The search company is developing a computer in a pair of glasses. But why would anyone wear them?

Google Glass, a compact computer fitted onto a pair of slim metal eyeglass frames, is an impressive technical achievement. But can it be a business?
Glass is the pet project of Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin. The compact frames have a boom on one side that hides a camera, a battery, motion sensors, a wireless connection to reach the Internet, and other electronics. That boom also contains a small display, the light from which is directed into a person’s eye by a thumb-size prism positioned just under his or her right eyebrow.
Google has shown off video and crisp photos captured by trapeze artists, skydivers, and supermodels wearing Glass prototypes like those it first unveiled in April 2012. Recently the company posted a show reel in which people used voice commands to order Glass to take images and send messages.
But just how this R&D project might become a popular product and a significant contributor to Google’s bottom line remains fuzzy. Clearly, anyone who can reinvent the mobile computing experience has everything to gain. Apple proved that with its iPhone and tablets.
Yet for Google to turn Glass into a similar commercial coup, the company will have to negotiate challenges in fashion, design, and human relationships that lie outside its previous experience. Google, which says it plans to start selling Glass this year, declined to comment for this article.
Making Glass affordable to consumers will be the easiest part. The device may look unique, but it will mostly be a remix of compact electronic components now standard in smartphones, and it should cost about as much as a smartphone to make.
“We put the average prices of smart glasses, not just Google’s, at $400,” says Theo Ahadome, an analyst with IHS Insight, which strips down phones, tablets, and other devices to estimate their costs.
Persuading large numbers of people to put the device on their faces will be a far bigger challenge. Blake Kuwahara, an eyewear designer who has created glasses for Carolina Herrera and other fashion houses, says Google will have to reinvent its product to succeed as fashion, not just a computer for your face.
To judge from Google’s prototypes, “it’s clear that this device was designed by industrial designers,” says Kuwahara. “To make this something that someone will want to wear full time, there need to be adjustments to the aesthetics and styling—it reads as a device and not a pair of fashion eyewear.”
It also remains unclear what Glass’s killer app will be. Google has floated some ideas—people could use the technology to get directions while traveling, or to share video of experiences such as roller-coaster rides with friends in real time. Those videos make for great TV coverage of Google’s prototype, but the value to most people is uncertain, since most everything you can do with Glass you can do with a smartphone, and probably more easily.
Perhaps recognizing the dilemma, Brin has openly sought help generating more ideas for how to use the product, and he’s also taken digs at the competition. During the TED conference in late February, he called smartphones “emasculating” because their users are “hunched up, looking down, rubbing a featureless piece of glass.” By contrast, Glass would “free your eyes,” he said (see “Sergey’s Android-gynous Moment”).
Last June, Brin appealed to software engineers attending Google’s annual conference for outside developers, inviting them to pay $1,500 for prototypes to experiment with (these early “Explorer” models have yet to ship). After signing nondisclosure agreements, some developers attended closed-door meetings last month in San Francisco and New York to get their first experience with the technology.
Hardly any software programmers have experience developing for something like Google Glass, and doing it well will require throwing out some fundamental conventions of today’s computers, says Mark Rolston, chief creative officer at Frog Design, a design firm that has worked with many consumer technology companies.
Today, people treat mobile computers like tool boxes, says Rolston, digging out individual tools—applications—to achieve particular tasks. “If you’re wearing a computer, that application model needs to go away,” he says. “Instead, it needs to be cued by the outside world so it feels like natural life, not interacting with a computer.”
Google’s limited demonstrations of Glass suggest that the company agrees. The glasses do have a touch pad on the side for scrolling through menus, but in Google’s demonstrations, users are shown calling out “Okay, Glass” and then saying a command such as “Take a picture.” Google’s Android mobile operating system for smartphones has also been shifting away from an app-centric approach. Google Now, a core feature of the latest version of Android, offers live arrival and departure times when a person goes near a transit stop (see “Google’s Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead”), an approach well suited to Glass.
Those same techniques may also be suited to mixing in targeted ads, although the leader of the Glass project, Babak Parviz, said in January that he had no plans for ads to appear on the device.
The least predictable part of Google’s task is to make Glass as acceptable to people who aren’t wearing it as it is to those who are. Looks aside, the way people wearing Glass behave will be crucial, says Rolston. For example, talking with or even paying attention to other people while information streams directly into your field of view could be challenging.
“We’ll have to learn the social boundaries [of] ignoring someone when it looks like you’re engaged,” says Rolston. “Normal cues like taking out your phone will go away.”

Diff Displays reduces distraction by visually highlighting what’s changed on your screen since you last looked.
Most computer interfaces are designed to capture your attention—whether you like it or not. A new system for computers with multiple screens, called Diff Displays, responds to inattention by making the information on the screen a user isn’t focused on less distracting.
Created by human-computer interaction researchers at the University of St. Andrews, Diff Displays uses eye-tracking software to sense when the user is no longer paying attention to a particular screen. It then replaces the content on that with a subtle visualization that reduces clutter and only highlights the most important new information.
Diff Displays was inspired by the proliferation of multiscreen displays at computer workstations, and the “increased attentional demand” that such multitasking visual environments place on users, says Per Ola Kristensson, a lecturer at St. Andrews and one of the system’s creators. “It’s impossible to attend to all of these displays at the same time,” he says. “How can we create subtle, nondistracting visualizations that support this inattention instead?”
To create Diff Displays, Kristensson and his colleagues, Aaron Quigley, a professor, and Jakub Dostal, a PhD student, mounted webcams on top of each display in a three-screen workstation and installed eye-tracking software to detect when the user directs his or her gaze at a particular display. (The software, says Kristensson, is 98 percent accurate at detecting gazes directed at additional displays situated 40 to 60 degrees off the main-screen axis. It disregards false-positives from gazes detected in the background, such that of a coworker walking by.)
The screen that the user is focusing on behaves normally. But when Diff Displays detects that the user has shifted attention away, it inserts an interactive overlay that dims the content’s brightness and replaces its colors with different shades of gray.
The overlay also includes one of four visualizations designed to highlight important information: “Freeze Frame,” a static snapshot of the screen’s state when attention was directed elsewhere; “Pixmap,” which highlights any real-time pixel changes with normal brightness (“In your Twitter feed, you’d see bright pixels around new tweets,” Kristensson says); “Windowmap,” similar to Pixmap but on the window scale (i.e., any window with active content will rebrighten); and “Aura,” which draws a subtly pulsating outline within any newly active window content. When the user redirects attention back to a screen, the overlay quickly fades away, providing a visual distinction which directs the user’s attention to the new information.
User testing showed that the “Pixmap” visualization offered the best trade-off between information density and intrusiveness, Kristensson says, but “all of the visualizations reduced the number of times that a user switched attention between displays by about half.” Diff Displays’ visualizations make the user less worried about missing something on a screen they’re not paying active attention to, Kristensson says; therefore, they feel less pressure to frequently “context-switch” between screens. “You can rest assured that when you look back, it’ll tell you what matters,” he says.
This kind of “inattention-friendly” display could be particularly useful to specialized workers like air-traffic controllers and financial analysts, says Shamsi Iqbal, who studies multitasking and interface design at Microsoft Research. “These jobs require you to maintain constant awareness of many things at once, where information is changing all the time,” she says. “Showing what the changes were where you last left off is especially helpful.”
Kristensson agrees, but says Diff Displays was designed for typical knowledge workers. “What motivated us is that lots of everyday people have multiple displays now,” he says. “It’s a good sign that the technology can be applied to many areas. I’m planning to use it myself.” Diff Display was presented at the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in Santa Monica, California, last week, and is available as a free download here (Windows only).

