agosto 28, 2014



Time being Tablets will not substitute Pc or Imacs.
Although there was  a big trend in tablets consumption, everybody knows that usually what goes up fast plummet. Tablet’s sales have cooled. After two years with annual growth of over 50% in the first quarter of the year they did just 11%. The macro is not the worst-case scenario, but some companies are already experiencing already declining sales.
Apple is down 9.3% on the cake to twelve months, the equivalent of 1.3 million iPads that have been in stores, while Samsung, its great competitor, just get placed more than 100,000 Galaxy Tab in 2013 , growing a meager 1.6%. These figures indicate that the market is becoming saturated. What happens to tablets?
The main reason is that Tablets are not worth to work . First of all it should unmounts a myth that of the tablets eventually replace the PC. It's a nonsensical idea, sponsored by the manufacturers themselves, who never take shape. No, at least while the tablets remain a device for consuming content-and not for creating it. Keyboard is needed to write a long text keyboard is needed, and to work with Excel is much better with a mouse, Smartphones are also more suitable to take a pictures, to play and edit videos you need more power ... and besides, neither iOS nor Android are neither appropriate file management systems.
Ergo, if tablets are not suitable to work, they are not indispensable. Consequently the PC, especially the all in one and spurred on by the end of the XP support, they are picking up again. It is modest growth, or a cushioned fall, which in no way worth it to retrieve the pre-2010 levels, but that shows that has not been left out of the market.

Bites are been given to tablets’ share above and below. User uses the tablet mainly for Internet browsing and watching videos anywhere. In 2010, when the first iPad went on sale, laptops were much thicker and mobiles phones were small and unintelligent. Four years later the situation has changed: now we have 13 millimeters thick powerful notebooks and up to seven inch screen smartphones.

The threat comes from above not only more portable screen and lighter weight, but have emerged a sort of hybrid machines, known as two-in-one, who cannibalized his offer. We talked about lines such as Microsoft Surface or the Asus Transformer Book, able to function as a laptop or tablet as desired by the user.

The bites given below are more dangerous. Phablets have arrived to Stay and have features that many tablets lack, like the ability to call or 3G / 4G connectivity. In the best case, the display of a tablet is between three and five greater than an phablet, a difference which makes exclusive those devices. So, a few keepers of an Galaxy Note, for example, have also a tablet.

How many will be replaced? Its still unclear how many users of obsolete tablets will opt to buy new tablets? There have not enough time since 2010 to see if a strong substitution trend occurs, as happened in the past with PCs and smartphones, or users will pass page with this device. 
There are three reasons for concern. The first, the small intensive use of such devices, people use these gadgets an average of two hours a day, usually in the hours between the end of the working day until dinner time. Thus, wear down is much less pronounced than PCs and smartphones. Same happen with its battery, which with more capacity undergoes less charge cycles and as a consequence have a longer service life. Finally, the fact that the requirements for surfing the net are so low that users hardly will take computing capability as an important  matter for replacing your tablet.
WHAT FUTURE hae the TABLETS?
Some analysts are betting for super vitaminated models able to compete in power and features with conventional PCs. We are talking about a 64-bit system with 2 or 3 GB ROM and 64 GB or 128 GB internal memories and a physical keyboard. All this, embedded in an ARM structure due to the energy needs. In this line is drawn the Google Chrome books as portable devices that meet the requirements, failing in only one basic issue: the operating system. 
Anyway, it is unlikely that current tablets survive. Tablets needs to be integrated into a productivity suitable system.  Makes the leap from desire to necessity. Or not, and perhaps device integration is a story and we will live with a device dedicated to a short number of specific tasks. What do you think?



Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s suppliers are preparing to manufacture the company’s largest-ever iPad, with production scheduled to commence by the first quarter of next year, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The new iPad will have a screen measuring 12.9 inches diagonally, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public.
 Apple currently produces iPads with 9.7-inch and 7.9-inch displays. The Cupertino, California-based company has been working with suppliers for at least a year to develop a new range of larger touch-screen devices, said the people.

Trudy Muller, a spokeswoman for Apple, declined to comment.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is working to shake up the iPad line. Sales of the tablets, which are Apple’s second-biggest product by revenue after the iPhone, have declined for two straight quarters amid a lack of new models and as consumers have instead gravitated to smartphones with bigger screens. Apple’s suppliers recently started manufacturing an updated 9.7-inch-screen iPad, and were also set to enter production of a new version of the iPad mini, people familiar with the plans have said, with the devices set to be available later this year in time for the holiday season.

