HP gadget guru Phil McKinney is among those who believe everyone will eventually own at least two or three computing devices, choosing according to individual needs from among PCs, smartphones and everything in between. Right now, though, it’s that sweet spot in between that companies like Hewlett-Packard are racing to fill, with new products that try to strike the balance between mobility and user experience.
That’s where HP’s recent acquisition of Palm and its webOS software comes in. McKinney, the chief technology officer for HP’s personal systems group, was careful not to reveal plans for specific products during a talk at the MobileBeat 2010 conference Monday. (And he managed to get through a 30-minute presentation without once mentioning Apple or its iPad by name.) But he reiterated that HP plans to use webOS for what most people are calling tablets — HP calls them “slate” devices — as well as for phones and printers.
While giving no sign that HP would dump Microsoft as the operating system provider for most of its PC business, McKinney’s comments were probably no comfort to Microsoft’s mobile software folks. “We see Windows having its segments of the market,” McKinney said. But when it comes to mobile devices, he added, rather than relying on third-party software, HP believes that success lies with providing its own “end-to-end experience.”
McKinney also repeated his recruiting pitch for independent app developers, who are crucial to HP’s plans for building popular adoption of webOS. Echoing comments he made in a video recently posted on Palm’s website, McKinney suggested developers should consider building apps for webOS because HP has the scale and resources to sell “tens or hundreds of millions” of webOS devices, to both businesses and consumers around the world.
I wrote on Monday about a problem with the camera system on Apple’s new iPhone 4 that was affecting users’ ability to not only take pictures but use FaceTime, the new video chat feature. My colleague Maria Avila helped me put together the video below that illustrates the issue. (H/t to another colleague, Greg Young, who helped me illustrate the FaceTime issue.)
But now a new issue is coming to light: a faulty camera system that not only affects your ability to take pictures, it can foil your attempts to use FaceTime, the video chat feature that is the iPhone 4’s top talking point.
I ran into this issue over the weekend. Apple kindly sent me two iPhone 4s to test out. I’ve been trying to convince my wife that we need to upgrade our iPhone 3G’s to the new model, so I thought I’d show her how FaceTime works, figuring she’d be as wowed as I was when I tested it on a friend’s phone in the office.
But it didn’t work. While the phone I was using received my wife’s image, the small box that was supposed to display my image wasn’t showing anything. Meanwhile, on the phone my wife was using, she could only see her own image in the small box on her screen; she didn’t get any images from my phone. Read the rest of this entry »
Columnist Troy Wolverton has gotten his hands on an iPhone 4. Follow his reactions here. Note: If you’re having difficulty seeing the widget below you can check out Troy’s posts on Twitter @troywolv.
Larry Ellison doesn’t do a lot of interviews. But in a recent confab with the Reuters news service, the Oracle CEO offered up some typically unvarnished opinions about prior management at Sun Microsystems, the once-great computer-maker that had fallen on hard times when Oracle bought it for $7.4 billion earlier this year.
Though much of the interview covered familiar ground, it offered some interesting tidbits as Ellison described some of the inner workings of Sun’s operation – including what’s characterized as outdated manufacturing and distribution systems, inefficient sales commissions, wasteful spending and bad management at the very top levels.
“The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn’t succeed,” Ellison said.
Ellison offered what appeared to be a sharp dig at Jonathan Schwartz, the pony-tailed CEO who ran Sun before the sale to Oracle and who was known for diligently blogging about the company’s strategy and products.
“Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software,” Ellison said. “Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.”
Ellison also gave some hints about future acquisitions as he attempts to transform his hugely successful software company into a full-service purveyor of integrated data center systems. Short summary: Oracle may be looking to buy more hardware companies. “We’ll buy in all areas of our business,” Ellison said.
The PC market is coming back strong, according to new research released today by Gartner and IDC. But HP and Dell, the leading US manufacturers, are losing share to their Asian rivals.
Worldwide PC shipments were up 27.4 percent in the first quarter of 2010, compared with a year earlier, according to Gartner. IDC pegged the year-over-year increase at 24.2 percents, still exceeding expectations.
