Lenovo to Spend $800M to Develop Mobile Products

Lenovo to Spend $800M to Develop Mobile Products
May 7, 2012 by Todd Wasserman on Mashable

Lenovo, best known for its PCs, plans to get into mobile in a big way with an $800 million base in Wuhan, China, dedicated to developing mobile Internet products.

The facility, set to open in October 2013 and house thousands of employees, is charged with developing and delivering “new mobile internet products and bring(ing) them to its customers even faster,” according to a company statement. Such products include smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices.

The move comes as Lenovo continues to build market share in PCs, a tough segment. Last year, Lenovo surpassed Dell in sales to become the world’s number two player in the category next to Hewlett-Packard.

Lenovo currently offered some mobile devices, including its LePhone smartphones and its ThinkPad tablets (pictured). In the last fiscal quarter, the company shipped 6.5 million handsets and 400,000 tablets globally. Lenovo blamed its relatively slow growth in PC sales in 2011 to the growth of tablets, led by Apple’s iPad. Lenovo was the number two seller of tablets in China last year next to Apple.

Could Lenovo shake up the mobile market? Let us know in the comments.





Source: Mashable.com

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Mobiles More than humans in 2012, says Cisco

Mobiles More than humans in 2012, says Cisco

Mobile devices will outnumber humans this year, according to network firm Cisco's latest analysis of global mobile data traffic.

By 2016 it predicts that there will be 10 billion mobile connected devices around the world.

By the same date networks will be carrying 130 exabytes of data each year, equivalent to 33 billion DVDs.

Mobile data traffic in 2011 was eight times the size of the global internet in 2000, according to the report.

Gigabyte club
The rise in data consumption is likely to cause more problems for mobile operators already struggling to cope with demand.

Currently the average smartphone uses 150 megabytes of data per month but this is expected to rise to 2.6 gigabytes by 2016, the report found.

"By 2016, 60% of mobile users - three billion people worldwide - will belong to the Gigabyte Club, each generating more than one gigabyte of mobile data traffic per month," said Suraj Shetty, vice-president of products and solutions at Cisco.

There are various factors that are pushing data consumption ever higher.

People are using more tablet devices which are even more data-hungry than smartphones, the report found.

According to Cisco, tablet use exploded in 2011 - tripling to 34 million devices, each of which is generating over three times more traffic than smartphones. By 2016 it predicts that tablets will account for more than 10% of global mobile traffic.

Streaming video
Another factor is faster networks. 4G is currently only available for about 0.2% of mobile connections but they already account for 6% of mobile data traffic, the report said.

Using mobile data on a 4G connection generates 28% more traffic than a non-4G connection, it found.

Apple's iPhones had a reputation for using up more bandwidth than other handsets but the study found that Android consumption is now equal to, if not higher, to iPhone consumption in the US and Western Europe.

Seb Lahtinen, from broadband news site ThinkBroadband, is unsurprised by the findings.

"Most of us use a smart phone on trains, but we still struggle to get a good signal.

"As speeds and quality increases, more users will start watching streaming videos on mobiles, which is likely to lead to an explosion in mobile traffic growth," he said.



Source: BBC