I saw several quad-core tablets at the Consumer Electronics show, but no smartphones. Luckily, Sascha Pallenberg, my friend who runs the Netbook News site, captured video of a Fujitsu handset running on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. From the looks of it, this phone’s performance will rival that of the Asus Transformer Prime tablet.

Fujitsu doesn’t target the U.S. market, so I don’t expect to see this Android 4.0 smartphone for sale here. However, Sascha’s video gives us an idea of what to expect from the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona next month: console quality games on a large screen piped from a smartphone and played with using a wireless controller. Although this demo uses a wired HDTV connection, I anticipate we’ll see more wireless video solutions introduced  this year.

I’m still holding to the idea that throwing hardware alone at Android’s problem won’t solve any issues. However, I’ve used Android 4.0 for the past 6 weeks. The user interface improvements in Google’s platform, along with more powerful hardware, will allow Android to better contend against Apple’s iOS system.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of quad-core handsets shown off, with a few available in the first half of 2012. By mid year, we’ll start to see a larger number of these powerful handsets hit the market. Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others will also be touting quad-core chips. But if my mobile predictions for 2012 hold true, far more dual-core handsets will be sold this year.

Then again, Apple is rumored to include its own quad-core chip in the next iPad and would be likely to use the same in a future iPhone design. That means 2012 will be more exciting to watch than 2011 when it comes to tablets and smartphones from a consumer perspective: Two great mobile choices in combination with what I think will be a third up-and-comer in Windows Phone handsetsand possibly in Windows 8 tablets.

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Zynga executives and investors ringing the NASDAQ opening bell

Zynga held its initial public offering on Friday, raising billion in a stock market debut that valued the company at some billion at the height of the day’s trading. However, Zynga’s stock did not have the day one share price “pop” seen by some other recent web IPOs such as LinkedIn and Groupon: The stock closed Friday afternoon at .50 per share, a pretty significant drop from its IPO price of . Predictably, that’s left the door open for speculation about what this means for the viability of Zynga itself and the tech IPO market in general.

But it’s important to remember that IPO day is literally just the beginning for Zynga’s new life as a publicly traded company. Now that its ownership is shared by a much larger group of investors, Zynga will be subjected to closer scrutiny than ever before: The judgement does not stop here. There are several important events on the near-term horizon that pertain to Zynga, and checking in on the share price at those times could be even more telling as to how investors value the social gaming business.

The way I see it, the potential events to look out for are:

• When Facebook goes public
  This is a biggie. Facebook is said to be preparing to hold an IPO in the spring of 2012, and Zynga’s business as it stands today is hugely dependent on the social networking giant. In fact, Zynga’s S-1 filing to the SEC minced no words in outlining the risks inherent in the closeness of this relationship. If Facebook’s IPO performs strongly, that could be great for Zynga — but if it’s lackluster, Zynga may well feel the crunch. Or Facebook’s IPO could do well and Zynga’s stock price could suffer. (The stock market is an unpredictable thing.) Either way, Facebook’s IPO day will almost certainly have an effect on Zynga’s market valuation.

• When Zynga declares real independence from Facebook
  For all of Zynga’s reliance on Facebook today, the company is working hard to become more successful as a standalone gaming destination. Zynga made a major step towards independence in October when it unveiled “Zynga Direct,” which CEO Mark Pincus said is an over-arching strategy for the company to establish a direct relationship with its users. The first part of Zynga Direct is an upcoming social games platform, codenamed internally Project Z, a web platform in which users will be able to play any Zynga game within the same environment on any browser — rather than within Facebook.

  It’s a delicate balance, but it may just be a matter of time before Zynga makes more concrete steps toward autonomy, such as only releasing the lower-budget older versions of games on Facebook so users who want to play the newer ones have to go to Zynga directly. Independence for Zynga will mean it gets to keep a lot more money — Facebook charges a 30 percent commission on all third-party app revenue. And of course, more money is something investors usually like very much.

• On May 29, 2012
  Every company that goes public is subject to a “lock-up period” that typically lasts up to four months after an IPO. During this time, the company’s employees, early investors and founders are not allowed to sell shares of stock they hold in the company. The day a lock-up period ends, a significant amount of new shares can enter the market if those insiders decide to cash out. If demand doesn’t keep up with that boost in supply, share prices can take a hit: LinkedIn’s stock dipped a full seven percent when its lock-up period ended last month.

