Microsoft moved 3.9 million Xbox Ones, while Surface sales soared
The company’s search for a new CEO is still the dominant narrative surrounding Microsoft. But if you’re able to get past the quest to replace Ballmer, you’ll find a company that’s starting to get something of a second wind in its long life. For one, its new Xbox One console is selling quite well. After getting off to a slightly rocky start and trailing the latest PlayStation in initial sales, it outsold its rival in the US for the Month of December. All told during the last quarter Redmond pushed 3.9 million of the next-gen (now-gen?) gaming box out to retail channels. That’s in addition to 3.5 million Xbox 360s, which are still going quite strong and quite a bargain compared to the newest systems.
Another unit that struggled early on, Surface, seems to be righting the ship as well. (Though, its rough patch lasted quite a bit longer than the Xbox One’s.) Revenues from Surface sales more than doubled from $400 million last quarter to $893 million. And let’s not forget, that $400 million dollars represented a 47 percent increase over the quarter before that.
Obviously, things are not all rosy. Its desktop consumer Office and Windows 8 offerings continue to see revenues fall. But, the growth of its device division and increased income from Bing (which stunningly now accounts for 18.2 percent of searches in the US, according to Microsoft) are beginning to compensate for the “softness in the consumer PC market.”
Source: Microsoft
Adobe redesigns Photoshop Express for Android, makes it compatible with KitKat
On mobile devices, Photoshop Express is one of Adobe’s most crowd-pleasing applications. Now, to make things better for Android users, the software maker has released a completely revamped version of its handy app. Aside from being friendly with the latest flavor of Android, KitKat, the Photoshop Express app’s been tweaked to access/process images from an SD card in much faster fashion. Adobe states that the goal of this update was to bring the most popular features front and center, including things like Looks, Corrections, cropping, red eye reduction and a bunch of other useful tools. There’s also the debut on Android of Adobe’s new engine for rendering photos (which the company says is great for handling large files), as well as integration with its own photo service, Revel. And hey, above all, it still won’t cost you a dime to download it to your device.
Source: Google Play, Photoshop Blog
Qualcomm acquires Palm, other patent portfolios from HP
Chipmaker Qualcomm just announced that it’s acquired 1,400 granted and pending US patents and another 1,000 foreign patents from HP. Those include “fundamental mobile operating system techniques” and come from a collection of patent portfolios that include those of once-great smartphone manufacturer Palm.
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