The Zenfone 4 and Zenfone 5 have sold considerably well in India, and Asus (TPE:2357) is now looking to continue that momentum this year with the launch of its latest handset, the Zenfone 2. Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the Zenfone 2 grabbed headlines in the tech community as being the first device to feature an astounding 4GB RAM.

Launched in Taiwan in the month of March for what amounts to $295, the 4GB variant (ZE551ML) features great hardware for the price, including a 5.5-inch full-HD display, Intel’s quad-core 2.3GHz Atom Z3580 CPU, 64GB internal memory, microSD slot, dual SIM and LTE connectivity and a 13MP camera at the back along with a 5MP front camera and 3,000mAh battery. Software-wise, the Zenfone 2 features the latest version of Android 5.0 with Asus’ Zen UI rounding off the customizations.

While devices such as the Zenfone 2 are highly anticipated in Western countries, in India, the handset will encounter fierce competition from the likes of Lenovo (HKG:0992), Xiaomi and Huawei, all of whom offer stellar hardware at an affordable price. The differentiator for Asus, at least in India, will be the 4GB ZE551ML variant, which will make it the first device to offer that much memory.

In terms of hardware, the Zenfone 2 is up there with the likes of Xiaomi’s Mi Note, which the Chinese vendor has dubbed the “best smartphone available today.” Xiaomi has become a force to reckon with in India, but Asus has also enjoyed a healthy dose of attention from consumers with its budget offerings. Furthermore, the brushed metal design of the Zenfone 2 looks far more polished than the glass back on offer with the Mi Note. Pricing may also turn out to be a factor that determines the fate of either device in the country, with Xiaomi already showing that it can offer its products for as low as what they are available in China.

There isn’t an exact launch date mentioned for the Zenfone 2 in India, but it should be making its debut sometime before the end of the month. Along with the 4GB model, there will be several affordable options that offer 2GB RAM and a lower resolution screen.

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While 4K certainly has its uses and benefits on larger displays, the potential use cases on such a small smartphone screen are negligible at best. On an average smartphone screen, which is usually around 5.5-6 inches, the resolution of QHD — let alone 4K — is too great for the eye to appreciate. Apple’s Retina display has a pixel-per inch density of 326. A QHD display on a smartphone would equal something in the range of 538.

A PPI of 538 is far beyond the maximum resolution that the human eye can recognize. There is a bit of controversy as to what the highest practical PPI is for a 5.5 inch screen held 12-18 inches away from the eye, but the consensus holds that it’s 477 PPI at 12 inches and 318 PPI at 18 inches. Of course, holding it closer than 12 inches away from your face would make it difficult to properly focus.

So this means that the iPhone’s Retina resolution introduced in 2010 is the highest practical resolution for a smartphone sized screen. Of course with bigger screens found on phablets and full-on tablets this figure jumps.

QHD and 4K smartphones are impractical

The other issue with QHD and 4K displays on smartphones is the substantial battery drain that comes as a result. Battery technology has reached a ceiling, yet the demands keep on increasing. A QHD or 4K screen requires substantially more push from the SoC to drive a screen of that resolution, which means the SoC will require more battery power for all tasks.

Before the 2015 Mobile World Congress kicked off, Huawei (SHE:002502) announced that it would not be producing 4K smartphones because it simply is not worth the battery drain.

“4K needs a lot of power, so if you use it you have to make compromises. A 4K display on a smartphone may give you half a day of battery life but a 2K display can give you maybe one day or more,” President of the Handset Product Line Kevin Ho is quoted as saying. “4K has four times the pixels of Full HD so the power consumption is maybe 4 or 8 times as much as Full HD so the smartphone has to have compromises with battery life.”

All about competition

Pushing up the resolution of smartphone displays  is not the only way to improve the quality of the screen. There’s much to be done to improve color depth, backlight quality, and the ability for the screen to display in bright conditions.

