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Samsung was world’s second-biggest tablet maker in Q1 2024

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Samsung was the world’s second-biggest tablet brand during Q1 2024. This is a good result, but the South Korean firm could have done better, as its sales have dropped slightly compared to the first quarter of last year. While Apple’s sales also tanked, Chinese tablet makers managed to increase their sales.

Over 6.7 million Galaxy Tabs were shipped in Q1 2024

According to the latest figures from International Data Corporation (IDC), Samsung ranked second globally in terms of tablet sales. It shipped 6.7 million tablets during Q1 2024 and captured a 21.7% share of the market. That’s 5.8% fewer shipments compared to Q1 2023. The company launched four affordable tablets—Galaxy Tab A9, Galaxy Tab A9+, Galaxy Tab S9 FE, and Galaxy Tab S9 FE+—in Q4 2023 and the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (2024) in Q1 2024. So, most of its recent launches were affordable models, and it is expected to launch the Galaxy Tab S10 early next year.

Apple Samsung Tablet Market Share Global Q1 2024 IDC

Apple ranked first with shipments of 9.9 million iPads and a market share of 32%. Compared to Q1 2023, iPad sales tanked by 8.5%. It has been nearly a year and a half since Apple launched any iPad. However, it is expected to launch two new iPad Pros with OLED screens from Samsung and M4 chips and two new iPad Airs with the M2 chip tomorrow.

Huawei improved its tablet sales by an impressive 43.6% (likely mostly in China) to reach shipment figures of 2.9 million and a market share of 9.4%. Lenovo shipped 2.1 million tablets, reaching a market share of 7%. Its year-over-year growth stood at 13.2%, which is decent. Xiaomi showed a staggering improvement of 92.6% to reach tablet shipments of 1.8 million and a market share of 5.9%.

Overall, the tablet market improved by an insignificant margin (0.5%) compared to Q1 2024. Over 30.8 million tablets were shipped globally in Q1 2024. Other brands accounted for 24% of all tablet sales during the first quarter of this year.

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World’s fastest broadband connection went live down under — Nokia demos 100 gigabit internet line in Australia in record-breaking attempt but doesn’t say when it will go on sale

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Faster broadband is on the way, and it won’t require network providers to overhaul their infrastructure.

nbn, the largest wholesale broadband provider in Australia, used Nokia’s Lightspan MF fiber platform, to deliver 10G, 25G, 50G and 100G broadband speeds over its existing fiber network. Nokia’s Lightspan delivers next-generation Passive Optical Network (PON) at scale.

PON is a type of fiber-optic network that combines point-to-multipoint fiber architecture with communications networking. The technology works by using a single fiber-optic connection that divides into many distinct fibers, allowing one line to serve multiple users. This is achieved through both active and passive splitters, hence the name. PON technology boosts the efficiency of a network because it reduces the number of active switching devices used. Furthermore, it requires less power and supports greater distances between users and their service providers.

Nokia NBN Demo

(Image credit: Nokia)

A game-changer

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HMD just partnered with Heineken on the world’s most boring phone (literally)

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Human Mobile Devices (HMD) ripped up the rulebook at MWC 2024 by announcing the Barbie Flip Phone, a stripped-back (and suitably pink) device that aims to “flip the script on smartphone culture” when it launches later this year.

Now, the Nokia phone manufacturer is doubling down on its minimalist vision with the Boring Phone, an even more simplistic take on mental wellbeing tech – developed in collaboration with beer brand Heineken – whose primary function is to send and receive calls and text messages (it does have a camera, but wait until you hear the megapixel count…).

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SanDisk reveals world’s first 4TB SD card for 8K video and storage bragging rights

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Tech company Western Digital breaks new ground as they have created the world’s first 4TB microSD card for laptops and cameras, the SanDisk Extreme PRO SDUC UHS-1 memory card. The company says the upcoming SanDisk model is set to release next year “and will be showcased at NAB 2024” in Las Vegas.

We can infer much about the upcoming card’s performance by looking at its name. UHS-1 refers to the Ultra High Speed-1 interface, which boasts a maximum data transfer rate of 104 MB/s, according to AnandTech. High transfer speeds don’t really matter to the average person, as slower cards can meet most people’s needs, but speed matters greatly to photographers. 

