2012
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How would you change Amazon's Kindle Fire HD (7-inch)?
Amazon's second-generation Kindle Fire arrived with a revamped design, excellent display and stereo sound. For all of these plus points, however, our reviewer's single objection was the same that it's always been. The Kindle Fire is less of a tablet and more of a Trojan Horse, a way to keep the Amazon catalog sandwiched between your hands at all times. If you can ignore that issue then it's a perfectly fine device, albeit one that couldn't topple the first-generation Nexus 7 as our Android tablet of 2012. The question, therefore, is what did you think of the Kindle Fire HD? Head on over to our forum and speak your brains.
Sony's 2012 earnings show a net profit of $458 million, its first since 2008
We've already heard from Sony about the positive effects some of its recent moves like the sales of several of its buildings are having on its finances, and now the company is revealing its detailed results for the last year. Sony has managed a net profit of 43 billion yen ($458 million) in 2012, its first in several years and a good sign after it projected such optimism in last year's results. The most anticipated news is what it projects for 2013, a year where CEO Kaz Hirai has promised better integration between its products and of course, the PlayStation 4. Sony's forecast projects sharply improved sales next year, however it expects the operating income to remain flat with a net profit of 50 billion yen ($506 million). For the year, its TV sales were down 38 percent, reflecting the same drop in the market reported by competitors like Samsung and LG, as well as Sony's cutbacks to reduce its losses. In phones, the newly-consolidated Sony Mobile experienced an increase in sales thanks to the shift to smartphones, however the cost of its inclusion caused the division to lose money. Next year, it's anticipating sales of 42 million smartphones, up from 33 million. In the games division, Sony had a decrease in sales for the PS3, PSP and PS Vita of 12.2 percent from last year, although of course it's counting on the PS4 to turn that around. There aren't any numbers listed for next-gen, but it's expecting sales of PS3 hardware to drop to 10 million units from 16.5 million (including the PS2) the year before. We'll have to wait for the earnings call later this morning to hear more of the company's future projections, for now you can check the links below for the full details on its results.
Sony revises its 2012 earnings forecast, doubles expected net profits
Just like last year, we're reporting on a revision Sony's making to its expectations for last year's profits, but this time around there's some positive news. According to Sony, selling some of the buildings it owns and a weakening yen have doubled its expected net profit from 20 billion yen announced in February to 40 billion yen ($403 million). The complete results will be announced May 9th, and despite Sony managing its first profit since 2008 investors are hoping to hear how it plans to keep the streak going with business gains next year. The PlayStation 4 is expected to headline CEO Kaz Hirai's plans for future products, we should hear just how optimistic Sony is about those prospects in a couple of weeks.
Nintendo has another tough year, shipped just 390,000 Wii Us in the last quarter (updated)
While there's no shortage of 3DS iterations headed to the market, Nintendo is having a harder time selling its new Wii U. Profits for the year are also half of its own predictions, despite the fact that Nintendo reduced its rosy estimates in the interim. Net sales are down 1.9 percent over the last year, down to 635 billion yen, but most importantly the company has managed to turn its net income into positive figures, netting 7 billion yen over the last year, compared to a 40 billion yen loss the year before. Following its launch, Wii U sales have slowed substantially, with only 390,000 units sold since December (now totaling 3.45 million), while the 3DS continues to sell in healthier numbers, with Nintendo shifting 1.25 million handhelds in the same period. Focusing on the next year, the company maintains that it'll increase net income to 10 billion yen in the next twelve months, with a focus on selling "the compelling nature" of its gaming hardware, as well as pushing its 3DS more in foreign markets. The financial statement adds that the games maker plans to concentrate on "proactively releasing key Nintendo titles" starting the second half of this year "in order to regain momentum." Those key titles will have to hit hard, as certain competitors' new consoles are creeping closer. In related news, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is taking on a second role as CEO at Nintendo of America, today's report states. Current NoA figurehead Reggie Fils-Aime will stay on as COO, overseen directly by Iwata.
Hon Hai shows record profits, keeps making money from making iPhones
Hon Hai Precision, also known as Foxconn Technology, has reported its earnings for the year and notched a net income of $3.2 billion according to the Financial Times. Most familiar as the manufacturing muscle behind Apple's iPhones, iPads and the like, the Taiwan-based manufacturer beat analyst predictions on high margins for those products. Its subsidiary, Foxconn International Holdings, is the world's largest cellphone maker and produces devices for companies including Nokia and Motorola, but suffered a net loss of $316.4 million. As a result, some are concerned about Foxconn's heavy reliance on Apple as a customer going forward. Still, the company is reportedly continuing a plan to increase vertical integration, by manufacturing the parts for devices and not just putting them together -- we'll see if anyone notices changes in the final product anytime soon.