But the resolution race is a way for vendors to compete with each other. The screen resolution of a device is an easy and digestible metric to understand. But for consumers this resolution race isn’t, in the end, a value add as it does little to increase productivity or performance.   

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People visiting Barcelona this month for the Mobile World Congress 2015 will be greeted by Huawei’s (SHE: 002502) new smart watch, which introduces a mix of old and new in a very good way.

The new wearable was simply introduced as the “Huawei Watch”. The basic overall design of the watch exude a classic look and finish, something that we are accustomed to with old-century type watches. The screens are even glazed in sapphire crystal, as well as being encased in stainless steel, which clearly introduces it as more than just another wearable. What’s obviously different though is that this is a smart watch, and has all the nifty perks modern wearables have today. It has a 1.2 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of internal storage. The screen itself shows off its bright and crisp 1.4-inch 400×400 AMOLED display.

Like with many other wearables, it will feature various kinds of sensors and monitors, including a barometer, a heart rate monitor, and a standard accelerometer/gyroscope. It will also use the Android Wear OS.

As the advertisement states “classic design and impeccable craftsmanship” meshed with “state-of-the-art wearable technology”. So far, at least according to the demo announcement, the “Huawei Watch” does not disappoint. The old, stylistic look certainly warrants it the premium treatment, as quaint as it may seem to be. Performance-wise, it should be able to handle the Android Wear OS, though we may have to see the actual commercial version to firmly assess this.

Ad placements at the Barcelona Airport have been welcoming arriving guests with a discreet announcement for its “Huawei Watch”, even since before Huawei’s official announcement of the new product a few days ago. The billboards, which has the slogan “Timeless design. Smart within.” written on it, are basically teasers that introduced one of its three possible color versions: silver, gold, and black.

No prices announced yet, but Huawei announced that it will be available very soon.

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Global smartphone shipments continued to grow in 2014 while more and more Chinese brand names have shared a large portion of occupation in the global market.

A latest research report by TrendForce said that global smartphone shipments for 2014 totaled 1.167 billion units, a year-on-year increase of 25.9%, while 453.4 million units of them belonged to Chinese brands.

“ The year of 2014 was definitely an impressive year for Chinese brands as they gained more share of the global market,” said Avril Wu (吳雅婷), global smartphone analyst for TrendForce.

TrendForce’s research stated that Chinese vendors managed to encompass almost 40% of the global shipments and represent six of the top ten smartphone brands worldwide. The pooled shipments of numerous Chinese brands, however, still could not threatened global brand leaders – Samsung (KRX: 005930) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL). TrendForce said that the total shipments for Samsung and Apple accounted for 518 million units.

“This shows that the fierce competition among the brands relatively and severely narrowed their profit margins,” Wu said.

Although its being listed as the top smartphone brand name with the most shipments, Samsung, however, has been through a difficult year in 2014 as its market share dropped to 28%, compared with 32.5% of the previous year. Wu said that Samsung’s large-size and high-end Galaxy Note series faced stiff challenges from Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus, while its midlevel and low-end smartphone shipments were undercut by inexpensive Chinese brands. Samsung’s overall shipment target had undergone downward revisions since the beginning of 2014, with annual growth in shipments only at 8.4%, which was about 326.4 million units.

In 2014, Apple maintained its high annual growth rate of 24.5%, which was about 191.3 million units shipped worldwide. With 16.4% market share, Apple was a solid number two in the worldwide smartphone rankings. Apple’s position was attributed to the success of its first large-size smartphone model, the iPhone 6 Plus. This new category addressed Apple’s lack of smartphones with above five-inch screens and thus significantly raised the fourth quarter shipping ratio.

For LG (KRX: 066570), TrendForce said that its strategy of “promoting high quality products at low prices” paid off with strong market reception to its flagship smartphone models, ranging from G2/G2 Pro to the newest G3.

