Cheap IPhone Coming soon

The manufacturer of the still-popular iPhone 4S has said that it plans to add 40,000 workers, boosting rumors that Apple plans to release an entry-level iPhone soon.

Taiwan-based Pegatron, which has manufacturing plants in Taiwan, mainland China, Mexico, and the Czech Republic, told Reuters that it plans to increase its Chinese workforce by 40 per cent in the second half of this year. Seeing as how Pegatron employs about 100,000 in China, the math is rather straightforward.


Rumors of a low(er)-cost iPhone targeted at emerging markets such as China and India have been simmering for some time now, and such a massive increase in manufacturing capability by one of Apple's most prominent handset assemblers stirs the pot of speculation even more energetically.

In addition, Pegatron CFO Charles Lin told Reuters that his company would book 60 per cent of its annual revenue in the second half of the year – although, of course, he could not be drawn out on whether that increase would be due to the manufacture of a mid-market Apple smartphone.

Lin apparently wants to keep his job.

He did, however, note that PC shipments are expected to increase during that period due to Intel's introduction of its next-generation "Haswell" processors. But will that ramp-up require 40,000 new workers? Unlikely.

More evidence of the possibility of the imminent release of a budget iPhone comes from Pegatron president and CEO Jason Cheng, who told an investors confab that revenues from communication products would rise to 40 per cent of company revenues in the second half of the year, up from 24 per cent during the most recent quarter.

Various sources have said that early production runs of the plastic-backed, entry-level iPhone are to begin this month, with full-scale production set to ramp up in June. That would be just about the right time for Apple to announce the li'l fellow – and possibly a flagship iPhone 5S and iOS 7 – at its Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled to be held in San Francisco on June 10-14. ®
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Pegatron also manufactures Apple's iPad mini. In response to a Bloomberg reportthat said he had told them that iPad mini orders were drooping, Cheng toldCNNMoney that his remarks had been misinterpreted.

Referring to his conversation with Bloomberg reporter Tim Culpan, Cheng said, "I did not say anything associated with any specific products," and that his company's recent consumer-electronics revenue decline had been the result of slackening sales, as Culpan correctly quoted, in "Not just tablets, also e-books and games consoles – almost every item is moving in a negative direction."

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Voice Recognition That Decodes Emotions: Beyond Verbal Gets A $2.8M for developing

With the introduction of Siri on the iPhone 4S in 2011, voice recognition, not exactly a new innovation, suddenly took center stage with consumers. But before that, and especially since then, there has been a rush of developments to meet the demand for ever better, more responsive technology across smartphones, tablets, computers, phone services and whatever else will come next. Beyond Verbal, a startup based out of Israel, claims that it has developed a way to take computer-based voice recognition one step further, by creating software that is able to detect not just the words, but the emotional nuances of a voice to decipher how a person speaking is feeling. Today, it’s announcing its first round of funding, $2.8 million led by the newly-launched Genesis Angels, to roll out its patented technology commercially.

As part of the investment, Kenges Rakishev, investor and co-founder of Genesis Angels, is joining the board.

Beyond Verbal offers its technology as a API-style cloud-based licensed service that can be integrated into bigger projects: the sky’s the limit for what these services might be, but you can imagine emotion detection used in all kinds of scenarios, from customer services to games, dating services (maybe to help people figure out if someone is really interested in them) and, yes, personal assistants like Siri.

Interestingly, while we tend to think of voice recognition as a customer-focused service, one potential application can actually be to help customer services representatives improve their own performance. “We can even tell if an agent is losing his temper. We can tell if you are losing your ‘sales perfect’ intonation,” said CEO Yuval Mor in an interview. Indeed, the premise of Beyond Verbal’s service is that a lot of the voice recognition services on the market today only give part of the story:
“It’s not just what people say but how they say it,” he says.

Beyond Verbal also provides analytics and diagnostics that helps customers track different emotions picked up through their applications. Beyond Verbal has yet to announce any customers, although the first is likely to come in the next few weeks, according to CEO Yuval Mor.

While the idea of voice recognition brings to mind companies like Nuance and True Knowledge (whose Evi we reported last month appears to have been acquired quietly by Amazon), which are able to parse natural language into actionable commands on a handset, Beyond Verbal is also touching on another trend in this area: the idea that these software-based services will become ever more human-like over time.

This is something also being developed by Affectiva, a startup spun out of the MIT Media Lab that takes facial recognition one step further by being able to detect emotions.

In the case of Beyond Verbal, Mor says that the system has been created with algorithms that can detect changes in vocal range that indicate things like anger, or anxiety, or happiness, or satisfaction, and cover nuances in mood, attitude, and decision-making characteristics. “To understand these three things is to understand emotions,” is how Mor puts it.

Given that many voice recognition systems — from Google Glass to IVR-based customer services — don’t actually work particularly well, I’m guessing that dissatisfaction may be one of the more highly calibrated of the emotions that Beyond Verbal can track.

Beyond Verbal, of course, is not the first to claim that it is able to read emotions in a voice recognition service. But it claims that it’s providing something different from what is on the market today. Nice, for example, also says that it can track emotions, but it uses speech analytics and word choice and volume to gauge levels of emotion. But without including intonation, Tor says such a solution is “very limited.”

Beyond Verbal is the first funding announcement to come out of the $100 million Genesis Angels fund, which was launched specifically to focus on early-stage investments in artificial intelligence and robotics.

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500,000 iPhones sold in first month

T-Mobile sold 500,000 iPhones since officially adding the Apple smartphone to its lineup in early April, the company said in a Wednesday earnings report.

Revenue for the first quarter landed at $4.68 billion, down 7 percent year over year. Adjusted earnings were $1.2 billion, up 12.4 percent from the fourth quarter, but down 7.5 percent from last year.

"Our first quarter operating metrics and financial results are showing positive impact from the changes we began making in the fourth quarter," T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a statement. "We ended the quarter with strong operational momentum, which is continuing into the second quarter, driven by the successful launch of our Un-carrier 'Simple Choice' service plan and the introduction of the iPhone into our device line-up."

T-Mobile now has 34 million customers, adding 579,000 over the quarter. Its churn rate - or the number of customers it lost - was at 1.9 percent, which T-Mobile said was its lowest since the second quarter of 2008.

T-Mobile made a number of changes over the quarter in order to attract and retain those customers. Chief among them was its switch to the "un-carrier" approach, which saw T-Mobile ditch monthly contracts. It also added the iPhone to its smartphone lineup, andlaunched its 4G LTE network.

T-Mobile also announced last week that its merger with MetroPCS was finally complete. T-Mobile and MetroPCS will continue operating as separate brands, though they will migrate to a common network infrastructure and similar support functions.

"Things only get more exciting from here, having brought T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS together to create the wireless industry's value leader and premier challenger," Legere said.

How does T-Mobile's new 4G LTE network stack up? We'll have more on PCMag's Fastest Mobile Networks 2013. Drivers are on the road across the country right now testing the top four wireless carriers; keep up with their travels via @PCMPhones. Also, see T-Mobile Cuts the Bulls**t, But Can it Win Customers?

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