It will come as no surprise that of the phones he compared the Samsung Galaxy Note ended up at the top of the heap having 66.9% of its body area made up of touch-screen real estate. Of course, no one can really call the Note a small device, unless they possess Shaquille O’Neal-sized hands.

While this isn’t a comprehensive study of all the available Android devices on the market, Thare did a good job including a range of the most popular devices across the four US carriers. Samsung also garnered the second spot on the list with its yet to be released Galaxy S3 (which of course is made for humans) which has 66.1% of its svelte design available for touch interactions. HTC rounds out the top three with its EVO 4G LTE phone running on Sprint. Its 4.7-inch screen gives owners 66% of real estate to play with.

iPhone owners won’t be surprised to see the 4S coming in next to last place, with the trade-off being of course those beautiful Retina displays that Apple is installing in the world’s most popular smartphone. Which leads to an interesting thing to point out. While the Galaxy Note certainly has a large screen, it also has the distinction of having one of the lowest pixel density’s in the chart. While it’s the first Android device to sport a higher resolution than the 4S, the iPhone still takes better advantage of the space it has to work with by having a pixel density of 326 ppi compared to the Note’s 285.

While the comparison of different devices is certainly interesting, probably the real gem that is visualized is the slow progression we are seeing in the mobile industry towards larger screens installed in consumer devices. With rumors abounding that Samsung has retooled many of its assembly lines to mass-produce its flexible OLED screens, it’s conceivable that we could, sometime in the near future, see bezel-less devices to hit retail stores. While market analysts say that it won’t be until 2017 before we see the market dominated by flexible display devices, it’s certainly interesting to think about the possibility because bezel-less handset will totally change this list.

via Reddit

The Nissan Altima is the new benchmark for midsize cars on both technical and traditional car virtues. The only flaws are the omission of a USB jack on the bottom 40% of the fleet and incessant warning beeps that may lead the driver to turn off potentially lifesaving features.

Integrated navigation is better, safer, and less likely to be stolen, but dash-top navigation is $100-$250 and smartphone navigation is just a few bucks a month. For $595, Nissan gives you a system built around Bosch hardware with a 7-inch touchscreen LCD and Navteq map software. And it works just fine. Ford and GM have begun to offer some cars with SD card-based navigation for $795 but most others are in the don’t-buy $1000-$2000 range.

For another $595, or $1090 total, you can have a tech package built around navigation and a rear-facing camera that does blind spot warning, lane departure warning (LDW), and moving object detection (kids walking behind the car). The location of a camera for LDW seems counter-intuitive, since the camera is looking backwards as you drive forward, but Nissan says it works just fine. (It did.) Since so much rests on a marble-size lens, Nissan equipped the module with a washer nozzle and a tiny air compressor to blow off crud.

The only flaw in Nissan lane departure warning, an otherwise very cool piece of technology, is the cockpit warning: the a tiny illuminated icon in the instrument panel is too small and an incessant beep that annoys you and has tells your passengers what an imprecise driver you are. The only way to get rid of the beep is turn off lane departure warning and (as the car is delivered) blind spot detection.

Nissan and sibling Infiniti need to find a better solution, possibly a vibrating steering wheel or vibrating seat as on the new Cadillac XTS, or a non-blinding light that strobes (flashes) the driver but doesn’t alert the passengers. A Nissan rep said the other solutions such as haptic feedback are expensive for such an affordable car. But remember these same engineers found a way to take more than $500 out of the price of navigation.

Every Altima comes with Bluetooth with streaming audio. The bottom models that comprise 40% of Altima sales don’t come with a USB jack, so you’ve got to buy a car charging cord that will cost you 10 times what it would cost Nissan to embed a USB jack or two. This is a minor annoyance, but it is an annoyance.

Next page: Tires that tell you when they are low and other cutting-edge auto tech…

For the big dogs, things are going pretty well. As we predicted, there’s been a wave of further consolidation; Hitachi and Western Digital have finalized the sale of the former’s HDD business unit to the latter, while Seagate recently announced its intended purchase of rival LaCie.

