How big is mobile? Well, sometime early next year (or maybe even in the Christmas surge) there will be more mobile phones than people. Technically that is subscribers, so some of those “phones” are actually spare SIM-cards in international travelers’ pockets. But even so that is an incredible statistic. Also,… Read More
Much has been written about the new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 in terms of the features, specifications, bill of materials, and chips used in the design. Today I’ll share my experiences of actually using the new iOS 6 on iPad as an EDA blogger.
Upgrading to iOS6
Clicking the On button and noticing that the App Store icon has something new,… Read More
The iPhone version of the SemiWiki App is now available. Download it from the iTunes store, it’s free. The App allows you to look at similar things to the website but much more conveniently adapted to fit the small screen. When you first start up the App you can log in (assuming you are a SemiWiki registered user and why would you… Read More
Now that the mobile market is keeping us all employed, take a close look at what is actually inside those devices we can’t live without. Before SoCs you could just read the codes on the chips. Now it is all Semiconductor IP so you have to do a little more diligence to find out what is really powering your phones and tablets. One thing you… Read More
The Q2 numbers for smartphones are now all in and the basic story is that Google is now registering an incredible million Android phones per day, half of them made by Samsung. That’s 85% of all the smartphones shipped last quarter. Android has (per IDC) 68% market share of all smartphones out there.
Apple grew by double digit… Read More
I wasn’t going to write about the cell phone business again for some time. After all, this is a site about semiconductor and EDA primarily. But the cell-phone business in all its facets is a huge semiconductor consumer and continues to grow fast (despite my morbid focus on those companies that do anything but).
But Research… Read More
I went to part of the Linley Tech Mobile Conference. This is the current incarnation of what started life as Michael Slater’s Microprocessor Report, and the twice-yearly Microprocessor Forum. These very technical analysis organizations seem to work well when they are a small group of analysts working together to cover… Read More
Holman Jenkins, the distinguished writer of business trends for the Wall St. Journal, recently penned an article entitled “The End of Apple’s Roach Motel?” (Personally, I think that since Apple is in California, he should have used Hotel California in his title), questioning the iPhone and iPAD maker of its ability to continue… Read More
Will they or won’t they convert the MAC Air to the A6 processor this year? That is the question that intrigues many analysts and prognosticators who want to see if a competitive ARM ecosystem… Read More
Well it looks like everyone (including me) was way too conservative about Apple’s iPhone sales last quarter. Analysts were expecting Apple to sell 30M iPhones and 13M iPads. In fact they sold 37M iPhones, almost a quarter more than expected, and over 15M iPads. In fact Apple sold more iPads than HP, the largest PC manufacturer,… Read More
