Who needs mobiles?

In an unusual sideline to its make products smartphone maker Xiaomi is getting into making bicycles.

Three years

HTC has scored a deal to exclusively manufacture Nexus devices for the next three years.

700 meters from the base station

Mobile World Congress was dominated by 5G – the next generation network that will replace the omni-present 4G / LTE network. Now South Korea's SK Telekom has showcased a demo of a base station and download speeds nearly 20 Gbit per second.

Interesting alternative

Majority of the phones at Mobile World Congress 2016 used Android and a few had Windows mobile 10. But if you want to be really different, Ubuntu was showing its highest end Meizu MX5 Pro Ubuntu phone.

Now if only we could assemble one

The Swedish makers of flatpack furniture which has a unique feature requiring screws to be hit in with hammers after consulting complicated plan with a font so small that it could be written on a rice grain, have come up with a table that kills off phone use.

Samsung is still number one

Beancounters at IDC have added up the numbers and divided by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that smartphone shipments hit a record 1.43 billion units in 2015.

Makes it the eighth largest

While lacking the fanfare in the west that its rivals get, the Chinese smartphone maker Oppo has just announced that it sold 50 million smartphones last year.

Replace it every year

Samsung  is rolling out a rental phone service which will replace a phone that is been used for a year with the latest model.

Copies Apple again 

It seems that Apple is not the only one which is being hard hit by a fall in interest in smartphones. its rival Samsung is reporting the same sort of problems, only it has the advantage of other products it can fall back on and a big R&D budget for future products.

Waiting for Zen might be cunning

Last year, Kerrisdale Capital Investment warned that AMD would go bankrupt by 2020 and with Zen not appearing until the end of this year we were slightly concerned that the outfit did not have enough to survive what will be a dismal year.