Laptops are the new desktops. While you can buy a solid tower PC for about $500, this price represents how little manufacturers care about the desktop world. Barring a few huge gaming rigs, laptops are where it’s at.

We have been arguably remiss in avoiding formal laptop reviews and so we’re trying to remedy that with a series we’re calling Laptop Week. This week we will focus on some of the best laptops available today alongside a few gems that popped up over the past year or so. We will run the gamut from Chromebooks to Windows 8 and take a few detours on the way.

You can read all of our Laptop Week coverage here and feel free to contact me if you’d like to see us look at anything in particular on the market or in the laptops we’re testing. Look for a few Laptop Week posts per day, starting with an amazing Ubuntu laptop that I think could easily replace a MacBook Air for those in the right frame of mind.

We’ve created a quick and easy rating method for each laptop we address and take into consideration the needs of designers, entrepreneurs, and programmers. Because you mostly don’t care about speeds and feeds, these will be high-level assessments of each laptop from a practical perspective.

Welcome to Laptop Week. We hope you enjoy your stay.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There has been a lot of talk about rooting your Glass device, or if it’s even possible. Well, it is. During a Hacking Google Glass session today, the team shared the steps to go through to gain root access for your Glass device.

Only the Fastboot tool for UNIX works, but there have been issues with using the OS X one. An official native dev kit will be available, too, which was announced earlier. If you can’t wait for an SDK to port your apps from Android to Glass, then get your root on.

This will void your warranty, so beware:

The entire process seems to take about 10-15 minutes, giving you warning messages along the way:

After you’ve run through all of that, bam, you get access to the entire data partition. You’re rooted and your device is worth nothing:

One developer has run Ubuntu on Glass, something that only a handful of geeks will try, but fun nonetheless:

“This isn’t the recommended Glass team way of building apps,” said the team, but hacking is worth it, right? When you root the device, Google’s support team will no longer help you if you get stuck. If you’re worried about voiding your warranty, the Glass team also discussed the device’s debug mode, which is much safer.

We’ll embed the full video of the talk once it’s available.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google is bringing Debian to Google Compute Engine and is making it the default OS  for developers using the service. Google will support both Debian 6.0 and Debian 7.0, which was released this week.

There are some pretty clear reasons why Google is making Debian the default OS. First of all, it’s free, said Krishnan Subramanian, a cloud analyst and founder of Rishidot Research. “With Ubuntu and Red Hat, Google has to deal with the vendors who want to make money themselves,” he said.  Further, Debian has  a large customer base. And it fits with Google’s geeky culture.

In its blog post, Google cites improvements in the Debian 7.0 “wheezy,”  release.  It has hardened security, better 32/64-bit compatibility and it addresses community feedback.

Google states that it will evaluate other operating systems that it can enable with Google Compute Engine.

It’s important to note that Google Compute Engine is only available for subscribers to the $400 Gold Support package.

This all looks like a tune up for next week’s Google I/O event where there are expected to be announcements about  Google’s cloud computing strategy.

Debian competes with other Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora.  According to DistroWatch, Debian ranks fifth in page hits. Mint is in the top spot.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about Google Glass, the Galaxy S4, and the magic of Ubuntu laptops. This time we’re joined by Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Greg Kumparak, and a pair of underwear that vibrates in Australia. Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS.
Subscribe in iTunes

Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – are the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua.

But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. At $188 per coin, the direction of the bitcoin is anyone’s guess right now and, unlike equities, these things don’t split. In short, you should probably mine. But what is bitcoin mining?

Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. You can read a lot more about it here but just understand that for every block mined you get 25 coins or, at current rates, $4,722.25. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price.

As it stands, mining solo is very nearly deprecated. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoins are worth.

Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. Using a service like “Slush’s pool” (more on that later) you can split the work among a ground of people. Using this equation:

While this is simplified, it is basically how the system works. You work for shares in a block and when complete you get a percentage of the block based on the number of workers alongside you, less fees. Using this method, I have been able to raise about $1.50 over the weekend by running a dormant PC. The astute among you will note that I probably used twice that amount of electricity.

