Microsoft swallows Nokia’s handset business for $7.17 b

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan

High stakes gamble by Microsoft to enter smartphone space

The once mighty Nokia mobile handsets and device business has fallen into the lap of American giant Microsoft at a price tag of $7.17 billion.
The announcement, made in the very early hours of Tuesday from Nokia’s headquarters in Helsinki, said that under the deal, Microsoft will pay “Euro 3.79 billion to purchase substantially all of Nokia’s device and service business and Euro 1.65 billion to license Nokia’s patents for a total transaction price of Euro 5.44 billion in cash.”
The release emphasised that Microsoft would also get a “long-term patent licensing agreement with Qualcomm, as well as other licensing agreements.”
Both Microsoft and Nokia were widely regarded as having missed the boat — Nokia was too late in the smartphone space and Microsoft did not have a device platform for its software business. This deal comes at a time when the mobile handset business is seeing a worldwide carnage.
Press releases from both companies clarified that the deal includes “the mobile phones and smart devices’ business units as well as an industry leading design team, operations including all Nokia devices & services-related production facilities, device & services-related sales and marketing activities, and related support functions.”
Nearly 32,000 Nokia employees, along with its now globally famous, relatively new Lumia range of smartphones, will go over to Microsoft. Nokia and Microsoft have had a strategic partnership since 2001, under which Nokia CEO and former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop had agreed to make Windows the exclusive operating system for Nokia smartphones.
Smartphone gamble
With 2.7 billion Internet users and nearly 7 billion mobile phones worldwide, Microsoft hopes to use the deal to leapfrog into the smartphone market by becoming a hardware vendor.
It is widely expected that a vast majority of the next four billion Internet users, including those in India, will access the web with smartphones and wireless devices.
According to Gartner, a research firm, Windows phones occupy a mere 2.9 per cent of the smartphone market, a share smaller than even BlackBerry’s.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LOADING TIME OF YOUR WEBSITE

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan
Image
CHECK LOADING TIME OF YOUR WEBSITE Now a day’s everyone is using Google to search their information. There are millions of websites are available in Google, each websites is with its own content.  When you search any information in Google, it will list the links, which is related to your topic. Each link is directed to some websites. While searching, the  user always  wants to load the websites very fast. Because now a days, in this  busy world no one has the patience. If the sites are loading slowly then the user may get tensed. So it may lead the people to get bore while using your website. If you are the blogger you should focus on your web page loading time. Loading time is very important goal to run a successful website.  So if you want to attract the visitors to your site you have to reduce the loading time of your website. Here are some websites to check your site loading speed freely. S...
Read more

Run ChatGPT-Like LLM Models offline on your PC

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan
       Ever since ChatGPT hyped the use of AI, everyone wanted to try similar AI models on their devices for daily queries. These are powerful AI models capable of executing high-level tasks. Now with the help of customized tools, users can install various Large Language Models (LLMs) on their computers for offline use. If you want to make your computer an AI chat tool that you can access anytime you want, then the answer is the tool that allows users to install various AI models such as Llama 3, Phi 3, Falcon, Gemma, Replit, and more. Let’s now see the steps to get these tools and setup AI Models. M inimum Requirements: Apple Silicon Mac (M1/M2/M3) with macOS 13.6 or newer Windows / Linux PC with a processor that supports AVX2 (typically newer PCs) 16GB+ of RAM is recommended. For PCs, 6GB+ of VRAM is recommended NVIDIA/AMD GPUs supported Note: You can follow this guide for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. AI Models use a high amount of RAM, CPU, and GPU. I...
Read more

How To Watch Time-lapse In Google Earth: Largest Video On The Planet!

By Ashwin Ananthapadmanabhan
Image
It’s a good way to see the world. Representative image. Image by Greg Rakozy on Unsplashed      In the ‘biggest update to Google Earth since 2017,’ Google has added the new Time-lapse feature. Time-lapse in Google Earth combines 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years to make a 4D interactive model. As the name suggests, the Google Earth Time-lapse feature lets you go through a time-lapse of how things have changed over the years.      Time-lapse in Google Earth consists of photos taken from 1984 to 2020, which equals 20 petabytes (1 Petabyte is one million gigabytes) of satellite images. Google took these pictures and stitched them into a 4.4 terapixel video. The company says that this entire video is equivalent to over 5 million 4K resolution videos. That said, Google is also calling Time-lapse on Google Earth the largest video on the planet.  In its blog  post , the company has also promised annual updates to Google Earth for the nex...
Read more