TBR's Best Tablets for 2016 – Android, iOS, Windows and Fire OS

With the year just picking up, its already a certainty that its still going to be another Tablet-year, owing to the constant shedding of marketshare in the PC zone. After recovering from a slump at the tail end of Q3 2015, the Tablet giants are once again ready for war. With so much focus on building even more powerful products to displace conventional Laptops from the hands of the upwardly mobile user as well as the social-savvy, the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft are expected to use 2016 to settle scores.

Though this market had belonged to Android and iOS since inception, a lot may happen between now and the next couple of years. Windows 10 may finally be the push Microsoft needs to establish itself as a key player in tablets. A new report from Strategy Analytics recently predicted that by 2019, Windows will be running on 18 percent of tablets globally, nearly doubling its current 10 percent market share.

The report claims that 2015 has been the year that Microsoft finally got it right on tablets. It's been a long road from Windows 8, which merged tablet and desktop interfaces in a less-than-convincing way. Windows 10, with features like the Continuum interface switcher, may be the push the system needs to cement itself in the tablet space.

IOS is expected to claim 23 percent of the market in 2019, increasing market share by one percentage point. The big loser in the shift will be Android, whose current 68 percent share will be eroded to 59 percent towards the end of the decade. “Windows Tablet market share has dwindled in the mid-single digit range for the last few years but Windows devices now run the gamut from 2-in-1 Tablets from E-Fun in the U.S. starting at $139 retail, to Microsoft’s Surface Book starting at $1499 retail," said Eric Smith, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics.

One of the key factors that will swing it to Windows will probably be the sudden interest from the business sector, hitherto occupied exclusively by Apple. While Android has found strength in its low-tier offerings, Apple has positioned itself towards capturing the high end with the new iPad Pro, aiming at the enterprise customer and graphics pros. Windows, on the other hand, is opting for a more balanced approach with a combination of value and premium offerings.

The Surface Book, one of Microsoft's newest additions to the 2-in-1 hybrid space, looks like a traditional laptop, but can detach to form a tablet at a moment's notice. The company poured resources into addressing the finer details like the hinge, and its asking price means Microsoft is clearly aiming for the high end.

But even before the Surface Book was announced, analysts had been predicting a major increase in Windows tablet marketshare. An August report from IDC pointed to the release of the 2-in-1-friendly Windows 10 as a driver of growth, with its 8.4 percent market share estimated to grow to 17.5 percent by 2019.

From a 6.55% level in the market in 2013, Amazon has continued to rise with its Kindle brand in the Tablet market. Its currently rated very highly in the market and may improve on its rating this year, especially at the detriment of Android. Packing a punch in the area of E-books, Movies and social apps, Kindle deserves a place among the big players. So using the reviews of Cnet, PC World, Forbes and TBR analytics, here's our pick of the best products from the four major platforms in 2016:

Google Pixel C:

The Good The Google Pixel C has a slim, compact aluminum build that feels sturdy. Its optional Bluetooth keyboard is equally solid and doubles as the tablet's cover and it has a powerful, long-running battery. The tablet runs the latest version of Android and its performance is lightning fast. The screen is sharp, bright and colorful, and gaming graphics look stellar.

The Bad It's a bit heavy when attached to the keyboard (which is sold separately). Big-name apps and games still tend to hit iOS before Android.

The Bottom Line The Google Pixel C is the best Android tablet money can buy.

The Pixel C starts at $500 and has a high-end design, spectacular screen, fast performance and long-lasting battery. But with interest in Android tablets decreasing more and more every year, Google's best effort at a high-end tablet may fall upon deaf ears.

iPad Air 2:

The Good The iPad Air 2 has a great balance of size and weight. Crisp, bright display. iOS 9 runs perfectly, including split-screen apps.

The Bad Priced relatively high for a tablet; single speaker isn't that loud compared to iPad Pro.

The Bottom Line Apple's mid-range tablet is a year old, but it's still the perfect mix of size and performance for nearly anyone.

It's rare to revisit a piece of tech one year later and find it's still the best of the bunch. That's the case with the iPad Air 2, a product that somehow seems better now than it did in when it was first released in late 2014. And here's the best part: the Air 2 is less expensive now. It can be found on sale frequently, and if you can get the 64GB version at a great price.

Microsoft Surface Pro 4:

The Good The Surface Pro 4 fits a larger screen with a higher resolution into a slightly slimmer body than last year's model. The pen and keyboard cover are also improved, and this is one of the first mobile systems shipping with Intel's latest processors.

The Bad Microsoft still refuses to include the Type Cover keyboard by default, forcing a separate purchase. Battery life still isn't enough for a full day.

The Bottom Line A host of small refinements cements the Surface Pro 4's position as the best-in-class Windows tablet -- so long as you're prepared to pay extra for the required keyboard cover accessory.

The new Surface Pro 4 is Microsoft taking a victory lap -- and a well-deserved one at that. After three generations of pitching "a tablet that can replace your laptop" -- with mixed success -- the formula has finally clicked. The 2015 version of Microsoft's tablet adds the latest Intel processors, a slightly larger screen (perfectly sized at 12.3 inches with a just-right 3:2 aspect ratio), and a handful of hardware and software tweaks, but doesn't radically change the DNA of its predecessor, 2014's excellent Surface Pro 3 .