Being a neophile, I’m surprised it took me so long to start mining. My buddy Tom explained how to set up a pooled mining account so I thought it would be interesting to share the instructions.

1. Get a wallet. You can either store your wallet locally or store it online. Coinbase.com is an online wallet that is surprisingly simple to set up. Wallets require you to use or download a fairly large blockchain file – about 6GB – so downloading and updating a local wallet may be a non-starter. Like all wealth storage mediums, keeping your bitcoins “local” is probably a better idea than trusting a web service, but that’s a matter of private preference. There is no preferred wallet type and there are obvious trade-offs to both. Privacy advocates would probably say a local wallet is best.

You can download a local wallet here but make sure you keep a copy of your data backed up.

Once you’ve created a wallet, you get an address like this: 1BEkUGADFbrEShQb9Xr4pKPtM8jAyiNQsJ. This, without the period, is a direct way to send bitcoins to your wallet. Make a note of your address. In Coinbase, the wallet address found under linked accounts.

2. Join a pool. To mine in a pool you have to work with a group of other miners on available blocks. The most popular is Slush’s Pool found here. You can also try guilds like BTC Guild as well as a number of other options. Each of the pools is characterized mostly by the fees they charge per block – 2% for Slush’s pool, for example – and the number of users. Pools with fewer users could also have a slower discovery time but pools with many users usually result in smaller payments.

How can you be sure the pool owner doesn’t steal all your bitcoins? You can’t. However, as one pool owner, Slush, notes:

For simplicity’s sake, I’m using Slush’s Pool and have created three workers. First, create a pool login. Then add workers. The workers are sub-accounts with their own passwords and are usually identified by [yourlogin].[workername]. I have three workers running, currently – one on my iMac and two on my old PC.

You must create workers to mine. The instructions are very straightforward for most services so don’t become overwhelmed. Like any online club, you can dig deeply into the subculture surround bitcoin as you gain experience. I like to think of it as a financial MMORPG.

Also be sure to enter your wallet address into the pool information. This will ensure you get your bitcoins.

3. Get a miner. There are a number of mining options for multiple platforms although OSX users may find themselves in a bit of a pickle. Miners use spare GPU cycles to power the mining operation, much like services like SETI@Home uses spare cycles for finding intelligent life. Miners, on the other hand, use these cycles to help handle peer-to-peer processes associated with bitcoins. Thus by doing “work” you are maintaining the network as well.

GUIMiner is the simplest solution for Windows users as it allows you to create miners using almost all standard graphics cards. You can download it here. 50Miner is also a popular solution. Both require you to enter your worker info and pool and they’ll start mining.

Linux users can run miners like CGMiner. An excellent guide to installing a miner on Ubuntu is available here.

OS X users can use DiabloMiner, a two-year old command-line program that will mine using OpenCL. Sadly, it uses deprecated calls to Bitcoin and is quite a bit slower. As a result, you need to run your own proxy, Stratum, that allows Diablo to connect with services like Slush’s pool. Both of these programs usually run without issue on OS X although you may need to install OpenCL for OSX.

To mine I’ve created a script that I run in Terminal that simply runs the proxy in the background and then connects Diablo. Note the last two arguments are necessary for Mountain Lion.

RPCMiner is far easier to run – you simply click an icon and enter some data – and both have very rudimentary, text-based interfaces. Running Diablo on my iMac has not had much effect on application performance under OS X although it does slow down my Windows 8 machine considerably.

4. Keep your mind on your money. Bitcoins are baffling in that they are wildly simple to use and mine. Speculators, then, would probably be able to throw hundreds of machines at the problem and gather bitcoins like raindrops, right? Wrong. As more bitcoins are found, they become more difficult to find. This profitability calculator will help you understand what you’re up against but understand that this isn’t a sure thing. I’ve run my systems for a weekend and seen a mere $1.50 – enough for a coke – but other users may have improved hardware and methods to succeed. In short, if it costs more to run your hardware than you gain in bitcoins, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Good luck in your journey and enjoy your first foray into this wild and wooly world.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Canonical announced via its blog yesterday that it will be building an Ubuntu-based open-source OS for China, in partnership with the Chinese government and members of the Chinese developer community. The joint-venture, which will produce a version of the Linux-based Ubuntu called “Ubuntu Kylin” for an April 2013 release date, is said to “go beyond localization,” and include specific features and applications geared towards the Chinese market.