Television viewers fumble with awkward remote controls and crave a richer array of on-demand programming. It’s time for Apple to step in and disrupt the TV business.

Steve Jobs couldn’t hide his frustration. Asked at a technology conference in 2010 whether Apple might finally turn its attention to television, he launched into an exasperated critique of TV. Cable and satellite TV companies make cheap, primitive set-top boxes that “squash any opportunity for innovation,” he fumed. Viewers are stuck with “a table full of remotes, a cluster full of boxes, a bunch of different [interfaces].” It was the kind of technological mess that cried out for Apple to clean it up with an elegant product. But Jobs professed to have no idea how his company could transform the TV.
Scarcely a year later, however, he sounded far more confident. Before he died on October 5, 2011, he told his biographer, ­Walter Isaacson, that Apple wanted to create an “integrated television set that is completely easy to use.” It would sync with other devices and Apple’s iCloud online storage service and provide “the simplest user interface you could imagine.” He added, tantalizingly, “I finally cracked it.”
Precisely what he cracked remains hidden behind Apple’s shroud of secrecy. Apple has had only one television-related product—the black, hockey-puck-size Apple TV device, which streams shows and movies to a TV. For years, Jobs and Tim Cook, his successor as CEO, called that device a “hobby.” But under the guise of this hobby, Apple has been steadily building hardware, software, and services that make it easier for people to watch shows and movies in whatever way they wish. Already, the company has more of the pieces for a compelling next-generation TV experience than people might realize.
And as Apple showed with the iPad and iPhone, it doesn’t have to invent every aspect of a product in order for it to be disruptive. Instead, it has become the leader in consumer electronics by combining existing technologies with some of its own and packaging them into products that are simple to use. TV seems to be at that moment now. People crave something better than the fusty, rigidly controlled cable TV experience, and indeed, the technologies exist for something better to come along. Speedier broadband connections, mobile TV apps, and the availability of some shows and movies on demand from Netflix and Hulu have made it easier to watch TV anytime, anywhere. The number of U.S. cable and satellite subscribers has been flat since 2010.

TVs could give Apple a way of entering or expanding its role in lines of business that are more profitable.

Apple would not comment. But it’s clear from two dozen interviews with people close to Apple suppliers and partners, and with people Apple has spoken to in the TV industry, that television—the medium and the device—is indeed its next target.
The biggest question is not whether Apple will take on TV, but when. The company must eventually come up with another breakthrough product; with annual revenue already topping $156 billion, it needs something very big to keep growth humming after the next year or two of the iPad boom. Walter Price, managing director of Allianz Global Investors, which holds nearly $1 billion in Apple shares, met with Apple executives in September and came away convinced that it would be years before Apple could get a significant share of the $345 billion worldwide market for televisions. But at $1,000, the bare minimum most analysts expect an Apple television to cost, such a product would eventually be a significant revenue generator. “You sell 10 million of those, it can move the needle,” he says.
Cook, who replaced Jobs as CEO in August 2011, could use a boost, too. He has presided over missteps such as a flawed iPhone mapping app that led to a rare apology and a major management departure. Seen as a peerless operations whiz, Cook still needs a revolutionary product of his own to cement his place next to Saint Steve. Corey Ferengul, a principal at the digital media investment firm Apace Equities and a former executive at Rovi, which provided TV programming guide services to Apple and other companies, says an Apple TV will be that product: “This will be Tim Cook’s first ‘holy shit’ innovation.”

What Apple Already Has

Rapt attention would be paid to whatever round-edged piece of brushed-aluminum hardware Apple produced, but a television set itself would probably be the least important piece of its television strategy. In fact, many well-connected people in technology and television, from TV and online video maven Mark Cuban to venture capitalist and former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée, can’t figure out why Apple would even bother with the machines.
For one thing, selling televisions is a low-margin business. No one subsidizes the purchase of a TV the way your wireless carrier does with the iPhone (an iPhone might cost you $200, but Apple’s revenue from it is much higher than that). TVs are also huge and difficult to stock in stores, let alone ship to homes. Most of all, the upgrade cycle that powers Apple’s iPhone and iPad profit engine doesn’t apply to television sets—no one replaces them every year or two.
But even though TVs don’t line up neatly with the way Apple makes money on other hardware, they are likely to remain central to people’s ever-increasing consumption of video, games, and other forms of media. Apple at least initially could sell the screens as a kind of Trojan horse—a way of entering or expanding its role in lines of business that are more profitable, such as selling movies, shows, games, and other Apple hardware.
That’s essentially the justification for the Apple TV product, the $99 hockey puck that streams TV shows and movies on demand for $1.99 and up. For most of its six years on the market, the device hasn’t been a big seller. Nor have many of the other TV add-ons, such as Google TV (see “Searching for the Future of Television,” January/February 2011), or even TiVo. But Cook has upgraded the way he talks about Apple TV: in October he called it a “beloved” hobby, perhaps because sales had almost doubled, to five million units, in the previous fiscal year. One reason it’s more appealing is that in July, Apple added Hulu Plus to the small list of Apple TV apps. That made it possible, for $8 a month, to watch current shows on demand the day after they air on TV.
But selling a TV set could also give Apple a way to enhance the role iPads and iPhones are playing in living rooms. Apps ranging from Apple’s own Remote to personalized programming guides such as NextGuide are turning them into far more capable portals into the TV than cable remote controls. In fact, Ben Reitzes, an analyst at the investment bank Barclays, believes that Apple’s TV strategy actually revolves less around the TV set than around the iPad as universal remote. He thinks the appeal of an iPad remote would help maintain Apple’s tablet dominance, especially as the company extends iPads to become a “central command” for lights, heating systems, and other features of the digital home.
A potentially much bigger advantage for Apple is a feature called AirPlay in the latest Mac and mobile iOS software. It allows whatever is showing on Macs, iPhones, and iPads to be “mirrored” to a TV set. Although not many iOS television apps support AirPlay yet, viewers can use Macs sold since mid-2011 to mirror shows from the free Hulu site, network websites, and even—perish the thought—pirate video sites. Suddenly, viewers can watch a lot of current shows on their HDTVs quickly and wirelessly—and, most important, without a cable subscription.