Apple is also increasing the screen size of the iPhone, people with knowledge of the plans have said. The company is holding an event on Sept. 9 to debut new bigger-display iPhones, the people have said. Those smartphones went into mass production in July, Bloomberg News reported in June. The iPhones will come in two new models: one with a 4.7-inch screen and another with a 5.5-inch screen, the people have said.

Tablet Growth

Apple is working on a bigger-screen iPad even as much of the growth in tablets has recently come from low-end smaller-screen models. That helped Google Inc.’s Android mobile operating system become the top tablet operating system last year, with 62 percent of the market, according to researcher Gartner Inc. IPads that use Apple’s iOS mobile software had a 36 percent market share at the end of 2013, down from 53 percent a year earlier, according to the researcher.

Potential customers for larger-screen iPads are businesses, where the device could take on more tasks of a traditional laptop computer. In July, Apple unveiled a partnership with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), and Cook said part of the pact’s rationale was to sell to corporations so they could “be a catalyst for future iPad growth.”
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Jitesh Ubrani, an analyst at researcher IDC, said while tablet sales growth has slowed, he projects businesses, schools and governments will become bigger buyers of the devices. Those groups accounted for 16 percent of tablet sales in the second quarter this year, up from 13 percent a year earlier, he estimated.

“We’re expecting larger tablets to do better” in the enterprise market, Ubrani said in an interview.

