ffnowbot

Microsoft is a software company. For nigh on three decades, Windows and Office have been the bread and butter of the Redmond, Washington company. However, the last decade has seen increasing success and competition from both Apple and Google. Now, it seems as if the mammoth software business just isn’t enough to keep Microsoft at the top of the game. With Xbox, and now Surface, we’ve seen Microsoft go further and further down the rabbit hole of hardware products, and it is becoming clear that Microsoft’s future isn’t just that of a software company.

1. Samsung.com Us

Inoltre, se hai deciso di installare Windows 7, Windows 8.1 o Windows 10 su un tuo vecchio computer, prima di poter formattare il PC ed installare uno di questi nuovi sistemi operativi, sappi che dovresti innanzitutto verificare se il tuo computer supporta uno di questi ultimi sistemi operativi.

Competition The Wall Street Journal outing Microsoft as actively working with Asian suppliers to manufacture a home-made smartphone While this is very far from an announcement, the intent is clearly there. Apple is making an obscene amount of money by selling its own hardware, and it’s clear that Microsoft wants in on that. The problem remains that Microsoft is dedicated to having both desktop and mobile operating systems available for licensing by third parties. These moves into the hardware market clearly put Microsoft in the awkward position of competing with its partners. Instead of trying to have its cake and eat it too, Microsoft needs to decide what it’s going to be. Is it a software and hardware company like Apple, or is it a software company like it has been all of these previous decades?

Its previous software-only endeavors in the mobile market have been less than successful. Windows Phone 7 and Windows Mobile didn’t launch Microsoft back into market domination. If it wants to make world-class devices, it needs to leave the previous model behind. Indecision Microsoft’s most well-known and successful hardware venture would undoubtedly be the Xbox line of game consoles. Originally launched in 2001, the original Xbox did okay in the US market, but it didn’t set the world on fire. Just four years later, the has done extremely well in every major market with the notable exception of Japan. It’s safe to say that this is a successful product line, but Microsoft doesn’t license the Xbox 360 software to hardware companies.

The Xbox 360 is a hardware and software combination owned and controlled solely by Microsoft. Its success doesn’t logically transition into success in the phone and tablet market as Microsoft is currently playing the game. If Microsoft wants to be competitive with Apple and Google in the mobile market, it needs to stop pussyfooting around. With Steve Ballmer at the helm, Microsoft just doesn’t seem to be able to make a decision — just look at the Surface. It’s an ARM-based tablet that runs a new GUI except when it runs the old Desktop. There is an Intel version on the way, and Microsoft is hoping developers will release both Metro and Desktop apps. Even the attachable keyboards aren’t consistent.

Microsoft couldn’t decide to make it using touch-based technology or traditional key-based technology, so they did both. How can Microsoft expect consumers to know which Surface they want if Microsoft itself can’t even decide what the Surface is? The Xbox was successful because it was a distinct product with a clear vision driving it. The Surface is not, and that is why it has an uphill battle to fight.

If Microsoft continues this trend in the phone market, it will have the exact same problems. Follow the leader There is also the curious case of the Zune. Launched in November of 2006, it was too little too late. The iPod was incredibly dominant, and Microsoft wanted a nice big chunk of that pie. Sadly, the iPhone was announced just a few months later, and that rendered the dedicated portable media player a niche market. Last year, Microsoft announced that it would be discontinuing the Zune brand. Microsoft was, very sadly, reacting to the market instead of being the leading force it has the brains and money to actually be.

If Microsoft isn’t careful, it could very easily fall into this same trap again by following a template designed by someone else. Going forward, needs to decide what it wants, and then execute in a clear a decisive manner. Playing the “me too” game hasn’t worked. Instead of creating products that are designed to compete with popular products made by, it should be focusing on creating the next big thing — and then knocking it out of the ball park.

Image credit:. As expected, iFixit managed to get their hands on the iPad Mini and tore it apart to show us the Samsung-made screen, stereo speakers and dual-core A5 chip housed inside Apple’s latest iPad. It appears that Apple and Samsung buried their hatchets deep enough for Samsung to provide those 1024×768 LCD screens to Apple, at least for this iFixit.com sample. As you may already know, there have been reports that both Samsung and Sharp have been supplying panels for iPad mini. IFixit.com teardown also managed to confirm the stereo speakers, crushing recent Amazon advert, and show us that A5 processor inside it. IFixit.com also noted that damaged display can be easily fixed since it is not fixed to the glass, other components are soldered together, so no luck if something else breaks in there.

Attraction 2000 cast. You can check out the full teardown. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the Motorola Xoom, the first official 10-inch Android tablet. By almost every stretch of the imagination, the Xoom was an awful tablet with a terrible display, poor battery life, iffy performance, and an ecosystem consisting of just three tablet apps. Today, 18 months later, we finally get a glimpse of Google’s next attempt at a 10-inch tablet: The Samsung Nexus 10.