The development of Ubuntu Kylin will be a collaborative effort between the China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP), the National University of Defense Technology, and Canonical engineers, will focus on a desktop release first. But future extension to other platforms is also planned, and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth indicated in the announcement that we could see a China-specific version of Ubuntu Touch down the road, too, for smartphones and tablets.

The BBC reports that this is “widely seen” as China trying to get its IT sector off of Western platforms and software, and onto alternatives sourced from within China itself. Of course, Canonical is based in the UK, but the new OS includes specific support baked in for China-based services and software, including music services, Baidu Maps, online shopping destination Taobao, Chinese bank payment processing and WPS, China’s most popular office suite software. In an interview, Canonical CEO Jane Silber explained that the move is about helping China take advantage of more open software options, and institutionalizing that behavior.

“It’s clear in what CSIT has said about the collaboration is that they’re interested in options, and choice and open source,” she said. “The same competitive pressures and openness that drives some people to open source in other markets are applicable in China as well. There’s certainly a desire to not be forced into walled gardens that look pretty but end up being handcuffs.”

A push to move China’s tech infrastructure off of Windows and onto Ubuntu, backed by the Chinese government, could have a major impact on Linux’s role in the future of computing. It’s fair to say that if China does indeed manage to migrate a significant percentage of its population onto Ubuntu Kylin, the global influence of Linux and Ubuntu will increase dramatically. China continues to gain influence as a market to target for software developers, and a sharp spike in share for Ubuntu pay big dividends in terms of encouraging companies to make Linux-supported version of their software.

Ubuntu already has strong traction in developing markets where it comes pre-installed on a lot of hardware, and this deal could help Ubuntu Touch replicate that kind of success, something Shuttleworth has previously stated is one of the company’s aims with the new mobile OS. It’ll have an uphill battle against Android, however, which has managed to pull far ahead in the race to sign on Chinese smartphone buyers. Silber added that while there’s currently nothing concrete in the works right now, but says she expects both mobile and cloud platform versions to be “part of this project in due course.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer something special, like Spideroak‘s approach to encryption, or ownCloud‘s host-it-yourself solution. QloudSync puts forward two interesting differentiators: it’s powered by 100% renewable energy, and it’s hosted in Iceland.

From a feature perspective, QloudSync isn’t anything new. File storage and synchronization. Share links with others. Stream music and video. The client apps are open source, and built atop SparkleShare.

QloudSync runs on GreenQloud‘s ComputeQloud and StorageQloud, which offer API compatibility with Amazon EC2 and S3. What is different about GreenQloud’s offerings, though, are that they run on renewable energy and claim to be carbon neutral, without the use of emissions offsets of any kind. Users of GreenQloud’s services can easily share their carbon savings to the social media outlet of their choice.

We see a great opportunity in utilizing Iceland’s abundant 100% renewable geothermal and hydro energy infrastructure, naturally cool climate and strategic location as a means to clean up IT and greatly reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.

GreenQloud is also making a strong play for the fact that they’re hosted in Iceland. According to them, your data “is safe from SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, Patriot act because StorageQloud runs from data centers in Iceland.” This doesn’t strike me as strong reason to use GreenQloud by itself, but it may be one of several that makes them a more attractive option in the sea of similar products.

If you’re at SXSW, stop by booth #1326 in the convention center and say hello to them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hot on the heels of the announcement of Ubuntu on phones comes Canonical’s latest announcement: Ubuntu on tablets. This is, in many ways, a no-brainer: Android and iOS have already demonstrated that the same OS can work on both form factors. But the story is a little more interesting when you consider what Ubuntu offers. And developers can start playing with it on Thursday.