Way back at the beginning of this mess, we selected a basket of drives by manufacturer, capacity, form factor, and performance. We’ve had to make some alterations along the way, but have managed to keep things fairly consistent. Here is what we’ve uncovered…

We started off tracking the Western Digital WD10EARS but that drive has apparently been deprecated in favor of the EARX. Performance between the two should be identical, but while prices have come down from January, they remain far above Q3 2011 levels. That trend holds true across the board; prices are generally down from where they were, but nowhere near where they used to be.

Here’s the percent above baseline data in chart form. Again, solid declines are visible nearly everywhere; Western Digital’s price increases on its 2TB Caviar Green and Caviar Black are outliers. When we spoke to Dynamite Data’s Kris Kubicki last winter, he predicted that we’d see manufacturers dropping SKUs and reducing the number of legacy drives they built, and that may be happening. Several lower capacity drives have disappeared, including Samsung’s Spinpoint MP4. The good news is, the 750GB M8 HN offers more than twice the capacity for the same $89 price point the M4 was hitting in January.

Are things going to change any time soon? We doubt it. WD and Seagate both reported record profits this past quarter. In Q1 2011, Western Digital reported net profit of $146M against sales of $2.3B while Seagate recorded $2.7B in revenue and $93 million in net income. That’s a net profit margin of 6% and 3%, respectively. For this past quarter, Western Digital reported sales of $3B (thanks in part to its acquisition of Hitachi) and a net income of $483 million, while Seagate hit $4.4B in revenue and $1.1B in profits. Net margin was 16% and 37% respectively.

With profit margins like this, the hard drive manufacturers are going to be loathe to cut prices. After years of barely making profits, the Thailand floods are the best excuse ever to drive record income for a few quarters. All of this means that while we expect prices to gradually decline, holding off on a necessary purchase doesn’t make much sense. If you need a drive, you need a drive; another six months may not show a dramatic return to form.

What About SSDs?

One of the predictions in the wake of the HDD floods was that SSD prices and adoption would spike thanks to the shrinking cost difference. That spike never materialized — SSD prices have continued a steady downward trend. Drives with full-featured controllers that would’ve been considered high-end just a year ago have now dropped to approximately $1 per GB.

128GB is an important price/capacity ratio for SSDs because it’s the point at which the drives offer enough storage space that switching over doesn’t feel like trying to slip into pants you haven’t worn since Bill Clinton was president. So how do these prices compare to hard drives in terms of cost-per-GB?

The hard drives still have a clear advantage there, despite the higher prices. Even Western Digital’s VelociRaptors, while still significantly more expensive than other hard drives, are just half the per-GB ratio of the SSDs. Then again, the shrinking gap points to the VelociRaptor’s relatively limited lifespan. The only way for WD to push the access speed envelope is to start incorporating cache in a hybrid structure like Seagate’s Momentus, increase the drive’s spindle speed to something approaching 15K, or both. The former seems far more likely than the latter; 15K hard drives run hotter, draw more power, and are noisier than anything enthusiasts are used to dealing with.

We don’t expect Flash prices to keep falling at the present rate; there’s a mountain of evidence to suggest that process node scaling will step on the breaks on that process. HDD capacities, in contrast, are headed into the stratosphere. Rather than slamming together in epic confrontation, the two standards are likely to co-exist for quite some time, with SSDs reserved for higher-end systems and a mixture of external drives, standard HDDs, and possibly HHD hybrid solutions picking up the majority of the market. That’s not to say we won’t see more notebooks continue moving towards solid-state storage at lower price points, but the fundamental capacity-vs-speed tradeoff isn’t going away.

We’d like to thank Kris Kubicki and his data analytics firm Dynamite Data for providing additional price information and market trends.

