How Blackberry Will Fix Its Black Eye

          The smartphone market and demand is absolutely huge. In 2015, global ANNUAL smartphone sales are expected to top 314.4 billion dollars by the end of the 2015. That is a massive amount of money to be made in only 365 days of the year! However, because there is so much money to be made, the smartphone market is:

1) One of the fastest developing industries in the world, due to its massive funding for research
2) One of the most competitive industries in the world, due to the competition striving to gain market share

          These two factors make for a tough market to sell in, so manufacturers are constantly innovating, whether it be by adding 3D Touch, making a phone incredibly thin, adding 2K or 4K screens, or boasting the best cameras or highest performance. If a company does not innovate or present itself as a meaningful switch, consumers will continue to buy the same phone every two years, or worse, leave your company for another's. This is where Blackberry ultimately went wrong.
          

          Blackberry (daughter company of RIM Communications, as shown on chart) began to show their downfall in power at the end of 2009. Android and iOS were two platforms that were starting to gain market share rapidly, and it was not by coincidence. Apple was releasing its new iPhone 3GS, and Android had just hit the market, offering the best of Google's software team to compete with Apple's smooth touch interfaces, both bringing full touch screens to the market. However, while Android phones and iPhone's looked like this with full touch-sensitive displays:

....The Blackberry continued with the "if its not broken, don't fix it" approach....


          While the design and build quality of these phones were not sacrificed, the main problems were software and touch interfaces. Blackberry did try to come to the market with touchscreens with its Blackberry Torch, but even then, Blackberry OS did not have an app store for apps (Apple and Google both had large app stores), and the user interface was clunky and laggy, as it was just a basic port of the OS that was meant for button-click navigation. Thus, Blackberry reverted to its trackball method for most of its phone lineup that it knew was good for them in the past...and unfortunately, what was good for them in the early thousands, did not fare them well against the battlefield of innovation coming from Google and Apple. The small market of security-desperate users stayed with Blackberry, but otherwise, the market and its users moved on to playing Angry Birds, talking to Siri, and touching their phones for interaction, while the few remained in the dust, clicking their buttons and living without apps.
          Blackberry is currently suffering with a black eye to the face. With merely 0.3% of the market, they're hanging on by a thread. However, they may have one last chance, and its coming in 2016. Named the "Priv", short for privacy, the phone is Blackberry's last chance at survival.
          It will be the company's first attempt at an Android-powered smartphone, but it may just save the company. It is elegant, with a beautiful display with curved glass and slim bezels, and it features the tactile feedback of the slide-out keyboard, something rarely seen in this market (it could actually be called revolutionary, something new for Blackberry in the last decade). It also has a crisp front-facing speaker for better audio, and hopes to steal users for their own market share with its secure platform, and most importantly, it has the Google Play Store, allowing any app to be used on the phone, one of the biggest complaints of older phones. It will be quite some time before the phone is released, but it will be interesting to see if Blackberry can pull a comeback when the Canadian company is in such a desperate position.

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iPhone 6s 3D Touch: Why Its Propaganda

          Apple unveiled their new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus weeks ago at its WWDC event on September 9th, 2015, and Apple's biggest three iPhone improvements were double the RAM (increased multitasking), a reinforced chassis (so no more #bendgate), and its rumored 3D Touch. Interestingly enough, Apple has taken the technology from its Apple Watch, which used to be called "Force Touch", and given it a new name in the iPhone, probably because the name "Force Touch" had a negative connotation given to it. The technology is the same, and allows the panel to distinguish between a regular tap, hard tap, and a hard press. Tim Cook made the feature set sound innovating, standing by the new slogan "The only thing that changed is everything." However, I believe 3D Touch is merely a marketing scheme. Surely, companies such as Samsung also have their own master plans of trying to take over market share with advertising, but Samsung's current campaigns, Wireless charging and Turbo charging, are both completely useful features. However, I see 3D Touch having little impact on how users interact with their iPhone. It is not even like "3D Touch" is a new feature. A week before the launch of the iPhone 6s, Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer, released a new phone, the Huawei Mate S, with a pressure-sensitive screen, and in a live demo, used it to effectively weigh an orange.

