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iPhone X Was The Best-Selling Smartphone In Q1 2018
Eight things to expect at Google I/O 2018
Google Daydream VR goes standalone with Lenovo's Mirage Solo

iPhone X Was The Best-Selling Smartphone In Q1 2018

Posted: 05 May 2018 05:03 AM PDT

Contrary to reports, the iPhone X is doing extremely well. In fact, it was the best-selling smartphone in the first quarter of 2018, according to an analytics firm. ( Justin Sullivan | Getty Images )

Apple's big iPhone X gamble pays off with 16 million units sold worldwide in the first quarter of 2018, according to data from Strategy Analytics, making it the best-selling smartphone in that period.

The iPhone X was a huge gamble for a number of reasons. One, it was the most radical iPhone yet, featuring a new "notch" design and an OLED display Apple had to order from Samsung. Two, it introduced Face ID, a state-of-the-art facial recognition system so secure and accurate that Apple got rid of Touch ID. Three, it costs $1,000.

Sales figures now prove those didn't matter for buyers. The news also comes after increasing speculation that the iPhone X was flopping, or wasn't meeting Apple's expectations in terms of sales.

Apple Takes Top Spot In Worldwide Smartphone Sales

Once again, Apple is the king of smartphones. The top four models in terms of shipments and market share are iPhones — taking the number two, three, and four spots are the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone 7, respectively. In terms of market share, the iPhone X represents 4.6 percent of all smartphones sold in the given period.

The report states that 345 million smartphones were sold globally in Q1 2018. In fifth place is the Xiaomi Redmi 5A at 5.4 million units, followed by the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus at 5.3 million units.

It's worth noting that Apple does not release sales figures for individual iPhone models, but the company confirmed in this week's earnings that it sold 52.2 million iPhones, with the iPhone X selling the most units out of all the models throughout the quarter.

"Customers chose iPhone X more than any other iPhone each week in the March quarter, just as they did following its launch in the December quarter," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "Since we split the line with the launch of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in 2014, this is the first cycle in which the top of the line iPhone model has also been the most popular."

iPhone X In Q2

Despite the success, rumors say Apple will produce only 8 million iPhone X units for the second quarter of 2018, Fast Company reports. The article suggests that Apple's production cut is the result of lukewarm sales, and that the company may focus on selling off an accumulated inventory of unsold iPhone X units.

Apple is expected to unveil three new iPhone models later this year, one of which is allegedly a cheaper iPhone with a 6.1-inch LCD screen.

See Now:27 Most Inspirational And Motivational Quotes By Influential Leaders In Tech

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Eight things to expect at Google I/O 2018

Posted: 05 May 2018 06:00 AM PDT

For a company as big and sprawling as Google, an annual developer conference can feel overwhelming. And, frankly, it is. Google offers a dizzying number of services and dabbles in almost every consumer tech industry under the sun, not to mention the 7 billion-plus user core internet products it owns and operates. But the company has a measured tempo when it comes to GoogleI/O, and we've come to understand how it prioritizes certain products over others come May every year.

At this year'sI/O, which will be held again at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California starting Tuesday, May 8th, we know we'll be hearing about the future of Android and Google's artificial intelligence efforts. But there will also be news on everything from its new wearable platform, Wear OS, and Google Assistant to Android TV, Google Home, Google Play, and Search. This is the time of the year when Google pulls out all the stops to showcase how its software is smarter and more forward-looking than the products from its rivals Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

So here's what we can anticipate about the future of Google on display next week.

Android P

Google I/O typically revolves around the latest version of Android, which this year will be version P. Following last year's more structural overhaul of Android with Oreo, which revamped notifications and streamlined how smartphones could be updated in the future, Google's latest approach to mobile software is more visual and focused on interface design improvements.

We've been playing with the first developer preview since early March, and we can already identify the big trends. Android P is focused on making room for the now pervasive display notch on full-screen smartphones, giving users more granular privacy settings, and unifying and simplifying the design language and usability of menus, docks, and settings screens. There's also a rumor Android P might incorporate some of Apple's iPhone X gesture design. We'll get even more info on Android P come Tuesday, when Google is expected to release a second developer preview.

Artificial Intelligence

Beyond Android, I/O is an event to get up to speed on all things artificial intelligence at Google. CEO Sundar Pichai has for years been positioning AI as the secret sauce to his company's future: software that can see and understand the world, identify objects, and parse natural language will help nearly every Google product improve in the coming years. That process has already started, with products like the voice- and text-based Google Assistant software, Google Translate, and the object and image recognition platform Google Lens. There's also all the ways Google's AI efforts feed into other Alphabet businesses, like London's DeepMind research lab and the Waymo self-driving car unit.