Best Buy announces fourth quarter net loss of $377 million, no rescue bid coming from founder
It's a hard time to be in the tech-retail sector, a fact that Best Buy knows all too well. The business has announced a fourth quarter net loss of $377 million on revenues of $16.7 billion. Incoming CEO Hubert Joly was upbeat despite the bad numbers, saying that the company's domestic sales helped offset its failures overseas. At the same time, Best Buy announced that founder Richard Schulze's attempted bid to buy back his company had failed, as the deadline for his offer expired at the end of February. As such, the company will now concentrate on turning a profit without any Apple store-style reinvention.
Best App Ever 2012 winners announced, Walking Dead takes top prize
Our friend Jeff Scott over at 148Apps has been running the annual Best App Ever awards for five years now, featuring some of the greatest apps on the App Store voted on by popular demand to determine the "Best App Ever." Last year's winners have just been announced, and Telltale's The Walking Dead game has taken the top spot in voting. There's no question at all that it's a great game and a terrific app, though personally I played it on the Xbox 360, and I preferred that platform. But it's a solid choice, and if you don't like that one, there are lots and lots of other categories to go through. Launch Center Pro, for example (which allows you to launch not just apps, but specific functions within them), won for Most Innovative App, while sync/sharing app Dropbox picked up Most Useful App. One of my favorite games, Punch Quest, won both Best Time Killer and Best Free To Play Game, while the great Junk Jack sandbox adventure game won for Most Addicting Game. There are tons of great apps in this list -- some are extremely popular, but there are a few choice gems in there that you may not have tried yet. Congrats to Jeff on a fifth successful year of the Best App Ever awards, and the site says they'll be back at the end of this year to reward the best of 2013.
MetroPCS rakes in $1.3 billion for Q4 2012 thanks to 2.2 million new LTE customers
Over a quarter of MetroPCS' customer base is now on LTE (26 percent), and the company made $1.3 billion in revenue for Q4 and $5.1 billion total in 2012 as a result, it said. Though revenue was down for Q4 over last year to $122 million compared to $215 million for Q4 2011, profits were up year-over-year by 10 percent to $824 million, and the company said it made a record $1.5 billion EBITDA (before taxes, etc.) The company attributes that in part to a 2.2 million LTE subscriber bump, an increase of 117 percent over Q3 2012, but indicated that it lost 93 thousand subscribers total over the same period. It added that churn (customers leaving to other carriers) fell to 3.4 percent, its lowest level ever. Meanwhile, the carrier said it's proposed Deutsche Telecom-backed merger with T-Mobile is moving along swimmingly with a definitive proposal filed yesterday. It anticipates "closing the transaction in early April" ahead of schedule, which it says would make MetroPCS "the leading value wireless carrier in the United States."
IDC: connected device shipments up 29.1 percent in 2012, smartphones and tablets rule
Researchers at IDC have had their ears to the ground keeping tabs on shipments for specific types of devices, and now they've painted a bigger picture of the hardware battlefield in 2012. "Smart connected devices" -- a category which includes desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones -- saw a total of 367.7 million units shipped in Q4 2012, up 28.3 percent from the year before. In total, over 1.2 billion units were shipped last year, marking a 29.1 percent upswing from 2011. Naturally, tablets and smartphones drove the boost by carving out roughly 60 percent of the year's combined marketshare, while PCs and notebook shipments sank by 4.1 and 3.4 percent, respectively. While Samsung and Apple each claimed crowns in specific gadget divisions, Sammy came out on top with smart connected devices in 2012 as a whole (and in Q4) thanks to a 20.8 percent marketshare, beating Cupertino by 2.6 percent. Lenovo finished in third place with a 6.5 percent slice, while HP and Dell trailed behind with 4.8 and 3.2 percent, respectively. IDC notes that Cook. and Co. could have come in a more distant second, but the debut of the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini pulled it out of a slump from earlier in the year.