Two concepts take center stage in Axis: instant responses and visual search. As you type in a search term, Axis returns results instantaneously based on what it thinks you may be searching for. The results appear as thumbnails across the top of your screen in iOS, and across the bottom on the desktop. You can scroll back and forth through these results to find the result you are looking for.

Visual search done right

On iOS, swiping across the page takes you from one result to the next. This is a nice shortcut for those of us who like to quickly search through multiple sources. There is a similar shortcut on the desktop: move your mouse to the sides of the browser windows and navigation arrows will appear. The visual search component of Axis is its most compelling feature, and is much nicer to look at (and usually tells you more) than looking through a list of links and text.

Given that Axis is multi-platform, Yahoo baked in a feature that allows you to continue browsing between devices. The last page you access on a device is sent up into the cloud, and then displayed on the Axis home page. Click on it on the other device, and you can continue where you left off.

This is a great feature for those of us that move from device to device frequently, although some may not like the fact that Yahoo is inherently tracking our every move.

The visual search and multi-device browsing are the two most compelling reasons to give Axis a shot, but also consider here is that Axis really isn’t a browser in the true sense of the word: it’s built upon pre-existing ones. This is important because pages will render as you expect them to, and only affect how your interact with your browser and not the way it works.

On iOS, Axis is more like a browser, but is really Safari within a skin due to Apple’s stringent controls on apps. That said, based of the time I spent testing I’d argue Axis is a better browser for iOS users than Safari due to its extra features.

Microsoft wins too

While Yahoo might have scored a win here with Axis, it was a big day for Microsoft as well. Remember that Bing powers Yahoo’s search results. If Axis takes off on mobile, it will be cutting into a fairly sizable chunk of Google’s search share.

One of the reasons that Google has been able to maintain dominance is its near stranglehold on mobile search. The two major mobile platforms — iOS and Android — both default to Google when it comes to search. If these folks now turn to Yahoo’s Axis, obviously that traffic’s going somewhere else.

It’s going to be interesting to watch — Axis is already 23rd on the top apps in the App Store in just its first day of release with not much in the way of promotion.

The Remee mask is designed to be customizable while being as lightweight as possible. It closely resembles a traditional sleep mask, but it comes with several hardware additions. On the front, it has two light sensors that allow the Atmega168 processor to be programmed by holding the mask up to a computer screen (with the Remee settings website loaded). On the back, it has three red LEDs per eye, which is where the magic happens.

One of the biggest hurdles to lucid dreaming is being able to consciously realize that you are in a dream. What Remee does is activate its red lights in programmable patterns once it detects that you are in REM sleep. The light is not bright enough to wake you up, but just enough to pass through your eyelids and cause visual anomalies in your dreams. Then, during your dreaming, by noticing the anomalies in the distance, you can become aware that you are dreaming. After that, like Neo in The Matrix, can then exert control over the world that only exists in your mind.

True lucid dreaming will still take training and practice, but the Remee mask is a good tool to allow you to break through the veil and become aware during your dreams. It was a very successful Kickstater, but many likely still question whether or not the device is legit. Without having one in hand, I cannot say for sure, but I can vouch for lucid dreaming itself. Everyone’s mind is different, but it is a least plausible that the device could help someone become aware during their dreams.

More information on the Remee and the developers can be found on their Kickstarter page.

Microsoft seems more than comfortable with the disruption — which is refreshing to see from the company — but it will still need to give desktop users tools with which the new OS can be operated. Originally it seemed like all the touch controls and new conventions would be additive and desktop users could just ignore them if they wanted, but that might not have to be the case. With the $40 Microsoft Touch mouse users without a touch display will be able to swipe, slide, and pinch their way through Windows 8.

Microsoft’s Touch mouse has been available for the better part of a year and touch gestures in Windows are nothing new, but we know that they will play a prominent role in Windows in the future. This mouse, and ones like it, could bring multitouch controls to the desktop-using masses, making them both affordable and accessible. It could be one of the tools that let’s Windows 8′s designers achieve both their user experience and HCI goals.