I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project and currently VP of Products at Canonical, about Ubuntu for tablets and phones. He was noticeably excited about the news, and reiterated several times that this will be “one Ubuntu” on multiple platforms: desktops, phones, and tablets. This has a number of very interesting ramifications.

While it’s the same distribution codebase, each platform uses a Linux kernel tailored for the specifics of the target hardware. This puts Ubuntu in a class by itself when compared to other multi-device strategies. iOS and Android are well suited for handsets, but don’t perform well — if at all — in traditional desktop environments. Even Microsoft’s efforts aren’t unified, what with Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Windows RT, etc. Apps written for Ubuntu desktops will run on Ubuntu phones and tablets.

Apps written for Ubuntu desktops will run on Ubuntu phones and tablets.

Canonical is aggressively embracing the post-PC culture, and are driving computing convergence with a coherent “multi-screen” strategy. Your Ubuntu tablet works like most other tablets when you’re out and about, save for the fact that it’s running Ubuntu. But connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse and you suddenly have the traditional desktop experience, with a full window manager and multiple windows of concurrently running apps. Interact with your apps through mouseclicks. Undock (or disconnect the peripherals), and resume interacting with your applications using touch controls.

An unexpectedly interesting aspect of Ubuntu on phones is that developers with touch-enabled desktops can test out their mobile applications right from their desktop. The touch controls of Ubuntu mobile apps will work on touch-enabled desktop PCs, greatly streamlining the development and debugging process. Shuttleworth says “the experience is perfect.”

To me, the greatest offering of Ubuntu for tablets is a true multi-user experience, baked into the core OS. My family has an iPad, an original Amazon Kindle, and a Nexus 7. Coordinating which accounts to use to purchase apps, and managing the arrangement of apps on these devices is proving to be more cumbersome than we’d like. Ubuntu for tablets offers a true multi-user experience.

I asked Shuttleworth if they’d tackled how to handle user quotas, and administrator privileges, and all the other thorny issues that arise in shared-use environments. He admitted that they have not, yet. “But we have 30 years of UNIX history on which to build,” he added, “so I don’t see these problems as being anything other than implementation details.” Shuttleworth also shared that a number of OEMs have been in talks with Canonical specifically about the multi-user features. This feature is of great interest to military and medical environments particularly.

Finally, because Ubuntu on tablets is “just Ubuntu,” it means that all of Canonical’s management tools for Ubuntu systems already work. Corporate users of Canonical’s Landscape service can manage Ubuntu tablets alongside their fleet of desktops and servers. According to Shuttleworth, none of their competitors have a compelling enterprise story to tell.

According to Shuttleworth, none of their competitors have a compelling enterprise story to tell.

So what, exactly, will Canonical be releasing on Thursday in the “Developer Preview”? Open source code for Nexus phones and tablets: Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. It probably won’t take too long for folks to get this installed onto non-Nexus devices, too. Most stuff should work, with a few rough edges. Cameras, the browser, photo and video galleries, media player with hardware offload, notepad. All the standard stuff.

The Developer Preview will not be without bugs, of course. Notably, according to Shuttleworth, this release makes no effort to prevent device overload from too many apps running at once. Whereas most smartphones employ a number of tricks to put background apps in various stages of sleep, Ubuntu will not do so at this time.

Ubuntu for tablets offers an interesting multi-tasking experience. Applications will present their capabilities to the OS, such as “I’m a phone app” or “I’m a desktop app.” Phone apps can run in what Shuttleworth calls the “side stage”, and can run split-screen with other phone apps or desktop apps. Some obvious examples are Skype or Twitter or Facebook while you’re browsing the web or watching a movie.

Indeed, Shuttleworth shared that in their user testing thus far, people were absolutely delighted to see how all of this works. “If you ask someone ‘Would you like to multi-task?’ they don’t really know how to answer,” he said. “But if you ask them if they’d like to send a tweet while watching a movie, they know exactly what you mean.” Users expected to lose the playback of their movie when they launched Twitter. Instead, it opens up in the “side stage” and works flawlessly, all while the movie continues to play. Samsung featured similar functionality in their Galaxy S3 commercial; but Ubuntu is taking this functionality to a new level.

