Sony Overtakes Apple To Be No. 2 Smartphone Brand In India

Sony has overtaken ace rival Apple to emerge the second largest smartphone brand in India in value sales, thanks largely to its strategy to focus on the Rs 10,000-20,000 smartphone space, backed by Rs 300-crore marketing spend.

According to latest data from market tracker IDC, the Japanese electronics major garnered 9.1% value share in the Indian smartphone market in the October-December quarter of 2013 against Apple's 7% share. Samsung dominated the market with 43% value share.

IDC India senior market analyst Manasi Yadav said Sony's strong positioning in the mid-tier smartphone space of Rs 10,000-20,000 price band has delivered results for the company. "Some of the top selling models for Sony are Xperia M Dual and Xperia C priced in this bracket, which is one of the fastest growing segments in the Indian smartphone market," Yadav said.

The CEO of a leading mobility device retail chain said Apple lost out since it withdrew its largest selling model, iPhone 4, from India as a global decision thereby vacating the sweet spot of Rs 20,000 pricing. "While this loss of sales prompted Apple to relaunch iPhone 4 once again in India in January, sales have not picked up since it is not at all spending on marketing or offering any buyback offer and even the initial euphoria around iPhone 5S has sobered down," the person said.

Analysts, however, said Sony's share in the smartphone market may have slid in the January-March quarter, with Nokia venturing into Android phones with its aggressively priced X series, Apple relaunching iPhone 4 and Micromax rolling out a new range of Canvas phones. IDC will release its figures for the January-March quarter in May or June.

India is one of the rare markets outside Japan where Sony has achieved major success in the smartphones. Kenichiro Hibi, managing director at Sony India, said the company's smartphone business has attained similar revenues as its flagship television business in the fiscal ended March 31. The two businesses contributed around 70% to the company's turnover of about Rs 10,000 crore during the year.

"However, smartphone business will overtake television business in sales this fiscal year," Hibi told ET. "For us, both television and smartphone will be the main pillars to continue the pace of growth in India," he said.

Hibi said the company is poised to further grow its share this fiscal with flagship Xperia Z2 ready for launch this quarter. "The smartphone business doubled in last one year which led to 20% growth in overall sales in 2013-14. We expect to grow at a similar pace this fiscal as well to touch Rs 12,000 crore sales," he said.

Indian brands such as Micromax, Karbonn and Lava have notched up significant share in the smartphone volume sales. While Samsung had 38% market share by unit sales in the October-December quarter, Micromax is second with 13% share. Sony's volume share was 5.5% while Apple's was 2%.

Google Is Struggling to Trademark the Word 'Glass'

It won't surprise you to hear that Google is desperately trying to trademark the world Glass-but it may raise a wry smile on your face when you find out that the U.S. government is taking exception to the idea.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Patent and Trademark Office has objected to granting Google a trademark for Glass. There are two grounds for its refusal. First, it claims that trademarking the term will cause confusion between Google's product and others that use glass in the name-like Microsoft's SmartGlass. Second, it deems the word "glass" to be "merely descriptive." It's usually very difficult to trademark generic terms, and Google is finding that out now. Clearly, with simple and clear naming comes some administrative headaches.

In response to the trademark office's objections, Google's lawyers sent a 1,928-page letter-imagine that!-largely filled with with articles discussing Glass, to try and show that the name has already cemented itself in popular culture. It also tries to argue that "glass" isn't a merely descriptive term, noting that "the frame and display components of the Glass device do not consist of glass at all." Err, right. The patent office is yet to reach a final decision. [Wall Street Journal]

Turn Your Car's Cupholders Into a Wireless Smartphone Charger

Your car's cupholders were originally designed to hold beverages, but odds are most of us have repurposed them to hold our smartphones instead. So Zens has created a simple slotted insert that turns cupholders into chargers if your smartphone supports wireless charging.

Available mid-April for around $97, the ZENS Qi Wireless Car Charger connects to your vehicle's cigarette lighter adapter and, once plugged in, you no longer have to worry about wrangling additional cables. You just insert a Qi-compatible smartphone (with a 5-inch or smaller display) into the slot and it will start charging.

