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Nintendo’s Mario Kart mobile game won’t launch until the summer
It’s been a long year for Nintendo fans waiting on Mario Kart Tour to come to mobile and, unfortunately, more patience is required after the game’s launch was moved back to this summer.
Nintendo announced plans to bring the much-loved franchise to smartphones one year ago. It was originally slated to launch by the end of March 2019, but the Japanese games giant said today it is pushing that date back to summer 2019.
The key passage sits within Nintendo’s latest earnings report, released today, which explains that additional time is needed “to improve [the] quality of the application and expand the content offerings after launch.”
The checkered flag has been raised and the finish line is near. A new mobile application is now in development: Mario Kart Tour! #MarioKartTour Releasing in the fiscal year ending in March 2019. pic.twitter.com/8GIyR7ZM4z
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 1, 2018
It’s frustrating but, as The Verge points out, you can refer to a famous Nintendo phrase if you are seeking comfort.
Shigeru Miyamoto, who created the Mario and Zelda franchises, once remarked that “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
There’s plenty riding on the title — excuse the pun. Super Mario Run, the company’s first major game for the iPhone, showed its most popular IP has the potential to be a success on mobile, even though Mario required a $9.99 payment to go beyond the limited demo version. Mario Kart is the most successful Switch title to date, so it figures that it can be a huge smash on mobile if delivered in the right way.
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Samsung posts fourth-quarter profit drop, warns of weak demand until the second half of 2019
Samsung Electronics reported its largest quarterly profit decline in two years during its earnings report today. As the Galaxy maker warned in its earnings guidance earlier this month, its results were hurt by slower-than-expected demand for semiconductors, which had bolstered its earnings in previous quarters even when smartphone sales were slow.
Samsung’s forecast was also dour, at least for the first half of the year. It said annual earnings will decline thanks to continuing weak demand for chips, but expects demand for memory products and OLED panels to improve during the second half.
The company’s fourth-quarter operating profit was 10.8 trillion won (about $9.7 billion), a 28.7 percent decrease from the 15.15 trillion won it recorded in the same period one year ago. Revenue was 59.27 trillion won, a 10.2 percent drop year over year.
Broken out by business, Samsung’s semiconductor unit recorded quarterly operating profit of 7.8 trillion won, down from 10.8 trillion won a year ago. Its mobile unit’s operating profit was 1.5 trillion won, compared to 2.4 trillion won a year ago.
Smartphone makers, including Samsung rival Apple, have been hit hard by slowing smartphone sales around the world, especially in China. Upgrade cycles are also becoming longer as customers wait to buy newer models.
This hurt both Samsung’s smartphone and chip sales, as “overall market demand for NAND and DRAM drop[ped] due to macroeconomic uncertainties and adjustments in inventory levels by customers including data center companies and smartphone makers,” said the company’s earnings report.
Samsung expects chip sales to be sluggish during the first quarter because of weak seasonality and inventory adjustments by its biggest customers. The company was optimistic about the last two quarters of 2019, when it expects demand for chips and OLED panels to pick up thanks to seasonal demand and customers finishing their inventory adjustments.
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Foxconn pulls back on its $10 billion factory commitment
Well that didn’t last long.
In 2017, Foxconn announced the largest investment of a foreign company in the United States when it selected Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin for a new manufacturing facility. Buttressed by huge economic development grants from Wisconsin, an endorsement from President Trump, and Foxconn CEO Terry Gou’s vision of a maker America, the plant was designed to turn a small town and its environs into the futuristic “Wisconn Valley.”
Now, those dreams are coming apart faster than you can say “Made in America.”
In an interview with Reuters, a special assistant to Gou says that those plans are being remarkably scaled back. Originally designed to be an advanced LCD factory, the new Foxconn facility will instead be a much more modest (but still needed!) research center for engineers.