  Zynga’s lock-up period is 165 days long, ending on May 29, 2012.

• If regulators crack down on Zynga
  Now, this is a big “if.” But there are some people who are concerned about the way that people get “hooked” on Zynga games, and some Wall Street analysts are whispering that it’s only a matter of time before this draws real ire from governmental regulators here in the U.S. and abroad. Just this week, for instance, a woman in Maine was convicted of embezzling 6,000 from her employer to feed her addiction to Zynga games. The larger media loves these kinds of stories, and in the future some politicians may well seek to regulate the industry in the name of “protecting consumers.”

  This may be far-fetched, though: Zynga games are just entertainment, unlike gambling, in which real money flows both in and out. Games such as World of Warcraft have similarly addictive qualities, and they have not come under too much scrutiny, at least from U.S. officials. But Zynga games are arguably more likely to be in the spotlight because they appeal to a more mainstream audience than other online games have in the past. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the months and years ahead.

In all, Zynga has lots of potential for growth now that it’s got the money and larger respect that comes with being a public company. Its story does not end with this week’s IPO: As interesting as it has been to watch the company over the past few months, the road ahead promises to be even more interesting.

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Clearwire is thinking about skipping out on a 7 million loan payment due in two weeks, which could make things very uncomfortable for its primary shareholder and WiMAX bandwidth customer Sprint. A Clearwire default or bankruptcy could do irreparable harm to Sprint’s future 4G strategy –- whether the operator admits it or not.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Clearwire’s new CEO Erik Prusch said the mobile broadband wholesaler is weighing whether or not to conserve cash by putting off loan payments due Dec. 1. Clearwire has a 30-day grace period after the payment comes due so if Clearwire delayed sending a check, Pursch said the company could make good use of that time to seek more funding and to sign up new partners to resell its WiMAX service. Prusch declined to tell the Journal if Clearwire is considering the option of restructuring its debt load either in or out of bankruptcy, though he did say the company is consulting with multiple advisors on its “strategic options.”

Clearwire is walking a tightrope, and if it falls, its weight will land squarely on Sprint. Not only would Sprint lose much of investment during a Clearwire bankruptcy, but it also risks parting with perhaps its most valuable asset: spectrum. When Clearwire’s current incarnation was created in 2008, Sprint turned over 70 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum to the new venture, relying on Clearwire to be a good steward of Sprint’s future mobile broadband strategy. WiMAX turned out to be a flop, but as the network technology slowly dies, the spectrum it runs over remains just as valuable, if not more so.

Clearwire holds over 100 MHz in every major U.S. market. To put that in perspective, that’s more than five times what AT&T and Verizon are using to launch their current ultra-fast LTE networks. With that kind of capacity, Sprint conceivably could continue to offer unlimited smartphone data plans well into the future, while its competitors struggle to limit their customer’s usage.

Sprint wants to leave WiMAX in the dust eventually, which is why it has committed to its own LTE buildout using its own PCS spectrum. But you can bet Sprint is counting on keeping that 2.5 GHz in reserve, using the current WiMAX network to power its 4G smartphones and modems and Clearwire’s proposed future time-division LTE (TD-LTE) (subscription required) deployment to supplement future 4G capacity. Sprint, however, isn’t exactly advertising its dependency on that spectrum.

Sprint has taken several steps to create public distance between its 4G strategy and Clearwire. When Sprint revealed its future mobile broadband plans at an analyst conference in October, it began prioritizing its networks of choice. Clearwire ranked at the bottom of the list, behind Sprint’s own LTE network and network sharing deals such as the one it struck with 4G operator upstart LightSquared (which is still struggling to get FCC permission to launch). Even when Sprint and Clearwire publicly made up later that month with Sprint agreeing to work with Clearwire on its TD-LTE deployment, that network still came in dead last in Sprint’s priority list. Sprint has been playing a dangerous game of hard-to-get with its 4G supplier, making every effort to communicate that it doesn’t need Clearwire to move forward.

But reality tells a much different story than what’s written in Sprint’s PowerPoint presentations. Sprint has only a single clear 5 MHz-by-5 MHz block of spectrum over which to launch LTE. It’s primary competitors AT&T and Verizon Wireless have already launched LTE networks with twice as much capacity — and they have almost as much spectrum in reserve. To grow, Sprint will need to cannibalize its CDMA network or hasten the demise of its Nextel iDEN network, clearing those 800 MHz airwaves for 4G. If LightSquared can overcome the mounting political opposition to its launch, Sprint will get some relief, but even then it only can hope for the equivalent of another 5 MHz-by-5 MHz LTE carrier. Once that’s exhausted, that only leaves Clearwire.

