Posts tagged Comeback
Seo In Young Holds Special Comeback Showcase – Yahoo! Philippines News
May 17th
 Yahoo! Philippines News |
Seo In Young Holds Special Comeback Showcase
Yahoo! Philippines News Singer Seo In Young held a special comeback showcase to promote her upcoming new album titled “Forever Young”. The event took place in a hotel in Itaewon Station days ago. Seo In Young has been in the music industry for 11 years and just last year, … |
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Seo In Young feels the pressure about her ballad comeback – Yahoo! Philippines News
May 15th
 Yahoo! Philippines News |
Seo In Young feels the pressure about her ballad comeback
Yahoo! Philippines News Singer Seo In Young ended her 7 month hiatus from the music scene with her 'Forever Young' showcase yesterday, prior to her new mini album release on May 15th. Her new album which goes on sale today comprises of 5 songs including 'I Want You Back', … Seo In Young to Appear on Talk Show, 'Knee Drop Guru' |
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Seo In Young Feels Pressure about Making a Comeback This May – Yahoo! Philippines News
May 14th
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Seo In Young Feels Pressure about Making a Comeback This May
Yahoo! Philippines News Seo In Young′s new album contains a total of five tracks, including the promotional single Let′s Break Up, I Want You Back, Anymore, Letter and Let′s Dance. Let′s Break Up is a ballad piece that uses acoustic band sounds, and is about how a woman … |
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HTC Has The Tools For A Comeback
Apr 23rd
People of a certain age will remember well the Cola Wars and the advertising blitz of the blind taste test of the late 1970s and 80s. The “Pepsi Challenge” was almost a cultural phenomenon at the time and has been an enduring marketing slogan for almost 40 years.
In 2013, the Cola Wars are so passé. Now, we have smartphones.
Last week I decided to perform my own kind of test. I walked around with two smartphones, the HTC One and a Samsung Galaxy and handed them to people. “First impression, which phone would you want more?” I asked. Of 25 people I asked, 18 of them preferred the HTC One.
The test was not scientific and user interaction was not substantial. It was more of a first-impression type of thing. Now, this is not a marketing pitch for HTC. It is merely an observation that goes to support a point: HTC makes very nice smartphones and it would be a shame if this manufacturer died.
HTC has posted six straight quarters of declining revenue. Its most recent quarter, it barely eked out an operating profit and the company’s leaders expect the next quarter to be worse. Unlike mid-level rivals BlackBerry and Nokia (whose fall from grace mirrors that of HTC), the Taiwanese manufacturer is not sitting on a large cash hoard.
HTC’s two most recent phone launches, the One and the First (the “Facebook Phone”) show that it has the chops to rebuild its brand and market share.
What Makes The HTC One Best Of Brand
Aesthetics: First, let’s move past the fact that the HTC One does not have a removable back or expandable memory slot. The One is built with a full metal body, 4.7-inch screen with one of the best screens that has come out on a smartphone at 468 pixels-per-inch. At 143 grams (5.04 ounces) it is not the lightest smartphone on the market, but it is definitely sturdy. The weight, size and build were the reasons most-cited in the first-impression test when people held the One.
Apple, Samsung and Nokia all make beautiful phones as well. HTC can definitely put the One up against any of its competitors ounce for ounce, inch for inch and say that it has one of the best looking phones on the market.
Hardware: HTC has not always been a hardware leader. That title goes to Samsung and the specs from the forthcoming Galaxy S4 prove that yet again. But, HTC is no slouch. The battery is 2300 mAh, considerably bigger than the 1800 mAh the One X shipped with at this time last year. It still falls behind the impressive 2600 mAh of the S4 but the battery life of the One is good enough to last a full day of moderate to heavy use when Wi-Fi, GPS and LTE are all being employed by the user.
The quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 keeps things moving along well on the One. The Snapdragon 600 is the same chip that the Galaxy S4 and LG Optimus G Pro will employ in the United States.
The One has two front-facing speakers employing what it calls “BoomSound.” Boom indeed. The sound on the One reminds me of the portable stereo I used to have in the early 90s, but better. I do not recall ever having to turn down the volume on a smartphone when playing music through its speakers, but I had to with the One. Quality was not sacrificed either, as every note came through clearly. Now, while the sound is impressive, not many consumers tend to play music through their smartphone speakers, eschewing it for the comfort and privacy of ear buds.
Sense Features: HTC has a new skin with the One – Sense 5.0. It has been difficult to quantify Sense among users over the years. Some love it, some hate it. If anything can be said about Sense 5.0 is that it generally stays out of the way of the user experience, with a couple notable exceptions. The first is “BlinkFeed” the built-in content feed that doubles as the home screen when you turn on the device. BlinkFeed aggregates from your Facebook newsfeed along with highlights from various publications of interest. It is kind of like having the Pulse News reading app as a home screen that updates itself. In and of itself, that is not a bad thing if you are a news junkie. Yet, BlinkFeed does not allow you to bring in customized feeds for publications not already in its network. For instance, if I want technology news, I can use the “tech highlights” setting or get feeds straight from The Verge or CNET. While quality publications, I prefer a more egalitarian set of choices for my news that I can control.