“Right now G3 is the first smartphone outfitted with a 2K screen that gives users better viewing experience,” Wu said. “This showed LG’s advantage of having a display panel manufacturer as under its wings.”

For that reason, LG was the dark horse of 2014 with its ranking jumped up to number four and annual shipment growth at 75.4%, which was about 70 million units.

While Lenovo (HKG: 0992) officially completed its acquisition of Motorola from Google in the fourth quarter of 2014, the acquisition and reorganization process took almost a year since Lenovo’s announcement. Lenovo’s total shipments in 2014 exceeded 90 million units and its annual growth surpassed 100%. It ranked first place among Chinese smartphone vendors and third worldwide with its 7.9% global market share.

With the introduction of the Honor 6 model in 2014, Huawei (SHE: 002502) changed its strategy of using smartphone chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek for its high-end products. The Honor 6 is packed with Kirin 920, a 4G chipset developed by Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon. With approximately 70 million units shipped and an annual growth around 70%, Huawei was ranked number five in the 2014 worldwide smartphone shipments.

Xiaomi, meanwhile, was recognized as the “best cost-performance products.” Its flagship models cost between US$ 300 and US$ 350. Since Xiaomi was launched in China during the latter half of 2011, the “China’s Apple” has been able to more than double its growth each year, that its 2014 annual shipment growth exceeded 200% with 60 million units shipped, and at one point managed to edge out the leading vendors in China such as Samsung, Huawei, and Lenovo.

Xiaomi was ranked as the sixth on the same chart for 2014.

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For as much as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) might try, it’s had a tough time convincing hardware partners to take the plunge and invest serious resources in developing Windows Phone powered handsets. Now, Huawei’s (SHE:002502) head of international media affairs has come out with a reason why vendors are hesitant to develop for the platform: it’s simply not a profitable endeavor.

“We didn’t make any money in Windows Phone,” Huawei head of international media affairs Joe Kelly told the Seattle Times in an interview. “Nobody made any money in Windows Phone.”

Earlier this year Huawei — which has a poor reputation in the US due to associations with Chinese espionage —  cancelled plans to develop a dual-boot Android and Windows Phone handset targeted to the US market. Huawei spokespeople later said to the press that the project was canned because the cost-benefit analysis was not there. The R&D costs did not meet the projected sales.

In order to drum up interest amongst vendors for the mobile operating system, Microsoft pledged earlier in the year to give it away for free.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) reported their earnings for their fiscal fourth quarter of 2014, calendar Q3 2014 as well as the whole fiscal year of 2014 which ends in the calendar third quarter of every year. Qualcomm reported profits of $1.89 billion on $6.69 billion in revenue which boils down to an EPS of $1.11. Qualcomm’s revenues were up 3% year over year and down 2% from the last quarter, which worries some investors. Additionally, Qualcomm’s profit was up 26% year over year, but down 15% from the previous quarter.

However, Qualcomm’s quarterly figures missed on both revenue and non-GAAP EPS based on analysts’ expectations. Analysts had a consensus prediction of $1.31 EPS, which Qualcomm missed by $0.05 and they had a revenue target of $7.03 billion, and Qualcomm missed on that as well by $330 million.

Qualcomm also reported their results for the whole fiscal 2014 year, which showed the company as reporting $26.49 billion in revenue and a non-GAAP EPS of $5.27 while shippin 861 million MSM chips globally, an absolutely crazy number of SoCs. And if you take into account that

The primary problems that Qualcomm has right now is that they have a very strong position in the mobile market and are the leading SoC and baseband vendor for almost all of the leading smartphone vendors. In many regions, this has made Qualcomm very profitable and helped them grow to the $26 billion a year company that they are. They also managed to generate $8 billion in profit over the course of the last year, which is up from $6.8 billion in the previous fiscal year, a pretty significant improvement by any measure.

