Important Note
Tech Narratives was a subscription website, which offered expert commentary on the day's top tech news from Jan Dawson, along with various other features, for $10/month. As of Monday October 16, 2017, it will no longer be updated. An archive of past content will remain available for the time being. I've written more about this change in the post immediately below, and also here.
Moto G5 + Moto G5 Plus hands-on: A little less convention, a little more action – Android Central (Feb 27, 2017)
Lenovo’s Moto G range is one of its most popular, providing a pretty nice Android experience at fairly competitive prices, and at MWC it got some nice upgrades. This part of Lenovo’s portfolio has performed much better than the rest at a time when its smartphone sales overall and in China in particular have been collapsing. Those sales have been strong in markets like Latin America, where low-cost Android is a good fit. This is yet another example of the various strategies Android OEMs will have to pursue to find workable market niches – Sony is going up market, Samsung and Huawei rely on large scale in very different segments, and Lenovo/Motorola is finding some success in this low-mid range although not elsewhere.
via Android Central
Sony Launches Xperia XZ Premium and Xperia XZs Phones For US Market – AnandTech (Feb 27, 2017)
Sony’s focus on premium continues with these new phones announced at MWC, one of which has been priced at $699, above the base price for other premium phones in the US, with the other not yet priced but featuring a higher end processor and therefore likely to go for even more. These devices also seem to continue the Sony design language of thin, relatively squared-off devices with lots of glass, which is still somewhat distinctive relative to other Android devices, but can make them seem fragile and also often makes them a little uncomfortable to hold. It looks like there’s some clever stuff with the camera, which will continually take shots when you open the camera app so that there’s literally zero lag when you press the shutter button. The big problem here is that what’s ostensibly the flagship, the XZ Premium, won’t launch for months, so any buzz generated now will die down entirely or be channeled into the less premium device instead. It’s also unclear from the reporting which US carriers will actually sell the phone, which is critical because Sony has had a tough time getting US carrier support for years now.
via AnandTech (more on Techmeme)
Popularity of Sony’s PlayStation VR Surprises Even the Company – The New York Times (Feb 27, 2017)
This is a rare non-MWC announcement this morning, but is interesting in context of all the mobile-centric news coming out this week. Sony has sold just under a million Playstation VR headsets since its launch – 915k as of a week ago – which is really very impressive given the installed base of Playstation consoles is vastly smaller than the base of smartphones in use. It also means this will be a useful revenue stream for Sony – at $400 a pop, that’s $360 million or so so far, which is probably as much or more than Samsung has made from selling / bundling its Gear VR headsets. I continue to believe that the next couple of years in VR will be characterized by a bifurcation between relatively small numbers of sales of high-end rigs from Oculus, Sony, HTC, and the like on the one hand, and larger unit sales (at much lower prices) of mobile headsets. Over time, a third category of standalone units will emerge and take some meaningful share, but for now it’s about these two extremes.
via New York Times
Samsung’s new Gear VR controller lets you point, drag and shoot in VR – Wearable.com (Feb 27, 2017)
Samsung’s Gear VR headset has been by far the top-selling VR device so far, with over 5 million units “sold” (although many were likely given away or bundled at a very low price with smartphones) versus under a million so far for Playstation VR. Mobile VR is the mass market segment, and it’s always going to beat the hardcore VR rigs on volume, but the performance is often sub-par, and the user interface on the Gear VR has been pretty abysmal. The Daydream VR headset Google debuted late last year was much better in this regard, with a nice little hand-held controller which was mostly much easier to use, though it can be a little glitchy at times. It looks like Samsung now has a much more usable controller too, which should be a big help in making its VR experiences more enjoyable. The new controller ships with a new version of the Gear VR headset, and may or may not be available as an accessory for existing owners (price and date are also still unavailable).
via Wearable.com (more on Techmeme)
Google’s digital assistant comes to new Android phones – Reuters (Feb 27, 2017)
This, to my mind, is one of the bigger announcements coming out of MWC – that Google will finally allow other smartphone makers to use the Google Assistant, after several months of keeping it exclusive to its own Pixel smartphone. I described that decision at the time as representing a big strategic shift for Google, and probably a mistake, and the evidence since has borne that out. The Pixel has sold in small numbers, Amazon’s Alexa has extended its lead considerably as the voice platform of choice for hardware makers, and even at MWC itself Android vendors announced Alexa integration despite Google’s shift here. The good news is that it’s only been a few months, but the bad news is that this change in policy will come too late to hit the new flagships debuting at MWC, including the new ones from both Samsung and LG. It will likely become available later, but shipping as an integrated part of these new smartphones would have been much better. I’m betting that Google will continue to pay for this strategic misstep for some time to come – even once it’s available, OEMs will want to offer more differentiation than the Google Assistant allows them, which will continue to make Alexa an appealing alternative.
