February 12, 2010
World finally using unified communications
The Register
Josie Sephton writes about the unified communications space.
“It seems that Unified Communications (UC) has at last started to move beyond the ‘what is it’ stage and hit the mainstream world of real users with real implementations and real experiences. As we found in our poll at the end of last year with Reg readers, which looked at advanced business communications in the workplace, when we talked about the different components of UC, such as Unified Directory (UD) or Unified Messaging (UM), many have already either implemented these or have them on the agenda to some degree, with only a very small proportion actually having rejected them completely.”
Touchscreens take lead in smartphone biz
Register Hardware
Tony Smith writes about the touchscreen smartphone market.
“The world’s smartphone makers shipped more touchscreen models in Q4 2009 than at any time in the past – and more touchphones than devices with buttons. During the quarter, 55 per cent of all smartphones shipped had touchscreens. That’s just under 30 million touchscreen handsets altogether, market watcher Canalys said. Touchscreen shipments were up 138 per cent year on year, compared to overall smartphone shipment growth of 41 per cent.”
Will Tablets Kill E-Readers?
Network World
Craig Mathias offers his thoughts on why he doesn’t think tablets will “kill” e-readers.
“Will tablets kill e-readers? No, they won’t. The e-reader (typified by the Kindle, but there are in fact many of these with more to come) is designed primarily a device for reading old-fashioned books – you know, sequential text, no illustrations (and thus no need for colour or very high graphical resolution), static material that doesn’t change over time and thus can be distributed and priced atomically, and otherwise firmly wedded to the past – perhaps it’s best to think of e-readers as bridges to the future for the more conservative users out there. Sure, the Kindle and a few of the others can perform assorted other tasks, but they’re not terribly flexible or programmable and may not be useful for other functions beyond casual access to media or the Web. But E-readers are, granted, cheap and very convenient to use, again with consideration of their limited range of function. It’s not hard to see why these have sold well.”