However, Qualcomm’s situation in China appears to be worsening rather than improving. They have plenty of products and IP that Chinese OEMs wish to utilize in their products, but are having a hard time getting them to properly license those technologies and pay for/accurately report how many Qualcomm licensed devices they are shipping and for how much. Additionally, Qualcomm is being probed by the Chinese government for the very reason that they are not Chinese and they are very present in the Chinese market. This very likely has to do with the fact that many large western companies have been probed in China recently and is a mere political move by the Chinese government to get more foreign technological investment.

Qualcomm’s outlook for the fiscal year of 2015 is what really drove Qualcomm’s stock downward today on yesterday’s news, with the company expecting revenues of $26.8 billion to $28.8 billion and an EPS of $5.05 to $5.35 which is below the consensus estimates of $28.9B and $5.58. The stock fell a whopping 8.5% today in regular trading after losing 6% in after hours trading yesterday and continues to lose ground into after hours trading, slipping an additional 2%. At the time of publication, Qualcomm’s stock is at $69.19 which is significantly lower than the $77 it was trading at before earnings were announced yesterday. As we learned in the case of Samsung, and now Qualcomm, nobody is invincible.

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When Khronos had originally announced OpenVX and the associated APIs, there was a lot of excitement about how it could help simplify and unify computer vision within the industry. That announcement was merely the establishment of the working group and the companies that would contribute to the standard’s development and finalization. With today’s announcement, however, OpenVX officially becomes an industry standard that can be commercially deployed within products and developed for immediately. This finalized and ratified OpenVX 1.0 version brings a laundry list of features that help abstract the underlying computer vision interaction with hardware in order to make cross-platform implementations more possible.

Keep in mind that OpenVX is an API abstraction that makes implementing computer vision easier and more vendor agnostic while also giving more tools to improve performance and optimize power consumption. The target goals are to help bring mobile SoC vendors as well as embedded vendors to bring more refined computer vision implementations to their customers and make developing for computer vision more universal as well. OpenVX helps take prototyped OpenCV implementations and turn them into finalized products that can ship into whatever market they are targeted towards, OpenVX is designed to bring production quality computer vision to these vendors and their customers.

OpenVX Companies

Since the announcement of OpenVX and the finalization of OpenVX 1.0 as a standard, the number of companies that have joined the working group have also expanded and may actually help give you an idea of who is interested in utilizing computer vision in their products as well as who will have a more developer-friendly environment. Also, the spec itself has not changed since the original announcement, but rather now there are conformance tests available in order to ensure that certain implementations of OpenVX are interoperable between vendor implementations and adhere to the standard. Also, since the original announcement, there are now two implementations of OpenVX that prove the design, one being a Khronos sample implementation that will be available opne source by the end of the year, and another from Nvidia that is already working in the alpha phase as part of the VisionWorks vision SDK.

Unfortunately, one company missing from the OpenVX working group is Apple, who is a member of other working groups like OpenCL and actively utilize standards like OpenGL in most of their products. It is a little concerning that they aren’t part of the list of companies involved with OpenVX as computer vision becomes ever more increasingly important to mobile and embedded computing. Not to mention, most of Apple’s competitors are already involved with OpenVX and there’s a very good chance that this could give those companies the leg up on Apple in terms of computer vision implementations. There is still a chance that Apple could simply use OpenVX without officially being an ‘adopter’ or a member of the working group through their GPU relationship with Imagination, and hopefully that will be the case, but at the same time there’s a very strong chance that they could be developing their own computer vision technologies and may once again diverge from the rest of the industry.

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Huawei (SHE: 002502) has had a tough go of it in the United States, often being painted as an apparatus of China’s intelligence complex. Now, Huawei’s boss has said that his company is prepared to look beyond the US if troubles there don’t quickly subside.

Speaking to the BBC, Guo, who is one of Huawei’s three rotating CEOs, brushed off concerns that a US ban would be detrimental to his company. Famously, Huawei and its competitor ZTE (SHE: 000063) have been banned from bidding on US government contracts over fears of electronic espionage.