Tesla's Q4 2012 earnings: $90 million net loss, but forecasts a profit for Q1 2013
If you're one Elon Musk, you're probably ready for just about anything to take the place of the only story dominating the Tesla tagline for the past few weeks. Of course, a $90 million net loss isn't the ideal story to overtake the Model S kerfuffle, but hey -- at least the company's aiming to pull in a profit next quarter. In a bid to keep investors focused on the positive, the automaker's Q4 2012 shareholder letter notes that Tesla is officially predicting its first quarterly profit in Q1 2013, sliding up from "late 2013." For the quarter that just wrapped, the firm saw revenues of $306 million (a 500 percent increase sequentially from the $50.1 million seen in Q3 2012), and it ended the year with $221 million in total cash after having made the first quarterly principal payment of $12.7 million to repay the loan to the U.S. Department of Energy. Tesla also plans to deliver some 20,000 Model S vehicles in 2013, with around 4,500 of those happening in Q1. Europeans and Asians can expect their deliveries in "summer" / "late this year" (respectively), with the first Model X deliveries to occur in early 2014. Musk also told investors that it plans to "spend significantly less on capital expenditures" in 2013 compared to 2012, helping to (hopefully) generate "slightly positive net income on a non-GAAP basis" in Q1 2013.
EE sees contract activations fall during its first quarter with LTE
When EE activated its LTE network part-way through its fourth-quarter, there was an assumption speed-hungry Brits would storm the company's numerous stores to get at that super-fast mobile data. The reality, however, seems to indicate that it takes more than a Kevin Bacon commercial to send the homeland into a frenzy. The company's financial results show that the network only added 201,000 customers between October and December 31st -- 49,000 fewer than in Q3 and 112,000 fewer than signed up in the same period in 2011. EE also isn't breaking out figures for how many of its existing customers made the change -- so for now we'll have to assume that the UK isn't as sweet on the guy from Footloose as Olaf Swanee had hoped.
Zynga posts $209.4 million loss for 2012
Though 2012 was a rough year Zynga – with the company seeing studio closures, layoffs and departures – the casual game developer and publisher fared better financially than it did in 2011. Zynga ended 2011 in the red to the tune of $404.3 million, while the company has posted a net loss of just $209.4 million in 2012. Year-end revenues stacked up at $1.28 billion; a 12 percent increase over 2011.The difference between Zynga's overall Q4 revenue in 2012 and 2011 is negligible: $311.1 million as compared with $311.2 million, respectively. Online game revenues were down by three percent year-over-year, while advertising revenue was up by 35 percent, cresting $36 million. Year-over-year net losses are dramatically different, however, with Q4 2012's loss of $48.5 million an 88 percent decrease from the $435 million loss posted in Q4 of 2011.Looking forward, Zynga anticipates a net loss for Q1 2013, somewhere in the ballpark of $12 million to $32 million.
Toshiba's 2012 Q3 makes $322 million net profit, sees a future in nuclear
Toshiba's latest numbers may not reach the dizzying heights of last quarter, but at least it's not back to filling out its spreadsheets in red pen. The company is announcing profits of $322 million from net sales of $14.9 billion. A big chunk of that change came from Tosh's "social infrastructure" division, which produces power plants, medical systems and radiation detectors -- while its home entertainment and computing divisions sat and watched profits continue to decline. Toshiba has maintained the cut-back forecast it made in October, expecting annual net profits to be around $1.2 billion, more than enough for it to send you a cute bug-eyed robot for your next birthday.
iOS games make 3.5 times more than Android counterparts
Popular App Store tracker App Annie has released its latest report, and the news is good for iOS developers. Not only is iOS revenue up in general (by about 20% year over year), but it's still about three and a half times higher than Android revenue. Both Apple's App Store and Google Play saw big revenue increases in the latter half of last year, as you can see above, but iOS is still clearly much higher, which is definitely one of the reasons developers are so keen to be on Apple's platform in the first place. It's notable that the top apps on the App Store aren't games at all: Apple and Google are the two top companies with the most downloads on the marketplace, and they don't produce any games at all. But in terms of revenue, games are still the biggest moneymakers on the store, and companies like EA, Zynga, and GREE are definitely picking up plenty of revenue. It's interesting to note that some of the companies on top of the revenue list are still only running one or two games, so as big as the App Store is, any developer out there with a big enough hit still has a chance to make the top revenue list.
Gameloft announces 27% boost in earnings in 2012, 56% of sales from back catalog
Developer Gameloft has announced its earnings for the last quarter, and they're up. The company even beat out its own guidance, ending 2012 with a 27 percent boost in earnings on the year in total, up to $275 million. I would have thought much of that was from the major Christmas sales that we saw, but I would have been wrong: Gameloft says that the company's Q4 sales were only up by 23 percent, with Q2 and Q3 showing more growth, at 35 and 37 percent, respectively. That's interesting. The company also announced that while sales of major new releases of course played a part in its success, over 56 percent of its sales in 2012 came from back catalog titles, older releases like Ice Age Village, Order and Chaos Online and Asphalt 7. It's a lot to draw out a trend from the earnings report of one company, but those numbers definitely stand out. I wonder if we're hitting a transition point on iOS in general -- in the past, big new releases (and Christmas sales) have almost always made or broken companies' earnings reports, but I wonder if, as the App Store gets more and more crowded, just having bigger libraries of back catalog titles might not make more of a difference. Of course, at the same time, Gameloft announced that it has shut down its India-based studio, so not everything is going perfectly over there.