That said, I/O will be more consumer and developer facing, so we should expect to hear more about products like Google Lens, as well as the company's TensorFlow platform and its Tensor Processing Unit chips. Those chips are the core of the company's specially designed AI training systems, and they help the company accelerate the learning process for its neural networks. Also expect to hear a lot of the same grandiose predictions about AI that we heard onstage at Facebook's F8 developer conference last week, when executives also described AI as the future of Facebook's business. Of course, it's no surprise that Google and Facebook compete for top talent, as both companies have rival AI research divisions that command some of the highest salaries in the tech industry.

Google Assistant & Google Home

Google Assistant and the Google Home hardware family it primarily lives on are slated to be big consumer-facing focuses for the company at this year's I/O. Assistant remains Google's largest competitive push against Amazon's Alexa and, to a lesser extent, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. And while Assistant does live on iOS and Android devices as an app and voice interface, it's most readily useful as the OS layer for any number of smart home devices, starting with Google's smart speaker family.

We should expect to hear about some new features for Google Assistant, as well as some new integrations for Google Home. The company will likely save its hardware announcements for the standard fall Pixel event, so don't expect any new Google-branded products. But considering Google has been aggressively expanding the availability of Google Home products and third-party developer support for Google Assistant, I/O should have some exciting news on both fronts.

Google Photos, Google News, and Google Play

While they aren't necessarily the most exciting subjects on the list, Google Photos and Google News, alongside the general Play Store platform, are hugely popular products that do always earn a mention or two during I/O every year. Most notably, Google Photos is home to most of the feature improvements and AI advancements coming from Google Lens, so we'll likely hear about how the company's image and object recognition software is improving its photo storage app and helping it surface interesting insights and automate the creation of montages, GIFs, and other fun short-form video content.

AdAge also reported last week that Google is planning a revamp of its News platform on both desktop and mobile. That reportedly will include the folding in of the Google Newsstand app into an new all-in-one Google News mobile app, along with more video from YouTube and faster load times courtesy of the company's proprietary AMP format on all platforms. The new Google News is expected to debut tomorrow at I/O during the keynote. And, like usual, we should get some new stats on the popularity of Android apps via the Play Store.

Gaming

Google has been trying to crack gaming for a while now, usually by leveraging the ubiquity of Android and its success in the living room with Chromecast to create some form of hybrid mobile-console solution. Unfortunately, it's never quite materialized. That may change soon, as Google appears to have a lot cooking in the gaming department. First, there's Yeti, the company's yet-to-be-announced Chromecast-powered game streaming service first reported back in February.

There's also the company's new social-gaming startup Arcade from tech entrepreneur Michael Sayman, now at Google after a high-profile stint as a young 17-year-old employee of Facebook, that looks to be taking cues from HQ Trivia. And then there's Google Play Instant, the Instant Apps-powered service that lets Android phones try mobile game apps with a tap by powering them through the mobile browser like a web game. Any one of these projects, or all of them, may be on the agenda at I/O, so gaming fans should keep their eyes peeled.

Material Design Refresh

Google's once-lauded Material Design philosophy — the foundation of a vast majority of the UI and UX of modern Android, Chrome, and mobile app design — is now about four years old. So that's probably why we've been hearing about a "Material Design Refresh" replacing previous documentation citing a "Material Design 2." Google may not be planning a full-fledged sequel to Material Design, but it's clearly thinking about how to update its visual language for 2018, and we may hear more about that I/O next week.

Building the case for a new version of Material Design is a subtle change to Chrome tabs spotted last month alongside a new Material Design document on the Chromium site, rumors of a big Chrome redesign in September with a focus on touch controls and ChromeOS benefits, and the giant Gmail redesign that went live last week. All signs are pointing to a more unified approach to software across Android, Chromebooks, desktop Chrome, and web apps — and I/O would be the prime destination to unveil that to the world.

Wear OS

In addition to Android P, I/O is the time of the year when Google holds a kind of state of the union on its wearable technology platform, now called Wear OS after a rebranding from the previous Android Wear name. The new, inaugural Wear OS software has been out in developer preview alongside Android P, and it's brought some much-needed improvements to battery life along with a welcome dark mode for the user interface to make looking at the watch at a glance much easier on the eyes. And just this week, Google announced several updates for Wear OS that bring more Google Assistant features to the platform.

At I/O, Google will likely shed more light on the first Wear OS update and release a second and more widely available developer preview (the first was restricted to Huawei models). We'll also hopefully get a better idea of how Wear OS reimagines what smart watch software can do, particularly around concepts like voice control with Google Assistant integrations.