via Reuters (more on Techmeme)
The LG G6 is sleek, solid, and surprisingly sensible – The Verge (Feb 27, 2017)
After last year’s largely unsuccessful focus on modularity, it looks like LG has gone back the other way, with a really solid, slab-like phone that trades removable items for dust and water resistance. We’ve seen phone makers go for durability as a selling point before, sometimes in a core model and sometimes in a rugged variant (Samsung favors the latter), and it’s rarely enough to act as a big differentiator, especially in a premium phone. But it looks like LG is also majoring on the combination of a really big, high-res screen with small bezels and better one-handed use. It’s always interesting to watch the pendulum swing back and forth between masses of clever features and simplicity with the Android vendors, and we’re seeing that here. I’m betting this phone does better than the G5 last year, but LG continues to be in a tough spot in smartphones – it’s losing money every quarter, sales are falling, and it’s stuck in that unfortunate middle within the Android ecosystem where it’s neither at big scale in premium devices nor price competitive enough to do really well in the mid market. I don’t see this phone dramatically changing its fortunes.
via The Verge (more on Techmeme)
Huawei Watch 2 and Watch 2 Classic officially unveiled at MWC 2017 – AndroidAuthority (Feb 27, 2017)
These two watches are somewhat reminiscent of the LG smartwatches that debuted with Android Wear 2.0 a few weeks back – there are again two, with somewhat different form factors, but this time the feature set is more consistent across them, as is the price. That price, though, is fairly steep – in line with the low end of Apple’s Watch price range, which continues to be a tough place to be when your watches look very much like the smartwatches they are rather than nice pieces of smart jewelry. Huawei definitely has the scale to do some interesting things in watches if it chooses to, but I can’t see these new models selling in very large numbers at these prices.
via AndroidAuthority (more on Techmeme)
Nokia Making Big Move Into Digital Health, Relaunching Withings As Nokia This Summer – Forbes (Feb 27, 2017)
This is where things are going to get interesting – on the one hand, you now have HMD Global launching Nokia phones, and on the other you have the entirely separate company called Nokia launching its own consumer gadgets under its own brand. So there will be both smartphones and fitness devices in the market carrying the same brand, which have nothing to do with each other. It looks like Nokia is going to kill off the Withings brand it acquired and make a big push into health and fitness. As a non-consumer brand since its sale of the phone business to Microsoft, this is going to be an uphill battle for Nokia, and especially in a crowded and somewhat stagnant wearables market. Withings produced some interesting devices over the last several years, but it’s never had significant market share, and I’m not convinced Nokia will change that. Health (as opposed to pure fitness) is certainly one of the more promising aspects of this broader space, and it looks like Nokia is investing there, with a HIPAA-compliant Patient Care Platform among other elements. That may be its one opportunity to succeed where others have failed.
via Forbes
HMD Launches New Nokia Phones – Wired (Feb 27, 2017)
Quick explainer for those that haven’t followed the saga of Nokia over recent years: Microsoft bought Nokia’s Devices and Services business, including the smartphone and feature phone businesses, a few years back, along with exclusive use of the Nokia brand in these markets for several years. That exclusivity has now expired, and Microsoft last year sold the rump of the feature phone business to a new Finnish entity called HMD Global, which now has the rights to manufacture phones under the Nokia brand. The original owner of the Nokia brand and devices business, which now mostly makes telecoms network gear, has essentially nothing to do with these new phones. The MWC announcement actually covered three smartphones, the Nokia 3, 5, and 6, but almost all the attention has been on its resurrection of the extremely popular candy bar feature phone from 17 years ago, the Nokia 3110. It’s fascinating to see both the BlackBerry and Nokia brands get reboots at MWC from new companies – both were once key players in the global industry but have fallen enormously from those heights, and are probably past the point where a meaningful resurrection is possible, considerable nostalgia notwithstanding.
BlackBerry’s new keyboard phone is doomed to be a noble failure – The Verge (Feb 25, 2017)
I think this headline from the Verge captures my sentiments on this phone pretty well. I have covered BlackBerry as a company pretty closely in the past, and still do to some extent, and whenever I write about them or post charts on Twitter, the first response I almost always get is “I though they went out of business”. The reality is that BlackBerry has dropped so far out of the public consciousness in what were once their biggest markets that a phone like this at this point isn’t really going to get them anywhere. The moment for this phone was years ago, not today, and at this price ($549) it’s not an option for the markets where the BlackBerry brand still means something to consumers, like Indonesia. So many of even those who once insisted on a physical keyboard have now caved to the inevitability of the full touch screen, and the vast majority of those won’t go back now they’ve discovered apps, content stores, and everything else modern smartphones have to offer and BlackBerry devices have never really been able to. At least now the risk is mostly on TCL’s books rather than BlackBerry’s, and the reality is that the hardware business at BlackBerry is so small now (under $100 million in the November 2016 quarter) that this is almost all upside for the company – if TCL doesn’t sell any, that’s more or less a continuation of the tiny hardware revenue BlackBerry has been booking, and if it sells a few hundred thousand, that’s useful additional revenue. But this is very likely to be a tiny overall revenue opportunity for both companies, and I’m curious to see how long TCL sticks with the partnership.
