Month: November 2021

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Counterpoint Research has a new report detailing the smartwatch market, and Wear OS is a huge winner. Just three months ago, Google and Samsung teamed up to resurrect Wear OS, with the new Wear OS 3.0 debuting on the Galaxy Watch 4. Counterpoint's latest data has the partnership down as a resounding success, with Wear OS market share rocketing from 4 percent in Q2 2022 to 17 percent in Q3 2022.

Google and Samsung's team-up was a complete reboot of both companies' smartwatch strategies. Google was floundering at the bottom of the sales charts, having seemingly lost interest in Wear OS for years. The last major OS release was Wear OS 2.0 in 2018, and that had been stagnating on the market for years. The major Wear OS tech partners from the early days, like Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorola, had left the platform, with only fashion brands like Fossil hanging around to make watches. Qualcomm was the main SoC provider, and while Apple was revolutionizing the power you can get from a smartwatch SoC, Qualcomm wasn't really putting in a full effort and strangled the Wear OS market for years with sub-par chips.

Samsung left Google's smartwatch ecosystem after the initial release and struck out on its own with Tizen OS. Tizen is a Linux-based OS made by Samsung, built out of the ashes of other failed mobile Linux OSes, like Nokia's Maemo and MeeGo, Intel's Moblin, and Samsung's Bada and LiMo. The OS was described by one security researcher as "the worst code I've ever seen" and doesn't have a ton of third-party app support. Samsung's strength is in hardware, and unlike Qualcomm, Samsung's Exynos division has regularly been churning out flagship-class smartwatch SoCs using a modern transistor size and decent ARM CPU designs. Combining the two has meant pairing Google's OS, software, and app ecosystem with Samsung's hardware, marketing, and distribution prowess, a combination that built the Android phone juggernaut that exists today.

Enlarge / Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, as seen in a 2012 promotional photo. (credit: Flickr / bobbykotick)

Nintendo has become the last of the three major console makers to express concern to employees following the latest reports of widespread harassment and mismanagement at Activision Blizzard.

In an email to all Nintendo employees sent Friday and obtained by Fanbyte, Nintendo President Doug Bowser said the reports coming out regarding Activision Blizzard were "distressing and disturbing. They run counter to my values as well as Nintendo’s beliefs, values and policies."

Without getting into specifics, Bowser goes on to say that Nintendo management has been "in contact with Activision, [has] taken action and [is] assessing others.” And Bowser added that Nintendo is working with the industry's leading lobbying group, the ESA, to strengthen its anti-harassment language. “Every company in the industry must create an environment where everyone is respected and treated as equals, and where all understand the consequences of not doing so.”

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Microsoft has created versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 that run on ARM chips, but to date, the company has not been interested in selling Windows on ARM licenses to anyone other than PC builders. The ARM versions of Windows can run on things like the Raspberry Pi or in virtualization apps running on Apple Silicon Macs, but Microsoft doesn't officially support doing it, and the company has never elaborated as to why.

One possible explanation comes from a report on XDA Developers, which claims that an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm keeps Microsoft from making the ARM versions of Windows more generally available. According to "people familiar with it," that exclusivity deal is currently "holding back other chip vendors from competing in the space." The Qualcomm deal is also said to be ending "soon," though the report isn't more specific about how soon "soon" is.

This allegation comes a few weeks after Rick Tsai, CEO of ARM chipmaker MediaTek, said on a company earnings call that MediaTek "certainly intend[s]" to run Windows on its chips. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Rockchip, and others are all shipping ARM chips for Chromebooks, in addition to the chips they all provide for Android devices.

Enlarge / A health care worker prepares to administer Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines at an elementary school vaccination site for children ages 5 to 11. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Cases of COVID-19 are increasing in children, and they continue to account for an out-sized proportion of infections, according to the latest data compiled by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The fresh data comes at the start of a holiday week and a new surge in cases, worrying experts that the pandemic—and its impact on children—will only worsen as the country heads into the winter months. Travel during this week will likely rival pre-pandemic levels, according to estimates by AAA and the Transportation Security Administration. And many families are anxious to resume holiday traditions and packed family gatherings, in which unvaccinated children are at risk of getting and transmitting the virus.

In the week of November 11 to 18, nearly 142,000 children reported getting COVID-19. That's an increase of 32 percent from two weeks ago. Overall, cases of COVID-19 in the US have increased 27 percent in the past two weeks.

Enlarge / As usual, a whole lot of video games are on sale for Black Friday. (credit: Ars Technica)

Black Friday has come and gone, but many of its most notable deals are still going. We have a big roundup of the best deals we're seeing more generally, but here we've updated and relaunched our dedicated roundup of video game discounts, since a metric ton of them remain available.

Major retailers like Amazon, Target, Best Buy, and GameStop are still in the midst of their holiday sales, as are the digital storefronts for Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation. And while many of the steepest high-profile game discounts we're seeing are for consoles, PC gaming storefronts like Steam, Epic, GOG, and Humble are still running sweeping sales as well, bringing price drops on several indie games we like in particular.

We've pored over as many advertised offers as we can find from all of these promotions and listed the genuine discounts we like below, spotlighting a few particularly notable offers along the way.