If Sprint were to tap into a future Clearwire TD-LTE network, it would have capacity to burn. Clearwire can feasibly launch an LTE network with 40 MHz of bandwidth, double what AT&T and Verizon offer today — and Clearwire has plenty more room to grow.

But if Clearwire files for bankruptcy, Sprint could lose that treasure trove of spectrum. Sprint’s investment in Clearwire could be wiped out completely, or worse: the spectrum could be auctioned off to the highest bidder, placing it into the hands of a cash-rich competitor like Verizon or AT&T. From a spectrum position, Sprint today is the envy of the industry with access to the richest stores of frequencies of any operator. If it lets Clearwire default and descend into bankruptcy, Sprint would become the operator with the weakest spectrum position, except for T-Mobile. And we all know what T-Mobile’s 4G strategy is: get bought by AT&T.

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Autonomy’s impending acquisition by Hewlett-Packard is nearly done.

The .3 billion deal was cleared by regulators in the U.S. and Australia on Thursday. Autonomy shareholders  still have until Monday morning 10 a.m. U.K time to weigh in, according to a company spokeswoman cited in reports.

Autonomy’s enterprise search capabilities could be a boost to HP’s big data strategy and the purchase itself was a cornerstone of former CEO Leo Apotheker’s grand plan to build HP’s enterprise software and cloud services portfolio.

There was some question last week after Meg Whitman succeeded Apotheker as CEO as to whether his whole strategy would prevail, but it looks like the Autonomy piece of it is proceeding as planned.

The Autonomy buy was controversial from the moment it was announced on HP’s Aug. 18 earnings call because of the price. The next day, in a show of disapproval of this deal and HP’s decision to shop its PC business around, Wall Street lopped more than billion off of HP’s market cap.

The whole pricing question sparked an escalating war of words between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison  and HP/Autonomy.  That controversy flared again today when Oracle posted a statement about the matter again and Autonomy responded. 

Oracle and HP, once fairly tight partners, have been at odds since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and its hardware business, putting the two companies in direct competition in the data center hardware market. That contention ratcheted up after Oracle hired Mark Hurd, HP’s deposed CEO, last year as co-president.

Today there was more speculation that HP’s decision to replace Apotheker with Whitman was made to shore up HP’s share price so that Oracle could not buy the company.

Image courtesy of Flickr user melmada.

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When ereaders hit the market in 2007 they were the first of their kind. They are comparable to a small tablet device, and are something in between a small laptop and a smartphone. The difference, though, is that they were designed chiefly as a means of storing and reading books.

Many of the ebook readers on today’s market are still primarily book readers. However, within a few years of the release of the first ebook reader, new models began to hit the market with other capabilities. A common feature on some of these newer devices is the ability to connect to the Internet.

Some of today’s newer smartphones and tablet devices are being made with programs or apps for reading and storing books, though they have certain disadvantages compared to dedicated readers. The main drawback is that most require users to be connected to the Internet in order to use these features. This racks up extra data charges that many consumers are not willing to incur.

What about consumers who want to read digitally, would like to connect to the Internet at their discretion, but don’t want to pay a monthly data charge? This is where ebook readers like the Pandigital Novel come in handy. A recent Pandigital ereader review named this device and other like it a perfect compromise.

These devices are still created mainly for the purpose of reading and book storage. However, they have a Wi-Fi connectivity built in. A user can connect to the Internet within range of a free signal and not have to pay for data or use a mobile Internet stick.

When choosing a device with Wi-Fi connectivity, remember that there are several other features you’ll need to think about. The main consideration with any device is how many and what kinds of books you’ll be able to download.

Barnes and Noble and Amazon and Kobo are just a few of the major ebook suppliers. Which one you’ll be able to buy books from depends on your particular device. Be sure you research this before purchasing. Barnes and Noble, for instance, is the supplier for the Pandigital device (you can read a Pandigital Novel review online for further information).

As the market closed on Friday, something pretty remarkable (but believable) happened: Apple’s market value was more than Intel and Microsoft, combined. More »

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