When it comes to marketing proneness, Taiwanese (and other Far Eastern) vendors often were afraid of their own shadow, not to interfere with lucrative OEM deals that western vendors utilized to the full extent: you may build your own stuff, but we contract you to build our stuff and you shall not interfere with that.

For good portion of it, the said mantra is true to this date, with Far Eastern industry giants still afraid to speak out, even though they now do almost everything for Western vendors such as Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) – without Foxconn (TPE: 2354) (iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro), Pegatron (TPE: 4938) (iPhone), Asustek’s (TPE: 2357)  China facility, Flextronics (NASDAQ: FLEX) and Quanta (TPE: 2382) (MacBook an MacBook Air) – you would not be able to buy your favorite product from Cupertino (Designed in California, Made in China / Taiwan).

Not anymore – Asustek recently found balls of steel (that corporate move to Singapore seems to have helped) and decided to ditch the fear of the West and go for the jugular.

In two infographics, Asus attacked Apple’s products, pushing its design and manufacturing capabilities.

First ad attacks the MacBook and pitches its Zenbook:

ASUS North America tries to prove ZenBook is a thinner (and better) product than Apple MacBook. And 50% cheaper.

Second picture goes for the Golden jugular, pardon, Apple:

Golden Apple (Watch) is not the solution. We (our ZenWatch) is.

Who knows, perhaps Asian tigers will start challenging its former and current customers on more fields than just the price. After all, the key to selling a product is something that Far East still has trouble understanding – it’s not about the physical product, it’s about the experience.

Still, a ballsy move Asus. Ballsy indeed.

The post Asus’ Balls of Steel vs. Apple’s Golden MacBook and Watch appeared first on VR World.

From the legendary movie ‘Grand Prix’ in 1966 to controversial Breaking Bad TV series, TAG Heuer watches are presented as objects of desire. Today’s ad campaigns feature select number of actors, race drivers, F1 teams, pilots and the like, all touting the precision brought by TAG Heuer. Yet, the most precise watch you can buy is one of digital, not the analogue kind. Secondly, there is not one, but two generations of people that are growing up using a mobile phone to check for time, reducing the need for watches in its entirety.

Not even a week after Apple’s event, Reuters passed the comments made by Jean-Claude Biver, founder of Hublot and current head of watchmaking for LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) . His statement “We want to launch a smartwatch at TAG Heuer, but it must not copy the Apple Watch.” confirmed that the LVMH concern will make a smartwatch using the TAG Heuer brand. We believe this will not be just one product but a ‘platform’ which guarantees its reappearance in multiple watches not just in TAG Heuer, but across LVMH brands. Furthermore, the company is also pushing its electronics team to create another six-figure smartphone to rival Vertu.

Today, most avid watch buyers are ones that grew up in 1980s, with Casio G-Shock and Swatch creating a generation of buyers that are in their 30s and 40s – going for the collectable editions with prices measured from thousands even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Generation growing up today would probably skip on watches entirely, until we start seeing wearable devices such as FitBit followed by Pebble, LG and Samsung smartwatches, and now Apple entered the frame with its Watch (does the lack of ‘I’ means Apple’s 2015 phone will simply be called – Apple Phone? Apple Pad?). All of the smartwatch/wearable device push from the manufacturers is bringing horologie back into fashion, and if you are a smart manufacturer (pun intended) – you will have to react.

We don’t expect the smartwatch to make appearance before annual watch gathering in Baselworld (March 19-26, 2015) while the new smartphone is planned to make an appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (March 2-5, 2015).

All in all, luxury giant LVMH is reacting. The question is, how long until every other watch vendor starts following? We can only hope they won’t engage into a race to the bottom, like the standard consumer electronic companies.

The post LVMH Brand TAG Heuer to Launch Smartwatch in 2015 appeared first on VR World.