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World’s first modular handheld inkjet printer claims revolutionary print-on-any-surface capabilities — Chinese startup makes big promises but watch out for the price of consumables

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If you ever wished you could print on anything, Printisian could be for you. The handheld inkjet printer lets users print on various materials and surfaces, including wood, paper, metals, fabric, leather, stone and even food and skin. 

Its modular design allows for easy switching between different accessories, such as an edge positioner, laser aligner, and code scanner, to meet specific printing needs. 

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This ‘world’s smallest’ iPhone and Apple Watch dual charger might be perfect your travels

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Apple no longer sells the MagSafe Duo, its two-in-one charger for the iPhone and Apple Watch, but if you’ve found yourself with a charger-shaped hole in your life, Twelve South’s new ButterFly might patch it right up.

Similar to the MagSafe Duo, the ButterFly comes with two magnetic charging pucks in a fold-up design. It can simultaneously juice up an iPhone and an Apple Watch or your AirPods, and Twelve South claims it is “the world’s smallest 2-in-1 USB-C MagSafe charger.”

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Firewalla unveils the world’s most affordable 10-gigabit smart firewall — ready for next-gen Wi-Fi 7 and high-speed fiber networks, but a price increase is expected soon

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Firewalla makes configurable hardware firewalls that connect to your router, providing protection for your home or business against various network and internet threats.

The company has announced the pre-sale of Firewalla Gold Pro, the newest and most powerful addition to the “Gold” product line. Touted as the world’s most affordable 10-gigabit smart firewall, this device is designed to be compatible with the next-generation Wi-Fi 7 and high-speed 5 and 10-gigabit ISP fiber networks.

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Life Style

Long-lost photos reveal details of world’s first police crime lab

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A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science.

The huge collection, which comprises more than 20,000 glass photographic plates that document the laboratory’s pioneering scientific methods, crime scenes and Locard’s personal correspondence, is thrilling historians at a time when many consider that forensic science has lost its way. “There is a movement to look back to the past for guidance as to how to renew the science of policing,” says Amos Frappa, a historian affiliated with the Sociological Research Centre on Law and Criminal Institutions in Paris, who is overseeing the analysis of the images.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many people in Europe and beyond were thinking about how criminals might be accurately identified by using techniques such as fingerprint, blood and skeletal analysis. Locard was the first person to create the semblance of forensic science. He established the first scientific lab that came under the aegis of the police, and that was dedicated to studying ‘traces’ of criminal activity collected from crime scenes.

Garage find

The collection of photographic plates almost didn’t survive. It languished for decades in a garage belonging to the National Forensic Police Department in Ecully, a Lyon suburb. In 2005, the glass plates were rescued from the garage and stored in Lyon’s municipal archives. But at the time, the Lyon archives lacked the resources to treat the collection properly, says director Louis Faivre d’Arcier. It wasn’t until 2017 that an inspection revealed that the plates’ gelatine layer containing the image information was, in many cases, infected with mould. After a sorting and decontamination project in 2022, conservators saved around two-thirds of the plates.

Left: attooed woman by the first name of Marie-Clémentine, 20 February 1934, from the collection of glass plates of the Lyon police laboratory; Right: Guided-hand technique for the identification of handwriting, undated.

Left: A tattooed woman named Marie-Clémentine in 1934; Edmond Locard’s team used tattoos as a way of identifying potential criminals. Right: Handwriting analysis as a means of identification was investigated but later spurned by Locard, who deemed it unreliable.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon

The mammoth task of digitizing the contents of the fragile plates, which are mostly unindexed and disordered, became possible only when a local publisher and historian of funerary practices, Nicolas Delestre, offered to finance it. In collaboration with the municipal archives, his team developed a photographic protocol to capture as much information from the plates as possible. The digitization will be completed this spring, to coincide with the publication of Frappa’s French-language biography of Locard. The slow rebuilding of the indexes continues.

Locard, who worked in the early to mid-twentieth century, is famous for his maxim, which is usually formulated in English as “Every contact leaves a trace.” Trained as a forensic pathologist, he turned to the study of trace evidence after a French political scandal called the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer called Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of espionage. During the affair, Locard’s mentor Alphonse Bertillon, who had invented a method of identifying people through bodily measurements, was called on as a handwriting specialist, despite having no expertise in the field. He wrongly identified Dreyfus as the author of an incriminating note.