How Gadgets Ruin Relationships and Corrupt Emotions

  • BY SUE JOHNSON  
  •    
  • 9:30 AM  |  
  •  
  • PERMALINK

Image: Andrew Rich/Getty
Image: Andrew Rich/Getty
The average teen sends more than 3,000 text messages a month (and that was a few years ago). But here’s the thing: Ten percent of people under the age of 25 don’t see anything wrong with texting during sex.
Even as technology helps us understand how relational we truly are, the basic currency of social connection — face-to-face contact and simple conversation — is becoming marginalized. Pamela Eyring, director of the Protocol School of Washington (which teaches social manners to corporate and government clients) has identified four stages — confusion, discomfort, irritation, and, finally, outrage — of what she terms “BlackBerry abandonment”: the feeling a person suffers when trying to connect with devotees of such electronic gadgets. Since personal and business relationships rely on making others feel valued, devices put these relationships at risk, so Eyring calls an obsession with iPhones “cell-fishness.”
But this is about more than an issue of gadget etiquette or a lack of consideration for others. It’s about connection. While our electronic gadgetry is keeping us more connected in some ways, it is a shallow connection — not the deep emotional engagement needed for any kind of meaningful relationship. Why? Because texting and e-mails are set up for volume, velocity, and multitasking — that is, the splitting of attention.
Our gadgets therefore create an illusion of connection. The danger, though, is that they also set up a new way of relating in which we are continually in touch — but emotionally detached.
Sue Johnson
Dr. Sue Johnson is a clinical psychologist and Distinguished Research Professor at Alliant International University in San Diego, CA, as well as Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Ottawa, Canada. The founding director of the International Center for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (a model she developed), Dr. Johnson has also received numerous honors for her work — including the Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Couple and Family Therapy Award from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and the Research in Family Therapy Award from the American Family Therapy Academy.
The one thing that our gadgets cannot do — despite the vision presented by movies like Her — is feel emotion; they offer a counterfeit performance that imitates connection. Cleverly designed substitutions like robotic pet hamsters, robot puppies for the elderly, and therapeutic seals for depression “put the real on the run” (to use MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s phrase). Reducing relationships to simple bytes that then become the accepted norm is “defining relationships down” (to borrow a phrase from the late Daniel Moynihan, noted sociologist and U.S. senator).
Because I listen to so many couples in therapy describing how they spend their time, I see how tapping on iPads and watching TV diminish our opportunities to engage with and care for another person. We become accustomed to the simplified, the superficial, the sensational; we turn to the endless stories of celebrity relationships and online dramas rather than engaging in our own. As political scientist Robert Putnam notes in Bowling Alone, “Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real world counterpart, internet contact gets ranty, dishonest, and weird.”
There is also a chicken-and-egg factor here. Isolation, I am arguing, is an effect of our obsession with technology — but growing social isolation also creates this obsession.
More than at any time in human history, we live alone: In 1950, only four million folks in the United States lived on their own; in 2012, more than 30 million did. That’s 28 percent of households (the same percentage as in Canada; in the UK, it’s 34 percent). As NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg observes about these skyrocketing statistics, “a remarkable social experiment” is occurring.
How does this shift fit into the “design” of the creature we call a human being?
Western society long held the view that we are essentially insular, selfish creatures who need rules and constraints to force us to be considerate of others. Today, we are drawing a diametrically opposed portrait: we humans are biologically driven to be associative, altruistic beings who are responsive to others’ needs. We should, it seems, be called Homo empathicus.
Empathy is the capacity to perceive and identify with another’s emotional state. The word, coined in the 20th century, derives from the Greek empatheia, meaning “affection” and “suffering.” But the concept was first developed by 19th-century German philosophers who gave it the name Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into.” How strong that capacity is in human beings is being proven in study after study.
Most fascinating, perhaps, is research showing that just imagining or thinking that another person is in pain — especially a loved one — makes us respond as if we are going through the exact same experience. Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues at the University of Zurich found that when a woman received a small electric shock to the back of her hand, the woman beside her, who received no shock, reacted as though she had received it, too: the same pain circuit was activated and the identical area of the brain lit up in both women. We literally hurt for others.
Roughly, the way empathy seems to happen is: you see me (or even, as in the experiment above, imagine me) experiencing a strong feeling, maybe pain or disgust; you mirror my response in your brain; you mimic me with your body (your face crinkles in the exact same way as mine does); you respond to me on an emotional level and move into empathetic concern for me; you help me.
As we imitate others in dimensions beyond the virtual, we also communicate and show them that we feel for them. This creates instant connection.
Psychologists point out that the cooperation on which society depends is a learned skill that until recently almost everyone acquired. Today, however, fewer and fewer people have the ability to collaborate; instead they withdraw from group tasks and social life. Real connection with others is being crowded out by virtual kinship.
lovesense
When they become lost and desperate, the distressed couples that come to me for therapy pick up solutions that seem to offer immediate comfort but further distort our ability to really connect with another person. As MIT’s Sherry Turkle suggested, our tools over the last 15 years have begun to shape us and our connection with others, so that we now “expect more from technology and less from each other.” Substitute pseudo-attachments — even those with people online — can be seductive, but in the end they take us farther and farther away from the real thing: a loving, felt sense of connection that requires moments of full, absorbing attention and a tuning in to the real-life nuances of emotion.
In that sense, technology reflects a profound lack of awareness about our need for intimate emotional connection. In a good love relationship, if we can turn off the screen, we can learn to say what really matters to us in ways that build connection.
In Oregon State University psychologist Frank Bernieri’s study of young couples teaching each other made-up words, pairs who showed the greatest motor synchrony — that is, those who mimicked each other most closely — also had the strongest emotional rapport with each other. In my own team’s studies of forgiveness, nearly every injured partner told his or her lover some version of, “I can’t forgive you until I see that you feel my pain. Until I know that my pain hurts you, too.”
Adapted and excerpted from the book Love Sense by Dr. Sue Johnson. Copyright 2013 by Sue Johnson. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.






22 AGOSTO, 2014

2

¿Estás conmigo o con el móvil?

POR JOSE MENDIOLA
L
legamos al restaurante de moda. No había resultado fácil reservar mesa, pero aquel día era especial y mereció la pena esforzarse por conseguir un hueco para una velada en la intimidad. Luz tenue y la música de un piano acariciado con mimo en alguna esquina del local presagiaban un cara a cara muy cercano y lleno de afecto.