Android TV & Android Auto

Developments regarding Google's set-top box software, Android TV, and its in-car infotainment product, Android Auto, have been relatively quiet of late. But any news we get on those fronts will likely come at I/O this year. Android TV has been around for a few years, and last year we saw a redesigned home screen for the Android O version, but not much else. It's also worth mentioning a rumor that Google might release a new 4K Chromecast-like Android TV dongle that would include the full TV interface and possibly a remote, though that comes courtesy of images included in an FCC filing that have since been taken down.

As for Android Auto, that software has also been around for a few years, but it's most recently added wireless support for Pixel and Nexus devices as of last month. Back in January, Google announced that its Assistant software would soon power voice functions for Android Auto, so it's likely I/O will mark the launch of that feature.

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Google Daydream VR goes standalone with Lenovo's Mirage Solo

Posted: 05 May 2018 05:35 AM PDT

Enlarge/ The Lenovo Mirage Solo headset with its WorldSense cameras clearly visible on the front.
Lenovo

Daydream, Google's foray into the crowded virtual reality space, has hitherto used headsets that are simply holsters, a way of holding an Android smartphone right in front of your face so that it works as a pair of VR goggles. This makes Daydream's cost of entry cheap—the headset can be a completely passive device with no electronics of its own—which is important for making VR accessible.

Lenovo's $400 Mirage Solo, out today, is the first standalone Daydream headset. You don't slot a phone into this one—the device has all the hardware it needs to provide a standalone VR experience. The hardware inside the headset is certainly phone-like; it has a Snapdragon 835 processor with 4GB RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 4,000mAh battery. It also contains phone-like sensors, with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer. But because it's built for VR, it has a couple of extra sensors: a pair of world-facing cameras that Google calls "WorldSense."

WorldSense is Google's inside-out, six-degree-of-freedom motion-tracking solution. As with similar systems in Microsoft's HoloLens and the various Windows Mixed Reality headsets, the system combines data from the device's internal sensors with data from the cameras to track the headset's position and orientation in space, without requiring the fixed-base stations that are used on the first-generation HTC Vive and Oculus Rift devices.

Enlarge/ The Lenovo Mirage Solo packs in plenty of hardware, as this exploded view shows.
Lenovo

The screen is also special. It's a 5.5-inch IPS LCD screen with a 75Hz refresh rate and 2560×1440 resolution, providing a 110-degree field of view. Lenovo says that it has some special sauce to reduce latency and eliminate blur. I don't know precisely what Lenovo has done, but it seems very effective. Even under fast motion, I didn't see any blur or image ghosting—just a clear, bright picture. The screen does have a lot of backlight glow, though; when it was supposed to be black, it looked decidedly gray.

All the hardware is packed into a smart white headset that adjusts with a single dial at the back. It has a handful of ports and buttons: a microSD slot, a USB Type-C port, power and volume buttons, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. To control Daydream software, it also includes a white version of the Daydream controller.

The battery should last for about two and a half hours. I'm not sure I would want to wear the headset that long. The Solo was comfortable enough for short periods, but it's quite heavy (1.42lb/0.65kg, compared to 1.04lb/0.47kg for the Oculus Rift and the newest revision of the HTC Vive), no doubt a consequence of all the sensors and battery it has to include. It also suffers the same issues as I've found on every VR headset I've ever used: it ends up squashing my glasses against my face, and the foam band used to create a seal against the face gets very hot, very fast. Still, I found it easier to take off and put on than some other headsets I've used; it's certainly more convenient than the HoloLens, for example.

The software is Google's Daydream, which is based on Android 8.0.0. A handful of titles have been updated to support WorldSense, and Google is promising to have about 70 soon. The Daydream software has one particular feature that I thought was sensible. One of the frustrating aspects of both VR and AR systems is that you can't readily show people what you're seeing. If you're playing a game, for example, there's no easy way to tell someone "come and watch this cool thing I did" because only the person with the headset can actually see what's going on. Daydream's solution to this is to include Chromecast capabilities within the software, so you can project what you're seeing to an external display. This potentially makes VR a lot less antisocial.

The Daydream home screen.
VR photos are mildly entertaining.
It's Android, but of course not the latest Android.

In using the Mirage Solo, you can immediately feel one disadvantage of the self-contained model. My Android phone is already set up with my Google account, my Wi-Fi network, and so on. The headset isn't. This meant lots of typing out passwords by clicking one letter at a time using the controller, and it's tremendously tedious. Doubly so, since, with the headset on, I can't read my 1Password window to see what my actual password is. This made setting up my Google account an exercise in frustration.

