Thorsten Heins: BlackBerry won’t sell sub-$50 phones
Squint and you’ll find a few neat parallels between BlackBerry and Nokia. Both are fallen giants which are staking their livelihoods on a nascent OS, while the former is a Canadian run by a European, and vice-versa. The one point where the pair’s philosophies differ, however, is on the low-end market. While Nokia strove to embrace low-end phones like the Asha and the 105. Thorsten Heins has said he has no interest in producing budget phones for the developing world. At a question and answer session at the company’s Waterloo HQ, the CEO was quoted as saying “You will not see us getting into the 50-, 60-buck phone segment. This is not BlackBerry.” The move might alienate those who thought the Z10′s elevated price in places like India was a bit excessive — but at least Stephen Elop’s got something for every wallet size.
Filed under: Mobile, Blackberry
Source: Bloomberg
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Kodak to sell the film business that made it so famous
Kodak is selling off its renowned film arm in order to revive its moribund fortunes. It’ll join sales of the company’s patent portfolio, online gallery, commercial scanning, photo kiosk and theme park businesses so it can concentrate on a not-yet successful printer enterprise. It needs to raise more than $660 million to pay back creditors before it can emerge from Chapter 11, which it aims to do early next year — but not in any form that we’re likely to recognize.
[Image Credit: MercerFilm]
Filed under: Digital Cameras
Kodak to sell the film business that made it so famous originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Aug 2012 05:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple pulls out of EPEAT green registration, may not be able to sell computers to federal agencies
Apple has withdrawn all its laptop and desktop computers from the EPEAT environmental rating system, including older MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models. According to iFixit, who recently tore down a MacBook Pro and its retina screen, that’s likely related to a design direction favoring smaller, lighter notebooks and longer battery life. Doing so required them to glue the cells to the aluminum shell, making it impossible to recycle the case and other parts — iFixit couldn’t pull the batteries out without spilling the (highly toxic) battery guts all over. Cupertino’s decision means that many federal agencies might not be able to buy those products, since 95 percent of its electronics purchasing must conform to the EPEAT standard. On top of that, many educational institutions that require the certification would also need to opt out of Mac purchases, as well as large corporations like HSBC and Ford. Currently, iPhones and iPads are exempt from that certification, but considering recent ads from Apple specifically touting its conformance to EPEAT, the company might have some ‘splaining to do.
[Image credit: iFixit]
Apple pulls out of EPEAT green registration, may not be able to sell computers to federal agencies originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Jul 2012 02:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Leave a commentGoogle plans to sell off stake in Clearwire at a steep loss
It was just under four years ago that Sprint and Clearwire brought together an impressive group of companies as part of a multi-billion dollar partnership to back the WiMAX service provider, but it’s safe to say that things haven’t quite worked out as planned in the years since. While Clearwire is of course still up and running, its WiMAX-based network has faced an uphill battle against other carriers’ LTE-based networks, which even Sprint and Clearwire itself have been switching to. Now one of those partners, Google, has decided to offload its stake in Clearwire at a steep loss. According to an SEC filing, Google will be selling off its shares at a price of $1.60 each, or just over $47 million in all — that’s compared to the $500 million it spent to invest in the company. Not surprisingly, that has caused Clearwire’s shared to take a tumble. As of this writing, shares in the Washington-based company were down almost six percent.
Google plans to sell off stake in Clearwire at a steep loss originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sony eyes electric car future, wants to soon sell you Li-ion batteries
Sony must be smelling dolla dolla bills in the EV-charged streets because the company just announced its intentions to fab lithium-ion batteries for the cars mid-decade. The statement, made from its plant in Motomiya, hinges on a future market flush with consumer demand for the earth-friendly autos, and could see the construction of several dedicated factories. Given the Japanese company’s recent history eating bits of competitor dust (hello Wii and iPod), we understand its forward-facing desire to become king of this Li-ion hill. But the mega-electronics maker isn’t placing all of its batteries in one fuel-source just yet — it’s “also [considering] developing batteries for gasoline-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids” — should they win the green energy popularity contest. While we applaud the company for encouraging adoption of the environmentally-friendlier tech, we’d much rather see them make batteries for this bad boy from tomorrowland.
Sony eyes electric car future, wants to soon sell you Li-ion batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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