          Since the dawn of the iPhone, the controls have been seen as very simple, with a home button and lock button as the main physical buttons, and app developers being responsible for placing simple back buttons in the upper left of every app. However, 3D Touch introduces a whole new world of interaction that could be very confusing for less tech-savy users. I for one know that if my mother were to try to use 3D Touch, she would end up hard pressing something when she wanted a light tap, and would not know when to hard tap vs light tap, and explaining the difference between a tap and a press would just confuse her to the point where she would ask me how to turn 3D Touch off (luckily, Apple has recognized this, and created a settings toggle switch to disable it). I predict 3D Touch will be a feature students and the younger crowd will cause commotion about it during the school day for the first few weeks the phone diffuses through the population, but after this period, the feature will be limited in its actual effective uses, and will fade, remaining as only a propaganda feature.

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Technology's Negative Effect on Your Sleep

          I watch perhaps two episodes of my current television series on Netflix before going to sleep. I also text a few friends and send a few Snaps while curled up in my bed. What do all three of these activities have in common? They all are killing the effectiveness of my sleep.
          All of our gadgets that emit their bright glow in the night also have a dark side to the light they emit. Normally, as night creeps closer, the pineal gland in the brain slowly releases the sleep-inducing drug by the name of melatonin. Darkness increases the release of this drug, but unfortunately, our gadgets have the opposite effect. Wild animals are more fortunate, as once the sun is down for them, it is time to hit the bunker. However, we live in a high-tech world full of light-up gadgets, and the more we use them at night, the more blue light we are bombarded with, and this blue light, if received in high enough doses, will cause melatonin to completely stop its release. This has terrible effects, as it can lead to problems such as "Netflix binging" or "all-nighters", and the night doesn't end until melatonin can build up to high concentration to force you to rest your eyes in exhaustion. Forcing your eyes to stay open until the very last second of night has its repercussions on health the next day.
          A poll by the Sleep Foundation shows that 58% of teenagers reportedly receive less than 7 hours of sleep, far less than the 8.5-10 hours reccomended by medical professionals. Personally, I receive about 6.75 hours of sleep a night, and I attribute this to my urge to fall asleep watching Netflix or YouTube. However, boycotting the use of electronics before bed not only allows a person to fall asleep faster and sooner, giving more hours of rest, but a person also becomes a deeper sleeper, receiving a higher quality of sleep alongside the other benefits. So next time you decide to use your cell phone or watch TV right before bed, remember technology's negative effect on your sleep.

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What "Terms and Conditions" Really Say

Most people have seen the "Accept the EULA' or "Accept our new terms agreement", and just clicked agree for the sake of installing new software or creating a new account for Twitter. However, not many people have read the actual license they are agreeing to, so these are some scary user agreements. ENJOY!

1. By uploading any photos to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc, you are giving them full usage rights to your photo. This means that they are allowed to take that photo of you, add "6 ways I learned to lose weight fast!", and turn it into an advertisement, all without your consent, because you agreed they had full rights to that photo. Snapchat also owns any photo you send, so even after they're "gone", Snapchat will store that selfie (or other photos) for who knows how many years on their servers, and have the right to give that photo to anyone.

2. You don't really own your phone. You may think that you paid good money for your phone, but by using your phone, you have agreed to have your phone shut down remotely by the manufacturer for any number of reasons should they see fit. If Samsung or Apple wants to, they can lock you out of your phone, because you agreed to it by using the device!

3. You cannot use iTunes to build nuclear weapons. At least, that's what you've agreed to when installing an update to iTunes. "You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons." So next time you try to make nuclear missiles with your iTunes music software, beware, you've voided the agreement!

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Blocking Ads on the Internet: Yay or Nay?

