Spotify announced at its live event on February 22 that it will be offering its services in 85 countries. Target users in the new market exceed 1 billion. In addition, as the market expands, the platform languages will also support more than 60 languages by adding 36 languages such as Romanian, Hindi, and Swahili.
Meanwhile, at the event, Spotify also announced the offering of Spotify Hi-Fi, a CD sound quality. Spotify HiFi is a CD quality lossless audio format. For reference, Spotify has so far been a mediocre quality with a maximum bit rate of 320 kbps as a compression method.
On February 24th, NVIDIA released its fourth quarter 2020 financial statements. According to this, NVIDIA reports that game commercial and data center business revenues recorded all-time highs during the same period, and annual sales also recorded all-time highs.
In its financial statements, NVIDIA announced that sales in the fourth quarter of 2020 were $5 billion, an increase of 61% from $3.11 billion in the same period of the previous year, and a record high of 6% from $4.74 billion in the previous quarter.
Driven by growing demand for graphics cards, NVIDIA’s fourth-quarter game sales increased 10% QoQ and 67% YoY to $2.5 billion, a record high. In addition, it is reported that the annual sales in 2020 also increased 41% year-on-year to a record record of $7.76 billion.
Following the game business, the good field was the data center business. In the fourth quarter of 2020, data center business revenue grew by 97% compared to the same period last year. As a result, annual sales reached an all-time high of $6.7 billion, an increase of 124% year-on-year.
The following is the smartphone news. Huawei has officially announced the Mate X2, a foldable foldable smartphone. The previous generation, Mate X, was in the form of a flexible display folded outward, but the Mate X2 was equipped with a display that folds inside and unfolds outside like Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Fold 2. The price is 17,999 yuan for the 256GB model. It has not yet announced plans to sell outside of China.
Meanwhile, Gartner, a market research firm, released the results of a survey on the number of global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2020. According to this, Apple shipped more than 80 million iPhones this quarter, surpassing Samsung Electronics, which recorded 62 million units, and rose to the top in four years after the fourth quarter of 2016.
Gartner analyzed that in the fourth quarter of last year, consumers were cautious about spending and put some purchases on hold, but the reason that iPhone sales continued to boom was that 5G smartphones and pro camera functions led some end users to purchase smartphones or replace phones. I am doing it.
Worldwide smartphone sales in 2020 were down 12.5% from 2019. Samsung Electronics decreased by 14.6% compared to the previous year, but remained the No. 1 in the industry, while only two smartphone makers grew from the previous year, Apple and Xiaomi. However, Huawei, which was once close to Samsung Electronics, saw a noticeable decrease in sales due to the effect of the ban on Google applications.
Let’s go to space for the last news. The NASA’s NASA Mars probe, Perservance, landed on Mars on February 19th. In 203 days, NASA drew attention by revealing the 360-degree view of the Perservance, which arrived on a planet more than 400 million kilometers from Earth.
If you look at the 360-degree video taken, you can see sand and mountains in the distance in your field of view. You can view the video by moving the viewpoint up, down, left and right by dragging and dropping the mouse or using the controller button. If you tilt the camera forward, you can also see the perspective on the camera.
It is also said to have been successfully recorded after landing as it is equipped with a microphone. If you listen, you can hear the sound of the wind blowing on the Mars land in a faint sense. Thank you.