Ng: Android dominance and China

A FEW years ago, Google had a run-in with China. They said China was trying to ask them to censor search results but instead of giving in, the Internet search company opted to leave the country. They are in another tussle now.

Although Google is not active in China anymore, it still has been enjoying great success in its Android operating system. Google’s Android is reportedly in over 70 percent of the smartphone market share worldwide for the 4th quarter of 2012, which puts them well ahead of Apple’s IOS at 21 percent.

According to market research company Informa, Android shipments in 2012 hit 461 million units. Out of these, at least 1/3 of total world shipments, or approximately over 150 million units, were sold in China. It is estimated that Android runs over 2/3 of all smartphones in China.

This is on the back of reports that this year, smartphones may even outsell ordinary feature cell phones.

This is obviously viewed with concern by China. In fact, a government ministry has reportedly issued a white paper that says they don’t want China to be ‘too dependent” on Android, noting that despite its openness, the core technology and the road map is strictly controlled by Google.

On another note, there is an interesting announcement from Seagate, the only other remaining major disk drive manufacturer than Western Digital.

They recently announced they will stop making 2.5-inch 7200 rpm mobile hard drives. Most standard desktop and notebook hard drives spin at the rate of either 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm. Of course the faster the spin, the faster the performance of the hard drive. Most servers have special hard drives that can spin up to 15,000 rpm.

However, the faster the hard drives spin, the more risks they encounter and the more energy they use up. What Seagate is planning is that instead of using 7200 rpm technology, they will instead use the older 5400 rpm technology but they will put a solid state technology memory cache.

SSD is solid state memory (much like memory used in tablets and cellphones) and what Seagate is saying is that it does not matter that you have a slower spin, but with a faster cache, the overall system will be faster. It is akin to the technology since adopted by Intel is that instead of using faster megahertz, they instead adopted dual core and multicore technology to speed up the overall performance of their processors.

(www.twitter.com/wilsonng)