          The internet is widely used in the United States. Infact, its regularly used by 84.2% of the US population. These 268 million people visiting the internet create a huge 63.2 billion dollar annual enterprise (that is, 63,200,000,000 dollars to add emphasis to the 0's) , and its through this money that companies such as Google thrive and grow. Where is all of this abundance of money coming from, one might ask? Well, those annoying ads before and while a YouTube video plays, the ads at the top of Google search results, the flashing animations on web pages; all of these add up to a huge $63.2 billion annual lump sum of cash for business. On average, each person in the world (minus Chinese users) earn Google $6.30 annually, not much money on its own, but given the worlds population, money will add up quickly. For Google, its their source of income, and it allows a person to use Google Drive, Docs, YouTube, Maps, Earth, Search, Blogger, and more, all for free! All a person has to do is see a few ads daily, and they can have their "free" stuff. Its a pretty sweet deal, but what if a person could have their cake and eat it too? Welcome, to the world of adblockers.
          Adblockers have been around since 2006, and do just as the name implies, blocking ads. Its quite simple to use for the mainstream, as it can be installed on Firefox or Google Chrome browsers with the click of the install button, and once installed, they block almost all ads from appearing, on almost all websites. Not only does enabling adblockers remove annoyances before videos, but they also help protect the user from clicking on an ad that take the user to an unsafe or unintended website. Seen from this perspective, adblock is a wonder, making websites load slightly faster, keeping people safer from unintented content, and relieving annoyances. No more, will ignorant Grandma click on an ad stating that this one weird tip will help her lose weight! In total, adblock has a large userbase, with usage growing 70% between 2013 to 2014, from 85 million users to 144 million users, with the exponential growth showing no near end in sight.
But nothing in life is free, and the cost lands on the corporate end. In 2014, Google reportedly lost 6.6 billion dollars to users using adblock. That totals more than 10% of Googles revenue. Adblock users are the largest bleeding wound for Google, but that might change soon. Google is reportedly deciding to fight back in 2015, planning on reworking how they integrate ads so as to bypass the adblocker, so that their ads can no longer be blocked. Rumor also has it that Google has been paying off adblock programs, such as the popular Adblock Plus, millions of dollars to secretly leak small ads here and their to their users. This benefits both the adblock software company and Google gets some of their lost revenue back, but has created worry of corruption in the adblock community, not sure which adblocking software companies have been bribed to betray their users.
          The lesson to be learned is that adblocking is clearly having a huge 6.6 billion dollar effect on advertising revenues, and companies are clearly making statements that this blocking must come to an end. However, users are also clearly making the statement that ads are obtrusive and annoying. The only real compromise that could be reached between the two parties is a reduction in obtrusive ads, leaving only relevant, nonintrusive ads. No one knows how this battle will resolve itself in the coming years, but clearly companies such as Google are quite concerned, and the internet cannot be free without a cost.

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Why Apple Must Die

          Apple was once a great company. They revolutionized the way the world listens to music, moving the world from buying CD's to downloading music to digital devices capable of storing thousands of albums. They revolutionized the smart phone definition, moving the world from physical keyboards and clunky user interfaces, to smooth scrolling pages and colorful icons. However, ever since the death of Steve Jobs, I believe Apple has fallen into a pit of reiteration, and as if they were stuck in glue, they can no longer revolutionize. But unfortunately, Apple defies the standard business model, and continues to grow in strength despite their lack of innovation, and other companies such as Samsung and LG are suffering unjustly.
          For example, the Apple iPhone has had an extremely small screen compared to its Android counterparts until just recently. Samsung had been making "phablets" (phone-tablets) since 2011 with their first Galaxy Note 5.3", but it wasn't until 3 years later, in 2014, that Apple finally moved from its puny 4.0" screen to 4.7" and 5.5" variants. If any other company, such as Blackberry, were three years late to the market, they would have seen huge drops in sales and revenue, and maybe gone bankrupt, but Apple just sold phones like hotcakes. Apple also puts inferior, cheaper technology in their phones. Their base model iPhone still costs $650, the same as Samsung's latest offerings, however, they include half as much storage (16GB vs 32GB), they have lower resolution screens (720p panel vs 1080p), the batteries are smaller, the processors are slower, the RAM (allows fast multitasking) is a third as much on the iPhone's, and the list just goes on and on.
          Specification wars aside, the iPhone consists of only 18% of the world market share for smart phones, which is not alarming or seemingly very high. However, Apple makes 92% of the worldwide profits on smart phones, selling its 64GB iPhone 6 Plus for $849, when it only costs $240 to fully manufacture. That leaves 8% of the profits for Samsung, HTC, LG, Microsoft/Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola, and dozens of other top manufacturers to split among themselves, and even though they are the innovators, they are forced to try to compete against this behemoth and survive, like Oliver Twist pleading, "Please sir, I want some more."
          Apple currently holds a monopoly on the people, and it comes to market with technology 3+ years after its competition, but yet, people continue to feed the flame of anti-innovation, and it needs to stop. If it doesn't, other companies will be squeezed out of the profit margins, and there could be a day that everyone is forced to own an iPhone. However, contrary to Apple's belief, one single phone will never be suitable for all 7 billion people on this planet; we need diversity, and thus, Apple's dictatorship over the smart phone market must end, and Apple must die.

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