Amazon Fire HDX 8.9:

The Good The Amazon Fire HDX 8.9 is the first tablet with Dolby Atmos audio-enhancing technology and Amazon's item-identifying Firefly function. Its user-friendly operating system includes Mayday instant customer service, extensive parental controls and the ability to set up individual profiles. It's still one of the lightest and slimmest tablets around.

The Bad Amazon's curated app store has far fewer apps and games than Google and iOS app stores. The heavily modified OS leaves little room for customization and there's no microSD card slot.

The Bottom Line Impressive Amazon features and an outstanding display make the the Fire HDX 8.9 one of the best and most affordable media consumption tablets.

The Amazon Fire HDX 8.9 is one of the most understated high-end tablets of the year. Though physically it's virtually indiscernible from the 2013 model, it packs a more powerful processor, an updated OS with more family-friendly functions, and exclusive features like audio-enhancing Dolby Atmos and item-recognition software, Firefly.

Instagram to help local Indonesia SMEs with ad campaigns

With its increasing popularity as a free platform for advertising and brand building for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), mobile photo sharing app Instagram says that it will continue to educate SME players to use the service to its fullest extent.
“Focusing on community aspects and user passion points will continue to be really important, such as educating SMEs to stay relevant to their customers and provide advertising solutions,” Instagram’s Asia Pacific brand development head Paul Webster said at an Instagram event in Jakarta on Thursday.
“Some Indonesian SMEs I’ve seen have managed to successfully create an engaging ad campaign and are able to translate that into web conversion and foot traffic into their retail stores,” Webster added.
The key focus for businesses, he said, should be on measuring their goals, because the engaged Indonesian user base tended to have high expectations of what appeared in its social media feeds, especially from businesses.
“I think people and brands are learning all the time. We don’t want people to think that the creative benchmark [to create an effective Instagram ad campaign] is too high, but we do want to see what brands can achieve in the next level, and we are able to help them with that,” he said.
Instagram usage is reportedly seeing 100 percent year-on-year growth in terms of daily usage in Indonesia, with Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta and Bali the cities with the most users.
According to GlobalWebIndex’s fourth-quarter report in 2014, Instagram and social media channel for professionals LinkedIn have around 17.8 million users each, accounting for 7 percent of the Indonesian population of 255 million. The most popular social media platforms for Indonesians are Facebook (14 percent), mobile messaging app WhatsApp (12 percent), Twitter (11 percent), Facebook Messenger (9 percent) and Google+ (9 percent).
Meanwhile, global market research company TNS reported in a recent analysis that 89 percent of Indonesian users were made up of young, educated and upper middle class users. Females make up 63 percent of the entire Indonesian user base and Indonesia’s user base doubles every year, according to the analysis. The photo-sharing service reportedly reaches 400 million active global users per month.
Other statistics show that 46 percent of Indonesian users tend to like brand posts, with 41 percent of them reportedly engaged by short video clips in ad campaigns. Meanwhile, 43 percent of users tend to visit a specific brand’s official website when they come across it for the first time on Instagram, with 31 percent tending to follow the brands on the service.
Fashion, travel and technology posts are among the most popularly liked in Indonesia, which Paul said would benefit SMEs and e-commerce players trading in those categories, especially if they stepped up their use of the service.
“There’s a big fashion and art culture in Indonesia, and [Indonesians] also love to travel: sharing posts of places they have been to or want to go. Brands that plan around that fact tend to do well in their Instagram ad campaigns,” Webster said.

Samsung Grows Mobile Health Market with Smart Bio-Processor

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, recently announced that it is addressing the growing trend of quantified health with an all-in-one advanced system logic chip for the health-oriented wearables market, the Bio-Processor. The Samsung Bio-Processor, now in mass production, is specifically designed to allow accelerated development of innovative wearable products for consumers who are increasingly monitoring their health and fitness on a daily basis.

“With improvements in smart, fitness devices and an increase in consumer health consciousness, more and more people are looking for ways to monitor various personal bio-data, or fitness data, to constantly manage their health” said Ben K. Hur, Vice President of marketing, System LSI business at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung’s Bio-Processor, which can process five different biometric signals, is the most versatile health and fitness monitoring chip available on the market today and is expected to open up many new health-based service options for our customers.”

Samsung’s Bio-Processor is the industry’s first all-in-one health solution chip. By integrating not only Analog Front Ends (AFE), but also microcontroller unit (MCU), power management integrated circuit (PMIC), digital signal processor (DSP), and eFlash memory, it is able to process the bio-signals it measures without the need of external processing parts. Even with its integrated design, the Bio-Processor is particularly innovative thanks to its incredibly small size. When compared to the total area of the discrete parts, the Bio-Processor is only about one fourth of the total combined size, which is ideal for small wearable devices, offering a bounty of options when designing new devices.