Of course the mouse will work with laptops, but trackpads will be a lot more convenient and popular option. With laptops outselling desktops these days there is no question that the trackpad will be the primary gesture tool in Windows 8. And the Touch mouse will never be for Microsoft what the Magic Trackpad is for Apple — the canonical device by which Apple’s laptop and mobile device interactions are shifted to the desktop — but it could still play an important part in allowing desktop users to take advantage of the features that Windows 8 offers.

With the mandate that Windows 8 “work[s] like a device, not a computer” it’s clear that Microsoft is banking on products like this one to bridge the gap between different classes of users and different modes of Windows usage. If you think that’s strong language, the company also noted that it wants “touch as a first-class input method” and that it’s “embracing” touch on the desktop. How do you do that without a refresh to most of the displays in the world and a some nasty cases of “gorilla arm“? A capacitive, multitouch-capable mouse of course.

The final piece to this puzzle is Microsoft’s announcement in February that the Touch mouse will be updated for Windows 8. Specific changes were not mentioned, but I’ve been told that there will be more gestures and better gesture compatibility once Windows 8 hits GA status. Swipes will be able to handle tasks like summoning Windows 8′s charms and app bar, as well as switching between programs. Nothing you can’t with the keyboard, but with the focus on touch it’s important to give desktop users an option.

Needless to say, this made people who wanted LTE world phones rather upset. However, Verizon Wireless likely did it for a single reason: carrier lock-in. It all ties into the rules that the FCC placed on the 700MHz C block spectrum that Verizon Wireless bought to run its network on. According to the regulations, Verizon Wireless is prohibited from disabling features on devices it provides to its customers. This is explicitly extended to include enabling features and crippling them.

In the past, Verizon Wireless offered special “world phones” with GSM, WCDMA, and CDMA2000 support. However, the radio firmware always had a built-in block for the United States’ mobile country code. This ensured that the GSM and WCDMA radios would not permit the device to work on US carriers (other than Verizon). It did not have to worry about the CDMA2000 radio, since that is always custom programmed for the carrier network it is intended for, and is not likely to work well on other networks. This is absolutely not allowed for any device Verizon Wireless wishes to offer that supports its 4G LTE network.

The regulations also seem to forbid SIM subsidy locks (also known as network locks). With that in mind, Verizon Wireless would be extremely hesitant to offer global GSM and WCDMA support on its 4G LTE phones. The main reason no one takes his/her 4G LTE device to another carrier is because no other carrier has a 4G LTE network that is compatible with the device. That impediment doesn’t even require a SIM subsidy lock, but with an unlocked device that has GSM and WCDMA support, consumers would be free to purchase Verizon Wireless 4G LTE global devices and actually pick which carrier to use them on. That is a bit too much power in the hands of the consumer, which Verizon does not want. US carriers thrive on the ability to impede consumers from getting the device they want and using it on a carrier of their choosing.

Something must have happened at Verizon Wireless, because it has changed its tune about global GSM and WCDMA support on 4G LTE devices. In February, Verizon Wireless enabled full global roaming capabilities in the Motorola Xyboard 8.2 and 10.1 tablets. In a statement Verizon Wireless announced that the following devices will get full global roaming capabilities this summer:

• Motorola Droid Razr
• Motorola Droid Razr Maxx
• Motorola Droid 4
• HTC Rezound

Aside from the HTC Rezound (which only has quad band GSM and dual band WCDMA for European 3G networks), all of these devices support quad band GSM and WCDMA for global roaming all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Additionally, these devices will not have the mobile country code block. That means that they will operate on AT&T’s HSPA network. And of course, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network will support them too after it refarms its spectrum to launch PCS HSPA+ and AWS LTE. The phones will work on both carriers’ GSM networks, too.

