<IT
WORLD> Angry Birds shuns
Windows By Martin J
Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - Industry research
firms released data this week clearly showing the
remarkable growth in the Chinese smart-phone
market. According to analytics firm Flurry, China
has surpassed the US in terms of new activations
of Apple and Android smart-phones and tablets.
This month in 2011 China accounted for 9%
of the world’s total iOS and Android activations.
March 2012 tells a different story
with the figure at 24% and
taking the number one spot from the US which has
dropped from 31% to 21% in the same period.
China’s large population and growing
middle class make it a primary choice market for
hardware and software manufacturers. App usage has
also surged in China in the last year, with a
staggering 1,126% jump on the same period the
previous year.
Microsoft wants a piece of
this action and has launched its Windows Phone
partnered with HTC in China this week. The slick
device dubbed Eternity comes with a new Chinese
language interface, dual cameras, 4.7 inch
display, and Microsoft's Metro based platform.
The company is aiming to out-price rivals
Apple and Google by selling handsets in the 1,000
yuan (US$158) range. In comparison a 16GB iPhone
4S costs a whopping 4,988 yuan ($790) in the
People's Republic.
Microsoft will not be
making its own phones; it supplies the software to
partners such as Nokia, Samsung, and HTC who
produce the handsets. It plans to bring Windows
Phones to 23 more countries for a total of 63,
many of which are in emerging markets, where
consumers may not have pockets deep enough for
Apple.
The company was dealt a blow this
week when makers of the world’s most popular
smart-phone game, Angry Birds, announced that the
next edition will not be available on the Windows
Phone. Slow demand was cited as the reason that
programmers at Rovio Entertainment will not be
recoding Angry Birds Space Edition for the
Microsoft platform. The quirky game could reach a
billion cumulative downloads within the next few
months when the new edition is released, and
Windows Phone users could be left angry if they
purchased the device for gaming.
Email Web-based email providers
such as Hotmail and Yahoo have always been
notoriously bad at deciphering spam from genuine
email. By employing heavy filtering methods a
large percentage of legitimate email is being sent
to the junk folder while the recipient remains
oblivious and the sender gets increasingly
frustrated by a lack of response.
Gmail,
up until recently, had been one of the better
alternatives, but it too has started a campaign of
digitally carpet bombing user's inboxes resulting
in masses of missing mail. This week Google
started offering explanations as to how and why it
decided what was spam.
Gmail users can now
select any message that the system has
automatically banished to the junk folder and
click a "Why is this message in Spam?" notice to
get more information. Explanations included
phishing scams, messages from an unconfirmed
sender, messages the user flagged as spam,
similarity to suspicious messages, and
administrator-set policies.
Google hopes
that for the few users who do check their junk
folders the explanations will serve to inform them
about scams and harmful emails. In reality, most
people ignore their spam folder and trust the
system to take care of it oblivious to the fact
that many genuine emails are also getting trashed
simply because they contain a web link or words
that other users have flagged.
The only
true way to have control over your email is by
using your own domain name and hosting account
with a reliable client, such as Mozilla's
Thunderbird, which can be configured to catch spam
effectively and show you all of your messages
giving you the choice. Relying on web-based,
advertising driven, email providers such as
Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail grants control over your
inbox and incoming mail to them and whatever
content filtration technology they decide to
implement.
Hardware Hard-drive
manufacturer Seagate announced that it has reached
a milestone in data storage technology this week.
The company claims to be the first to achieve one
terabit per square inch, which means that it will
be able to produce a standard 3.5 inch hard disk
that can store 60 terabytes of data within the
next decade. Today's standard hard disks offer a
maximum of 3 terabytes; doubling this capacity
will achievable within the next couple of years.
Seagate said it reached this landmark in
data density by using technology called
heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which
employs lasers to heat the disk and reduce
magnetic interference which is common in today's
technology. The company stated that the first
generation of HAMR drives will offer 6TB of
storage space in the desktop (3.5 inch) standard
and 2TB in the laptop (2.5 inch) standard.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
(Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
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