As expected, Motorola announced a new smartphone that uses an Intel Atom chip. A surprise, however, is the phone’s battery life: At 20 hours of mixed use, it’s the same as a similar Razr using Qualcomm’s chip. Will Intel be inside your next phone?
What’s normally a quiet time turned into a busy week: Before the new Kindle Fire HD tablets launched, Motorola introduced three new Razr phones while Samsung touted its Galaxy S III sales figures: 20 million to date. Android tablets sales are on the rise too.
Has one single Android phone outsold the iPhone 4S? Apparently so, at least at Verizon, where the Motorola Razr and its 4G LTE radio is tops. Acer is taking on Apple’s iPad with a $449 tablet while an Intel phone — yes, Intel — gets a nice review.
Motorola Mobility said its newly re-envisioned Razr led the way to increases in total device shipments and revenue in the fourth quarter, but considering Moto’s vastly reduced market share, those increases didn’t lead to much. It shipped 5.3 million smartphones and a paltry 200,000 tablets.
At CES, Motorola announced a new Droid for Verizon’s LTE network that appears to be a combination of all of its Android smartphones released to date. Meanwhile, LG got cinematic with LTE’s video stream capabilities, announcing a new HD phone, while Samsung unveiled its Tab 7.7.
The new Motorola (s MOT) Droid is pretty hot today. It’s a phone! It’s a brand! It’s an iPhone killer! But here at GigaOM we decided to ask a far more important question, “Is it a RAZR killer?” Can today’s Droid phone top the world’s most ubiquitous mobile gadget on its path to crush the iPhone? Can it even get close to the iPhone? Let’s see how the competition stacks up: Read More about Forget the iPhone, Can Droid Top the RAZR?
Even though Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) appears to be knocking the ball out of the park after confirming today that it has more than 10,000 applicat…
According to The NPD Group, the leader in market research for the wireless industry, the iPhone 3G surpassed the Motorola RAZR as the leading handset purchased by US adult consumers in the third quarter of 2008.
The RAZR had been ranked as the top-selling consumer handset for the past three years, which means that the iPhone knocking the device from the top spot is no small deal.
“It represents a major shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD. “Four of the five best-selling handsets in the third quarter were optimized for messaging and other advanced Internet features.”
The top handset models in rank order, based on unit sales in Q3, were as follows:
Read More about iPhone Takes Number One Spot, Surpassing the RAZR
Veoh, the online video startup, has made its second round of layoffs this fall, cutting 20 percent of its 110 employees this afternoon out of both its San Diego and Los Angeles offices. It said it still expects to be profitable next year.
“We have to make sure we have enough capital to weather the [economic] storm and ensure that we are operating with an efficient footprint,” Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang told us.
Mitgang sees Veoh’s primary objectives as one, organizing video; two, helping people discover video; and three, making money. He also said the company has had to make a number of tactical decisions in the last year to save money, including exiting international markets, building a plug-in for peer-to-peer streaming in the browser in order to lower bandwidth costs, and laying off its St. Petersburg development office in order to hire people with more appropriate skills in the U.S. However, Mitgang did not name any projects that would be cut in association with the layoffs.
Mitgang said Veoh has a global audience of between 25 million and 28 million, with more than a third of that in the U.S. We were struck by his comment that Veoh has had success monetizing by “selling audience.” That means the site targets its advertising based on users’ behavior rather than the content itself. And what that means is that Veoh is actually monetizing user-generated content, something few people are even trying (the key word for most everyone else is “premium.”)
