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11/11/2012

The weekly WrapUp - 10 Nov 12

Today I'm starting this new feature in my blog. 

Although this week I didn't catch news that made me scream "I must give a piece of my mind about that!" and write a whole post about, I still consumed my fair share of reading so I'll give you a summary of what I think are the most "worth knowing" news of the week.

These posts will probably become a weekly appointment on my blog at least in the weeks where I don't have something major to discuss. 

  • Messenger is history: Microsoft announced from the Skype Blog that Messenger will converge to Skype. You can now log into Skype with your MSN credentials, eventually merge your Skype and MSN accounts, and chat with your Messenger friends. That's a good move for Microsoft that is cleaning the house from redundancies and unifying experience across its product line and something that also competitors (aka Google) are doing aggressively.
  • Office for iPhone and Android is in the works: the rumor has been around for some time now and became more concrete when the Czech Microsoft office spoke about it last month. Now The Verge has a comment form a Microsoft spokesman that confirms it. The apps should come to iOS in March 2013 and then to Android in May. That's good news for everyone and that could finally solve one of the main problem I find in tablets: productivity. (If you ask I find hilarious that Microsoft is resolving the main competitor disadvantage in that market.)
  • Some patent Wars settled while other start: Apple was found guilty of infringing some of VirnetX patents concerning FaceTime and will have to send $368M of damage to the company that is already filing another law suit against Cupertino. Meanwhile Apple and HTC reached a settlement on their patent disputes with a 10 years cross licensing deal. Considering also the suit with Samsung in England the war isn't going that good for Tim Cook anymore and some losses could do well in reducing future ridicule disputes.
  • The best seller phone of Q3 2012 is Galaxy SIII: Samsung announced spectacular figures for its flagship phone, the Galaxy SIII, that sold over 30M units in the 150 days since launch. On top of that analysts declared that the phone was the best seller of Q3 2012 selling even more units than Apple did. To be fair the iPhone 5 was announced quite late in the quarter so numbers are surely changing for next quarter. In fact Foxconn is already declaring that they can't meet demand for the device.
  • nVidia confirms that PC and Laptop are a declining market: during the quarterly earning call nVidia CEO declared record revenues that were guided by the tablet and smartphone markets. For Jen-Hsun Huang the budget PC market is being cannibalized by tablets and he went on saying that since the relase of Windows 8 and Windows RT "the future of cheap PCs is tablets". And I agree.. in part.

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