'iPhone 5' expected in this year

Apple's next generation iPhone will have a faster processor and will begin shipping in September, according to three people with direct knowledge of the company's supply chain.

The production of the new iPhone will start in July or August and the smartphone will look largely similar to the iPhone 4, one of the sources told Reuters.

The iPhone - introduced in 2007 with the touchscreen, on-demand application template now adopted by its rivals - remains the gold standard in the booming smartphone market.

Reports on the timeline of the new iPhone launch vary, though it is largely expected that Apple will likely refresh its iPhone4 later this year. It was introduced in June 2010 by chief executive Steve Jobs and shipped in the same month.

The timing would mean a delay from the usual 12-month refresh cycle for the iPhone since its introduction in 2007, when new versions have been shown off at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. That is presently scheduled for 6-10 June.

The sources declined to be identified because the plans for the new iPhone were not yet public. An Apple spokeswoman in Hong Kong was not available for comment.

he sources declined to be identified because the plans for the new iPhone were not yet public. An Apple spokeswoman in Hong Kong was not available for comment.

The iPhone is one of Apple's most successful products, with more than 16 million sold in the last quarter of 2010. It accounted for more than a third of the company's sales in the quarter.

Apple sources many of its components from Taiwan-based suppliers, many are expected to benefit from a rise in sales as some of them rely on the US company for about 20-40% of their business, said Vincent Chen, an analyst at Yuanta Securities.

"For some suppliers, Apple is their cash cow, or their bread and butter," Chen said. "With all these versions being launched so frequently, it will be the so-called low-margin suppliers, such as those that assemble the phones, who will benefit the most."

Suppliers to the new iPhone include camera module maker Largan Precision, touchscreen panel maker Wintek Corp and case maker Foxconn Technology, two of the people said.

The companies would begin production either in July or August before shipping components to Hon Hai Precision Industry, flagship of Foxconn, for assembly, they said. Officials at Largan, Wintek and Foxconn declined to comment.

On Wednesday, Largan's Taipei-listed shares ended up 3.7%, Hon Hai rose 4.3% and Foxconn rose 6.6%, outpacing the benchmark Taiex share index's 2% advance.

Apple, a big purchaser of touchscreen displays and flash memory, is also dependent on Japan for some of its key components, sparking concern that the disruption due to the crisis there may hurt its gross margins.

But other reports have suggested it moved quickly after the earthquakein March to secure supplies from other sources.

Apple is expected to report another spectacular quarter on Wednesday evening, tempered by growing caution over how supply constraints will squeeze margins and restrain iPhone and iPad sales. Early estimates suggest it will have sold 18m iPhones and between 4m and 7m iPads in the quarter.

Google activating 350,000 Android devices per day

During its first-quarter earning call, search giant Google offered a few more insights into its mobile initiatives, but much of the proceedings involved Google's unexpectedly low profits and its efforts in social media.

Specifically, Google's Jeff Huber said the company's mobile search traffic has increased 5,000 percent during the past two years, and that company is now activating around 350,000 Android smartphones per day. Separately, Google's Susan Wojoicki said Google's AdMOb mobile advertising platform is now recording 150 million ad requests per month from Android and Apple iOS devices, a figure she said has increased 50 percent during the past four months. She also said the company now counts more than half a million advertisers using company's click-to-call mobile advertising function.

"These are just a few examples," Wojcicki said of Google's mobile business.

Google executives also briefly discussed the tablet market, highlighted by the success of Apple's iPad. In response to a question on tablets, Google's Huber said that "tablets are doing very well. There's certainly been a lot of growth in that segment." Specifically, he said Android 3.0, dubbed Honeycomb, is built for the tablet form factor, and that Google recently introduced an advertising product that allows online advertisers to specifically target their ads to tablet devices.

But analysts attending the company's quarterly earnings conference call continued to question Google's social strategy, apparently worried about the growing dominance of Facebook on the Internet. Google launched its new +1 button earlier this month in an effort to challenge Facebook and its ubiquitous "like" button. Google executives repeatedly noted the company's social networking efforts will continue.

Further, analysts worried over Google's lower-than-expected profits. Google's net revenue rose during the first quarter, but the company's profits fell below Wall Street expectations, according to Reuters. Google's net income in the first quarter of 2011 was $2.30 billion, up from the $1.96 billion the company earned in the first quarter of 2010.

Google executives said the company continues to invest in new functions and areas. "I'm very, very optimistic about our future," said Google CEO Larry Page during a brief appearance on the conference call.

参考：http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/google-activating-350000-android-devices-day/2011-04-14?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

Motion detection enhances wireless network switching

MIT researchers have presented a set of new communication protocols that uses information about a portable electronic device's movement to improve performance when switching between wireless networks

In experiments on MIT's campus-wide Wi-Fi network, the researchers discovered that, for users moving around, the protocols could often improve network throughput -- the amount of information that devices could send and receive in a given period -- by about 50 per cent.

The researchers used motion detection to improve distinct communications protocols. One is said to govern the smartphone's selection of the nearest transmitter.

"Let's say you get off at the train station and start walking toward your office" said the researcher. "What happens today is that your phone immediately connects to the Wi-Fi access point with the strongest signal. But by the time it is finished doing that, your have walked on, so the best access point has changed. And that keeps happening."

By contrast, he added, the new protocol selects an access point on the basis of the user’s inferred trajectory.

‘We connect you off the bat to an access point that has this trade-off between how long you’re likely to be connected to it and the throughput you’re going to get,’ said Balakrishnan.

In their experiments, the MIT researchers found that, with one version of their protocol, a moving mobile phone would have to switch transmitters 40 per cent less frequently than it would with existing protocols. A variation of the protocol improved throughput by about 30 per cent.

Another of the protocols governs a phone’s selection of bit rate, or the rate at which it sends and receives information.

Bit rate needs to be tailored to the bandwidth available, given that data can be lost when sending too much data over a weak connection. Solving that problem by keeping the bit rate slow can lead to wasted data capacity.

When a device is in motion, the available bandwidth is constantly fluctuating, so selecting a bit rate becomes more difficult. Because a device using the MIT protocol knows when it’s in motion, it also knows when to be more careful in choosing a bit rate.

In the researchers’ experiments, the gains in throughput from bit-rate selection varied between 20 per cent and 70 per cent but consistently hovered around 50 per cent.

A third protocol governs the behaviour of the wireless basestations rather than the devices that connect to them.

Ordinarily, a basestation knows that a device has broken contact only after a long enough silence. In the interim, the basestation might try to send the same data to the device repeatedly, waiting for acknowledgment and wasting time and power. With information about the device’s trajectory, the basestation can make an educated guess about when it will lose contact.

The MIT team presented its work at the Eighth Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, which took place in Boston in March.

Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/sectors/electronics/news/motion-detection-enhances-wireless-network-switching/1008290.article#ixzz1JgWA6Vod

参考：http://www.theengineer.co.uk/sectors/electronics/news/motion-detection-enhances-wireless-network-switching/1008290.article