via The Verge (more on Techmeme) (note the MWC2017 topic tag on this post will take you to all the posts on news from this year’s Mobile World Congress)
Uber’s Car Was Driving Itself When it Ran a Red Light in San Francisco – NYTimes (Feb 24, 2017)
During the very brief period when Uber’s self-driving cars were operating in San Francisco, one of them ran a red light. However, the company at the time engaged in some audacious spin and claimed the car was being driven by a human at the time and that the incident just highlighted the benefits of autonomy. Now, however, the Times is reporting that the car was supposed to be driving itself at that time and the human driver merely failed to intervene in a timely fashion. If validation were needed that the California DMV made the right decision when it stopped Uber from testing its cars without a license, here it is. But this is also yet another case of Uber acting like the rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to it, and outright lying when it gets caught. And that in turn makes it very hard to believe it when it claims it’s in compliance with rules, and it only has itself to blame. What a terrible few weeks for Uber, pretty much all of its own making.
via NYTimes
Apple, tech leaders will side with transgender youth in upcoming Supreme Court case – Axios (Feb 24, 2017)
This is a nice scoop for Ina Fried, who just moved from Recode to Axios. But more importantly, the news itself is a significant escalation of the comments several tech companies made this week about the Trump administration’s policy on transgender students and bathrooms in schools. This would now be the second time in as many months that several major tech companies find themselves on the opposite side of a high profile legal case from the new administration. What a massive turnaround from those first weeks after the election, when tech companies seemed afraid to say anything negative about the new US government.
via Axios
Lyft expands to 54 more U.S. cities in race with Uber – USA Today (Feb 24, 2017)
A few weeks back, I wrote about Lyft expanding into 40 new cities as part of a 100-city push for 2017. Here’s the second part of that push, with another 54 cities launching today. Given what’s been happening with Uber over the past week or so, the timing of this massive expansion couldn’t be better from Lyft’s perspective – it’s now primed to benefit from the #deleteUber movement in many more places, given that it’s the only meaningful alternative to Uber across most of the US. Again, as I wrote in that earlier comment, this means Lyft is likely investing heavily in those new markets, which will push it further into the red at a time when it looked like it might be making progress towards profitability, but if this expansion helps it close the gap with Uber, then it’s almost certainly worth it.
via USA Today
Android Messages will be the new default texting app Google wants you to use – The Verge (Feb 24, 2017)
There are two separate stories here – firstly, a reminder that Google has two separate messaging apps on Android, and it’s still actively pushing both; and secondly, that Google is doubling down on its commitment to the RCS standard and working with carriers and device makers to spread its use on Android. The former is a long-standing story: Google has always had several different apps for the same use case on its devices, a problem that only gets worse when OEMs and carriers add their own. To some extent, though, this standardization around RCS should help with the OEM / carrier side of that, by consolidating the SMS apps into a single standard Android app. But this is also about the richer features enabled by RCS, which is a telecoms-driven standard for richer messaging which is always at least several years behind the feature set offered by third party messaging apps at any given point in time. This is Google’s effort to create an equivalent to iMessage, but one which is far more open and inclusive than iMessage itself is, for better or worse. Google doesn’t control the standard, which is basic in its functionality, and that makes it a tough differentiator for Android, but it may be the best Google can do in this space.
via The Verge
Apple and Google condemn Trump’s decision to revoke transgender bathroom guidelines – Recode (Feb 23, 2017)
This issue feels like it’s attracting a lot less attention than the immigration executive orders from a few weeks back, but that doesn’t mean that tech companies aren’t weighing in all the same. This article has comments from Apple, Google, and Salesforce opposing the administration’s actions, but John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed has been tweeting commentary from a number of other companies today including Facebook, IBM, and Dell. Unlike the immigration bill, where at least part of the rationale for opposing the administration was business related, this argument is being made entirely in moral terms, echoing some of the opposition to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” last year. That’s interesting territory for big public companies to wade into – something we discussed on the Beyond Devices Podcast two weeks ago.