What Apple Still Needs

But Apple isn’t likely to disrupt the TV business solely by helping people get around the traditional cable and satellite providers. Instead, it will try to work with them—and give them an incentive to come along. Stewart Alsop, a partner in the VC firm Alsop Louie Partners and a former member of TiVo’s board, says Apple could use a tough-love approach: “Apple is the one company in the world that’s powerful enough to take on monopolies and force them to change.”
Making friends with them has proved to be Apple’s most difficult challenge so far—and a solution is hard to discern. A few media conglomerates that run cable and broadcast channels, such as Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, remain extremely profitable. TV advertising generates $72 billion annually in the United States alone. Plus, the cable and satellite operators that distribute programming to homes gross $103 billion a year in pay TV subscriptions, sending $28 billion of that back to the media companies. Pay TV operators such as Comcast are also large Internet service providers, giving them influence over how far online TV services can go.
So unlike music labels before them—which were weakened by piracy and thus were more willing to grant Apple the right to sell individual songs for 99 cents apiece—they have no need to sell their content cheap. In particular, producers won’t give Apple access to their live shows without a guarantee of the same big bucks they get from cable and satellite operators. The TV companies are wary of even letting Apple create a new TV user interface for their customers, the key to making an Apple television something special.
The classic Apple approach to such a situation would be to come up with a superior, or at least more elegant, product and force companies in related fields to play along. But Apple used to do that by having Steve Jobs charm and cajole recalcitrant partners. Jobs also understood the entertainment business and knew the players. He built Pixar into one of the world’s most successful movie studios, then served on Disney’s board after Disney bought Pixar in 2006. And even he struggled to persuade TV companies. CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, for one, said he rejected overtures in 2011 by Jobs himself for an Apple TV subscription service. Today, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, is the company’s most important TV dealmaker.
So how can Apple get more leverage and force the pay TV industry to deal? One possibility is that the troika of iPads, Apple TV, and the TV set—made by Apple or not—could bring about even more sweeping changes to make the television-watching experience more interactive. Google tried to do something similar two years ago with its Google TV service, but at least initially the results were too geeky, requiring a keyboard and clunky navigation. Its recently introduced voice-driven remote control feature, using Android smartphones and tablets, only underscores the fact that people want a less brain-taxing experience in the living room.
But a new generation of “dual-screen” apps could provide the best of both traditional TV and the Internet, says Jeremy Allaire, chairman of Brightcove, a provider of online video services. Major League Baseball’s iPad app, for instance, plays a game on the TV through Apple TV while you check out relevant stats and chat with friends on your tablet. Essentially, says Allaire, whose company helps software developers create these apps, iPads and iPhones serve as the real brains of the TV.
Jobs understood the entertainment business and knew the players, and even he struggled to persuade TV companies.
Apple could also let people use voice-driven commands to find shows and change channels using Siri, its intelligent personal assistant. You could toss that annoying cable remote and just tell your TV what you want to watch. Moreover, Apple’s iCloud storage service could be used as a digital video recorder in the sky, as Jobs hinted to Isaacson. Already iCloud can store TV shows bought on iTunes and feed them to any Apple device.
If such enhancements make Apple TV ever more useful, then “at some point, the growing Apple TV installed base will gain enough mass to become a viable distribution channel, an alternative to traditional cable TV,” suggests onetime Macintosh executive Gassée, now a general partner at the venture firm ­Allegis Capital. “When this happens, someone will crack.” That is, a cable channel such as ESPN will offer its must-have sports coverage on Apple TV, and others will feel forced to follow—thus paving the way for a credible Apple television.
Apple has also explored building a cable set-top box—possibly a souped-up Apple TV using a CableCard, a small card that plugs into a DVR or other TV device and allows subscribers to view cable channels without a separate box. Although it would be working within the current cable industry model, Apple would provide a more intuitive interface, like the iPad’s, and users would be able to watch live and on-demand shows through an Internet-based DVR service.
This might work. Comcast and Time Warner Cable executives have said they’re open to new program guide interfaces from Apple and other companies so long as cable subscribers keep paying them. Cable subscribers could be “authenticated” through Apple’s set-top box, or eventually a TV, to prove they’re subscribers—a system like the one HBO uses, for example, with the HBO Go app that streams its shows to mobile devices.
But Apple may not have time to wait for them to deal. Competition from Google (which is experimenting with a pay TV and Internet service in Kansas City), Amazon (which has a streaming video service and plans to produce original series), or Microsoft (whose Xbox gaming console is as much a video delivery device as a game machine) may force Apple to stake out territory in the living room more forcefully, and soon. Maybe, just maybe, a sleek Apple-designed flat screen, combined with a more elegant user interface, iPads serving as slick remotes, Apple’s existing iTunes library, and shows from outside services such as Netflix and Hulu, would be compelling enough for consumers while Eddy Cue keeps doing lunch in Hollywood. “The reality from a consumer standpoint,” says Piper ­Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, is that Apple “needs to revolutionize the interface and the design” before it can reorganize TV content. Munster expects to see an Apple television this November, at least two years after he initially predicted. “We don’t need a nuclear event around content for an Apple television to be successful,” he says.
It’s worth noting that with its iPads and iPhones, Apple is already selling the TV screen of choice for a rising number of peripatetic viewers. You can’t use these devices to watch everything you get on cable, but TV apps offer shows from CBS and HBO, some free, plus live baseball games and other programming. More than half of tablet owners under 35 watch TV on them at least weekly, according to a survey in August by the consulting firm Altman Vilandrie.
In other words, don’t just think of an Apple TV as the big screen in the living room, or else you might miss where Apple really envisions the 75-year-old medium going next: everywhere. “Whatever it is, it’s not going to be just on that big box,” says ­Jeremy Toeman, CEO of Dijit, developer of the TV programming guide app NextGuide. Before long, he says, “everything you have with a screen will become a television set.” Jobs may have “cracked” television, but Apple could blow it wide open.
 

Microsoft’s latest attempt at smartphone software is a job well done—but there’s still plenty of work ahead.

For a smartphone operating-software maker whose name doesn’t rhyme with “Snapple” or “frugal,” success doesn’t come easy. The market is littered with companies that have succeeded in grabbing only a small number of users.
Microsoft approached its recent launch of Windows Phone 8 as a member of this brotherhood of stragglers. It had just 2 percent of the global smartphone market in the third quarter, according to data from IDC, compared with 75 percent for Android smartphones and 15 percent for the iPhone.
Fortunately for Microsoft, Windows Phone 8 is a strong effort. It’s snappy, easy to navigate and customize, and good-looking to boot—all traits that will help the company as it tries to surpass Research in Motion’s ailing BlackBerry and Nokia’s dying Symbian platforms.
But—and of course, there has to be a “but”—the operating system still faces an uphill battle to become a strong third-place player in the smartphone market, and the weakness of its app store won’t help.

