Behind Your Business

Move over, computers and tablets. For the first time, annual worldwide shipments of smartphones are larger than PCs and tablets.

According to figures released Friday by industry research firm Canalys, there were more than 158 million smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of last year, a whopping 57 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010. For the entire year, smartphones were up 63 percent, to 487.7 million units.

'Significant Milestone'

By contrast, the global client PC market grew 15 percent last year, to 414.6 million units. This includes a huge, 274 percent growth in tablets, which are now the fast-growing segment in the client PC category.

Chris Jones, Canalys vice president and principal analyst, said in a statement that this is a "significant milestone." Jones said that, within a few years, smartphones "have grown from being a niche product segment at the high end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition."

The milestone comes as a previous report from Canalys, released earlier this week, showed that tablets are now 22 percent of all PC shipments. Coupled with Friday's report on the growth of smartphones, it's clear that the center of mobile computing is now in smartphones and tablets.

The Canalys report said that, while decreasing price points have been a key driver of the smartphone growth, there also has been an "increasing consumer appetite" for using smartphones for Net browsing, content consumption and apps.

However, the era of smart phones being more popular than computers or tablets may be short-lived. Canalys said it expects smartphone growth to slow this year, as vendors begin to emphasize cost control and profitability.

As an example, the company noted that some vendors who have focused on the low end, such as Huawei, ZTE and LG, are now turning their attention to higher-level, pricier models that cost more,...

While not leaping into the arms of ARM, AMD is hinting it's less wedded to the traditional x86 architecture that is its history.

AMD calls its strategy "ambidextrous" and says it builds on the company's current strengths in x86 and graphics products while embracing other technology and intellectual property the company hopes will differentiate its products in a competitive market.

The Intel rival sees its future in HSA, or heterogeneous system architecture. AMD outlined its strategy at its Financial Analyst Day this week.

"AMD's strategy capitalizes on the convergence of technologies and devices that will define the next era of the industry," said Rory Read, president and CEO of AMD. "The trends around consumerization, the cloud and convergence will only grow stronger in the coming years."

Repositioning AMD

As Read sees it, AMD has a unique opportunity to take advantage of a key industry inflection point as executives continue the work they started last year to reposition the company. Read says the new strategy will "help AMD embrace the shifts occurring in the industry, marrying market needs with innovative technologies, and become a consistent growth engine."

A major part of the plan includes HSA, which promises software developers a way to program APUs by combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the graphics processing unit -- all while offering high-bandwidth access to memory at low power. AMD is working to make HSA an open industry standard for the developer community.

"The battle plan that Read is articulating isn't to go head-to-head with Intel. He's suggesting going around Intel," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, who attended AMD's Financial Analyst Day. "Read was talking about going where the market was going, using whatever technologies they have access to in order to get there, including both x86 and ARM. You had to read between...

Looking to bolster confidence in the security of its fast-growing market for mobile applications, Google is posting a bouncer at the door.

The service analyzes new applications in the Android Market as well as those already posted, and even developer accounts, looking for known malware, spyware and trojans.

Google's Bouncer also looks for "behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving," according to a post on Google's mobile blog Thursday announcing the service.

The service develops a baseline of previously analyzed apps and compares it with new ones for signs of trouble.

"We actually run every application on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior," writes Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for Google's Android division.

And Stay Out!

Bouncer will also scrutinize new developer accounts to make sure those who are tossed as repeat offenders do not come back.

Bouncer works in addition to existing Android tools such as sandboxing, which builds virtual walls between applications and other software on the device so malware can't access data; permissions, which scrutinizes the capabilities of apps to help users make decisions; and malware removal tools that can remotely scrub intruders from a phone or tablet.

Still, the Android Market's growth -- it topped 11 billion downloads -- has made it a top source of malware. Juniper Networks in November announced that its Global Threat Center believes the easy process for posting apps led to a 472 percent increase in malware samples since the previous July.

"These days, it seems all you need is a developer account, that is relatively easy to anonymize, pay $25 and you can post your applications," wrote Juniper on its threat center blog. Lack of sufficient screening means poorly defined, unscreened apps will only be removed if malware is reported or detected by...

With Windows 8 moving toward release later this year, providing an integrated operating system for laptops, desktops and tablets, new details are beginning to emerge about Microsoft's plans for its next phone OS. Recent reports point to the ways in which Windows Phone 8, code-named Apollo, will advance the company's mobile platform and tie in with the tablet and computer OS.

The online reports began appearing this week. They build on a leaked video of a Microsoft phone executive, Joe Belfiore, which reportedly had been intended only for the eyes of Nokia executives, as well as various postings and hints by Microsoft.

Web Browsing, NFC, BitLocker

According to the reports, the Apollo OS will provide support for multi-core processors, four different screen resolutions, removable microSD cards, wireless e-commerce, and near-field communication, which allows tap-to-share functionality that will work with other phones, computers and tablets.

From the perspective of user interface and application development, the interfaces between Windows 8 and Apollo are expected to be similar, and Phone 8 is expected to reuse the kernel, network stacks, security and multimedia coding of Windows 8. As a result, applications developed for Windows 8 could potentially run, with relatively little modification, on Apollo phones.

To speed up Web browsing, Apollo will also reportedly use proxy servers that compress and deliver pages to the Internet Explorer 10 browser on the phone, a la the Opera browser. The reports also indicate that a revised Skype, now owned by Microsoft, will be integrated with Apollo, there will be automatic Wi-Fi connectivity, and Microsoft's 128-bit BitLocker will be used for full disk encryption, which is expected to appeal to businesses. Support for SkyDrive will allow data to be shared among Windows 8/Phone 8 devices.

Apollo's release schedule has not yet been announced, but it is expected to occur sometime after the coming...

Microsoft Corp. slammed search rival Google Inc. with full-page newspaper ads Wednesday, saying that recent changes at Google that allow it to internally merge the data it collects on user activity across services such as YouTube and Gmail are meant to allow advertisers to better target customers.

Google has touted the overhaul it announced last week as a simplification of detailed but obtuse policies and a way to provide a better user experience.

Microsoft offered up its own Web-based alternatives, saying for instance that users of its free email service, Hotmail, don't have to worry about the content of their emails being used to help target ads.

The attack ads appeared in newspapers including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

"Every data point Google collects and connects to you increases how valuable you are to an advertiser," Microsoft says in the ad.

In response, Google published a blog post in which it refuted what it called "myths" about its new privacy policy, saying, "Our privacy controls have not changed. Period."

The company does not dispute that it serves up ads based on words in private emails written by users of Gmail, but says such scanning is automated and is similar to how many email providers filter out spam. It has operated that way since Gmail's introduction in 2004.

Both companies offer several controls to prevent advertisers from tracking users' online activity.

Online expert Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Web site Search Engine Land, said that Google's privacy policy simplification has turned into a public relations "nightmare," but only because it again focused attention on the kind of data that Google has collected for years.

He said Microsoft is in no position to point fingers, since it also collects a lot of user data from its search engine, Bing, and will adjust search results based...