There is no denying that Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) is a different company from the days when Steve Jobs walked the halls of the company’s Cupertino headquarters. Apple is now run by Tim Cook, Steve’s operations guru that managed to enable Apple’s ruthless efficiency and even more importantly their absolute profit margins. It comes as little surprise that Apple comes off as feeling dull to many since Jobs’ death in four years ago in 2011. Sure, four years is a long time in the tech world, but when it comes to a company like Apple, it takes time for someone’s impact to wane, like Jobs’.

Let’s not forget that Jobs’ helped Apple introduce a plethora of new products to the market, all with varying levels of wild success, but one of the most important things about the man is that he stuck to his guns. Very rarely did Jobs compromise or waver in his decisions and one of those decisions was that the iPhone needed to be a certain size in order to be “usable” or user-friendly. Before his death, Jobs in fact stated that nobody would want to buy a big phone, which proved incredibly wrong as the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S have been competing with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy, HTC One and Sony Xperia phones, all of which now come in 5 inch or larger screen sizes.

It comes as little surprise that Apple today announced that it would be releasing the iPhone 6 at a screen size of 4.7 inches as well as the iPhone 6 plus at a whopping 5.5 inches, something Jobs probably would’ve fired someone over. However, after Jobs’ passing, Apple started to see challengers and face challenges from competitors that Jobs somewhat foresaw (in Samsung (KRX:005930)) but also didn’t foresee (LG (KRX:066570). The reality is that many users started to leave Apple for Android devices for one reason or another. At first, it was LTE because the iPhone didn’t have it and Android phones did, then it became screen size because Android phones had bigger higher resolution screens and now Apple does too. But until today, Apple clearly feared the implications of not having a competitive “big” phone, some may argue that can be considered a phablet (at 5.5 inches).

In fact, some people are already discussing selling their iPad retinas and just getting an iPhone 6 Plus to simplify their usage needs. Truthfully, there is no denying that Apple has the most diverse set of smartphones for consumers to buy, ranging from the iPhone 5C all the way up to the iPhone Plus. However, Apple may have made a grave mistake by not offering a size smaller than 4.7 inches because there are a lot of people out there have stuck with iPhones because of their size. The new Apple is focusing on what is driving market demand and where the market appears to be going, which has been bigger and bigger phones for the last two years running.

The new iPhone 6 does bring some new things to the table for Apple, which includes NFC technology, something that Apple’s devices have lacked for quite some time. The iPhone 6 also sports an entirely new camera, which promises to once again deliver incredibly competitive images against the rest of the competition. But really, the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are fairly dull and merely represent Apple’s pivoting to market demands and very little by ways of innovation.

Sure, the new phones use Apple’s new A8 SoC, which happens to be the world’s first 20nm SoC, but the truth is that it mostly appears to be an incremental improvement over the iPhone 5S’ A7 chip. It does pack a whopping 2 billion transistors into an absolutely tiny area, allowing Apple to continue to use minuscule battery sizes and still get fairly good battery life. Apple’s 64-bit lead will also be extended with the A8 processor, as none of the Android vendors have really shipped anything with a 64-bit on Android until recently. So, Apple’s lead here continues to be strong.

In fact, Apple really seems to be focusing very heavily on hiring very talented individuals and there appears to be a search for top talent, one that the company has never seen before. It appears that Apple is compensating for their lack of vision (sans Jobs) with a focus on having the best tech and the best execution of that tech that could possibly exist. This can be seen across the board throughout the company’s various divisions and there’s a very good chance we’ll see a result of this new culture in the iPhone 6’s launch and whether or not users experience any issues like previous Apple early adopters.

The Apple Watch

Now, the Apple Watch is technically the company’s very first new product line since Steve Jobs and Apple launched the iPad back in 2010. However, this new product won’t actually be available until 2015, meaning that Apple will have had five years between new product lines and most of those years were without Jobs at the helm. It comes at little surprise that the new Apple Watch comes off as incredibly ugly to some (if not many) and very likely would have never passed Jobs’ muster. Some may even argue that Apple’s new watch is uglier than Motorola’s already announced Moto 360 and that today marks the day that Motorola out-designed Apple.