It’s a huge loss for Wisconsin, but the greater shock may be just how obvious all of this was. I wrote about the boondoggle just a few weeks ago, as had Bruce Murphy at The Verge a few weeks before that. Sruthi Pinnamaneni produced an excellent podcast on Reply All about how much the economic development of Mount Pleasant tore the small town asunder.
The story in short: the economics of the factory never made sense, and economics was always going to win over the hopes and dreams of politicians like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who championed the deal. Despite bells and whistles, televisions are a commodity product (unlike, say, airfoils), and thus the cost structure is much more compatible with efficient Asian supply chains than with American expensive labor.
Yet, that wasn’t the only part of the project that never made any sense. Foxconn was building in what was essentially the middle of nowhere, without the sort of dense ecosystem of suppliers and sub-suppliers required for making a major factory hum. (Plus, as a native of Minnesota, I can also attest that Wisconsin is a pile of garbage).
Those suppliers are everything for manufacturers. Just this past weekend, Jack Nicas at the New York Times observed that Apple’s advanced manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas struggled to find the right parts it needed to assemble its top-of-the-line computer, the Mac Pro:
But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not.
There are of course huge manufacturing ecosystems in the United States — everything from cars in Detroit, to planes in Washington, to advanced medical devices in several major bio-hubs. But consumer electronics is one that has for the most part been lost to Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and of course, China.
Geopolitically, Foxconn’s factory made a modicum of sense. With the increasing protectionism emanating from Western capitals, Foxconn could have used some geographical diversity in the event of a tariff fight. The company is Taiwanese, but manufacturers many of its products on the mainland.
And of course, a research center is still an enormous gain for a region of Wisconsin that could absolutely use high-income, professional jobs. Maybe the process of rolling out a next-generation manufacturing ecosystem will take more time than originally anticipated, but nothing is stopping further expansion in the future.
Yet, one can’t help but gaze at the remarkable naïveté of Wisconsin politicians who offered billions only to find that even massive subsidies aren’t enough. It’s a competitive world out there, and the United States has little experience in these fights.
India may put friction on foreign firms to protect domestic startups
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (MONEY SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images)
One of the major battles for tech supremacy is over the future of the Indian IT market, which is rapidly bringing more than a billion people onto the internet and giving them robust software services. I’ve talked a bit about data sovereignty, which mandates that Indian data be stored in Indian data centers by Indian companies, pushing out foreign companies like Amazon, Google, and Alibaba.
Now, it looks like India is taking a page from the Asian tiger-school of development, and is going to increasingly favor domestic firms over foreign ones in key industries. Newley Purnell and Rajesh Roy report in the WSJ:
The secretary of India’s Telecommunications Department, Aruna Sundararajan, last week told a gathering of Indian startups in a closed-door meeting in the tech hub of Bangalore that the government will introduce a “national champion” policy “very soon” to encourage the rise of Indian companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. She said Indian policy makers had noted the success of China’s internet giants, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. , the person said. She didn’t immediately respond to a request for more details on the program or its timing.
The idea of national champions is simple. Unlike the innovation world of Silicon Valley, there are obvious sectors in an economy that need to be fulfilled. Food and clothes have to be sold, deliveries made, all kinds of industrial goods need to be built. Rather than creating a competitive market that requires high levels of duplicate capital investment, the government can designate a few companies to take the lead in each market to ensure that they can invest for growth rather than in, say, marketing costs.
If done well, such policies can rapidly industrialize a country’s economic base. When done poorly, the lack of competition can create lethargy among entrepreneurs, who have already won their markets without even trying.
The linchpin is whether the government pushes companies to excel and sets aggressive growth targets. In Korea and China, the central governments actively monitored corporate growth during their catch-up years, and transferred businesses to new entrepreneurs if business leaders failed to perform. Can India push its companies as hard without market forces?
As the technology industry matures in the West, entrepreneurs will look for overseas as their future growth hubs. The challenge is whether they will be let in at all.