Locard, seeing other countries adopt fingerprint identification, embraced that method instead. In 1910, he set up his laboratory in the attic of Lyon’s main courthouse, and gradually expanded his scientific analyses to include traces such as blood, hair, dust and pollen.

Sherlock Holmes connection

This much was known from published sources, but the photographic archive offers details about the social and intellectual milieu that produced Locard, onthe scientific networks in which he was embedded, and on how his thinking evolved as he experimented and made errors. His exchanges with contemporaries in countries including Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the United States shaped his approach, which might be why he did not consider himself a founder of a new field. But Locard’s ideas — his scientific methods and his insistence on meticulously studying crime scenes — fell on fertile ground in Lyon’s police chiefs and judges, who, unlike their Parisian counterparts, accepted the evidence that such approaches generated. “Lyon was a receptacle,” says Frappa.

Edmond Locard using a Leitz photographic bench in the 1920s.

Edmond Locard using a photographic bench in the 1920s.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon

The new collection reveals Locard’s team at work. It captures their equipment and experiments, and the forensic traces they analysed. The close-knit group socialized together, received international visitors and investigated myriad means by which people could be identified. One way was to look at people’s tattoos, and the collection contains a large set of tattoo images. Locard took inspiration from many sources, including the Lyon-based Lumière brothers, who were pioneers of cinematography, and the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he corresponded. In time, Locard discarded some techniques — notably, handwriting analysis — deeming them unreliable.

Since 2009, when a report from the US National Research Council found that many modern forensic techniques were inadequately grounded in science, the discipline has struggled to reorient itself. “By the late 20th century, it’s fair to say that forensic science had become an adjunct of law enforcement without allegiance to science,” says Simon Cole, who studies criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, and directs the US National Registry of Exonerations. Cole has written about the problems with fingerprint identification, and last year reported on the fallibility of microscopic hair comparison. These techniques are routinely used to investigate crimes in the United States and elsewhere, and the evidence they generate is admissible in court.

Modern troubles

The 2009 report suggested that improving forensic science would require larger labs in which diverse specialists were insulated from each other and from the police to prevent bias. The trouble with that view, says Olivier Ribaux, director of the School of Criminal Sciences at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is that, when considering the potentially infinite number of traces that a crime scene can generate, some subjective selection by humans is inevitable. To ensure that this selection is as informative and as unbiased as possible, the forensic scientist must understand a trace in its context — as Locard’s maxim in French originally implied. “The problem with the big labs is that they have severed the connection with the crime scene,” Ribaux says.

He favours an alternative model in which smaller labs employ generalists, who can oversee specialists in certain fields, such as ballistics and DNA, but can also offer a more holistic view of a case. These generalists would work closely with the police — a return to Locard’s approach, in other words. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, Ribaux says. They are just snapshots of the ongoing debate about how the field should reinvent itself.

That debate will surely be fuelled by the emerging portrait of Locard, sometimes dubbed the French Sherlock Holmes, whom Frappa describes as “a man so visionary he predicted, correctly, that he would be forgotten”.

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Samsung archrival plans construction of world’s largest chip factory — at more than $90 billion, it will take more than 20 years to finish, so one wonders what other exciting tech will it produce

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SK Hynix, Samsung‘s chief competitor and the world’s number two memory maker, has begun its audacious plan to build the largest chip production facility on the planet.

The construction at SK Hynix’s giant Yongin Semiconductor Cluster in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, will comprise four units. Work on the first unit, which is intended to be the world’s biggest three-story fabrication plant, is anticipated to commence in March 2025.

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Entertainment

How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app

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In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messenger gets all the credit for my long-distance relationship of two years, which is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great, Google+ Hangouts are the best thing to have happened since Gmail but nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text message.”

A few months into that internship, Facebook announced it was buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion. In WIRED’s newsroom, there were audible gasps at this seemingly minor player’s price tag. American journalists weren’t exactly unfamiliar with WhatsApp. But much of the country was still locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles, even as the rest of the world had switched to an app created by two former Yahoo! engineers in WIRED’s Mountain View backyard.

Text messaging was one of the few things you could do on WhatsApp in 2014. There were no emoji you could react with, no high-definition videos you could send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year and certainly no voice or video calling. And yet, more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom of using nascent cellular data to swap unlimited messages with friends and family instead of paying mobile carriers per text.

WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to people’s names in a phone’s contact book. But after Apple introduced push notifications on the iPhone later that year, it evolved into a full-blown messaging service. Now, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become a lot more — an integral part of the propaganda machinery of political parties in India and Brazil, a way for millions of businesses to reach customers, a way to send money to people and merchants, a distribution platform for publications, brands and influencers, a video conferencing system and a private social network for older adults. And it is still a great way for long-distance lovers to stay connected.

“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”

Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users .

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for the company.

Will Cathcart, a longtime Meta executive, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders departed the company, credits WhatsApp’s early global growth to it being free (or nearly free — at one point, WhatsApp charged people $1 a year), running on almost any phone, including the world’s millions of low-end Android devices, reliably delivering messages even in large swathes of the planet with suboptimal network conditions and, most importantly, being dead simple, free of the bells and whistles that bloat most other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired it, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.

“That was really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget, “People who don’t have high rates of literacy or someone new to the internet could spin up WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”

In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, something Cathcart said was a huge selling point. The feature made WhatsApp a black box, hiding the contents of messages from everyone — even WhatsApp — except the sender and the receiver. The same year, WhatsApp announced that one billion people were using the service every month.

That explosive growth came with a huge flip side: As hundreds of millions of people in heavily populated regions, like Brazil and India, came online for the first time, thanks to inexpensive smartphone and data prices, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation to flow freely. In India, currently WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 700 million users, the app overflowed with propaganda and disinformation against opposition political parties, cheerleading Narendra Modi, the country’s nationalist Prime Minister accused of destroying its secular fabric.

Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, frenzied mobs in remote parts of the country high on baseless rumors about child abductors forwarded through WhatsApp, lynched nearly two dozen people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp swung into action. Among other things, it made significant product changes, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages — the primary way misformation spread across the service — as well as severely restricting the number of people and groups users could forward content to at the same time.

In Brazil, the app is widely seen as a key tool in the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 win. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman, was accused of getting his supporters to circumvent WhatsApp’s spam controls to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent, Fernando Haddad.

Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations globally (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checkers depend on users reporting messages to their WhatsApp hotlines and respond with fact checks). It also made additional product changes, like letting users quickly Google a forwarded message to fact-check it within the app. “Over time, there might be more things we can do,” said Cathcart, including potentially using AI to help with WhatsApp’s fact-checking. “There’s a bunch of interesting things we could do there, I don’t think we’re done,” he said.

Recently, WhatsApp has rapidly added new features, such as the ability to share large files, messages that auto-destruct after they’re viewed, Instagram-like Stories (called Statuses) and larger group calls, among other things. But a brand new feature rolled out globally in fall 2023 called Channels points to WhatsApp’s ambitions to become more than a messaging app. WhatsApp described Channels, in a blog post announcing the launch, as “a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re a bit like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with content is limited to responding with emoji — no replies. There are currently thousands of Channels on WhatsApp and 250-plus have more than a million followers each, WhatsApp told Engadget. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and the WWE (10.9 million followers). And even though it’s early days, Channels is fast becoming a way for publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.

“It took a year for us to grow to an audience of 35,000 on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) told Nieman Lab in November. “Comparatively, we [grew] a similar-sized following [on WhatsApp] in two weeks.”

WhatsApp’s success at consistently adding new functionality without succumbing to feature sprawl has allowed it to thrive, both with its core audience and also, more recently, with users in the US. According to data that analytics firm Data.ai shared with Engadget, WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the US in January 2024, compared to 80 million a year before. A couple of years ago, WhatsApp ran an advertising campaign in the US — its first in the country — where billboards and TV spots touted the app’s focus on privacy.

It’s a sentiment shared by Zuckerberg himself, who, in 2021, shared a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” on his Facebook page. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around,” he wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”

Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told The New York Times.

A few years ago, a configuration change in Facebook’s internal network knocked multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, off the internet for more than six hours and ground the world to a halt.

“It’s like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] essentially functions as an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado reportedly wrote on X (then Twitter). In New Delhi and Brazil, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost out on wages. In London, crypto trades stopped as traders were unable to communicate with clients. One firm claimed a drop of 15 percent. In Russia, oil markets were hit after traders were unable to get in touch with buyers in Europe and Asia placing orders.

Fifteen years after it was created, the messaging app now runs the world.


Engadget 20th anniversary bannerEngadget 20th anniversary banner

To celebrate Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

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