You cannot remove BlinkFeed as one of the panels on your device. If you want to marginalize it, you can set a different panel as your home screen. Sense 5.0 only allows five panels, reducing real estate to pin apps and widgets to your device.
Camera: When HTC announced that the One would have “ultrapixels” we basically scratched our heads and said, “ummm, what?” Ultrapixels is a marketing term and not a very good one at that. But how does the actual camera perform? Very well.
Ultrapixels are supposed to allow more light into the aperture of the camera, creating clearer pictures, especially in low-light settings. We have found this to be true, as seen in the examples below.
The popular thing to do among smartphone makers these days is to pack as many features into their cameras as possible. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is particularly egregious at this, but Nokia and Apple are both guilty as well. HTC is no different. It has a variety of settings for sharing (under the HTC Zoe feature), the ability to take “sound photos,” panorama shots, various filters, shoot and edit videos (at 1080p) and more. Frankly, most people are going to just open the camera app and snap a photo but HTC provides a variety of advanced features as well. The smartphone camera wars are alive and well and the advanced capabilities brought forth by various manufacturers are a good thing for consumers, developers, hobbyists and enthusiasts.
HTC First: A Decent Option For The Mid-Level
The Facebook Phone (the HTC First) is remarkable for really one reason: Facebook. Otherwise, this device is so non-descript that it is almost painful. David Pogue of The New York Times probably said it best when he described the First: “What’s the deal with this phone? It’s plastic, dull, uninteresting. It’s so generic, it should come in a plain white box that says PHONE on it.”
Harsh, but true. The first impression of the First when taken out of the box might be, “wow, this looks like an iPhone.” That is where the comparisons to Apple’s flagship stop. The phone runs Facebook Home as a launcher, which is fine if you like Facebook and want it centralized as the skin for your phone. Otherwise, the First runs stock Android Jelly Bean. You can use the phone without Home, which essentially turns it into a mid-level smartphone not unlike a Google Nexus device except without the official Google support that the company gives its flagship Android devices.
Really, that is not entirely a bad thing. The First comes at a reasonable price ($99 on contract through AT&T or $449.99 off contract) and can be attuned to a full Android experience or an Android experience colored by Facebook. The market for that type of device could be parents looking to get their teenagers their first smartphones or developers looking for a relatively cheap Android device to test apps on. The First may not be anything special, but if you are looking in the middle market for smartphones, you could definitely do worse.
With the One and the First, HTC could gain momentum to overtake several of its rivals, which are numerous. Right now, HTC’s biggest rival is probably Nokia, which has filed an injunction against the One for use of microphone technology in the device. But HTC also has to battle for position with the leaders of the pack in Apple and Samsung as well as the Android Army of ZTE, Huawei, LG and others. If it can avoid the pitfalls that doomed it the last two years (legal issues, distribution and marketing), HTC has the tools to come out ahead.
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T-Mobile Comeback Challenges Mobile Industry Predictions of Its Demise
Dec 11th
For many mobile industry analysts, T-Mobile seemed to be “going the way of the dodo”, but the world’s third-largest mobile-phone service provider now has an ace up its sleeve: the iPhone. No biggie, if you consider that many other carriers offer iPhones or support iPhones with their contracts, but a big deal if you think [...]
The post T-Mobile Comeback Challenges Mobile Industry Predictions of Its Demise appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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America’s Mobile Comeback
Oct 5th
For the first time in a long time, two American companies are driving innovation and leading one of the planet’s most important industries.
(This report also ran in the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of SAY Magazine.)
The first half of 2012, I flew more than 60,000 miles, searching for interesting tech stories for ReadWriteWeb, including stops in Korea, Japan, Iceland, Spain, Germany and Silicon Valley. The biggest meta-trend I’ve observed: How two U.S. companies, Apple and Google, stand tall as the world’s most influential mobile companies, leading one of the planet’s most important industries.
It wasn’t always this way. Now five years after the first iPhone debuted and almost four years since Android launched, it is easy to forget that America was once a mobile-phone backwater.
The iPhone-ification Of Japan
One trend I’ve enjoyed watching over the past several years is how Japan — perhaps the most interesting mobile-phone–accessorizing nation — has embraced the iPhone.
In December 2007, eight months before the iPhone launched in Japan, but shortly after it had gone on sale in the U.S., I spent a week wandering around Tokyo, zipping in and out of electronics stores. It was a fascinating experience. Everything felt so foreign, because it was. In the States, it already seemed obvious that a full-touchscreen smartphone was the device of the future. But in Japan, it felt like the opposite.
The most sophisticated phones were big, long flip phones without touchscreens. Gadget department stores had huge sections of charms that you could buy to attach to a tiny loop on your phone: Cute little animals, cartoon characters, food items, screen wipers, all sorts of stuff. (On a later visit in 2010, even Japanese Starbucks stores sold their own cellphone charms, including a tiny plastic coffee cup.)