Video game geopolitics
Nexon’s MapleStory2 game is one of its most profitable (Screenshot from Nexon) .
Korea and Japan are two of the epicenters of the video game industry, and now one of its top companies is on the auction block, raising tough questions about media ownership.
Nexon founder Kim Jung Ju announced a few weeks ago that he was intending to sell all of his controlling $9 billion stake in the leading video game company. The company has since executed something of a multi-stage auction process to determine who should buy those shares. One leading candidate we’ve learned is Kakao, the leading internet portal and chatting app in Korea.
The other leading candidate is China-based Tencent, which owns exclusive distribution rights in China of some of Nexon’s most important titles.
Tencent has been increasingly under the sway of China’s government, which froze video game licensing last year as it worked to increase content regulation over the industry. Now the question is whether it will be politically palatable to sell a leading star of Korea’s video game industry to its economic rival.
Mr Wi added that Nexon would be an attractive target for Tencent, which pays about Won1tn in annual royalties to the South Korean game developer. But selling the company to Tencent would be “politically burdensome” for Mr Kim, given unfavourable public opinion in South Korea towards such a sale, he cautioned.
“Political risks are high for the deal. Being criticised for selling the company to a foreign rival, especially a Chinese one, would be the last thing that Mr Kim wants,” said Mr Wi.
Such concerns around Chinese media ownership have become acute throughout the world, but we haven’t seen these concerns as much in the video game industry. Clearly, times have changed.
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Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney
My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.
What’s Next
- More work on societal resilience
This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York
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India’s largest bank SBI leaked account data on millions of customers
India’s largest bank has secured an unprotected server that allowed anyone to access financial information on millions of its customers, like bank balances and recent transactions.
The server, hosted in a regional Mumbai-based data center, stored two months of data from SBI Quick, a text message and call-based system used to request basic information about their bank accounts by customers of the government-owned State Bank of India (SBI), the largest bank in the country and a highly ranked company in the Fortune 500.
But the bank had not protected the server with a password, allowing anyone who knew where to look to access the data on millions of customers’ information.
It’s not known for how long the server was open, but long enough for it to be discovered by a security researcher, who told TechCrunch of the leak, but did not want to be named for the story.
SBI Quick allows SBI’s banking customers to text the bank, or make a missed call, to retrieve information back by text message about their finances and accounts. It’s ideal for millions of the banking giant’s customers who don’t use smartphones or have limited data service. By using predefined keywords, like “BAL” for a customer’s current balance, the service recognizes the customer’s registered phone number and will send back the current amount in that customer’s bank account. The system can also be used to send back the last five transactions, block an ATM card and make inquiries about home or car loans.
It was the back-end text message system that was exposed, TechCrunch can confirm, storing millions of text messages each day.
A redacted example of some of the banking and credit information found in the database (Image: TechCrunch)
The passwordless database allowed us to see all of the text messages going to customers in real time, including their phone numbers, bank balances and recent transactions. The database also contained the customer’s partial bank account number. Some would say when a check had been cashed, and many of the bank’s sent messages included a link to download SBI’s YONO app for internet banking.
The bank sent out close to three million text messages on Monday alone.
The database also had daily archives of millions of text messages each, going back to December, allowing anyone with access a detailed view into millions of customers’ finances.
We verified the data by asking India-based security researcher Karan Saini to send a text message to the system. Within seconds, we found his phone number in the database, including the text message he received back.
“The data available could potentially be used to profile and target individuals that are known to have high account balances,” said Saini in a message to TechCrunch. Saini previously found a data leak in India’s Aadhaar, the country’s national identity database, and a two-factor bypass bug in Uber’s ridesharing app.
Saini said that knowing a phone number “could be used to aid social engineering attacks — which is one of the most common attack vectors in the country with regard to financial fraud,” he said.
SBI claims more than 500 million customers across the glob,e with 740 million accounts.