Pero mientras ojeábamos los manjares de la carta, elevamos la mirada para observar con horror una estampa tristemente cada vez más frecuente: nuestra media naranja tenía el rostro iluminado, pero no por la pasión del momento sino por la pantalla de su móvil.
De hecho, pronto nos dimos cuenta de que compartimos la velada con un terminal electrónico que cada vez ocupa más espacio en nuestras vidas. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter… cualquier excusa es buena para desviar la atención del aburrido mundo que nos rodea para zambullirnos en la magia de cartón piedra de un mundo irreal, con amigos a los que realmente no conocemos y a los que, sin embargo, dedicamos más tiempo que a los que son amigos de carne y hueso desde hace años.
A uno se le cae el alma a los pies al contemplar con cada vez mayor frecuencia esta escena en bares y restaurantes. Parejas que apenas se miran, dejando escapar valiosos momentos que no volverán jamás. ¿Exagerado? No tanto. En varios países asiáticos el asunto ha dejado de ser un fenómeno para pasar a convertirse en una epidemia que ha obligado a las autoridades a tomar cartas en el asunto, y no titubean al emplear el término «adicción».
Pero por desgracia no es un fenómeno que afecta en exclusiva a una parte del globo, sino que su influencia es general y cada vez toca a más ciudadanos. En este sentido, la doctora Kimberly Young dirige un centro ubicado en Pensilvania que atiende a pacientes diagnosticados con adicción a internet, y es la propia Young quien va más allá advirtiendo que los enganchados a esta nueva droga no se limitan a los smartphones, sino que buscan «pantallas» en general para saciar su pulsión.
Y como buena muestra de la magnitud de esta plaga, los expertos ponen como ejemplo lo sucedido en un tren en San Francisco: el vagón fue asaltado por un individuo armado que demandó el dinero a los presentes, ¿y qué sucedió? Nadie le hizo caso porque estaba todo el mundo enfrascado en el brillo de sus móviles y tabletas. El asunto no fue a mayores, pero en realidad podría haber acabado en un auténtico baño de sangre por la inconsciencia provocada por esta plaga.
Como suele suceder en estos casos, los más vulnerables son los más jóvenes. Niños de muy corta edad que han crecido viendo cómo sus padres se pasan el día mirando absortos a las pantallas de sus móviles mientras se perdían una sonrisa suya. A diferencia de los adultos, los niños no saben distinguir lo que es normal de lo que no en el uso de un dispositivo electrónico, y por ello los expertos sugieren que se creen horas «libres de pantallas» en los hogares para así poder comentar cara a cara y mirando a los ojos cómo ha ido el día.
shutterstock_132008354
¿Funciona como una droga la adicción a las pantallas? Atentos al dato porque los expertos advierten que sí: estar delante de la pantalla genera una ansiedad y distracción que libera dopamina en el usuario, que vuelve a conectarse compulsivamente en busca de su dosis. «Funciona igual que cualquier otra droga en la que la recompensa es una dosis de dopamina»,explica la psicóloga Jocely Brewer.
Uno puede pensar que este fenómeno afecta a cuatro locos que se pasan el día en el metro y del que somos inmunes, pero ¿qué nos sucede cuando nos vamos un fin de semana de escapada a una casa rural en la que no hay cobertura? Dos cosas sucesivas: pánico inicial, síndrome de aislamiento y lo que podríamos definir como ‘mono’ en una primera instancia, para luego descubrir de repente la mirada de nuestro acompañante, la gracia de sus comentarios y el verdadero valor de su compañía.
¿El consejo? Convertir nuestra casa en un refugio de montaña todos los días a partir de cierta hora. Ni móvil, ni tablet, ni tele.

agosto 27, 2014

Google bolsters iOS productivity suite with Slides, updates to Docs and Sheets

Google on Monday released presentation app Slides alongside updates to existing iOS apps Docs and Sheets, offering a free Web-connected alternative to similar productivity suites from Microsoft and Apple.

Google Slides joins word processor Google Docs and spreadsheet solution Google Sheets to complete the usual trifecta of productivity apps seen in suites like Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork.

As noted by Google, Slides allows users to create, edit and collaborate on presentations directly from any compatible iOS device. In addition to on-device content creation, the free app connects to Google's cloud for Web-based editing and sharing across multiple platforms.

Like Google Docs and Google SheetsSlides supports real-time collaboration and persistent document saving. An offline work mode also comes built-in, while Microsoft PowerPoint files can be opened, edited and saved. Finished projects can be presented directly from an iOS device, much like Apple's Keynote.

In addition to Slides, Google rolled out updates to Docs and Sheets, both expanding support for files originating from Microsoft's Office suite of apps. The latest version of Docs lets users open, edit, and save Microsoft Word files, while Sheets can now do the same with Microsoft Excel files. Users of Google's spreadsheet creation app can also view charts, insert formulas and use find/replace tools.

Google Slides is a free 61.5MB download from the iOS App Store. Google Docs and Google Sheetsare also free and come in at 50.4MB and 82.3MB, respectively.