As for why release Ubuntu for tablets now, Shuttleworth opined that the typical open source mantra of “release early, release often” can be a curse in both ways: if you release too soon you have nothing but vaporware; but if you release too late you lose momentum and attention. Now, he feels, is the proper time to release Ubuntu for phones and tablets. Developers can start digging in, and the general public can start salivating.

The October release of Ubuntu (13.10) will have the smartphone code complete, says Shuttleworth, which lines up pretty nicely with Canonical’s comments at CES earlier this year. Shuttleworth was quick to point out that regulatory certifications and factory processes take time, so in reality we shouldn’t expect hardware before Q1 2014. After that, software updates from Ubuntu will follow their established cadence.

This release, says Shuttleworth, is intended to drive three threads of activity. First, it allows developers to start enjoying the native experience. While the Ubuntu mobile SDK is available right now, you can’t really test it on a phone. Thursday’s release remedies that.

Second, the people inside the Ubuntu community are excited about expanding the community umbrella to cover new platforms. This goes beyond just building apps or getting more poeple to use Ubuntu. It includes things like governance and steering or Ubuntu initiatives.

The initial release is targeted at the Nexus line of hardware

And finally, there’s hardware testing. The initial release is targeted at the Nexus line of hardware, but as the third-party ROM market for other devices clearly shows, there are a lot of clever people out there shoe-horning Android onto all kinds of devices. Thursday’s Developer Preview will allow major electronics companies and exuberant enthusiasts alike the opportunity to start playing with Ubuntu on their preferred harware.

Shuttleworth went on to share that there are three legs to a successful launch: silicon, manufacturing, and carriers. He stated that Canonical has a silicon partner now, but official news of who that is won’t be made until March. On the manufacturing side, “partners have expressed interest,” he told me, but didn’t elaborate too much. And as for carriers, he said that Canonical is “having good conversations with the #1 and #2 carriers in North America, Europe and China.”

Obviously any such conversations — for silicon, manufacturing, or carriers — are complex with multiple stakeholders. These kinds of negotiations take time to play out. All of this drives home the likelihood that it’ll be 2014 before we start seeing real Ubuntu devices.

Shuttleworth hinted that we might expect the first Ubuntu device to be a high-end luxury smartphone.

The upshot of all of this is that Ubuntu will be available for Nexus devices this week. Hacker culture being what it is, I’d expect additional devices to be supported by the end of next week. We may see official hardware announcements toward the end of this year, but I’d be really surprised if we saw a new dedicated device for Ubuntu available for purchase before 2014.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After spotting it on video and briefly playing with it at CES, Canonical’s mobile-friendly version of Ubuntu will soon be available for the truly curious to muck around with. Starting on February 21, developers will be able to load the build onto their Galaxy Nexus or Nexus 4 — on the off-chance that you’re attending MWC like we are, Canonical will be on hand to flash your compatible hardware for you.

As you’d expect, the release is intended to familiarize enthusiasts with Ubuntu mobile, but Canonical has also released templates, a preview SDK and an app design guide to give us all a better understanding of the development process involved.

Curiously, developers looking to make their mark in a relatively new mobile environment may end up working with a slightly different distribution process at first. Canonical confirmed early on that Ubuntu for phones would launch without a centralized app store in tow. As Canonical product manager Richard Collins put it in an interview with Engadget, the company is going after a market segment “where users are primarily interested in being able to use a core set of applications” rather than a picking and choosing pre-loaded storefront full of them.

It may seem like a crazy omission for a platform that’s being pegged with potential in markets as varying as enterprise and developing economies, and that’s at least partially because of how these Ubuntu apps are meant to work. You see, the sorts of applications that will ultimately run on an Ubuntu-powered phone will also run on Ubuntu PCs, televisions, and tablets in addition to just smartphones The onus on developers then is to craft the sort of all-encompassing experiences that work across these different devices, a task that’s no small feat even for experienced designers and programmers.