Just days earlier, SBI accused Aadhaar’s authority, UIDAI, of mishandling citizen data that allowed fake Aadhaar identity cards to be created, despite numerous security lapses and misuse of the system. UIDAI denied the report, saying there was “no security breach” of its system. (UIDAI often uses the term “fake news” to describe coverage it doesn’t like.)
TechCrunch reached out to SBI and India’s National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre, which receives vulnerability reports for the banking sector. The database was secured overnight.
Despite several emails, SBI did not comment prior to publication.
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China’s social credit system won’t tell you what you can do right
For the past few years, China has been rolling out a Black Mirror / Harry Potter-esque social rating policy known as the Social Credit System (SCS). Far from just a credit score in the financial sense, an SCS score can determine whether a person can buy business class tickets on trains (or take the train at all) or have access to flights. Apps are rumored to exist that would tell users whether they are standing near someone with a debt listed in the system, so … they can walk away I guess.
This is a massive undertaking, and researchers are finally starting to collect good data on the system’s operation, such as a MERICS report looking at the implementation of this complex system, which involves companies and all levels of the Chinese government. Westerners have also increasingly explored the generally positive reception of the system by Chinese citizens, which would seem at odds with typical desires for privacy.
Yet, one of the biggest and most obvious open questions is what exactly will get you rewarded or punished by the SCS? Now, we are finally starting to get answers.
In a new paper that will be presented this week at the ACM FAT* Conference on algorithmic transparency, a group of researchers investigated how positive and negative points were assessed by downloading a large corpus of hundreds of thousands of entries from the Beijing SCS website and analyzing it with content analysis machine learning tools.
They found that Beijing was remarkably clear about what will get you punished, but vague about what will get you positive points. For instance, the vast majority of the blacklist was made up by people who had failed to pay their debts, or who had committed a traffic violation. Meanwhile, the people on the redlist (the positive list) were there because they were, say, great volunteers, but with no criteria on how to get that status or why they were listed at all.
“It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact degree of transparency,” of SCS said Severin Engelmann, one of the lead researchers based at the Technical University of Munich. Far from being just an experimental startup, SCS is already quite advanced. “Blacklisting and redlisting are already in place, and they clearly indicate what behavior is bad … but not what behavior is actually good,” he said.
Even more interesting, there are more companies on the blacklist and redlist than there are individuals within the Beijing corpus, indicating that while the government is certainly concerned about citizens, it’s bringing its social control mechanism onto companies perhaps more aggressively.
Jens Grossklags, another of the researchers, noted that this level of transparency — while inconsistent — was unusual in the West. “It is really fascinating from a data science perspective to see how much information is being made available not just to individuals but to the general public,” he said. He noted that public shaming has been common with the Chinese system, while Western consumers have a hard time accessing their own scores let alone the scores of others.
The study is one of the first to look at the actual implementation of SCS and reverse engineer its algorithm, and the researchers are potentially following up by investigating regional variations and further changes to the system.
TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.
Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney
My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.
Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)
Short summaries and analysis of important news stories
Hustling to nothing
Erin Griffith has a great piece on the increasing pervasiveness of hustle culture. This is part of a long-running debate in Silicon Valley between the work-your-ass-off crowd and the productivity-peaks-at-35-hours crowd. The answer in my mind is that we should see work in phases — running at 100 MPH all the time is most definitely not sustainable, but neither frankly is working a very stable number of hours per week. The vagaries of life and work mean that we need to surge and recede our efforts as dictated, and always track our own health.
Nvidia’s troubles continue
We’ve talked a lot about Nvidia over the past few months (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Well, the bad news train just continues. As my colleague Romain Dillet reports, Nvidia is cutting its revenue outlook, and now the stock is falling again (another 14% as I write this). It cites lowered demand particularly from China, which is experiencing a major slowdown in its economy.
Can Chinese startups subsidize customers forever?