HP remains the world’s leading seller of PCs, with 18.2 percent of the global market by Gartner’s count and 19.7 percent according to IDC. Both firms estimate that HP shipped almost 20 percent more units than a year earlier, while still losing a little under one percentage point of market share.
Acer, by contrast, was in the No. 2 position with 14.2 percent of the world market, up from 11.7 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner. IDC’s report gives Acer 13.6 percent of the market, up from 11.9 percent.
Both research firms are reporting that Dell’s share of the market also slipped a bit, while Lenovo, Toshiba and ASUS showed gains from a year ago.
IDC and Gartner each use slightly different methods of estimating the market, but their numbers usually track pretty closely. One difference this time: Gartner reported Apple gained almost a point of market share in the United States, while IDC reported Apple lost ground slightly.
Perhaps not a surprise, but a sign of transition: James Gosling, the longtime Sun Microsystems software guru credited with developing the Java programming language, has resigned from Oracle just a few months after it acquired Sun.
In a blog post on Friday, Gosling wrote that he resigned on April 2. “As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.”
Gosling, 54, is a popular and respected computer scientist and, to many, an icon of the free-spirited early days of Silicon Valley. The bearded, long-haired Gosling favors t-shirts and jeans and always seemed to enjoy himself at Sun’s annual Java One conference, at least during the traditional opening rite in which he and other Sun execs used giant sling shots to loft souvenir t-shirts into the crowd.
Last year, when Sun was in talks to be acquired by IBM, Gosling told tech blogger Jason Stamper that there might be some interesting issues as IBM tried to integrate Sun’s free-wheeling culture with its own. “We’re definitely weirder than they are,” he said then.
As it turned out, the IBM deal fell through and Oracle swooped in. Many wondered if there might be a similar culture clash as Sun old-timers found themselves working for a company that’s definitely oriented to the bottom-line. Gosling didn’t say much more in his post. Instead he wrote:
“The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.”
Last week’s criminal conviction of former Brocade Communications CEO Gregory Reyes, on charges relating to options backdating, was not as big a bombshell as the results of his first trial in 2007, when dozens of other Silicon Valley companies were still smarting from examinations of their own stock options practices.
Reyes’ conviction on nine counts of securities fraud and submitting false statements - he was acquitted on a conspiracy count - came after the results of his first trial were overturned last year on appeal. Meanwhile, experts say that heightened scrutiny and new regulations have clamped down on options abuses.
But there have been some ripples of fall-out this week. The Hill, a politics newsletter in Washington D.C., is reporting that national Democratic Party officials are attempting to make hay with Reyes’ conviction by calling attention to $75,000 that he donated over the previous decade to GOP causes.
A Democratic National Committee staffer blasted her Republican counterparts for keeping the donations, claiming that Reyes “defrauded the public using the same irresponsible tactics that sparked the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” according to The Hill.
In politics, of course, appearances count. The Hill also reported that the DNC has announced it will give $505 to charity after it was pointed out that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was given that amount in 2008 by a man recently charged with threatening to kill Republican U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia.
IBM rolled out a new line of Unix server systems under the Power 7 nameplate on Monday. Analysts said IBM appears to be positioning the new machines as a counter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s ambitious plans for selling high-end Sparc servers from newly acquired Sun Microsystems.
Both companies are angling to sell powerful (and expensive) systems that combine hardware and software, engineered and optimized for specific uses such as running complex financial operations. IBM’s press release lays out all their technical specs in detail.
But IBM didn’t stop there. Ellison has been trash-talking IBM for months now, and Big Blue answered back today with a feisty Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ServersForTruth) and a YouTube video that digs at Oracle on several points, including an episode last fall when an industry standards group fined Oracle $10,000 for using the group’s name in ads that didn’t meet its rules.
The video, which IBM says it produced in-house, is a fun spoof of a typically over-heated political campaign spot. Borrowing from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and her much-discussed ad attacking rival Senate candidate Tom Campbell, IBM even threw in a cameo appearance by a sheep with glowing red eyes.
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