Category: Gadgets

A report from IDC has showed that even as it matures in some countries, others are still taking off.

The IDC has now released its report on the growth of the smartphone market for 2014 and it has shown that while mature marketplaces are forecasted to grow by only 4.9 percent, emerging regions are expected to keep up a tremendous rate of 32.4 percent.

Some of the regions of the world are experiencing faster growth than the average reported by IDC.

According to the report, the Indian smartphone market saw a massive 300 percent growth rate in 2013. As only 10 percent of the over 700 million users of cell phones had smartphones at that time, it was only natural that the growth rate be exceptionally high. By the first quarter of this year, the penetration rate of these mobile devices had already reached a much higher 29 percent.

In emerging countries, the dynamics of the growth of the smartphone market are different than in mature regions.

For instance, many emerging marketplaces do not have a broad scale fixed line infrastructure. Therefore, this means that it provides an ecosystem that is much more favorable for the use of mobile broadband technologies for the delivery of high speed internet connections than is the case in mature markets, where that infrastructure is considerably better established.

The demand within emerging regions is, therefore, driving growth in both smartphone shipments and in mobile broadband subscriptions. Two very large and yet highly different examples of this occurrence are going on in India and in China.

In China, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported that at the end of 2012, there was a 74.5 percent growth in mobile internet users to the most recent figure, which is 81 percent. Clearly, this is a notably higher growth rate and the CNNIC is calling the smartphones the primary driving force for internet use in the country.

On the other hand, in India, Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins, indicated in the report called the 2014 Internet Trends that while smartphone use is tremendous, revenues are very large, and the opportunity is considerable, companies are still seeing tiny margins. At the moment, only 4 percent of the budgets of advertisers in the country is being spent on advertising in the smartphone market.

The popular music streaming service has officially rolled out its first application for this wearable technology.

Explorers now have a brand new way to be able to listen to music over their Google Glass wearable tech, as Pandora has now rolled out its very first app that is designed specifically for use over these devices.

The Glass app gives users the ability to be able to control their stations through the use of voice command.

The Google Glass app first came to life as an internal hackathon project earlier in 2014 that was held by Pandora. The company found that the effort was so popular that it went ahead and turned it into an official application designed for the augmented reality headset. It provides users with the ability to be able to listen to music through the AR glasses in three separate ways. The first is with the ear bud that is provided in the Glass Explorer kit. The second is with the additional optional stereo ear bud gadget. And the third is with the guilt in speaker of the wearable tech, itself, which doesn’t require any additional accessories.

The Google Glass version of the app can be controlled either through the touchpad or voice command.

Pandora made a blog post to share the control methods, in which it said that “Our Glassware allows you to access your personalized radio stations from wherever you are, interacting with the service through voice command or by using the touchpad.”

Users can also either play existing stations or create new ones through the use of the new app. Among the voice commands that are available to them are those that allow them to choose or form new stations. However, the touchpad goes above and beyond that for allowing users to play, skip, or pause tracks, as well as to rate individual tracks using the thumbs up or thumbs down signs.

In order to download the app, owners of the device simply need to visit the Google Glass page, turn on Pandora, and then sign in. This is the second app that has been designed by Pandora for wearable devices. The first one was made specifically for the Pebble smartwatch, and it was rolled out earlier in 2014. That said, the company has been dropping hints to suggest that there may be more focus on wearables in the future.