The Financial Times asks an important question about the “China model” of startups: should founders heavily subsidize customers in order to buy market share and fight competitors? They point to bike sharing startup Ofo’s collapse, although I would point to the expensive rise of Luckin Coffee as perhaps the latest example. It’s a lesson that Munchery’s investors also have had to learn: at the end of the day, those unit economics better turn positive if a company is to survive.
What’s next
- More work on societal resilience
This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York
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China’s smartphone shipments dropped 14 percent in 2018
Smartphone numbers are down all over — but things look especially stark in China these days. Tim Cook cited softened demand in the world’s largest smartphone market as a key factor in Apple’s lowered guidance, and Apple is far from alone in feeling the pinch. Today, Canalys reported another large drop in the country for 2018.
The firm says that shipments dropped 14 percent in China for the year. That’s the second year in a row shipments have dropped, following more than half a decade of impressive growth, rocketing China to the number one spot, ahead of the U.S. All told, 396 million units were shipped last year, marking the lowest level since 2013.
Domestic companies Huawei and Vivo both managed to grow in that time, hitting first and third place, respectively. Oppo and Xiaomi slipped a bit, but managed to hold the second and fourth place positions, respectively. Apple, the sole U.S. representative in the top five, held on to fifth place, but still dropped 13 percent. The rest of the industry, meanwhile, dropped a staggering 60 percent, year over year.
Much of what’s at play here is a familiar story all over. A matured market means upgrade cycles have slowed down, as more users are choosing to hold onto handsets for longer. Even more pronounced, however, is a combination of slowed economic growth and lowered purchasing power in the country.
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Whim, the all-in-one mobility app for ridesharing, public transit and rentals is coming to the US
MaaS Global, the company behind the all-in-one mobility app Whim, which offers a subscription service for public transportation, ridesharing, bike rentals, scooter rentals, taxis or car rentals, will be making its U.S. debut later this year.
The company will choose its American launch city from Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and Miami, according to Sampo Hietanen, the company’s chief executive.
The Whim app is currently available in Antwerp, Birmingham, U.K., Helsinki and Vienna, according to Hietanen, and offers a range of subscription options. The top of the line version is a €500 per month all-inclusive package giving users unlimited access to ride hailing, bike and car rentals and public transportation.
“Cars take 70 percent of the market and it’s used 4 percent of the time so you’re paying for the optional capacity,” says Hietanen. Using Whim, which, at the high end costs about as much as a car in Europe, users can get all of the optionality without paying for the unused capacity. It should ideally reduce transportation costs and cut down on emissions, if Hietanen’s claims are accurate.
The Helsinki-based company uses APIs to connect with the back end of a number of service providers. For car rentals, it’s working with businesses like Hertz, Enterprise and EuropeCar; for ridesharing, the company has linked with Gett and local European taxi companies, according to Hietanen.
Users have already booked 3 million trips through the company’s app since its launch and the company is continuing to expand not just in North America, but in Asia as well. There are plans in the works for the company to launch operations in Singapore.
Giving consumers more options for transit through a single gateway could reduce demand for vehicles, but some analysts argue that it won’t do much to alleviate congestion on roads. Consumers, they argue, will choose the convenience of rideshare over mass transit and could actually increase.
As Richard Rowson, a mobility consultant from the U.K., noted in this post:
MaaS doesn’t implicitly mean a net decrease nor increase in the number of road vehicle miles. The changes are complex, but in balance look likely to result in an increase.
Factors such as migration from private car to public transport should cause a reduction, but migration from train and bus, to private hire and smaller demand responsive buses will cause an increase. Other factors such as ‘positioning’ movements as ‘on demand’ vehicles are positioned to exploit demand also create journeys.
Smart journey planning and navigation systems should make better use of available road capacity, such as identifying alternative routes – but at the expense of migrating through traffic to local access roads.
There is the potential that having a single point of access to mobility may actually help cities push riders to favor public transportation by offering a window into the amount of time using each service would take and showing users the fastest route.
