Tech 360

Tom Sangala October 18, 2017

400 2 minutes read

In the mobile phone industry, patents are gold mines. It is wholly for this reason that Apple and Samsung rake in almost all the profits of the industry. Apple leads the park but the rules of the game are about to change.

It has been revealed that Samsung owns the iPhone X’s almost bezel-less display. And Samsung is poised to “syphon” billions of dollars from iPhone X sales. According to Counterpoint Technologies, a research firm that partnered with Wall Street Journal to dig up the facts, Samsung is expected to earn $110 per each iPhone X sold. That is more salacious than the $202 per Galaxy S8 sale.

Apple is expected to sell 130 million iPhone X’s during its expected 20 month lifespan. Do your math, and you should, to your chagrin, discover that Samsung will be $14 billion dollars richer by the end of the exercise; for what? For doing nothing.

Enough of Apple and Samsung. What else is happening?

The hard disk company, Seagate, has announced the introduction of a 12 TB desktop hard drive. The new hard drive comes with a five-year warranty. This extends Seagate’s product range from the 10 TB cap.

The drive has slightly improved sustained transfer rates to 250 MB/S; an improvement from 220 MB/S on the 10 TB drives.

The price ranges from $530 t0 $487. This works to four cents per Gigabyte which is equal to lower capacity drives. This comes at a time spinning drives are facing stiff completion from Solid State Drives (SSD). With 1TB SSDs costing as low as $259, they are only 6.5 times more expensive.

SSDs are not emotional; just like flash disk, they do not have movable parts; they don’t spin, therefore, do not crash when dropped. Most laptops are now being shipped with SSDs including the almost ubiquitous Lenovo.

What else is up in the tech world? Microsoft made a stunning revelation during the week. The company is disembarking from mobile phone business ship. In tweet message, the Redmond based company said that while it would continue to support the platform, fix bugs and issue security updates, it would, however, stop further investments into the leaking vessel.

“We have tried VERY HARD to incest app developers. Paid money. Write apps for them. But volume user is too low for most of the companies to invest,” reads a tweet from Joe Belfiore, Microsoft Vice President for Windows.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer,said that Windows Phone has not been in his vision since he took over from the noisy Steve Ballmer a few years ago. It has survived this far because Satya did not know what to do with it.

Microsoft has paid the price for coming to the party late. By the time it showed up, Apple and Google had already imbibed the wine and too intoxicated with money power to late it go.

I must submit to you that I have been dealt a brow; I love a Windows phone; it worships the same god that my desktop and laptop luv.