“If the United States needs our products someday, we are more than happy to have the chance to serve them. If they’re not ready, we can wait,” he said. “For Huawei, it’s not very important.”

During the interview Guo didn’t appear to have any ill will towards the US, stating that should hostility against his company subside he’s perfectly happy to do business there.

“If the United States needs our products someday, we are more than happy to have the chance to serve them. If they’re not ready, we can wait,” he said to the BBC’s Linda Yueh.

Where does the ‘threat’ originate?

To date there has been no concrete evidence that Huawei has backdoors for Chinese intelligence, or actively cooperates with the Chinese intelligence community.

Looking at the language used in Congressional reports about Huawei’s “threat” to national security, it’s apparent that some of this language originates in documents from Huawei’s competitor Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO).In 2011, The Washington Post published a document obtained from Cisco called “Huawei & National Security.” According to The Washington Post this document was delivered to telcos in the US, Canada and Europe.

“Huawei has struggled to de-link itself from China’s People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese government,” Cisco wrote in the document.

At a 2013 hearing before Congress about Huawei’s apparent threat to national security, similar language was used.

“Throughout the investigation, Huawei consistently denied having any links to the Chinese government and maintains that it is a private, employee-owned company. Many industry analysts, however, have suggested otherwise,” read the congressional report.

While Cisco may have played a role in drumming up paranoia over Huawei’s intentions, Huawei should be treated with some suspicion. After all, in China’s state-capitalist economy, if a private company like Huawei goes as far as it does assume that it has to please — and owe favors to — some elements in the Chinese leviathan. However, remember that US tech companies cooperating with the NSA isn’t the product of conspiracy theory — it’s fact.

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According to Glenn Greenwald, who seemingly quotes himself in his own titles, the NSA has routinely been intercepting US-based networking hardware bound for countries abroad. While Glenn Greenwald doesn’t specifically implicate any networking companies, it would be safe to assume that companies like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Dell, HP and many more. This is in the face of the fact that the US government had been criticizing the use of Huawei networking hardware due to the beliefs that the Chinese would be presenting a security risk to the US. They essentially claimed that Huawei was bugging their networking equipment for the Chinese government and that their routers weren’t safe, meanwhile the NSA was doing exactly what the US was accusing the Chinese of doing.

Glenn Greenwald states that this is among many other revelations in his new book due out tomorrow, called No Place to Hide which chronicles Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. It is a bit curious that he would release such news from Edward Snowden a day before his book’s release and alluding to the fact that there would be more details buried within his book. A lot of people are going to look at this as an obvious money grab and are going to question his motives and whether he’s doing all of this to personally enrich himself. While he doesn’t address this in his interview with GQ directly, he clearly has a lot to say about a multitude of topics, including Edward Snowden himself. This is in addition to having left The Guardian, the publication that had originally helped him run all of the Snowden documents and gain worldwide attention to the US’ vast surveillance apparatus to start The Intercept.

So, How does the NSA do it? Well, according to a 2010 NSA document obtained by Glenn Greenwald, they would receive (intercept) routers, servers and other computer networking devices planned on being exported from the US before they were to be delivered to their final international destination. The NSA’s secret division would then implant backdoor surveillance tools and repackage the hardware with a factory seal and send them on their way. The NSA would then be able to gain access to those companies’ networks and all of their users and possibly data through these backdoors. He even states that the NSA document gleefully states that, “SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!),” clearly alluding to their physical tampering with hardware. Eventually, the bugged hardware connects back to the NSA and provides them with the data they want. The report continues, “In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network.”

Clearly, the NSA has a very detailed and well-established structure for these activities and likely has been doing so for quite some time. The NSA are probably much more careful about how they do things nowadays with all of the attention drawn to them because of the Snowden disclosures, but it would be foolish to assume they’ve stopped.

If you’re interested in getting Glenn Greenwald’s book, I recommend you head over here.

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