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Tag: accessories

  • Confirmed: Apple HomeKit Products to Start Shipping in June

    Confirmed: Apple HomeKit Products to Start Shipping in June

    apple-homekit

    Soon your iPhone will control your locks, cameras, lights, thermostats, doors, plugs and switches via corresponding apps.

    Apple has confirmed to Mashable that the HomeKit products will start shipping in June this year. This news comes in the wake of another published by Fortune claiming that Apple users might have to wait longer for HomeKit products.

    Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said in an email directed to Mashable that the HomeKit had already attracted dozes of partners who are ready to provide HomeKit accessories, with the first hitting the market as early as next month.

    The HomeKit platform was first announced in June last year during Apple’s developers conference promising to replace garage clickers, thermostat dials, and light switches with a single control panel that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices. Siri could for example be extended to respond to commands for HomeKit enabled products.

    It is important to note that Apple won’t be launching HomeKit by turning on a switch since the HomeKit products will be available once the approved accessory developers go live with their products.

    Apple opened the certification process last November and the first batch of approvals came in January. Apple says it is now waiting for the device makers to launch their products.

    Also read: Apple TV will be the center of Apple’s smart home

  • Memory Cards Earn Best Handset Accessory Revenue Return


    Memory cards provide the greatest revenue of all mobile phone add-ons, according ABI Research.

    This is despite cellular handset accessories such as chargers and batteries shipping far more units in what is today a USD $58 billion industry.

    Driven by the photo, audio and video demands of media-centric handsets and smartphones, these memory cards, largely from third-party suppliers such as SanDisk, will see a 17 per cent compound annual growth rate in shipments over the years to 2013.

    Industry analyst Michael Morgan said that of all accessories, memory cards deliver the best revenue return.

    "In fact, as production has outstripped demand the market is currently oversupplied, leading to a 60 per cent year-over-year fall in per-Megabyte prices," he said.

    "However, the memory capacity of the cards being sold is always increasing, and the resulting higher Megabyte volumes more than offset the decline in ASP."

    Handset makers have been putting inexpensive low-capacity cards into smartphone and media phone boxes for some time.

    Morgan said there is currently a point of friction between handset vendors and carriers: the operators want all memory cards out of the box, preferring to sell higher-capacity cards separately.

    "The challenge for mobile operators is that subsidizing handset accessories means losing some of the high margins that they earn through the sales of these products," he said.

    "But subsidies also mean that many more subscribers will have handset accessories such as memory cards, and will be more likely to use mobile music services or download songs, leading to higher data ARPUs for operators."

  • Opera Mini Updated And Working On Android


    The final release of the Opera Mini 4.2 browser is now available – and it works on Google’s Android phone.

    Opera Mini 4.2 is the first browser alternative for the Android platform, which comes preloaded with Chrome light.

    Already known for its fast internet access, Opera claims this has increased in speed by more than 30 per cent for users in the US since the previous beta version launched.

    It says the improvemnt is largely due to the opening of a new Opera Mini server park in the US – the Java ME-based browser works by rendering pages on a server and then sending them to the device, so reducing the connectivity demands of the phone.

    As well as being available for the T-Mobile G1 – as a download from the Android Market – Opera Mini also works with some Blackberry and Windows Mobile handsets.

    Opera reports that 21 million unique users browsed five billion pages using the Opera Mini beta in October 2008 alone, totaling a 490 per cent increase since October 2007.

    Other improvements to Opera Mini 4.2 include:

    • More than 90 language versions, including the recently added Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kirghiz, Lingala, Marathi, Malayalam, Mongolian, Oriya, Punjabi, Pashto, Sinhala, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Uzbek, Khmer, Kashmiri, Lao and Turkmen
    • Funky new skins for personalizing the look of Opera Mini
    • Opera Link support for notes, allowing users to sync their notes between the PC and Opera Mini
    • Improved real time streaming protocol (RTSP) handoff. This increases the number of phones with support for mobile video.