While heart rate monitoring alone may have been compelling in the past, the ability to measure a variety of fitness data is expected in today’s wearable products. To meet such demands, Samsung has designed its Bio-Processor to integrate five AFEs including bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), photoplethysmogram (PPG), electrocardiogram (ECG), skin temperature, and galvanic skin response (GSR) into a single chip solution that measures body fat, and skeletal muscle mass, heart rate, heart rhythm, skin temperature and stress level, respectively. In addition, combinations of these fitness inputs can be considered for a variety of new use cases.

To speed product development and better understand Samsung’s new Bio-Processor, several wearable reference platforms are now available to demonstrate various uses cases. For example, wrist band, board and patch type reference devices exhibit the Bio-Processor’s potential by demonstrating its ability to measure multiple fitness variables on an extremely small device.

The Real Reasons Major Car Makers Bought Nokia's HERE

The fear of becoming too heavily reliant on U.S. tech giants Apple and Google accelerated the decision of Germany's biggest carmakers to buy Nokia's HERE mapping unit, analysts has disclosed. BMW, Audi and Daimler announced they were to acquire HERE for 2.8 billion euros ($3.1 billion) in August. This so-called high-definition mapping will form the basis for driverless cars as the auto industry moves towards increasingly autonomous features in vehicles. This increasing dependence on digital mapping by the automotive industry was highlighted by the recent bidding war that broke out for a division of Nokia that most people have never heard of called HERE. The deal is expected to go through in the first quarter of 2016, the Finnish company announced.

Among the amazing technologies available for vehicles these days – from connected navigation that can help find everything from the cheapest fuel to films playing nearby to e-horizon features that can anticipate hills ahead and adjust fuel consumption accordingly – mapping software is the enabler behind most of these innovations. It’s also crucial to the future of self-driving cars.

Nokia initially shopped HERE around to Apple, Google and Uber, causing concern among automakers that the company’s detailed digital maps could fall into the hands of these tech giants who are engaged in their own mapping-software arms race and possibly gearing up to compete with the auto industry by developing self-driving cars. While Uber and the Chinese tech company Baidu were at one point putting a deal together to acquire HERE, it was then reported that Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler have concluded the buying of the Nokia mapping division. And according to a source quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the German automakers are also planning to invite Ford, Fiat Chrysler, General Motors, Toyota, Renault and Peugot Citroën to invest in Here and “run the service as an open platform for everyone.”

While this sharing of proprietary technology may seem counter-intuitive in the hyper-competitive auto industry, as more cars become connected and send info on their whereabouts to the cloud, more mapping data can be amassed. And the auto industry can better fend off threats from the likes of Apple and Google by embedding mapping software in millions of vehicles and collecting data from the technology. “That’s why we need more car companies involved,” said Floris van de Klashorst, head of HERE’s connected driving business. “The more cars providing information the better the map.”

Google and Apple's own mapping software is a potential rival to HERE. Analysts said that if the consortium of carmakers didn't buy Nokia's system, they would either have to develop their own in a costly process, or use the technology from Silicon Valley's tech giants, an option they wanted to avoid.

"One of their big potential competitors in this is of course Google and they probably wouldn't want to be dependent on what might be a potential competitor for their maps," Martin Garner, senior vice-president at CCS Insight, told CNBC over the phone. "They are wary of Google. So since there was an option to have maps from a non-Google company, they were interested. The maps are so important to the future that it made sense to them to buy HERE."

The benefits:

HERE had operating profit of 46 million euros for the first half of 2015, according to Nokia. The three German auto companies will take an equal stake in the venture. It also employs about 6,000 workers in 200 offices — whether the consortium will restructure HERE isn’t immediately clear. At the time of publishing, Nokia didn’t respond to request for comment.

Nokia is shedding HERE as it prepares to merge with Alcatel-Lucent. Nokia bought the French telecommunications company for $16.6 billion earlier last year, and the deal is expected to go through by the first half of this year.

But here is not just for car maps. Other services such as mobile apps and websites that require mapping services employ the technology. The German automakers intend to keep the service "as an open, independent and value creating platform for cloud-based maps and other mobility service", according to a statement.

By doing so, analysts said that Google's competitors will have still have an alternative rather than to rely on the search giant for its maps.

"Mobile companies—many with consumer-facing mobile clients including Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu and Samsung—see an independent mapping solution as critical in order to compete with Google for mobile advertising dollars," the analysts maintain. The demand for mapping systems is only going to increase, particularly in the automotive industry. Data provided by the maps will allow cars to become autonomous through route mapping and knowing where traffic jams are, for example. There's a forecast that there'll be 11.8 million new autonomous vehicle sales in 2035 and with the consortium now in control of HERE, that trend could quickly become a reality.

Still, the acquisition of HERE may not allow BMW, Audi and Daimler to be completely independent from Google and Apple. While the consortium is in control of the mapping technology, they do not have their own advanced in-car operating systems (OS). Google currently has Android Auto and Apple has Carplay, both operating systems designed specifically for cars to allow people to make calls and access music, for example. Analysts said that it is likely BMW, Audi and Daimler may still support these OS's in their cars.

"This only gives them the maps, it doesn't give them an in-car operating system and that is a separate discussion," Garner said. "This doesn't answer all the questions about autonomous driving."