The top 30 games of 2012 in Japan
Japan's list of best-selling games in 2012 is full of national pride, including titles from Capcom, Nintendo, Namco Bandai, Square Enix and Sega, among a few other Japan-based publishers. The top game of 2012 in Japan is Pokemon Black and White 2 for Nintendo DS, which we found to feature a "world that feels larger and more interesting than ever."Black and White 2 is followed by Animal Crossing: New Leaf for 3DS, New Super Mario Bros. 2 for 3DS, Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry's Wonderland 3D for 3DS and, breaking the pattern in more than one way, Resident Evil 6 for PS3. Check out the entire lineup below, as compiled by Siliconera from data on 4Gamer.
Top Xbox Live, Arcade, Indie and Windows games of 2012
If an alien intelligence agency got a hold of this "Top Xbox games of 2012" list, it might come away with the conclusion that humans are really, really into mining. The aliens might also conclude that we enjoy warfare, including the kind that affects extraterrestrials, so let's hope that they focus on the harmless digging thing and keep their lasers to themselves.Major Nelson breaks down 2012's top 20 games of the following categories: Live, Arcade, Indie and Games for Windows Live. The top Xbox Live games of 2012, determined by average unique users per day, are Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Modern Warfare 3, Halo 4, Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition and Black Ops. Following that is a round of sports games, including FIFA Soccer 13 and 12, and Halo: Reach, Assassin's Creed 3, Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Far Cry 3 and Skyrim.The top five Xbox Live Arcade games, determined by full versions purchased, are Minecraft, Trials Evolution, The Walking Dead, Pinball FX2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Castle Crashers is hanging out at No. 6, followed by Fez at No. 13. Indie games are ranked with the same method, and they carry a familiar theme, headlined by CastleMiner Z, CastleMiner, Total Miner: Forge, Avatar Deathmatch and FortressCraft Chapter 1.Games for Windows Live games get ranked by average unique users per day, and the top five are Grand Theft Auto 4, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, Age of Empires Online, Batman: Arkham City and Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition. Remember, aliens, humans sure do love the smell of fresh, pixelated dirt. See for yourself with the full lists, provided by Major Nelson, after the break.
Huawei 2012 results: $2.5 billion profit, smartphone penetration 'still way too low'
Huawei has announced some pretty respectable numbers for the year just passed, with the company taking $35.4 billion (CNY 220.2 billion) in revenue and turning that into a $2.48 billion (CNY 15.4 billion) profit -- both figures show an improvement over their 2011 counterparts. CFO Cathy Meng, daughter of Huawei's founder, said that despite the money coming in, "smartphone penetration is still way too low and there is a lot of room for growth." Meng also brought up the ongoing trust issues with the US, which she doesn't expect to hamper growth. Huawei is certainly maturing its international business regardless -- 66 percent of overall revenue came from other regions. All we know is that Huawei's becoming increasingly visible at international trade shows like CES, and it will undoubtedly have more to share at the upcoming MWC, where we can only hope to hear more about that mouth-watering eight-core chip.
China adds 51 million internet users in one year, mobile numbers increase by 18.1 percent
China's internet dealt with 564 million users during 2012, increasing its user base by 10 percent. Despite continued efforts to monitor residents and restrict access to subversive content, these substantial gains were apparently driven by mobile internet access, with the number of Chinese users tapping into the web from phones and tablets rising by 18.1 percent, now totaling 420 million. According to these figures from the China Internet Network Information Center, that's 75 percent of all internet users.
How would you change the mid-2012 MacBook Air?
Remember when people decried the MacBook Air as a dumb idea when it first launched? Well, given the amount of Ultrabooks that are now floating around the world, we bet they've not shared that opinion publicly too often. The most recent vintage of the unit gained USB 3.0 ports, Ivy Bridge chips and, well, not the one thing that would have made the unit unbeatable -- a retina-class display. No, instead that feature was reserved for a different line, letting rivals like the Zenbook Prime beat it in the resolution stakes. But aside from that notable (and for Apple, lucrative) omission, how have you found these machines? Tell us what you've loved, hated and, most importantly, what would you change?