If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously by consumers and app developers, it will have to make serious strides with its Windows Phone Store, which for now includes just a fraction of the apps available for Android and iOS. But Microsoft is an old hand when it comes to wooing developers, and Windows 8—its operating system for desktops and tablets—is designed to make it easier for developers to create software components that work on both mobile and conventional computers. So I’m going to bet they can do it, even if it may take some time.

As with previous versions of Windows Phone, I really liked the look of Windows Phone 8, which I tested on a Nokia Lumia 920 (the phone itself isn’t under the microscope here, but suffice it to say it’s a good device though a little on the chunky side).
It was fun and easy to customize the main screen of my Windows Phone 8 device with a slew of “Live Tiles.” These are basically the Windows Phone version of widgets, though they’re more dynamic than the ones bundled with, say, Windows Vista, and you can fit a ton of them on a single screen. The Live Tiles can take the form of a big square, a quarter-size square, or a large rectangle (the tiny ones didn’t seem to show live info). If you want to see a long list of all your applications, just swipe left on the main screen.
The tiles updated often, showing me things like an ever-changing array of friends on the “People” tile and images stored on the camera on the “Photos” tile. Since there’s no notification center, it’s important that the live tiles give consistent, up-to-the-minute info, and I found that with the tiles and the alert data that popped up on the Lumia’s lock screen, I didn’t really miss that corral of alerts you get on the iPhone or Android smartphones.
Windows 8 includes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 browser, which, as expected, was quite zippy in my tests. Pages looked good and rendered quickly.
Another smart addition is the Kids Corner, which you can use to share specific apps, videos, music, and games with kids (and presumably keep them out of your work e-mail and away from unwelcome content). It’s easy to set up and add apps, and kids (or adults who don’t know your phone’s password) can get to it by swiping left on the phone’s lock screen. Little fingers can move tiles around and resize them, giving them a sense of control over the phone, but they can’t delete the apps.
Windows Phone 8 also includes near-field-communications support, so phone makers such as Nokia can include an NFC chip and users can then tap two NFC-capable phones together to transfer photos, Web pages, and more.
More intriguing to me is the promise of NFC for making quick payments with Microsoft’s new Wallet app (a feature that wasn’t enabled on the phone I was using). If Microsoft can get this working on a large scale, the Wallet app will be really cool. At the time I tested it, all I could do was store payment card and PayPal account info, which I could use to buy apps and music in the built-in Windows Phone Store, keep track of my loyalty cards, and check out and save local deals.
Less impressive was the voice recognition software on Windows Phone 8. It can do things like open apps or find local restaurants—I had no idea there were so many doughnut shops in San Francisco—as well as call contacts, send texts, conduct Web searches, or make notes. But it sometimes had trouble understanding what I was asking for, and the features seemed pretty limited. It couldn’t, for instance, update Twitter or create a new e-mail. In this regard, both Apple and Google, with Siri and Google Now, respectively, have a big advantage.
The biggest shortcoming, not surprisingly, was Microsoft’s Windows Phone Store. Without any context it sounds pretty big: it is stocked with 120,000 apps, including a number of popular ones like Netflix, Draw Something, and Yelp. But it’s still just a fraction the size of Apple’s App Store (over 700,000 apps total, the vast majority of which work on the iPhone) and the Google Play store for smartphones and tablets running Android software (over 500,000 apps total). Microsoft’s store also lacks some really key apps like Instagram, Pinterest, and Pandora (the latter, at least, will be here next year, along with a year of ad-free tunes for Windows Phone 8 users).
The apps I tried, such as Foursquare and Facebook, worked well and generally looked good. The Facebook app in particular includes a photo-focused, swipe-friendly, uncomplicated layout that I quickly came to prefer to the version on my own iPhone. (One gripe: oddly, the live tile for the app only seemed to show my latest Facebook status update made through that app—not updates I made on the Website itself.)
Yet, like a spoiled kid, I missed the huge app stores with overflowing categories that are available on an iPhone or Android phone. I really hope Microsoft can catch up in this regard, because in many ways it’s the apps that have made Apple and Google so successful in the smartphone market.
Despite this gap in particular, I was pleased with Windows Phone 8. It’s a well-done operating system. If Microsoft can get developers coding away for its platform, consumers will be wise to give it a look when searching for a first smartphone—or a replacement for an existing one.

A little over a year ago, 38-year-old entrepreneur Liang Liwan wasn’t making smartphones at all. This year, he expects to build 10 million of them.
Liang’s company, Xunrui Communications, buys smartphone components and then feeds them to several small factories around Shenzhen, in southern China. There, deft-fingered workers assemble the parts into basic smartphones that retail for as little as $65.
Manufacturers built about 700 million smartphones last year. But the market has taken on a barbell shape. On one side are familiar names like Apple and Samsung, selling pricey phones for $300 to $600; on the other, several hundred lesser-known Chinese brands supplied by a thousand or more small factories.
The change began in 2011, when computer-chip makers began selling off-the-shelf chipsets—the set of processors that are the brains of a touch-screen phone. Those, plus Google’s free Android operating system, made smartphones much easier to produce.
The flood of inexpensive devices could hurt struggling phone makers like Nokia and might also force Samsung and Apple to offer cheaper models. “They have reached their peak,” Liang said during an interview near his office in Shenzhen, which has become a hub for electronics makers. “In [manufacturing] technique we are close to the same level. Then the only difference will be the cost and the brand.”
Larger Chinese companies, like Lenovo and Huawei, have also swarmed into China’s market with midrange phones that cost closer to $200. Lenovo captured 12 percent of China’s market last year.

Liang’s phones are the ultracheap kind. He builds them at several Shenzhen factories, like Shenzhen Guo Wei Global Electronics, a nondescript building that opened in 1991 as a manufacturer of fixed-line phones and audio equipment. At Guo Wei, young Xunrui engineers lounge about, smoking cigarettes and drinking warm Coca-Cola while playing games on various brands of laptops.
One floor up, past a metal detector and an enclosure where high-pressured air blows dust and other impurities off workers’ blue smocks, are the production lines—five of them, each with 35 young workers able to solder together and box up 3,000 smartphones a day.
Guo Wei has had to make some investments to get into the smartphone game, including importing new solder inspection equipment from Korea. One production line costs around $1.6 million to set up, according to Li Li, a production manager at the factory who showed off the equipment.
“The techniques are very complicated compared to older phones,” says Li, who joined the factory 17 years ago to work in a department that repaired fixed-line telephones.
But the real reason for the switchover to smartphones was that last year large chip makers, including the Taiwan-based MediaTek and Spreadtrum, started offering “turn-key” systems: phone designs plus a set of chips with Android and other software preloaded. Spreadtrum says it may sell 100 million units this year.
Each chipset costs $5 to $10, depending on the size of a phone’s screen and other features. In total, Liang says, his cost to make a smartphone is about $40. He says he can manufacture as many as 30,000 smartphones a day for brands such as Konka Mobile and for telecom operators like China Unicom.
In the United States, a smartphone’s high cost is generally masked by wireless companies, which discount them steeply if consumers agree to a contract. In China that happens as well. Liang says his phones retail for about $65 or $70 but can cost only $35 with a contract.
That is making China, now the world’s largest smartphone market, a challenging place for foreign firms to compete. Apple accounts for 38 percent of U.S. smartphone sales, but its share in China is 11 percent and falling. Google has even bigger problems making money. Even though the devices use Android, they often don’t come with Google’s apps and search tool installed (see “Android Takes Off in China, But Google Has Little to Show for It”).
Liang says his aim is to make smartphones that are affordable, even if they aren’t yet as good as an iPhone. That means the camera and LCD screen might not be the best, and the battery life could be shorter. “I always use this word ‘acceptable,’” he says. “A lot of users only need an acceptable product. They don’t need a perfect product.”
What’s certain, Liang says, is that the quality of the phones his factories produce will rise. “There is no profit at the bottom,” he says. “Everyone is trying to improve their techniques.”

Mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, smartphones have even begun reaching the group of relative technophobes that consumer researchers call the “late majority.” About half of mobile-phone users now have one.
The big question facing technology companies, and the subject of the upcoming stories in this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report, is how to make money from this rapidly expanding technology.
Wireless carriers make money at the greatest scale. Globally, 900 of them take in $1.3 trillion in revenue each year, about four times the combined revenue of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Intel. Yet individual device makers, notably Apple, capture more profit. That company’s markets aren’t restricted to one network. Its products, by bringing personal computing to phones, have sharply increased their capabilities and value.
In 2007, the average wholesale price of a mobile phone was $120 and falling; analysts talked of market saturation because nearly everyone who could afford one had one. But since then, prices have leapt by 50 percent, and the revenue from all mobile handset sales has doubled.
Apps and services still account for the least amount of money in mobile computing. Mobile advertising brings in only $9 billion as yet. But here is where the most opportunities lie. Facebook has a monthly audience as large as any ever reached. And in January, it said for the first time that more of that audience was coming from mobile devices than from PCs.
The swings in the company’s value—it was worth $104 billion at its IPO, then $42 billion, and now more than $60 billion—are a measure of its No. 1 ranking among apps (23 percent of the time that Americans spend on mobile apps is devoted to Facebook) and the uncertainty about whether it can profit from ads on the small screen. But the rise in its stock price reflects the fact that it has started to.
Who isn’t making money is a story too. For example, Microsoft’s share of mobile computing is negligible. The company “didn’t miss cell phones,” Bill Gates said in a TV interview in February, “but the way we went about it didn’t allow us to get the leadership. It was clearly a mistake.” Gates underplayed what’s been lost. In 2009, his company’s software was on 90 percent of personal computers. At the end of 2012, it’s on just 23 percent of devices sold, when smartphones, tablets, and PCs are all accounted for.
That was fast. Now, watching the fever lines on tech analysts’ charts cross and collide has become a kind of spectator sport. Smartphones outsell PCs. Touchscreens outnumber keyboards. In India, mobile Internet traffic exceeds desktop traffic. Even ordinary search—Google’s great cash cow—is declining in the United States as people use their phones to search for restaurants, bus times, and weather reports

Large companies are responding with bold moves. Google is developing Google Glass—a computer in a pair of glasses. The components are cheap, off-the-shelf. It’s not hard to make. Google hopes this new way to use a computer tilts mobile revenue in its direction. Whether anyone will want Glass isn’t clear, but it’s worth trying. That’s because we’re still early in the mobile switchover.How early? Mary Meeker, the venture capitalist and Internet prognosticator, leads her annual set of predictions with observations on the underlying trends. By her tally, 1.14 billion people own mobile computers, but another 5.8 billion don’t. Of those, 4.5 billion aren’t users of the Internet at all.
In one of this month’s upcoming stories, you’ll meet an entrepreneur with a feel for the opportunities that lie in those figures. His name is Suneet Singh Tuli, and his company, DataWind, is trying to sell dirt-cheap tablets in India. They come with free wireless access, supported by ads. Just as customers in the developing world skipped landlines for cell phones, Tuli thinks, they’ll skip PCs for wireless tablets and smartphones. It makes sense: in India only 11 percent of people are on the Internet, but just about everyone already has a mobile phone. “We’re talking about what will be their first computer,” he says.
That’s a reminder of what the real stakes are: the killer app isn’t Angry Birds, but access to computing itself. Wireless smartphones and tablets allow the Internet and its digital affordances to flow into every hand, everywhere, in every circumstance. We’re not in the “late majority” yet, either. We’ve got nearly six billion people to go.

Google Now, an app for Android smartphones that serves up useful information such as flight details when it thinks you need it, is getting some competition from a former Googler.
Sherpa, a free smartphone app, mines your e-mails, calendar, and location data to determine the best time and place to let you know something like your flight information and help with next steps, such as getting a cab to the airport.
Bill Ferrell, the company’s founder and CEO, used to work on search advertising quality at Google. He spent a lot of time traveling for work, pulling out his laptop to look up when his flight was leaving or which hotel he was staying at. Why, he wondered, couldn’t the information just come to you?
Google was apparently thinking the same thing: Google Now came out last summer. But Ferrell believes smartphone owners will take a shine to Sherpa despite Google’s resources and head start. “We’re trying to figure out what are the relevant pieces of information that we can bring to you,” he says. “By using location as the angle of attack, how do we slice space and time together to bring you that information?”
Sherpa begins an invite-only beta test on the iPhone today. The company plans to make the app publicly available soon, but it hasn’t said when. It has also announced venture backing—a seed round of $1.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, InterWest Partners, and some angel investors.
Sherpa is joining a growing group of mobile apps attempting to push beyond Apple’s sassy digital assistant, Siri, by bringing you helpful data before you even ask for it. Besides Google Now, others include Grokr (see “The iPhone Gets an Answer to Google Now”). Ferrell expects Sherpa’s predictive intelligence to help it stand out. Once you give the app permission to access your calendar, e-mail, and location data, it starts figuring out how to be useful. If it knows you have an afternoon meeting somewhere, for example, Sherpa’s remote server may send you an alert letting you know you need to leave early because traffic is bad, Ferrell says.
Sherpa can even make connections between a regular appointment on your calendar that has no location attached to it—a piano lesson, for example, at 2 p.m. every Tuesday—and the location you go to whenever that appointment occurs. “Now we can say, ‘Hey, Bill, it looks like you’re running late for your piano lesson,’” Ferrell says.
Sherpa uses machine learning to understand the content of your e-mail; the company’s technology classifies messages into types and then extracts key information. It creates a geo-fence in the Sherpa app around a relevant geographic area, so when you arrive in a new city for a few days, for example, Sherpa will know to pop up your hotel information.
Since Sherpa only needs to figure out where you are to within about a kilometer, Ferrell says, it tends to use cell-tower and Wi-Fi hotspot pinging to find your location. Those techniques are less accurate than GPS but chug less battery power.
Ramon Llamas, a mobile analyst at the research company IDC, thinks it will be challenging for Sherpa to make sense of all the information it collects from users and figure out how to deal with it. Yet Ferrell seems confident that Sherpa can not only do this but make money off it, by allowing some companies to be preferred service providers. Eventually, when Sherpa reminds you about your flight to New York tomorrow and asks if you need a cab to the airport, it may suggest a taxi service that pays Sherpa for bringing in customers.
Ferrell also envisions Sherpa offering additional features. It’s currently testing one at a Philz Coffee in downtown Palo Alto: if you tend to get coffee there each morning, Sherpa can alert you when you’re about 500 meters away from the shop and ask if you want your regular cup. If you respond yes, it will be ready for you when you walk in the door.