Last August the company said it had raised a €9 million round from undisclosed investors. It had previously received capital from Toyota Financial Services and its insurance partner Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance.
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China finally grants a game license to Tencent
Tencent has finally come out of a prolonged freeze on game approvals as Beijing granted licenses to two of its mobile games this month.
According to a notice published Thursday by China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, Tencent is one of nearly 200 games assigned licenses in January.
That’s big news for the Shenzhen-based firm, which has seen its share price plummet in the past months because the licensing halt crippled its ability to generate gaming revenues. Tencent is best known for its immensely popular WeChat messenger, but games contribute a bulk of its earnings.
Both games approved are for educational purposes so are unlikely to generate income at the level of Tencent’s more lucrative role-playing titles, such as Honor of Kings. Tencent has been at the center of government criticisms on games deemed harmful and addictive, and the firm has subsequently introduced so-called “utility games” in 2018 designed to promote traditional Chinese culture, science and technology.
That said, the tech giant could be raking in big bucks from a third-party game that also got approved this week. The title comes from China’s third-largest game publisher, Perfect World, with exclusive publishing rights handled by Tencent.
“The game is the mobile version of the extremely successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game with the same name,” Daniel Ahmad, an analyst at market research firm Niko Partners, suggests to TechCrunch. “We note that Perfect World Mobile is a core game that is set to be a high revenue generating title when it launches.”
China resumed its game approval process in December after a nine-month hiatus during which it worked to reshuffle its main regulating bodies for games. However, it left Tencent, the country’s biggest game publisher, and runner-up NetEase off its first batch of approved titles that month.
NetEase also scored its first post-freeze license in January and had better luck than Tencent, winning a nod for a multiplayer online role-playing game.
Despite the thawing, industry experts warn that approvals will come at a much slower rate than before as Chinese regulators look to more closely monitor game content, putting the burden on developers and publishers to decipher new industry rules.
“The size of the gaming company does not matter. It matters how fast the company can be adapting to the new set of rules and guidelines,” Shenzhen-based game consultant Ilya Gutov told TechCrunch in December.
“As the review and approval process for games resumes, we are confident that Tencent will be producing more compliant and higher-quality cultural work for society and the public,” a Tencent spokesperson said in December, highlighting its plan to churn out content that fits into China’s ideological agenda.
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Xiaomi teases a double-folding smartphone… ohhai digital triptych!
China’s Xiaomi has become the latest smartphone maker to tease a folding smartphone, dropping the below video clip of its president and co-founder, Bin Lin, fondling the device on social media today.
The twist is the tablet does not have a single center parting but rather two folds that divide it into three panels, with Xiaomi claiming in a tweet: “It is the world’s first ever double folding phone.”
The video shows Bin contemplating a tablet-sized touchscreen device before quickly turning it on its side, taking it into landscape orientation, where he performs the party trick — folding two panels of screen, one at each side, back behind the tablet to form a slightly chunky looking phablet.
Excited to share this video of a special Xiaomi smartphone from our President and Co-founder Bin Lin . It is the world’s first ever double folding phone — that’s pretty cool, isn’t it? #xiaomi #foldingphone #technology pic.twitter.com/iBj0n3vIbW
— Wang Xiang (@XiangW_) January 23, 2019
The video is edited so it cuts from front view to back at the moment of the fold so the actual folding action is not seen from the front. But from the back the two folded wings go dark after being folded.
When the video cuts back to the front there’s a slight spinning of the screen, as the software appears to grapple momentarily with the new form factor, before it stablizes in portrait orientation.
The phablet form of the device resembles the bezel-less “infinity display” design of a handset like the 2018 Samsung Galaxy S8 — albeit more squat looking than the tall 18.5:9 aspect ratio of the S8.
Xiaomi’s tweet teaser does not include any details about how near (or indeed far off) a market launch of the device might be. We’ve reached out to the company with questions about the prototype and any launch plans.