Handsets competed mostly based on physical design, color and features such as built-in mobile TV support. One new device, the “KDDI InfoBar 2,” looked more like an art project than a phone, with colorful buttons taking up much of the phone’s face. Having already fallen in love with the iPhone, this seemed strange to me.
In many other ways, the Japanese were far ahead of the world: NTT DoCoMo, the dominant Japanese operator, had long established its mobile Internet services, and a universal mobile payments system meant you could pay for a subway ride or can of coffee with a chip in your phone. Meanwhile, most Americans were still learning how to send text messages.
Fast forward to May 2012, when I spent another week in Japan, again spending an unhealthy amount of time in electronics stores. I knew the iPhone had become popular in Japan and that local cellphone manufacturers had embraced Android. But I was shocked by the extent.
Those long aisles of cellphone charms are now dominated by a dizzying selection of iPhone accessories and cases, ranging from the practical to the absurd.
At one store, a $50 iPhone case looked exactly like a fried tonkatsu cutlet, the breadcrumb texture down to an incredible detail. At another: a case with a rubber hand on the back, so you could “hold hands” while talking on the phone. (Creepy.) I saw an entirely new selection of charms that plug into the iPhone’s headphone jack, including tiny pieces of sushi, a Tokyo commuter train car and Kapibara-san, my favorite Japanese fictional character. And an elaborate, $40 gadget in the shape of a baseball stadium — slip your iPhone into the “AppBaseball” plastic slot — designed as an analog controller for a baseball game from the App Store.
There weren’t as many toys specifically for Android because there are literally thousands of different Android devices and only a few that sell in enough volume to justify their own custom accessories. But all the big Japanese phone makers had switched to Android in my absence — the homemade, custom stuff was all but gone.
The Rise Of Mobile Software
What happened? Why did two American companies grow to dominate the mobile world? In a word: software.
If you watched the rise of Japanese electronics companies such as Sony and Panasonic in the ’80s and ’90s, most of their skill was in hardware design, engineering and manufacturing. They were amazing at making things tiny, with superb industrial design. The impossibly thin Sony Discman I bought in Hong Kong in 1998 is still one of my favorite gadgets of all time.
Hardware engineering and distribution were the most important traits of early mobile companies, and that’s how Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, Sharp and even U.S.-based Motorola moved the needle. For software, they either outsourced — thus, Symbian’s early smartphone OS dominance — or made their own. But it was mostly junk, and that was okay because screens were small and everything was very simple.
Then in January 2007, Apple changed everything with the iPhone. Sure, its industrial design was slick and its touchscreen looked different than other phones on the market. But its biggest revolution was software. The iPhone’s OS was as strong as a computer’s, and the apps it could run were super-advanced. Apple’s iTunes sync software was miles better than anything Nokia, RIM or any rival offered. When the iPhone App Store launched in 2008, it became the gold standard for mobile software.
Google’s Android project followed. It was never as good as the iPhone software, but it didn’t matter because companies like Samsung and HTC couldn’t get their hands on Apple’s OS. For many purposes, Android was good enough. And its easy (and free) licensing meant anyone could use it for almost anything. Samsung, most notably, has found success with its Android-powered Galaxy lineup, and almost every mobile company around the world has bet itself on Google. (Nokia, now in rebuilding mode, has also attached itself to a U.S.-based platform, the Microsoft Windows Phone.)
Back In The U.S.A.
A decade ago, a tour of the world’s mobile-phone capitals might have started in Finland, home of Nokia, stopped in London to visit Sony Ericsson (itself a joint venture between a Swedish telecom giant and Japan’s gadget leader) to Korea for Samsung and LG, perhaps to Germany for Siemens, wrapping up at Motorola — the company that invented the cellphone — in the Chicago suburbs. Of these, Samsung is now the only one still profitably making mobile phones, and its strengths are still mostly hardware and distribution — it’s hardly a software-platform company.
Today, the most important mobile corridor in the world is the one in Silicon Valley, California — the nine-mile drive between Google’s headquarters in Mountain View and Apple’s in Cupertino. Until the next revolution, at least.
(This report also ran in the Fall/Winter 2012 issue of SAY Magazine.)
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Seo In Young Gears Up for Comeback – KpopStarz
Aug 18th
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Seo In Young Gears Up for Comeback
KpopStarz The white background highlighted Seo In Young's outfits and colorful personality and nice skin. So far, it's got the male audiences talking and buzzing. Internet users are responding positively to the photos. "Didn't know Seo In Young had this side to her. |
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Singer Seo In Young To Make A Comeback At The End Of August! – KpopStarz
Aug 12th
 KpopStarz |
Singer Seo In Young To Make A Comeback At The End Of August!
KpopStarz Back in May, Seo In Young set up her own agency and thus, this will be her first comeback with her going solo since her last release in November of last year with her mini album Brand New Elly. A representative stated, "She is aiming to release her … |
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