppli, the price rise came as top-name makers added features to their products. Samsung, for instance, added several back-lit LED models to its lineup. Other makers introduced Internet connections and the ability to play Internet video.
Prices are likely to hold their ground in coming months, except on low-end models, where competition is fierce, predicts iSuppli.
On the low end of the market, premium brands are competing actively with value-priced brands such as Vizio. Cut-rate pricing helped Vizio rise to the top spot in the U.S. and Canadian LCD-TV market in April, iSuppli said.
The lowest price for a 40-inch flat-panel model in the month was $615.
The predictions were dire, and the actual results were nothing to shout about.
But the cellular handset market weathered the first quarter reasonably well given the depth of the global downturn.
Research in Motion's Blackberry Bold had a good first quarter
According to ABI Research, 258 million phones were shipped during the three-month period. That is down 11 percent compared with last year. But it is ahead of expectations for 253.5 million handsets.
The research firm now thinks handset sales will fall 8 percent his year, compared with its previous projection of a 8.4 percent decline.
The second quarter, similarly, should show improvement over the first, though it will still be down 10 percent from a year earlier.
Samsung and LG did well during the first quarter, as did RIM with its Blackberry Bold, said Practice Director Kevin Burden.
Posted by Jean-Baptiste Su 
Jean-Baptiste Su
Mark Boslet
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