On Thursday morning, Mark Zuckerberg stood smiling in front of a crowd of journalists and employees at Facebook’s headquarters and put months of rumors to an end. “Today we’re finally going to talk about that Facebook phone,” he said, referring to long-swirling speculation that the social network was secretly developing a device to rival the iPhone. He immediately clarified, adding, “More accurately, we’re going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great, simple, social device.”
Zuckerberg proceeded to unveil an app called "Home" that takes over the home and lock screen of Android smartphones, essentially building functionality around the social network. Home’s “cover feed,” for example, fills the home and lock screens with status updates from Facebook friends, which you can double-tap to “like.” Notifications shown on these screens include a picture of the friend who posted each of them, and Facebook messages and SMSs turn into “chat heads”—headshots that float in bubbles on a phone’s display, making it easy to carry on conversations while using apps.
Home will be available for free download on April 12 and will initially be available on just a handful of smartphones that run the latest versions of Google’s Android software. There actually will be a “Facebook phone,” too: The HTC First, which comes with Home integration and runs on AT&T’s network. It will also be available April 12, and will cost $100 with a two-year wireless service contract. 
The app makes a lot of sense for Facebook, and fits in with its much-mentioned “mobile first” strategy. But now that the Facebook phone is here, it’s not altogether clear how many of its billion-plus users will really want it.
Home, as Zuckerberg and several other Facebook executives made clear, makes your phone about people, rather than about apps. So, if you set it as your default home screen, it’s always there, showing full-screen status updates from your friends all of the time. Even if you spend a lot of time using Facebook on your phone—and you probably do, since as Zuckerberg pointed out, about a quarter of the time we spend on our phones is devoted to checking Facebook and Instagram—Home is a big change.
Ramon Llamas, a mobile analyst at research company IDC and self-described Facebook lurker, doesn’t see himself using Home immediately. But he does believe it will appeal to “Facebook fanboys and fangirls”—those already checking Facebook on their smartphones many times a day. “There are some avid users out there who are going to be like, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t mind upgrading to that,’ ” he says.
Home comes with some innovative features. The “chat heads” feature presents people you’re sending messages with through Facebook or via SMS as little bubbles that you can move across your smartphone’s display, and they appear atop any app you open. This makes it easier to switch back and forth between, say, getting a map to the movies and letting your friend know where to meet you by the theater. Because of this sort of easy access, Gartner analyst Brian Blau expects many regular Facebook users to give the app a try.
But since Home doesn’t offer an easy way to toggle back to the built-in Android home-screen experience, it might be offputting to those who already like the Android experience as it is.“Just as there are a number of Facebook fanboys and fangirls, there’s also a terrific number of Android fanboys and fangirls,” Llamas points out.
Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at Ovum, thinks it could be a tough sell for another reason. While Home will make it easier to share information with friends, it will also allow the social network to collect more data about what you’re doing on Facebook. And since Facebook depends on user-targeted ads for revenue, eventually, Home will include ads, too.
“That presents the biggest obstacle to success for this experiment: Facebook’s objectives and users’ are once again in conflict. Users don’t want more advertising or tracking, and Facebook wants to do more of both,” Dawson said in a statement.
Regardless, Home won’t even be available to everyone for a while. At the start, it will only be built into the aforementioned HTC First, and available for download on the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, and Samsung Galaxy Note II (it will also work on the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 when those are available). A version of Home for Android tablets is coming in a few months, Facebook says. There is no sign that an app like Home will be made available for iPhone users.
At least one benefit to all the data Facebook will gather is that Zuckerberg will quickly discover how many of them “Like” his update to the modern smartphone.

Our lives are pretty much connected to technology. Almost every aspect of our lives is dictated by our computers, social media, apps, smartphones and tablets. In some ways, it’s made our productivity much better and our working speed increase. However, more devices means more information, more things to take in and sometimes more work to the point where it ends up complicating things more than simplifying them. Thankfully, there are a number of apps designed to make things easier for you as you go about your daily life, making things more efficient and better for you. Of course, there are numerous apps and services out there that will help you out, but we’ve chosen five of the more pressing concerns in our lives.

Read Only Relevant News Stories

We all like to keep up to date with the latest news and events, but with so many blogs and news sites to keep up with, it’s better when you have a general app that curates content so you’re left with the news you’re interested in.
If you’re an iPhone user, Prismatic is a great app to start with. An intelligent app that uses both preferences, location and subscriptions to build up a smart news app. Also, whatever article you’re reading is accompanied by three of the most popular tweets to show you what the general mood is. Sometimes they’re general tweets, but the slick design and clean interface makes it a solid app. There’s also a desktop version for those who don’t own an Apple device.
For Android, you have Flipboard and Google Currents, both equally good alternatives for organising your news feed. Flipboard is by far the more stylish of the two, but Currents is arguably a more versatile product.

Keep Yourself Organised

We’ve already covered the importance of being organised before and what you can do to improve your time keeping. However, if you need some extra help, then there are a number of apps that you can use to keep yourself in check.
Alongside using the Calendar app that’s included with any Apple or Android phone, there are specialised apps such as Astrid, Remember the milk, Clear and Any.Do which will keep you on top of your schedule. With the exception of Clear, all these apps are free and will definitely help you out once you put a little bit of time into it.

Save Time Completing Tasks

It’s one thing being organised, but what about completing those tasks that are spread across different apps and will take too long to check around and complete. Especially when it comes to things like tracking deliveries, paying bills and syncing up your phone contacts with your Facebook account.
If that’s the case and you’re an iPhone user, consider downloading EasilyDo. It can connect to your social media and email account and instead of clicking on a task and directing you to said app, it lets you complete them through the app itself. If someone’s birthday was coming up, you would be notified and allowed to post a message through EasilyDo itself. If you have an appointment, for example, it alerts you when you should leave and provides directions to boot.
The app has some nice touches like alerting you to bad weather the night before, tracking shipments and merging duplicate contacts. Perhaps the best one is when you pull down on the list. Instead of refreshing your list, it shows you what tasks you’ve completed and how much time you’ve saved by using the service.