It's inevitable that at some point cars will come with wireless charging slots or pads as a standard feature, but until that time this seems like a really easy way to upgrade your vehicle with those capabilities. 

TomTom Squeezes a Heart Rate Monitor Into Its GPS Watches

When we reviewed the TomTom Runner GPS watch last year, we pointed out that if you wanted to monitor your heart rate, you'd need to buy an extra accessory. But for athletes looking to seriously train their bodies, metrics on how fast or far they ran, swam, or biked isn't enough. So TomTom has updated the Runner GPS with a new Cardio version that now includes an integrated heart-rate monitor.

The TomTom Runner Cardio and Multi-Sport Cardio GPS watches both include a heart rate monitor built into the strap that uses an optical sensor which shines light through the skin to detect changes in blood flow. It means athletes monitoring their physical condition during training no longer need to wear a chest strap that's wirelessly synced to their watch.

Like the original TomTom Runner and Multi-Sport, the Cardio watches use QuickGPSFix to track a wearer's distance and speeds, but from our previous testing it can be finicky and slow to lock onto your location. However, as far as GPS-equipped watches go, the waterproof Cardios manage to keep a slim lightweight profile, thanks mostly to the use of a four-way controller on the strap that keeps the display free of buttons.

The updated Cardio versions of the TomTom Runner and Multi-Sport are available today for $270 and $300 respectively, which is about a $100 more than their predecessors. But it means there's less hardware to wrangle while out on a run, which make it very much worth the extra cash.

Cheap, Colorful Solar-Powered Watches That Require No Maintenance

Based on the same technology that lets Citizen's high-end watches with Eco-Drive stay perpetually charged by the sun, Q&Q (a company founded almost 40 years ago as part of Citizen) has finally made its once Japan-only Solar Smile watches available internationally. So for just $40—with free shipping—you can get a simple timepiece that never needs winding, charging, or a new battery.

All that's required of you is to set the time, and decide which of the fifteen different colors and patterns you want strapped to your wrist. Made from partly recycled materials, the watches are all waterproof to an impressive depth of 164 feet. And after a full charge they'll keep running for about three and a half months without seeing the sun again. So you'll never feel guilty about spending your days on a couch and only seeing the sun every few months. 

Apple files for 'transparent texting' patent

In this Thursday, June 24, 2012 file photo, Jeremiah Ulibarri checks out his new iPhone 4 outside of an Apple store in Chicago. (AP / Kiichiro Sato, File)

Apple may have a solution for pedestrians who keep their eyes glued to their smartphone screens while texting and walking – even if a fountain is directly in their path.
The technology giant has filed a patent for “transparent texting,” an iPhone feature aimed at text-messaging pedestrians who sometime “find themselves in a rather unique predicament.”
"A user who is walking while participating in a text messaging session may inadvertently collide with or stumble over objects in his path because his attention was focused on his device's display instead of the path that he was traversing," according to the patent originally filed in September 2012.

The technology uses a smartphone's rear-facing camera to replace the text message's background with a live video feed of whatever’s in front of the user, thereby reducing the chances of stumbling over or bumping into an object while texting.
While such technology may not necessarily make it to the market, the patent is perhaps a reflection of the changing behaviour of mobile phone users. In the U.S., the problem of pedestrians distracted by their phones has become so widespread that a number of states have attempted to introduce distracted walking bills.
Like many technology companies, Apple secures patents on a wide variety of technologies. Here are three other Apple patents that have yet to make it onto store shelves:

Protecting smartphone users in distress: Using built-in sensors, this "failsafe detection" iPhone feature could potentially sense when a user is in an emergency situation, according to a patent filed earlier this month.

iWatch?: As wearable technology becomes increasingly popular, Apple last year reportedly filed a patent that could potentially be the tech giant's widely rumoured smartwatch

Two-faced iPhones?: The next-generation iPhone may include the option to have a "wrap around" flexible display that will allow users to view content from multiple perspectives, according to the patent secured earlier this month

GoogleMe vs Facebook

What's Google Me? It's Complicated..

In the past week, rumors have swirled around the possibility of a new Google-developed Facebook-killer. But given the company's long (and sometimes rocky) relationship with social networking, the development of such a site is likely to be anything but straightforward...