There is one more device in Verizon’s current lineup that is also due for an update that brings full global roaming support. Back at CES, Verizon Wireless announced that the LG Spectrum would also get its GSM and WCDMA radios enabled in a future update. The timing for that update has not yet been announced. The LG Spectrum has a quad band GSM radio and a tri band WCDMA radio for full roaming in Europe and limited roaming in the Americas and Asia. This device will partially work on AT&T’s HSPA network in certain areas, but it will work with T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network after refarming. And it will work on both carriers’ GSM networks, too.

When any of these devices are used on T-Mobile’s network, they will be able to use the carrier’s new nationwide IPv6 network.

It is quite likely that someone may have investigated and reported to the FCC that Verizon Wireless violated the terms of the network spectrum license when these devices rolled out without full global roaming. This would have forced Verizon’s hand and made it enable those radios for everyone. Otherwise, we would probably have not seen 4G LTE world phones for quite some time (probably only after Europe rolls out LTE).

When asking Siri a question, recordings of the question are sent to Apple’s servers where it is analyzed. Apple has not been too forthcoming on what is done with these files, if those files are stored ,and for how long if they are. This makes IBM uncomfortable, enough that it decided to ban the app.

“We’re just extraordinarily conservative. It’s the nature of our business,” Horan explains.

While the company’s move seems extreme, it stems from a legitimate concern. Companies big and small are struggling with employees’ desire to use their own devices in the workplace. The reasons for doing so vary: some prefer to use a platform they’re familiar with — say OS X over Windows, or Windows over Linux — or they want personal freedom, such as the right to access social networks or instant messaging clients while at work.

This presents a security problem for IT administrators. Admins can’t control what we’re doing on these devices quite like they can on company owned equipment, so it results in actions like the one IBM has taken.

Is Siri truly a threat to corporate security? That’s questionable. It’s hard to imagine what IBM employees would be asking or telling their phones that would truly put the company at risk. It seems more an issue of employee discipline than anything that Apple would do.

Above and beyond that, what would Apple truly gain from spying in on the actions of IBM employees? Probably not much. The moral of the story here seems to be that if you value your job, and are working on some pretty secret stuff, it’s your own responsibility to make sure it doesn’t slip out.

What’s new about Kai is the price, down to $199 from $249. According to Nvidia VP Rob Csongor, the company is putting together a two-pronged strategy between Android ICS at the low end, with Windows RT anchoring high end products. Speaking at the company’s investor meeting, Congor said: “Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point… So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.”

What sort of secret sauce? We suspect Nvidia’s DirectTouch will make an appearance. As we’ve previously discussed, DirectTouch is a technology that integrates the functions of discrete chips into the Tegra processor and handles touch computation on the Companion Core.

Nvidia claims that DT offers improved power consumption as well as better fidelity, and while touch sensors aren’t known for high power usage, they require independent circuitry and typically operate in an “Always On” mode, even when the device is in standby. Improved integration and lower power consumption are two factors vitally important to pushing the cutting edge of low-cost design; DT offers advantages on both fronts.

Nvidia’s decision to build a reference platform isn’t surprising; the company has done something similar for GPUs for years. The $199 price point, however, could definitely shake things up. Amazon’s Kindle Fire has an estimated Bill of Materials (BOM) between $150 and $199, and Kindle Fire sales have been high enough for the company to leverage economies of scale. Tegra 3 is significantly more powerful than the dual-core OMAP 4430 that powers the Fire, and unlike Amazon, the OEMs that might build such tablets don’t have anything like Amazon’s multimedia storehouse. If Nvidia can offer a reference design that still preserves some room for an actual profit, that’s a significant feat.

Today, the vast majority of web services and sites are hosted in the cloud. By this I mean that, instead of companies (such as Ziff Davis/ExtremeTech) managing their own hardware, third-party cloud storage and computing services are used. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google are three prominent examples of huge cloud clusters, but there are hundreds of smaller operations that range in size from a whole data center down to a few racks.