Don’t Strain Your Eyes
Chances are that you work in front of a computer every day. Consider that you spend eight hours minimum looking at a computer screen and perhaps spend some of your leisure time doing the same thing, it can be a strain for your eyes. Also, like watching TV late at night, this can make it difficult for you to get to sleep as your brain is wired.
If this is the case, you should download F.lux for your desktop. Compatible for both Windows and Mac users, F.lux adds an orange hue to your screen so that it’s easier on your eyes and prevents you from getting headaches. Since looking at a screen at night isn’t good for you, it automatically adjusts itself when it reaches evening time in your timezone, so all you need to do is select your settings and let it do all the work.
Unfortunately, the app isn’t available for Android, and can only be downloaded on a jailbroken iPhone or iPad. If you’re not comfortable jail breaking your phone, then you will have to wait until Apple or Google allow an official version in its stores.

Wake Up Feeling Fresh

Speaking of getting to sleep, if you’re waking up feeling a little groggy or find it difficult to get yourself out of bed; there are days that we will feel like this, but if it’s a persistent problem, you should monitor how you sleep.
If you’re an iPhone user, you should download Sleep Cycle, which monitors your sleeping patterns and wakes you up at an optimal time. By setting the alarm, it will wake you up within a 30 minute period depending on your sleep cycle. The more you use it, the more you’ll be able to identify patterns that aid or hinder your sleep like caffeine, mood, time spent in bed and timing.
For Android users, Alarm Clock Xtreme is a good alternative. Alongside a straightforward interface, the app has some nice touches including a home-screen widget which tells you when your alarm is set and it can detect when you’re moving and disable the alarm for you.
On top of that, it could be worth visiting the site sleepyti.me, which will help you calculate the best times for you to fall asleep. Just enter in the time you need to get up at and the site will recommend different times for you to sleep at.

It was only a matter of time before Facebook tried sinking its claws into mobile for a second time. While a lot of people were expecting a unique Facebook phone (technically that’s what they got with the HTC First), what was really revealed was the foundation of a new OS for smartphones.
The HTC First will be released in the U.S. on April 12th for $99.99, a solid price which should appeal to those who can’t or don’t want to purchase an iPhone 5 or Galaxy S III. While the aesthetics are pleasing to the eye – cover feed and the gesture controlled interface will certainly appeal to a number of users – there are a few thoughts that spring to mind.

Taking Over Your Phone From The Inside Out

From first impressions, the look and feel of Facebook Home reminds you of apps like Path. The use of cover feeds, circular profile pictures and how it integrates into the overall smartphone experience is easy on the eye and certainly helps the experience. Facebook has learnt from the lessons of previous Facebook phone experiments and has instead focused on taking over your phone from the inside out.
The masterstroke behind Facebook Home is going to be Chat Heads. Look past the terrible name and you’ll quickly realise that it’s a clever and well integrated feature that would be popular even as a standalone app. Combining both SMS and Facebook Messenger, it takes the focus away from what you’re using and instead places it on who you’re talking to meaning messaging is smarter. Also, the presence of Facebook apps on the screen as well means it’s a more intuitive experience if you’re a major Facebook user.

And making it intuitive is how it’s going to get people to stick with it. There’s a massive amount of users out there who only use Facebook so for them, it’s a perfect fit. Making it easy to find regardless of where you are and what you’re doing. Although that means that Google products like Now and Search have been put on the back seat, now requiring more steps to access them.Also, calling it a social phone is silly since pretty much every phone has been integrated with social in one form or another, making the term redundant. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that Facebook is creating a type of OS that has itself as the main attraction. Placing social at the front and centre of a smartphone is neither new or proven to succeed as Nokia and Windows Phone has found out (although sales are going up suggesting that it finally has a foothold in the market).
Striking deals with Samsung and Sony (and preparing a tablet version to be released over the coming months) that allow users to download and install the OS is a better idea since it’s not placing all its eggs into HTC’s basket. However, that brings it to another problem:

Chasing The New Smartphone Users

When you look past the glossy presentation and Chat Heads, what else is there to separate Facebook Home from Jelly Bean? More importantly, is there enough to convert regular Android users to Facebook Home when it arrives? At the moment there isn’t, and the lack of widgets and steps it takes to access Google services will put off the more dedicated Android users, but the target demographic isn’t current Android users, or even current smartphone users.
Instead, the pricing suggests that it’s aimed towards teenagers who have less disposable income, and those who are getting a smartphone for the first time. The latter is important as Facebook and HTC has the potential to break into developing markets like South America and Asia, the demographic where Facebook’s latest mobile audience is going to come from. By providing an easy access point for consumers to purchase a phone, it potentially creates new smartphone users and gets them accustomed to its OS since they’re not familiar with Android or iOS.

 You can certainly see Facebook advertising it to all Android app users – much like what it did with Poke back in December – but while that would certainly result in a high download rate, how many people are going to stick with it after the sheen has worn off? Also, will there be versions of Home available for lower spec phones, which would make up quite a significant audience, made available?
Certainly there will be a large group of people downloading it for curiosity value alone, and certainly there will be a vast number that will like it but will revert back to Jelly Bean, but that’s an audience that will be converted later. Currently, Home is an OS that looks nice but doesn’t have a lot of substance to it beyond being a evolved Facebook app. You can see a lot of new features being added to it over the coming months and it becoming more comprehensive over time, but for now, it doesn’t have enough to justify a permanent switch.

What Does Google Get Out Of This?

A lot has been said about the uneasy relationship Google has with Facebook so while Android is an open source platform, you have to imagine that Google isn’t too pleased about it. You would imagine that some deal has been struck behind the scenes, but even then, Google can’t do much to stop Facebook and perhaps blocking it from creating its own OS skin would be something that tech sites would be reporting on for days.

 Also, another new OS only serves to fragment the Android market even further. Alongside the original Jelly Bean operating system, you have hybrid versions like the Kindle Fire, Firefox and now Home. The manufacturer market is fragmented as it is, but Google is just allowing Facebook to test the waters with Home and see what the reception is like. It mightn’t be damaging now, but it could lead to it creating a new rival if it strikes deals with some of the major smartphone manufacturers.

Privacy Issues

Facebook is all about data. If it’s offering you something for free, you can bet that the payoff is going to be data that you enter. However a new OS gives it license to explore the entirety of your phone and see what apps you download, what apps you use the most and so on. Facebook is no stranger to privacy concerns and since Home is very much designed to gather mobile data, there is a lot of room for abuse.
The controversy around apps accessing your phone books back at the beginning of 2012 taught us that for many developers, it’s fine to do something until you get caught. There’s nothing to say that Home will do anything incredulous, but history has taught us that the definition of privacy is constantly being challenged so until Facebook address these concerns, there will be a section of users who will be reluctant to make the switch.