 

Social networking is Google's white whale. The search giant's otherwise nearly impeccable track record of launching properties has long been marred by its inability to make headway in the space largely dominated by Facebook and MySpace. The company's failure isn't for a lack of trying, of course. Google has made a number of attempts to corner the market, with limited success at best.
The company facilitated the development of Orkut Büyükkökten's eponymous social networking site, which launched as an invite-only service in early 2004. Orkut went on to become a hit in Brazil and India, with those two countries making up the vast majority of traffic to the site. In other countries, the U.S. included, Orkut hardly carries the same caché of other Google properties.
Back in February, Google launched its Twitter competitor, Buzz, and was roundly condemned for the perceived privacy issues surrounding that service's e-mail integration. It was a rare misstep for the company, which immediately took steps to address those concerns. Since then, the service has more or less limped along, outside the usual press spotlight that tends to surround Google products.
The company has had a number of other social network flirtations over the years, including a failed bid for a chunk of Facebook (having lost to the equally social network clueless Microsoft) and the introduction of Google Profiles, which was, more than anything, a social component to existing properties like search.
More conservative companies would have no doubt cut their losses by now—but that thought process has never applied to Google, particularly when it comes to launching new properties. This is the company, mind you, that sponsored a race to the moon. So, rumors that the company is giving the world of social networking another go really ought not to come as a surprise.
The rumors about a new Google social networking initiative, referred to as "Google Me," surface late last week, thanks to a rogue tweet from Kevin Rose. The Digg co-founder wrote, in part, "[h]uge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon 'Google Me,' very credible source." The tweet soon disappeared from Twitter with no further explanation.
Apparently, the rumors were confirmed by former Facebook executive and Quora founder Adam D'Angelo who cited "reliable sources in a post on his own site, stating, ""This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this."
Of course, as confident as Rose and D'Angelo appear in their respective posts, this information will have to remain fodder for the rumor file until Google issues an announcement stating otherwise. After all, even with a company so nurturing of its developers' every whim, I'm sure there are a number of projects that never actually make it into the hands of consumers.
According to D'Angelo, Google launched the project upon realizing "that Buzz wasn't enough." Given the relative disappointment of Buzz, there should be little surprise that Google would go back to the drawing board. Interestingly, Google demonstrated this week that it has not, in fact, abandoned Buzz. The company further integrated the property with Social Search, a feature added to Search back in January, which offers up an integrated set of search results culled from Google users' social circle.
The relatively minor update sent Google Me rumors into something of a fever pitch. For a number of bloggers, the additional integration confirmed that Google is readying itself to launch a "super social network." Unless they know something we don't, it seems a bit premature to suggest such integration is anything nearing concrete evidence of Google Me.
It does, however, highlight something that will have to be essential to the service, should Google craft a successful Facebook competitor: cross-property integration. That, fortunately, is something at which the company has long excelled. Often times, as is certainly the case with Yahoo and Microsoft, an increase in company size leads to a seemingly inevitable breakdown in communications between departments, leading to a fair deal of overlap in properties and a general lack of integration with products, despite their having come from the same company. Google, however, develops products with such seamless integration in mind.
Between separate-but-connected properties like Google Profile, Social Search, and Buzz, Google already possesses a number of important social networking features. What it lacks, however, is a central hub designed with the intention of definitively tying together these sites into a true social network, in the Facebook and MySpace sense. Doing so would require a bit of reverse engineering—essentially, building a Facebook from the top, down.
The creation of such a centralized site would seemingly go against the purpose of the disparate Google Friend Connect, which was an attempt to make the entire Internet one big Google social network (see also: Facebook's "Like" button). It would, however, create the potential for another heavily-trafficked site that's easily monetized with Google's own giant ad network. It would also allow the company to push various Google social properties without the perceived intrusion of baking them into a program like Gmail.
Of course, the key here is delivering a slew of products in a manner that isn't overwhelming. Google learned that lesson the hard way with Google Wave. If, however, the company can repeat Facebook's user-friendly approach (and if anyone can, it's Google), a site like Google Me might actually succeed where properties like Orkut failed...

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