Update: A spokesman pointed us to a post on Bin’s Weibo account where he asks his followers for feedback on the prototype, and suggests Xiaomi is still weighing up whether to bring the folding phone to market, writing: “If you like it, we will consider making a mass production machine in the future.”
He also asks for name suggestions, saying Xiaomi is toying with two: Xiaomi Dual Flex or Xiaomi MIX Flex.
“This symmetrical double-folded form perfectly combines the experience of the tablet and mobile phone, which is both practical and beautiful,” he writes [translated via Google Translate], saying building the prototype entailed “conquering a series of technical problems such as flexible folding screen technology, four-wheel drive folding shaft technology, flexible cover technology, and MIUI adaptation.”
“We made the first folding screen mobile phone, which should be the world’s first double folding mobile phone,” he adds, again taking a tentative tone vis-à-vis a potential launch time frame.
In recent months a handful of folding smartphone prototypes have been demoed by mobile makers, including a booklet-style folding slab from Samsung — trailed as incoming for years but finally teased officially last fall — which also appears to transforms into a rather chunky handset.
An invite to a February 20 Samsung launch event for the forthcoming Galaxy S10, sent out to press two weeks ago, also included a conspicuous centerfold in its graphic teaser. Ergo, a commercial launch from Samsung looks imminent.
While, at CES, a little known Chinese OEM called Royole beat others to the punch by showing off a folder in the flesh. In tablet form the Android-powered FlexPai, as the device was christened, is 7.8-inches. But once folded in half the gizmo is left with an unsightly gap between the screen pieces, bulking up the resulting smartphone.
Xiaomi’s triptych looks to offer a more pleasing design for handling the inevitable air gap created by a folding screen by concealing the ends in the middle of the dual folded panels. Side tucks certainly look more visually pleasing.
That said, two folds could mean a higher risk of screen problems — if the folding mechanism isn’t robust enough to handle lots of bending back and forth.
It’s also far from clear whether consumers will generally take to folding phones, or snub them as fiddly and gimmicky.
In recent years smartphone design has converged around a phablet-sized touchscreen and little else. So adding any fresh mechanical complication is a bit of a risk given how smooth and hermetically sealed smartphones have otherwise become.
But a clutch of Android OEMs are going to try their luck, regardless. And with a saturated smartphone market, stalled growth and competition fiercer than ever, you can see why they’re pushing the boat out — or, well, bending the screen back — to try to stand out.
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Google launches clean energy project in Taiwan, its first in Asia
Google has launched its first clean energy project in Asia. The company announced today that it struck a long-term agreement to buy the output of a 10-megawatt solar array in Tainan City, Taiwan, about 100 km south of its data center in the country. Google already has solar and wind projects across North and South America, as well as Europe.
The agreement is a collaboration between Google, several Taiwanese energy companies and the country’s government, which recently revised Taiwan’s Electricity Act to enable non-utility companies to purchase renewable energy directly. The revisions are part of Taiwan’s new energy policy, aimed at phasing out nuclear energy by 2025 and increasing the share of electricity generated from renewable sources to 20 percent.
Google is the first corporate power buyer to take advantage of the revised law. Its development partners are Diode Ventures, Taiyen Green Energy, J&V Energy and New Green Power.
The solar array will be connected to the same regional power grid at Google’s Chuanghua County data center, one of two in Asia (the other is in Singapore). The poles supporting the solar panels will be mounted into commercial fishing ponds, an arrangement that Marsden Hanna, Google’s senior lead of energy and infrastructure, said in a blog post will maximize land-use efficiency and respect the local ecology because “fish and solar panels can coexist peacefully.” Fishing pond owners will also be compensated for hosting the panels.
The agreement means Google will get a long-term, fixed electricity price for its operations in Taiwan.
“As the Taiwanese government pursues further measures to remove market barriers and reduce renewable energy costs, we’re hopeful that more companies will purchase renewable energy, driving even larger projects across Taiwan,” said Hanna.
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