Mobile and Portable

The Apple Event was today, and Apple made a series of interesting announcements about its iPhone lineup. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus were announced, and the rumored iPhone X was confirmed. These new iPhones offer more powerful processing via Apple's new A11 chip, as well as an Apple-designed GPU. This allows Apple to offer on-device machine learning and computer vision-enabled abilities which enable a number of new use cases. Apple's machine learning tech enables: Native...

During keynote speech at XPONENTIAL 2017, Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO, focused very heavily on new and exciting technologies in unmanned systems, including drones (a.k.a. UAS – unmanned aircraft system) being deployed as data collecting medium. To demonstrate commercial drone capabilities, Krzanich introduced the Intel Falcon 8+ System with an example of infrastructure inspection. While the excitement is real that commercial drones will take off to be a new business segment, there...

Distracted driving is a critical and growing issue. IoT Peggy Smedley kindly invited me to join her show this week as she focuses on IoT and Transportation this month, particularly in regards to distracted driving. Listen to the full interview. Parks Associates research shows that 92% of U.S. car owners perform activities that require mobile or Internet connection while driving , and more than 60% do so routinely. These activities include making calls, accessing maps,...

Uber announced plans to debut a flying car network, called Uber Elevate, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Dubai by 2020. Parks Associates is based in Dallas, and I can’t believe our good luck at having been chosen to be on the forefront of this effort. Still, let’s assess the reality. First, Uber’s “flying car” is a misnomer. The initiative is designed to launch electric or hybrid aircrafts that take off and land vertically and are designed to fly short ranges....

The Samsung Galaxy S8 event was yesterday, and, like many an analyst covering the mobile space, I watched it. Here are some of my key takeaways for the event: The Samsung Galaxy S8 may finally be the phone that replaces your PC. The S8's DeX desktop-like experience offers consumers the ability to connect to a monitor and use apps in a desktop-like mode, viewing apps side-by-side and enabling keyboard and mouse control. Apple has no feature comparable...

The traditional watch market faces two forms of competition from the CE space. First, the ubiquity of smartphones decreases the need for a separate timepiece. Second, the smart watch category challenges the traditional watch segment directly. Shipments of Swiss-made watches fell by over 14% from July 2015 to July 2016, and traditional watch sales declined across all price categories. Recent Parks Associates research assessed the impact of smart watches on the traditional watch...

Many autonomous car developers use multiple sensors in their test cars—optical sensors, radars, LiDAR, and ultrasonic sensors. Each sensor has advantages over others. Optical sensors can detect lane markings and changing traffic lights. Radar can travel under vehicles in order to detect objects that would be obscured by other cars, and radar performs well in rain and complete darkness. LiDAR can, more accurately than other sensors, detect the presence of objects to create a 3D map with...

Almost everyone in the autonomous car industry thinks autonomous cars will make us safer. Those who present on autonomous cars repeat the stats: 1.2 million people worldwide die every year in car collisions, and in America alone there are 33,000 collision-caused deaths each year. 94% of those collisions involve human error. Autonomous cars can eliminate a significant number of those fatalities. Even after a Florida driver was involved in a fatal Tesla crash while using the car’s...