Casual observers of the automobile industry are quick to compare connected cars to “smartphones on wheels.” It’s a simple way of looking at things that makes some sense now that half of all cars produced in the world are made with a built-in cellular modem…or two. It belies the complexity of connecting… Read More
The Automobile Club of America’s (AAA) ongoing battle with driver distraction, among other issues such as drowsy driving and teen driving, turns a new page with a report flagging 23 of 30 tested in-vehicle infotainment systems as demanding that drivers pay a high or very high level of attention when performing tasks with… Read More
The opening line of a recent Benedict Evans piece makes a bold statement: “The smartphone platform wars are pretty much over, and Apple and Google won.” Reading that line reminded me of the William Shatner scene in Airplane 2; let’s just shut it down and go home. That’s not the point Evans is making, however, … Read More
Alphabet is showing signs of taking over just about every infotainment function in cars except one: traffic information. When Alphabet, aka Google, arrived on the automotive scene the company and its minions quickly grasped that there was going to be a big opportunity for search, voice, navigation, maps, traffic and contextual… Read More
There has been a startling rise in a class of Android auto-rooting malware which is believed to affect over a quarter of a million phones in the US and well over a million in each of India and China. The attack has primarily infected older versions of Android (so far) – KitKat, JellyBean and Lolipop primarily.
The malware, known as Shedun… Read More
Microsoft BUILD is the company’s annual developer conference where they communicate their latest strategies and deliverables to developers and launch many new innovations. BUILD is extremely developer- focused and is intended to inform current Microsoft developers as well as recruit more developers to develop for Microsoft… Read More
At the high end of the Atmel product spectrum resides SAMA5 based on an ARM Cortex-A5 core. With an MMU supporting Linux or Android, plus on-the-fly memory encryption and ARM TrustZone in some variants, the SAMA5 family is drawing interest from IoT app developers. We’ll look at three examples, all illustrating how important seamless… Read More
Apple’s recent bout with ‘Batterygate’ highlighted just how important dynamic power management can be. Our last Sonics update looked at using their NoC to manage power islands; this time, we look at their research progress on architectural measures for power management.… Read More
As the smartphone industry has begun to mature, one-upmanship among smartphone manufacturers and SoC vendors has bred a dangerous trend: ever-increasing processor core counts and the association between increased CPU core count and greater performance. This association originated as SoC vendors and OEMs have tried to find… Read More
What is the second biggest tech company in the world? If you said Alphabet, you get bonus points. If you have never heard of Alphabet, then perhaps you have heard of Google.
On Monday, Google announced that it was going to reorganize its corporate structure. This would usually provoke a big yawn but this could turn out to be significant.… Read More