via Recode
Waymo Sues Uber over Stealing of Confidential Information (Feb 23, 2017)
Alphabet autonomous driving subsidiary Waymo is suing Uber and its Otto subsidiary over alleged stealing of confidential information by Anthony Levandowski, who was one of the early executives at Waymo and subsequently left abruptly in early 2016 and immediately unveiled a self-driving truck company, Otto. That company, in turn, was acquired just a few months later by Uber. Waymo has done some fairly detailed investigate work that’s outlined in the complaint, and discovered that six weeks before Levandowski’s resignation, he downloaded lots of files from Waymo’s servers, and it argues that these in turn informed Otto’s (now Uber’s) LiDAR designs. As this blog post from Waymo says, fierce competition in autonomous driving technology is a good thing – it’s pushing the market forward rapidly and leading to some great innovations that should benefit consumers. But there are obviously lines companies shouldn’t cross as they compete, and this would be one of those, if it’s proven to be true. This is the second lawsuit in recent weeks involving employees moving between autonomous driving companies – the first involved Tesla and a startup. In both cases, the allegation is in part about stealing proprietary information. Given that Uber is already dealing with the fallout from a sexual harassment and discrimination blowup in the past week and still reeling from the #deleteUber campaign, this is terrible timing, but may also be a sign that the company’s aggressive stance on competition is hurting it in more ways than one.
via Waymo (full complaint here)
Studios, Theater Chains Far Apart on Early Home Movie Release Deal – Variety (Feb 23, 2017)
This effort has been underway for some time, but mostly among smaller players at the periphery, not the big studios. But it now appears that major movie studios are becoming more open to the idea of at-home rentals within weeks of theatrical openings for at least some of their movies. The thinking is apparently that the studios have to give consumers what they want or they’ll find it illegally, though I’m not sure that $50 at-home rentals two and a half weeks after opening is exactly “what consumers want”. Unless you have a large group, that’s going to be significantly more than you’re paying for movie tickets, and you’ll still have to wait 17 days. Of course, theater owners make far higher margins on concessions than they do on showing movies, and that revenue goes away entirely under this scenario, so the studios are having to promise to compensate cinema chains for any lost revenue, which is partly why the cost is so high. Lots of evidence here that, though the industry understands the need for change, it’s still resistant to really giving people what they want, largely because the existing value chain is so entrenched, which is very similar to the dynamic in the closely related TV industry.
via Variety
Cellebrite director says firm now doing ‘lawful’ extraction of data through iPhone 6 – AppleInsider (Feb 23, 2017)
This is the same firm that was recently hacked, supposedly exposing some of the tools it uses to crack iPhones, and now it’s boasting that it can crack iPhone 6 models in addition to the earlier models it has long been able to crack. I’ve still never seen any kind of official commentary on the hack of Cellebrite itself, but if that really did happen the fact that the company is getting ever better at hacking iPhones while leaving itself open to hacking should be worrying to lots of people. And if US law enforcement is still regularly paying Cellebrite to do this work without ensuring that it is able to keep the hacks secure, then it shares part of the blame by funding this work which ultimately puts regular users at risk.
via AppleInsider
Video Pros Moving From Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs – Daring Fireball (Feb 23, 2017)
I’m linking to this piece from John Gruber rather than the source because he highlights the key point here, which is that for some creatives with high-end computing needs, the current Mac lineup isn’t cutting it anymore, and they’re switching to Windows. When the new MacBook Pros came out late last year, there was lots of complaining from the developer and creative communities about the computers being underpowered, with no recent updates to the Mac Pro either. I’ve written about this, and think there are two separate things going on: firstly, Apple’s base is about so much more than power users at this point, and it has to focus on the majority not the tiny minority; and secondly, it’s very hard to know how representative these one-off anecdotes are of the broader picture. Are lots of creatives really abandoning the Mac, or is it just a handful who are getting lots of attention because they reinforce a narrative? I wish someone would do some kind of representative survey here – I only have my own anecdotal evidence to go on, which is that most video creatives are sticking with Mac for now, but again it’s not representative.
via Daring Fireball
HTC’s Viveport VR Subscription Service Opens Doors to Developers – Variety (Feb 23, 2017)
HTC announced this subscription VR service for its Vive headset at CES, but it’s now opening it up to developers. The fact that only 14,000 consumers have signed up to be notified when it launches is a useful reminder of just how small the VR audience on any of the high-cost platforms is today. And I would guess that many users will still end up shelling out lots of money on a per-game basis because the best premium content won’t be part of the subscription, at least in the long run. But a subscription model for VR makes a ton of sense for non-gaming content as more of that starts to show up, although arguably it’s a better fit for mobile VR experiences which are more attractive to non-gamers rather than the big-ticket PC- and console-based rigs.
via Variety