But the self-contained advantage was also apparent: you can walk around with the headset on, and you don't have to worry about cables. The WorldSense system attempts to map what's around you as you do. In principle, this opens Daydream up to a range of room-scale VR applications where you can freely walk around. In practice, I live in Brooklyn in an 800-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment with practically every spot of floor space occupied by furniture, computers, or cats; I can't move more than a foot or two in any direction before crashing into something. Room-scale VR simply isn't relevant to my life. The tracking was accurate to the extent that I could test it, and we know the principles of the tracking are sound because they work well on other platforms, so I have no doubt that it would work adequately over larger distances.

I also found that WorldSense did very little to stop me from walking into the wall. If I strayed too far, it would tell me to move back to the safe area, and sometimes it would tell me that WorldSense was disabled (though this seemed pretty random and arbitrary). But at no point did it tell me, "Hey, there's a wall right in front of you—take a step back!" This feels like a strange and dangerous omission. I can't promise that it's meant to work this way (and honestly, I feel it's almost surely not supposed to work this way), but that's how it was for me.

The addition of WorldSense support means greater flexibility in the software. There's a Blade Runner game, for example, that has been updated for WorldSense, and rather than merely warping around the world, you can walk around as you investigate things. This makes the game feel a bit more real and immersive. To really enjoy it, though, I'd need to live somewhere much bigger. Aside from the titles with WorldSense support, I found the overall software experience very similar to the one Ars Gaming Editor Kyle Orland had in late 2016: it's quite limited, dominated by simple games, some educational software, and 360-degree video.

To this list, Google is adding a fourth category: 180-degree pictures and videos. 180-degree video is much the same as 360-degree video—you can move your head and look around—with the obvious constraint that you can't look behind you. This restriction has a number of advantages. It's much easier to shoot 180-degree video—360-degree video has the awkward problem of "where do you hold the camera such that you're not visible?" which isn't an issue with 180-degree video—and 180-degree video is much easier to view and treat as if it were regular video content.

Enlarge/ Lenovo Mirage Camera. Two lenses, both 180-degree fisheyes.
Lenovo

To make this 180-degree video easier to produce, Lenovo has built a dedicated VR180 camera. The $300 Mirage Camera is the size of a small point-and-shoot camera. There's no screen on the back, and on the front are two 13 megapixel cameras, each with a fisheye lens with a 180-degree field of view. You can shoot pictures and 4K videos using the camera alone, or you can pair it to a phone running the VR180 app for Android or iOS and use the phone as a viewfinder. The phone connects to the camera with Bluetooth for the initial setup and Wi-Fi for the data transfer. In addition to storing video locally, you can also use the Mirage Camera to live-stream VR180 content to YouTube. (The device has 16GB of internal storage and a microSD slot—though oddly, the spec sheet says it's only good for SD cards up to 128GB, compared to 256GB for the headset.)

The VR180 photos and videos are actually quite fun. The slight stereoscopic effect and the enormous field of view can add a level of interest to snapshots that would otherwise be mundane. It's a little strange taking pictures with such a camera because there's not much composition of the picture when compared to a camera with a more conventional field of view. You just point it in a direction and it captures everything from floor to ceiling.

The VR180 software connects to the camera over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
You can use the app as a viewfinder for the camera and marvel at the fisheye distortion.

Both of these devices work as they're supposed to. WorldSense is an important step for the Daydream ecosystem; inside-out, six-degree-of-freedom motion tracking is essential for any practical VR or AR system—the days of fixed base stations should be behind us—and Google's system appears to work well. I don't have a strong sense of whether it's better than Microsoft's similar tech in the Windows Mixed Reality headsets, but the Mirage Solo has an advantage that those other systems don't: it's untethered. The combination of accurate motion tracking and the freedom to walk around is compelling—at least for those with space. As has always been the case with VR, the real issue is the software: does the platform really have the applications to make the investment worth it? I'm not so sure.

If you are heavily invested in and excited by VR, the Mirage Camera is an easy way to make VR180 content. This kind of thing plays well to the limitations of the headset; you wouldn't want to wear the headset for hours on end, but you wouldn't want to look at someone's holiday snaps for hours on end, either. A few minutes looking at some family pictures and videos? That's much more reasonable.

At $400 for the headset, it's twice the price of the Oculus Go. The Oculus Go is another untethered, all-in-one headset, but unlike the Solo, it doesn't have six-degree-of-freedom tracking (so it only offers sit-down experiences), and its processor, a Snapdragon 821, is weaker. The software ecosystem is also different. Although the Oculus Go also runs Android (7.1.2), it isn't Daydream. Instead, it's Oculus' software lineup.

Overall, the Mirage Solo and Mirage Camera feel very competent, but I don't think they'll change anyone's mind about VR. If you're excited about VR, the standalone, untethered, inside-out tracking headset represents an important milestone. But if you're not, I don't think there's anything here that's going to radically change your perception. The space constraints and lack of clear killer applications remain important sticking points, and they're not something that a piece of hardware can change.

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