The hands-on reviews of the Nexus 10 are in, and while it’s enjoying a more positive reception than the Xoom, it’s still very much a mixed bag. In theory, with the highest-resolution (2560×1600) mobile display in the world, the first mobile device with an Exynos 5 (Cortex-A15) processor, and 2GB of RAM, the Nexus 10 should be a monster.

In practice, it would seem that Samsung and Google kind of forgot that battery tech still isn’t up to the task of powering and illuminating these monstrous Retina displays. The Cortex-A15 doesn’t exactly sip battery juice, either. In general, the reviews all point to very mediocre, verging on poor, battery life. Saw just 7 hours 26 minutes from its battery test, compared to the normal 10-11 hours that most other 10-inch tablets can muster. The rear-facing camera is bad. On the flip side, the dual, front-facing speakers sound good, and though it’s plastic, reviewers are generally pleased with the look and feel of the Nexus 10. Even when it comes to the 10.1-inch PLS (enhanced IPS) 2560×1600 display, fault can be found.

While the resolution is the highest on the market, that’s where the superlatives cease. Found the Nexus 10′s display to be middle-of-the-road in terms of brightness and contrast. Viewing angles are excellent — but at what expense? Cramming that many pixels into a tablet requires much stronger backlighting than a lower-resolution display — and as we can see from the low brightness of the Nexus 10, Samsung/Google obviously decided to skimp on the backlight, so as to maintain some semblance of all-day battery life. Nexus 10 (Exynos 5) vs.

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity (Tegra 3) Credit: Engadget More important than the display, though, is the fact that the Nexus 10 is the first mobile device to play host to Samsung’s Exynos 5 Dual SoC. This is our first chance to see the performance of the — the long-awaited successor to Cortex-A9 — and ARM’s new Mali-T604 GPU. While it’s too early to be conclusive, the first set of reviewer benchmarks suggest that the Exynos 5 isn’t going to blow your mind — at least not yet. In most tests, the dual-core CPU sits in the middle of the pack, beaten out by the iPhone 5′s A6, or the dual-core Snapdragon S4. It does seem to pull ahead of the pack in some browser benchmarks, though. For what it’s worth, reviewers all say that the Nexus 10 is very snappy — so it’s probably not worth paying too close heed to the benchmarks.

Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 GPU performance Credit: Anandtech The Mali-T604 GPU (which replaces the Mali-400 found in the Exynos 4) is also a bit of a mixed bag. It definitely improves on the Mali-400 in a big way, but it still falls behind the SGX543 GPUs found in the iPhone 5 and iPad 3/4. Software In terms of Android 4.2 (see: ), most reviews say that it’s nice — but nothing special. In terms of apps, it sounds like reviewers had a much better time than with the Xoom (phew!), but that there’s still scant few tablet-specific Android apps, and even fewer that are tailored for high-resolution displays. For the most part, you’re still dealing with scaled-up apps — which Android does quite well, but there’s an awful lot of apps out there with art and icons that just aren’t ready for the 300 PPI treatment. How fast is too fast? The overarching tale with the Nexus 10 seems to be specs above all else.

Yes, the screen has an almost inconceivable resolution — but in practice, the 1920×1200 Asus Transformer Pad Infinity will probably look better, thanks to higher brightness and contrast. Yes, there’s a brand new CPU inside, clocked at an impressive 1.7GHz, but games will still have a lower framerate than an iPad, iPhone, or some Snapdragon-powered smartphones. Is Android 4.2 only slick and responsive when backed by the Cortex-A15? Really, though, when you remember that the Nexus 10 starts at just $ 400, we probably shouldn’t be so picky. I just can’t help but wonder if the Nexus 10 would actually be a better tablet if the screen was slightly less preposterous and the CPU was clocked a little slower. It also pains me to think just how beautiful the new Samsung Chromebook could’ve been if it had used the 2560×1600 panel, rather than 1366×768.

As always, our good friends over at Kishonti managed to have the first GPU performance results for the new 4th generation iPad. Although the new iPad retains its 2048 x 1536 “retina” display, Apple claims a 2x improvement in GPU performance through the A6X SoC. The previous generation chip, the, had two ARM Cortex A9 cores running at 1GHz paired with four PowerVR SGX 543 cores running at 250MHz. The entire SoC integrated 4 x 32-bit LPDDR2 memory controllers, giving the A5X the widest memory interface on a shipping mobile SoC in the market at the time of launch.

Samsung.com Us

The A6X retains the 128-bit wide memory interface of the A5X (and it keeps the memory controller interface adjacent to the GPU cores and not the CPU cores as is the case in the A5/A6). It also integrates two of Apple’s new Swift cores running at up to 1.4GHz (a slight increase from the 1.3GHz cores in the iPhone 5’s A6). The big news today is what happens on the GPU side. A quick look at the GLBenchmark results for the new iPad 4 tells us all we need to know. The A6X moves to a newer GPU core: the PowerVR SGX 554.