Diversifying Its Portfolio

The ultimate aim is for Facebook to spread its net as wide as possible and be in a position where its desktop product is a section of its empire and not the main attraction. By expanding its mobile presence in this manner, it allows the possibility of it breaking away from Android entirely and creating its own unique OS, and if it’s popular, manufacturers will want to get in on the action. The key to any successful investment is to diversify your portfolio and Facebook is doing that to help grow the business and more importantly, make investors happy.

In a way, if Home does become a success, you could see Facebook paving a similar path to what Google has done. Create an OS and then later release its own hardware like what Google has done with the Nexus 4 and 7. It’s learnt enough from previous attempts what works and what doesn’t so it will be interesting to see just how Home is going to be received. It’s a smarter move than creating its own phone, but the question of whether smartphone users are looking for a Facebook centric experience is going to be answered pretty soon.

One of the most common Facebook questions is how do you see who views your facebook profile, is it even possible to answer the question “who visited my facebook profile” ?. You know that feeling where you are having a sneaky look at a friend’s profile on Facebook and you are so happy that they can’t actually see that you are checking them out? Well it has just become a thing of the past thanks to a new application called Fan check just launched on Facebook that allows you to see who is stalking you (or just generally checking out your profile). The application compiles data based on the way people react with your profile to find out who your biggest fans are, in their own words…

"This application ranks your friends based on how often they interact with your Facebook wall. Interactions counted include wall posts, comments, likes, gifts and other public items posted to your wall. We do NOT count page views or private messages."

The application will display your top fans in an easy to view mosiac and has become so viral because a)people have always wanted to know who is viewing their profile on Facebook and b)it tags you in photos that then appear in your friends news stream meaning that it had 5 million downloads on Sunday and has had nearly 20 million in total.You can expect the application to start breaking up relationships and causing rows between friends pretty soon as jealous partners find out just who their other half is interacting with in even greater detail than normal, we see trouble ahead!!

Facebook today announced a new apps called Facebook Home that replaces your standard Android’s homescreen with an immersive Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications. Facebook also announced a special version of Home will come pre-installed on the new HTC First phone on AT&T.

Home will launches on April 12th in the US, and will be available to users of Android Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich, but not Gingerbread. The international rollout will come later. It won’t require a forked or modified version of Android, though that’s what the HTC First runs. Facebook will try to make Home available on tablets within a few months, and it’s supposed to be a great experience there. Every month, Facebook will release a Home update to add new features and make it accessible to new devices.

You’ll be able to download Home if you have the most recent Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps on your Android phone. You’ll see a banner alert to download Home from the Google Play store. When you launch it the first time, you can decide to “try once”, or choose “always” to swap in Home for you homescreen from then on.

The Home home screen experience is focused on Cover Feed, which shows a constant stream of full-screen photos and stories you can just sit back and watch. Demo’d by Adam Mosseri, Director of Product, Home also features a new notifications system that lets you scrub through multiple alerts at once. Check out our hands-on video with Facebook Home for a better idea of how it actually works.

Apps are important too, Zuckerberg says, so you can still add apps to your device. One swipe away from the home screen is the launcher for apps. Messaging is at the forefront. Phones are communication devices and we spend all day message, in today’s appcentric world, messaging is treated like another app. Switching between apps is annoying. We want to talk to people, not apps.

When a friend messages you, Home brings up the Facebook Chat Heads feature. It pops up a person’s face and you can tap on their face and bring up a conversation without losing any context of what you’re doing in the app behind. Chat Heads means you don’t have to decide whether to read a message or keep using your current app. It lets communication flow across the phone experience. It’s designed to let you tap in between multiple message threads.

“Today we’re going to finally talk about that Facebook Phone, More accurately, we’re gonna talk about how you can turn your phone into a Facebook Phone” Mark Zuckerberg said to start the event. After noting we spend more than 20% of our mobile time on social apps, Zuckerberg said “We asked ourselves — if we’re already spending this much time on our phones, how can we make it easier? What if they were designed around people first, and you could also just happen to interact with apps?”

Facebook has created the Facebook Home Program to allow a handset makers to optimize the Home experience. Partners include AT&T, Orange, Qualcomm, HTC, Samsung, Huawei, Sony, EE, ZTE, Lenovo, and Alcatel.

HTC and AT&T will release one of the first phones with Facebook Home on it. The handset is called the HTC First. The device’s operating system will be “optimized” to give users unique experiences like notifications for email and calendars on Facebook Home. It will run on an AT&T LTE connection. It will be available on April 12th for $99.99. You’ll be able to pre-order the HTC First starting today at http://www.att.com/facebookhome

Zuckerberg closed the event by discussing developing markets and Facebook’s international potential. “Only about a third of the world is on the Internet” but in five to ten years legions of feature phone users will be on smartphones. Zuckerberg left a cliffhanger, asking the crowd to think about what that will mean for social networking and the web as a whole.

Overall, Facebook Home will trim down the time it takes you to check Facebook. Considering Zuckerberg said we spend 20% of our mobile time on social and open our phones 100 times a day, those shaved seconds can really add up. Home and the HTC First will mostly appeal to hardcore networkers, but they give us a vision of Facebook’s ideal experience, how it wants us be perpetually connected. It’ll be each user’s decision just how social they want to be.

Apple’s trajectory in the U.S. smartphone market over the past little while has been an upwards one, with the company gaining more and more iPhone subscribers every month. During the three-month period covering November 2012 to February 2013, Apple added 8.9 million new iPhone subscribersaccording to comScore, while Android as a platform in total added only 2.9 million. That means Apple’s share of the total smartphone subscriber base in the U.S. grew to 38.9 percent from 35 percent, while Android’s dropped from 53.7 to 51.7 percent.

ComScore’s figures also show that in terms of smartphone manufacturers, Apple also continues to lead the pack. Its share among OEMs rose 3.9 percentage points during the three month period, while Samsung gained only 1 percent percentage point, rising from 20.3 percent of the U.S. market to 21.3 percent. That means Apple and the iPhone continue to enjoy almost double the smartphone manufacturer share of its next closest rival.

The loser in this case wasn’t either Apple or Samsung, however, both of whom gained subscribers and share, but BlackBerry, which as a platform shed 1.7 million subscribers in the U.S. between November and February. These numbers predate the launch of BB10, however, so we’ll have to watch to see if that helps BlackBerry stem the tide of users leaving.

Of course, both Google and Samsung stand to reap the benefits of upcoming device launches, which could help swing the pendulum back in their favor over the coming months. Samsung is on the verge of debuting its next-generation flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, with pre-orders beginning in just a couple of weeks. The HTC One is also coming to the U.S. market in mid-April, which could give Android as a platform additional firepower in terms of competing with iOS and the iPhone.

Apple’s success to date has been based on the strong performance of the iPhone 5 since launch, and that device seems to continue to be an attractive choice for U.S. subscribers. There still doesn’t appear to be much in the way of a true race for a third platform, however, with Microsoft and BlackBerry either actively losing share or seeing only insignificant gains. The market is now at a crucial juncture in terms of product releases, but the fight looks likely to continue to remain a two-party affair for the foreseeable future.