Apple’s clear focus on health was noticed by us back in July when it was announced that the new Apple Watch would have a very heavy health focus. Back then, it was reported that it may have been a mistake to release such a device as an overly health focused device, and if one would look at it now, it has a very strong health focus and may lose some of a smart watch’s utility by not emulating more of what Android wear does. But if one were dig deeply, it can be seen that Apple clearly wants to do more with the smartwatch but doesn’t quite know any killer apps other than health tracking/fitness right now. And at the $350 price and iOS exclusivity they are going to have a hard time selling these to people that aren’t already fitbit or some other type of health tracker.

The fact is that Apple is not ready yet with its first new product in five years, but it is clearly afraid of losing the war of perception and decided to announce it at today’s event even though they really won’t be ready with it until next year. This is another thing that Jobs never did, if he had a product to announce, he was ready to ship it. This is just another sign of how things have changed inside of Apple and what we can expect to see for years to come. A more nimble, fearful, and competitive company that will very likely continue to react to market demands in ways that the old Apple probably never would have.

Many people talk about how Jobs’ departure effectively marked the beginning of the end for the company. But the reality is that if Jobs still were in charge today, there’s a very good chance that the company would not be anywhere near as competitive as it is today. There’s a very good chance that Jobs’ own beliefs may have prevented him from really doing what the market demanded. Sure, Jobs was the kind of person that told the market what they wanted (iPhone, iPad, Macbook, etc) but that doesn’t last forever either. Tim Cook has done a great job of keeping Apple going and they appear to be hiring all the right kinds of people to keep the company innovating, even if in small steps.

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As the world of smartwatches continues to move forward, Qualcomm’s ‘reference’ design smartwatch appears to be getting better and better, adding major new features well after the device’s initial release in September and since our initial review. Back in February, Qualcomm added activity tracking functionality, which is something that they had promised when the watch was originally announced. Since then, they’ve added some new watch faces and done some regular maintenance on the watch and the associated app and we’ve been using it all along the time since the Toq has such great battery life. Well, yesterday, we got wind of a new update and updated the application, which rolled through an update to the watch as well and lo and behold there was voice to text functionality added to the watch. This means that you no longer have to respond to text messages or any text communication via canned messages. With the Nuance powered voice to text functionality you can now quickly and easily respond to text messages without having to take your phone out or use any canned messages.

I took the Toq with Nuance for a test drive yesterday and the accuracy of the Nuance-enabled voice to text functionality was astonishing. In a quiet environment, it did a great job of perfectly transcribing my voice responses to text and sending them off quickly. The entire process was very quick and simple as now when you want to respond to a message you have three options instead of two (canned msg, voice to text and call). You simply press the middle button and it gives you something like 10 seconds to compose your message verbally and when you’re done you simply press the button again or stop talking and hit send if the message is correct, or redo. Then it sends the message and you’re on your way, its really quite flawless. It even picked my voice up perfectly in a crowded bar and understood multiple people fairly clearly, even though it did have a bit of a hard time understanding my mom’s Russian accent with a certain word.

Qualcomm’s Toq smartwatch with Nuance voice recognition

Otherwise, it was a very welcome thing to see added to the Toq and simply makes the platform as a whole even more competitive against what is out now or expected to come from other companies. In fact, I would say that companies that have chosen to implement the Toq platform, including the Mirasol display may actually have a significant hand up on their competitors because this platform has been very well perfected by this point, even though Qualcomm still hasn’t said anything about that iOS support they talked about back in September. With iOS capability and a higher quality design (not all plastic) anyone could pick up this smartwatch as a platform and do some amazing things, really. Which reminds me, we’ve already contacted Qualcomm about this, but the screws on our Toq have started to rust a bit which according to them is the first time they’ve seen such a thing happen but may be an indication that Qualcomm needs someone to pickup this platform and do it with very high quality materials.

Either way, there’s a reason why the Toq is still my preferred smartwatch of choice, and that’s simply because it provides the most reliable base level of functionality while still improving little by little every few months. I’m just excited to see what’ll happen once someone like HTC, Samsung or LG picks up this Toq platform and does something interesting with it, but as with all things, that takes time.

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