The power of the cloud is vested in the fact that it can be coerced and shoehorned into tasks as disparate as a cloud-based supercomputer, to webmail, to simple document storage. On a single cloud cluster, Google can host and serve petabytes of YouTube videos and store all of your email and documents. Of all the facets of the cloud, though, today we’re going to focus on cloud storage.

A Microsoft data center

While storage might not be as sexy as terabytes of RAM and thousands of CPU cores, it is the most reliable way of measuring the size of the cloud, especially when we factor in bandwidth usage. From the total amount of storage we can also work out the cost of cloud storage — and from there, we can finally work out why the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox are falling over themselves to provide cloud storage services.

Like the porn story, we’ll first start with some theoretical numbers, and then move onto some real-world figures (and hardware) from Backblaze, a cloud backup provider.

Petabytes

For the most part, real numbers from the big companies, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, are few and far between. If you scour the web, though, some rough ballpark figures emerge:

• Facebook, in its IPO filing, said it stores over 100 petabytes (PB) of media (photos and videos). It’s not unrealistic to say that Facebook probably has a total storage of capacity well beyond that, once you factor in backups and other data (status updates, likes, and so on), possibly in the 300PB range.
• Microsoft recently admitted that Hotmail stores over 100 petabytes, and that SkyDrive, with “17 million customers,” stores 10PB of data. Like Facebook, Microsoft’s total capacity, once we factor in the rest of Azure and its web properties, is probably well over 300 petabytes.
• Megaupload is relatively tiny in comparison, apparently storing just 25 petabytes.
• Amazon, rather than giving us a nice, easy number of petabytes, instead announces the total number of objects stored by its S3 cloud storage service. As of April 2012, Amazon S3 stored 905 billion objects. If we assume an average size of 100KB, that’s around 90 petabytes; if the average size is 1MB, that’s 900 petabytes — almost an exabyte!
• Dropbox, a year ago, stored “10+ petabytes” of data. It had 25 million users then, and 100 million users today, so all things being equal the company now stores around 40PB of data.

To put these figures into perspective, an average computer probably has a 500GB or 1TB hard drive, and a petabyte is 1024TB. At the very least, then, Microsoft and Facebook data centers play host to more than 100,000 hard drives. Without building custom hardware, you can squeeze 48 drives into a 4U enclosure. After accounting for networking gear, that means you’re probably looking at around 400 hard drives per 40U rack — or 250 racks, each of which occupies around one square meter of floor space. This might sound like a lot, but when you consider that Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft regularly roll out data centers with floor plans of over 30,000 square meters (300,000+ square feet), it’s really not that much. In the grand scale of things, a lot more space is dedicated to servers (i.e. CPUs) and networking gear.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth-wise, we have even less data from the big boys. We know that, as of last year, one million files were being saved every five minutes — so today, with four times as many users, that’s 800,000 files per minute. Amazon S3, which is significantly larger than Dropbox, handles “650,000 requests per second.”

If we assume that the average file stored on Dropbox is 500KB (a mix of photos, videos, and documents) then Dropbox stores a total of 400,000 megabytes (0.4TB) per minute — or 6.7GB per second (54Gbps). We don’t have any data on how much data Dropbox sends per minute (i.e. people downloading files from their Dropbox), but it’s probably in the region of 10 to 20Gbps.

Amazon S3, which is mainly used to store static files for websites (images, style sheets, videos), probably has a lower average file size than Dropbox. If we assume an average size of 100KB per file, then 650,000 requests per second comes to a grand total of 61 gigabytes of data transferred per second, or 488Gbps. This is very close to the 800Gbps figure that we estimated for a large porn site, which equates to around 2% of total internet traffic — Amazon is pretty darn big!

Facebook and Microsoft, with between 100 and 300PB of storage each, probably fall somewhere between Dropbox and Amazon in terms of bandwidth usage — maybe 200Gbps a piece.

But enough theory! Let’s discuss some real-world numbers and real-world hardware!