Naturally, that extra work can yield some big gains in terms of stickiness too — this sort of one-app-fits-all mentality may mean that the apps developers do wind up creating for Ubuntu phones can follow them as users bound from device to device, a compelling argument for adopting the Ubuntu platform as a whole. Sure it’ll take plenty of work to make sure these experiences are actually worth using, but at least Canonical is giving the app development world at large a bit of lead time.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chinese mobile maker Huawei rose to third place in the worldwide smartphone rankings for the first time in the fourth quarter of last year, according to analyst Gartner’s lastest global mobile report (Canalys and IDC have also pegged Huawei in third in Q4). In the full year 2012, Huawei sold 27.2 million smartphones to end users, according to Gartner up 73.8 per cent from 2011. However the gap between number three in the global smartphone rankings and the top two, Samsung and Apple, is more like a gulf.

“There is no manufacturer that can firmly lay claim to the No. 3 spot in global smartphone sales,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner in a statement. “The success of Apple and Samsung is based on the strength of their brands as much as their actual products. Their direct competitors, including those with comparable products, struggle to achieve the same brand appreciation among consumers, who, in a tough economic environment, go for cheaper products over brand.”

While worldwide mobile phone sales continue to decline, down 1.7 per cent from 2011 sales, smartphones continued to drive overall phone sales, said Gartner, with record smartphone sales in Q4 last year — of 207.7 million units, up 38.3 per cent from the same period last year.

2013 will be the year of the rise of the third ecosystem

Together, Apple and Samsung accounted for 52 per cent of the smartphone pie in Q4, up from 46.4 per cent in Q3 2012. Samsung ended the year top in both worldwide smartphone sales and overall mobile phone sales.

In Q4 Samsung’s overall smartphone sales continued to accelerate — rising to 64.5 million units, up 85.3 per cent from Q4 2011. In full year 2012, Samsung accrued sales of 384.6 million mobile phones, of which just over half (53.5 per cent) were smartphone sales. This is a considerable jump on 2011 when over a quarter of its sales (28 per cent) were smartphones.

“With Samsung commanding over 42.5 per cent of the Android market globally, and the next vendor at just 6 per cent share, the Android brand is being overshadowed by Samsung’s brand with the Galaxy name nearly a synonym for Android phones in consumers’ mind share,” added Gupta. The next Android vendor after Samsung is presumably Huawei, giving the Chinese mobile maker a six per cent slice of the Q4 smartphone pie.

Apple’s smartphone sales hit 43.5 million units in Q4, up 22.6 per cent year-on-year. For the full year 2012, Apple sold 130 million smartphones worldwide. Gartner noted that while consumer demand for iPhones in the quarter remained strong, buyers favored the less expensive iPhone 4 and 4S models over the newer iPhone 5. The analyst also said some consumers now face a dilemma about whether to spend on the iPad Mini, rather than buying a new iPhone.

Android captured 69.7 per cent of the OS market in Q4, growing 87.8 per cent and widening the gap with iOS which declined slightly to take 20.9 per cent of the market. Over the same period BlackBerry-maker RIM declined 44.4 per cent. Meanwhile Windows Phone maker Microsoft had a better fourth quarter, said the analyst, with its share growing 1.2 percentage points, and its smartphone sales increasing 124.2 per cent year-on-year.

Despite some momentum for Windows Phone in Q4, Nokia’s slide down the global smartphone marketshare rankings continued in 2012. In the full year Gartner said Nokia clocked up 39.3 million smartphone sales worldwide — down 53.6 per cent from 2011.

“2013 will be the year of the rise of the third ecosystem as the battle between the new BlackBerry10 and Widows Phone intensifies,” added Gupta. “As carriers and vendors feel the pressure of the strong Android’s growth, alternative operating systems such as Tizen, Firefox, Ubuntu and Jolla will try and carve out an opportunity by positioning themselves as profitable alternatives.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch