Silicon Investor - Smartphones: Symbian, Microsoft, RIM, Apple, and Others

[RMP] SCiO Inside! The world's first smartphone with an embedded SCiO molecular sensor...

RMP — 1/9/2017 1:40:34 PM

SCiO Inside! The world's first smartphone with an embedded SCiO molecular sensor - the Changhong

Video: youtube.com

Published on Jan 4, 2017!
Introducing Changhong H2 the world's first material sensing smartphone.
Embedded with a SCiO molecular sensor, it is the only phone available that can scan and analyze the chemical properties of physical objects.

[Ken Adams] I am having real problems with my iPhone 5c. The problem seems to be an incorre...

Ken Adams — 3/30/2016 10:50:54 AM

I am having real problems with my iPhone 5c. The problem seems to be an incorrect password for my Comcast mail account. I want to change my address to a gmail account as I'm moving to a different state where Comcast will no longer be available.

I can't find anything on YouTube that helps. I've called my cell phone provider but didn't get help there before the phone line went dead.

Can anyone give me some very simple and slow instructions to make all this work? All this is happening at a time I need to rely on my iPhone more than usual.

Thanks for direction....

[Eric L] Andrew Orlowski on Stephen Elop ... "The leadership of Nokia phones shuffled o...

Eric L — 6/18/2015 4:35:00 PM

Andrew Orlowski on Stephen Elop ...

"The leadership of Nokia phones shuffled out of Microsoft yesterday, with phones VP Jo Harlow joining former CEO and Microsoft devices VP Stephen Elop in the taxi queue. ... It’s no surprise: Nadella had been saddled with an acquisition he didn’t really want and distanced himself from it from Day One. Nadella shed some 18,000 jobs, with the majority coming from the former Nokia unit. ... Talking to dozens of former Nokians, I'm struck by how well-respected Elop was amongst his colleagues. ... Elop was actually a pretty good CEO – I’ve no doubt he will be again."

>> Farewell then, Mr Elop: It wasn't actually your fault

Elop elopes from Redmond

Andrew Orlowski
The Register
18 June 2015

theregister.co.uk

The leadership of Nokia phones shuffled out of Microsoft yesterday, with phones VP Jo Harlow joining former CEO and Microsoft devices VP Stephen Elop in the taxi queue. The traffic wasn’t all one way: Meego UX guy Peter Skillman has joined Microsoft from Nokia’s HERE division.

The moves are a result of a corporate reshuffle which has demoted the entire hardware business at Microsoft, subsuming it into the Windows fiefdom under Terry Myerson, so there were fewer chairs to sit on. It’s no surprise: Nadella had been saddled with an acquisition he didn’t really want and distanced himself from it from Day One. Nadella shed some 18,000 jobs, with the majority coming from the former Nokia unit.

Elop himself divides opinion, with some Finns blaming him for the demise of Europe’s biggest technology company and the former number one phone maker in the world. This really is a bit of chauvinistic nonsense, which seeks to transfer blame away from years of complacency and mismanagement at Nokia. What Elop’s critics forget is that he had an impossible choice in front of him when he arrived in late 2010.

Nokia’s demise differs from RIM/BlackBerry’s demise in one very important way. Apple’s iPhone, along with almost all devices on the market today, is a power-guzzling mobile computer which also makes phone calls. This doesn’t matter to people, as the value shifted to apps and services. Suddenly, everything the mobile industry had talked about for a decade was easy and accessible, and you didn’t need a manual. The consumer gave up a four-day battery life to enter this brave new world and so far seems pretty happy with it. RIM at first insisted that the practical nature of its assets – a great physical keyboard and efficient data usage – would mean the fad would pass. Then it kidded itself that it could make a leisurely transition at its own sweet pace.

Nokia was different, however, as it obsessed with the future and foresaw the eventual platform shift. In 2002 it began planning for it, by developing a computer which also made phone calls. It launched it ten years ago. Unlike RIM, Nokia saw the future and was ready for it... except it wasn’t. When the crunch came, it was too slow to execute. Corporate bureaucracy and infighting saw to that.

Nobody in the industry was interested in licensing Nokia’s modern, but still-to-be-finished Meego platform by then, and licensing was Nokia’s preferred ethical way of doing things. Google had given Android away for free, and Google wasn’t Nokia. There was no time to look the gift horse in the mouth; eager to get something iPhone-ish to sell punters clamouring for an iPhone-ish experience (which Symbian couldn’t offer), the industry rapidly swung behind Android.

So Elop’s choice was really to go with Android or risk going with the brand new Windows Phone platform. Going with Android may in theory have yielded more revenue, but look at where Android OEMs are today: Sony, HTC and even Samsung are all bleeding red ink. Some day soon, Google will reintroduce its Silver program and try and capture what value there is left in those brands. The Android option would also have been too much of a culture shock for Nokia. Think of Brian Clough at Leeds.

But by choosing to retain more independence than he would have under Android, Elop ran into two problems, as David Wood’s epic insider account of the smartphone wars reminds us, and armchair pundits forget. Windows Phone was very immature and lacked key features, while Nokia was left with a dead-end branch of the platform – leaving it effectively with nothing competitive to sell for almost two years. Only in early 2013 – two years after the Burning Platforms memo and the big switch – was Nokia able to start introducing a range of devices, from high-end flagship imaging phones to budget models.

Talking to dozens of former Nokians, I'm struck by how well-respected Elop was amongst his colleagues. Elop may have sometimes been predictable in interviews, for fear of moving the share price the wrong way. But Nokia’s presentations were a model of good, clear communication, and often full of playful little details people didn’t notice. Nokia made bold design choices that others, notably Apple, have copied. Elop chose the right technologies to promote, too, seeing the potential of the imaging team.

Windows Phone loyalists today haven’t seen a flagship for 18 months, but that’s a pragmatic decision too: the Zen-like consistency of the UI and meagre hardware requirements lend the platform to be a feature phone replacement. The Microsoft merger largely tied his hands: the board wouldn’t sanction expensive splurges on showy flagships like the Lumia 1020 that few people bought. And once in Nadella’s hands, the Nokia phones unit went from bold experiments to continually having to justify its existence.

Elop was actually a pretty good CEO – I’ve no doubt he will be again. ®

- Eric L. -

[zax] Thanks for posting this, Eric.

zax — 10/18/2014 7:08:21 PM

[Eric L] 'Operation Elop' -- New Book on Elop's Nokia ... Two respected British technol...

Eric L — 10/17/2014 4:10:46 PM

'Operation Elop' -- New Book on Elop's Nokia ...

Two respected British technology journalists comment on The new book by Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen of Kauppalehti which has not yet been translated to English.

"One area where blaming Elop was unfair is how badly Microsoft let Nokia down." - Andrew Orlowski -

"However, those they [the authors spoke to were insistent that, despite the claims of many outside the company, Elop was not a 'Trojan horse' with an agenda to make Nokia’s handset business worthless so that Microsoft could buy it cheaply." ... Charles Arthur

>> Of COURSE Stephen Elop's to blame for Nokia woes, says author

'Google did have some unique propositions for Nokia'

Andrew Orlowski
The Register
13 Oct 2014

theregister.co.uk

Interview Operation Elop, a new book on Nokia, got plenty of attention last week, with its suggestion that Nokia’s former CEO was the “worst CEO in history”. After I ridiculed the idea that Elop alone was solely responsible for Nokia’s crash, co-author Pekka Nykänen got in touch to say that isn’t quite fair. So we invited him to talk about what he had found.

“There’s a few things I’d like to tell you that are not mentioned in the international coverage of our book,” says Nykänen.

“We feel that Elop didn’t tell the truth about Nokia’s options at a time," Nykänen opined. "From the negotiations with Google – Elop said Google only offered the standard ‘Welcome to Android’ conditions. But actually, Google did have some unique propositions for Nokia. Google would have bought patents from NOK – and those would have benefited Android.”

Good for Google no doubt, perhaps less so for Nokia. What else?

“Nokia was good at developing new markets and Android was going down in price it would have been a perfect alliance,” says Nykänen. “Nokia would have been the best to deliver it.”

The authors got the idea that Google would have been ready to change its roadmaps to accommodate Nokia.

A corpse rots from the head down

One area where blaming Elop was unfair is how badly Microsoft let Nokia down. It wouldn’t allow Nokia much (if any) customisation; it wouldn’t change its roadmap; its roadmap caused problems with Nokia’s first phones (which couldn’t be updated to Windows Phone 8, which appeared a few months later); and it was out-developed by Google, which added features to Android far quicker. The result was that Nokia had hardly anything to sell for two years.

Nykänen doesn’t disagree. “Nokia could have done anything with Windows Phone,” he says. If it had been allowed to, “they had the best talent to do that. Microsoft was so inflexible to the interests of Nokia, it was totally the wrong match when Windows Phone was selling in the high price point”.

And he agrees the rot set in long before Elop arrived.

“Yes, the responsibility lies heavily there. The organisation got bloated, and the matrix organisation structure meant that everything was in committees, nobody made decisions, and nothing happened. The decision to put touch on top of Symbian was stupid because it kind of closed the gate to any really changes,” he told us.

“The CEO should have been changed earlier and Symbian should have been dismissed earlier.”

Nykänen also highlights the role of Elop’s McKinsey guru - Endre Holen.

“The Burning Platform memo is an old McKinsey thing. Elop invited Holen to sit in on all the management and leadership team meetings. Nokia had 200 people working in strategy but the results were not very good and McKinsey took some of the work, that department was then cut down heavily after Elop arrived.”
Humble pie

Anything positive to say for Elop?

“He had some very good qualities too – and he was a great motivator inside the company. He opened up the culture, which was paralysed after OPK [Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo]. Elop made the company act again – it started to move fast, and customers and operators were happy with the way he worked,” said Nykänen.

“He responded to emails all night. He worked like a maniac. This is also one of the reasons we are sure he was not a Trojan Horse. What was the motive to even have this Trojan Horse inside Nokia? A successful Windows Phone would have been better for Microsoft and better for Elop, it would have made his career.”

The staff interviewed by the authors also found the Canadian “fitted into the Finnish atmosphere well – he was quite humble.. and interested in ice hockey which we like,” but ultimately said he “made very poor decisions.”

As for the sale, Nykänen thinks it was a coup for Nokia:

“They were running out of money,” he notes.

And Microsoft didn’t really want to buy the phones division, but didn’t have a choice not to: it may have lost the OEM that generated over 90 per cent of platform sales. “It was not an easy decision but it was clever. Nokia’s share price has subsequently more than doubled.”

Kallasvuo, Elop’s self-deprecating predecessor, gave an interview earlier this year where he said the circumstances were unprecedented:

“Google and Apple were strong in industries outside mobile communications, who suddenly enter and in a couple of years become market leaders where they have never been before. That is unique in the business history of the world.

“The strategy was correct. The execution very often was difficult, some people, the skills were missing and you have to acquire them…Without good execution even a good strategy is worthless,” he told his interviewer.

The authors of Operation Elop tell us an English translation is on its way. ®

>> Elop was 'wrong man to lead Nokia' says new book on phone company's downfall

‘Operation Elop’ by Finnish journalists says ex-Microsoft executive was not a Trojan horse - but someone else might have been able to save the struggling business

Charles Arthur
The Guardian
8 October 2014

theguardian.com

Stephen Elop wasn’t a Trojan horse brought in from Microsoft to undermine Nokia - but he was “one of the world’s worst” chief executives, according to a new book published in Finland this week.

The book, “Operation Elop”, by journalists from the Finnish daily paper Kauppalehti, makes its harsh assessment of the Canadian who was hired to try to lead the mobile phone, mapping and networks company out of trouble in September 2010 – after an executive hunt that is said to have approached Tim Cook, then chief operating officer at Apple.

Elop was hired instead, lured away from his position at the head of Microsoft’s Office division in Redmond, near Seattle, to run what was then the world’s biggest mobile phone company - but one that was facing serious problems.

“By many measures Elop is one of the world’s worst - if not the worst - chief executives,” declare Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen, the authors, who interviewed more than a hundred people to produce their book.

They say that “Elop was the wrong man to lead Nokia. Someone else could have saved Nokia’s phone business.”

However, those they spoke to were insistent that, despite the claims of many outside the company, Elop was not a “Trojan horse” with an agenda to make Nokia’s handset business worthless so that Microsoft could buy it cheaply.

They also accept that many of the problems cannot be laid only at Elop’s door. Nokia also suffered from an obsession with costs, unclear chains of responsibility and bad executive decisions. “Elop… failed in his attempts to save Nokia,” the writers say. “He made monumental mistakes - but all in good faith. He took massive risks by putting all his eggs in one basket.” That was the decision to go with Windows Phone rather than Google’s Android, or keeping the Symbian software Nokia already used on its smartphones.

To categorise Elop as “one of the worst” CEOs, the authors look at Nokia’s market value before and after Elop took over, when he replaced Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who in the summer had challenged Nokia’s board to “back him or sack him”. One day before Elop took over, the company was worth €29.5bn on the stock market; three years later, as the phone division was sold, its valuation was €11bn.

Nokia’s handset division was sold to Microsoft for €5.4bn in September 2013 after it had fallen into a pattern of lossmaking, and failed to make significant impact on the smartphone market.

The authors charge that Elop’s famous “burning platform” memo “has become a legendary example of how a CEO can destroy everything in just one stroke”. The memo emerged from a jointly-written speech that he gave to senior managers to describe the problems that Nokia’s Symbian software faced by the end of 2010, as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android software drove a new wave of touchscreen phones, to which Nokia had no effective answer.

The choice of Windows Phone was partly advised by the consultants McKinsey, the book claims. Elop is known to have spoken to Google about the possibility of going with Android - but did not, famously leading Google’s Vic Gundotra to tweet that “two turkeys don’t make an eagle” - a reference to a comment by one of Nokia’s executives in 2005 about the proposed merger of BenQ and Siemens’s phone handset divisions. (It flopped.)

They also say that Nokia’s staff did not examine Windows Phone closely enough before choosing it - and only realised after signing the agreement with Microsoft that they would not be able to install it on handsets then priced at €100 which used keypads rather than a touchscreen. Nor could it use a front camera - useful for video calls - and had patchy support for MMS, a carrier standard for sending picture messages. Foreign language support was also patchy - so much so, the authors say, that one engineer thought there were missing pages when he first saw the list of supported languages.

Microsoft is also blamed as being inflexible, even though Nokia was its biggest Windows Phone OEM. ###

- Eic L. -

[zax] Samsung Was Paying About $1 Billion Per Year To Microsoft For Android Patent Dea...

zax — 10/4/2014 3:22:27 PM

Samsung Was Paying About $1 Billion Per Year To Microsoft For Android Patent Deal
By pradeep on October 3, 2014

http://microsoft-news.com/wow-samsung-was-paying-about-1-billion-per-year-to-microsoft-for-android-patent-deal/

We all know that Microsoft has lots of patents licensing deals with lots of Android OEMs. It was previously estimated that Microsoft may be earning over billion dollars in licensing revenue each year from these patents. In the recent court filing from Microsoft in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, it was revealed that Samsung paid more than $1 billion to Microsoft as part of patent royalties. Microsoft has already filed a legal complaint as part of the ongoing contract dispute with Samsung.

As we said at the time we filed our complaint, we began this case for two primary reasons. First, we’ve asked the court to resolve a contract dispute with Samsung. After months of painstaking negotiations by two of the biggest and most sophisticated companies in the world, in 2011 Microsoft and Samsung agreed on the terms of a patent license agreement and a separate business collaboration agreement, the latter of which is unique to our relationship with Samsung and, as explained in paragraph 35 of the complaint, was aimed at promoting the development and sale of Windows smartphones and tablets by Samsung. Samsung has suggested that Microsoft has breached the business collaboration agreement. We disagree, and that’s why we asked the court to rule that Microsoft is not in breach. Second, Microsoft has asked for $6.9 million in damages due to unpaid interest from last year.

Microsoft is confident that their case is strong and that they will be successful. At the same time, Microsoft values and respects their long partnership with Samsung, is committed to it, and expects it to continue.

Microsoft v Samsung Unsealed Suit

[zax] According to a report at The Information ( paywalled), Cyanogen Inc., the compan...

zax — 10/4/2014 3:17:01 PM

According to a report at The Information ( paywalled), Cyanogen Inc., the company trying to commercialize the popular CyanogenMod mobile OS based on Android, recently met with Google's Android chief to talk about an acquisition. The report says Cyanogen turned down Google's offer and instead seeks funding from investors and major tech companies at a valuation around $1 billion. "Cyanogen has told potential investors that it has a deal in place to bring its custom version of the Android OS to India through a manufacturer called Micromax. Alongside Samsung, Micromax currently holds almost as much share of the smartphone market in India, making this deal a very large step to get Cyanogen into the hands of millions of more people. Lastly, the report claims that Cyanogen should be wary of modifying Android too much. During the process, the company must continue to follow Google's compatibility requirements which ensure third-party applications will work on their devices. If those requirements are not met, devices will not be licensed to run Google's services, such as Google Play and other Google applications."

via SlashDot

[zax] Flagship HTC One handset is coming to Windows Phone usatoday.com NEW YORK — Th...

zax — 8/20/2014 6:48:41 PM

Flagship HTC One handset is coming to Windows Phone

usatoday.com

NEW YORK — The HTC One M8 that I reviewed when it appeared in March is one of the finest Android devices out there. It is a beautifully designed handset with a handsome curved all-metal unibody design. The 5-inch display is sweet to look at. The speakers are top notch.

</snip> Read the rest here: usatoday.com

[zax] LG G3 Review: QHD High Res Android Power hothardware.com!56jl0 [youtube video]...

zax — 6/29/2014 6:46:07 PM

LG G3 Review: QHD High Res Android Power

hothardware.com!56jl0

Display: 5.5-inch Quad HD IPS (2560 x 1440, 538ppi)

Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 801 Quad-Core processor up to 2.5 GHz

13MP OIS+ (Optical Image Stabilizer Plus) camera with Laser Auto Focus

Polished metallic skin and "Floating Arc" form factor

Memory: 32GB eMMC ROM / 3GB DDR 3 RAM / microSD slot (128GB)

Camera: Rear 13.0MP with OIS+ and Laser Auto Focus, Dual LED Flash / Front 2.1MP

Battery: 3,000mAh (removable)

Operating System: Android™ 4.4.2 KitKat

Size: 146.3 X 74.6 X 8.95mm

Weight: 149.8g

Network: LTE / HSPA+ 21 Mbps / CDMA

Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 LE (APT-x), NFC,

SlimPort, A-GPS/Glonass, USB 2.0

Color: Metallic Black, Silk White, Shine Gold

Redesigned graphic user interface (GUI): "Simple is the New Smart" concept of the LG G3

Other: 1 Watt Speaker with Boost Amp, Smart Notice, Smart Keyboard, Knock Code™

[Sr K] bloomberg.com

Sr K — 6/20/2014 2:36:56 AM

[Eric L] Amazon's Smartphone Entry (Wednesday? ... >> Amazon's big bet: How a smartphon...

Eric L — 6/16/2014 7:08:52 PM

Amazon's Smartphone Entry (Wednesday? ...

>> Amazon's big bet: How a smartphone intensifies war with Apple, Google

The online retailer treads into new territory that will test its strategy of selling products at cost.

Donna Tam
C|Net
June 16, 2014

cnet.com

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is rolling the dice once more with his riskiest wager yet.

When the Seattle e-commerce giant introduces its smartphone -- which is widely expected to happen at a company-hosted event on Wednesday -- it will be only Amazon's fourth device in the last seven years.

But where its first three products have skirted the edges of mainstream consumer electronic devices -- an e-reader, a budget-priced tablet, and a streaming Internet TV box -- Amazon is now jumping straight into the heart of an industry with the most personal and critical of tech gadgets. In doing so, Bezos is escalating Amazon's fight against Apple and Google for control of the hearts and minds of consumers by combining a branded smartphone with a set of services available through its Prime premium membership.

Amazon's anticipated foray into the smartphone world comes as its fellow tech titans have steadily expanded their own reach beyond devices such as PCs and smartphones, with Apple and Google -- as well as Microsoft and Samsung -- introducing an array of services. Their common goal: to power everything from thermostats to medical equipment to automobiles.

"The great ecosystem war has begun," said Ben Schacter, an analyst with Macquarie Research. "This is going to be a long, hard war with many battles."

For Amazon, it comes back to the smartphone, the one device many people won't leave home without, and its potential to be the remote control for all the other devices in our lives. The company likely sees it as the ultimate hook for its $99-a-year Prime service, which offers members two-day shipping, e-books, movie, and as of last week, a streaming music service. Bezos' bet is that Prime is more effective in keeping customers coming back to Amazon than any single device.

Here lies the company's main weapon. Bezos is more focused on making money off digital content and physical items shoppers buy through its hardware than actually making money off selling the devices.

Yet the e-commerce pioneer is treading into unfamiliar territory. The smartphone world is brutally competitive, with Samsung and Apple at the top of the market.

Amazon's phone is expected to feature 3D technology, enabled by four front-facing cameras, and to come with a service called Prime Data to encourage video and music streaming through the device. But it will take more than a gimmicky technology that hasn't worked in the past for other handset makers to win customers. In line with Amazon's usual hardware strategy, the phone is also expected to have a low price tag, which it needs to compete.

It will go up against the popular, and likely more expensive, Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S franchises at the high end, and an increasing array of affordable, but high-quality smartphones including the Motorola Moto X and Google Nexus 5 for the more budget conscious.

The unique dynamics of the smartphone business will test the company's strategy of selling its products at cost to gain a price advantage.

Still, Amazon has as good a shot as any. The company has spent years turning its Kindle devices into a trusted brand, and it boasts the world's best digital storefront in the Amazon.com homepage.

The man behind the devices

Amazon's ability to break into the smartphone business comes down to Dave Limp, publicly named vice president of devices in April.

While Bezos spells out the vision for the company, Limp's job is to execute upon that vision.

"Every day, when I wake up, I read customer feedback," he told FastCompany, reciting a common mantra among Bezos' top employees. "Some days it's hundreds of emails; others, it's thousands. We get ideas from all of it. The feedback leads to rapid iteration."

A tech veteran who has worked on the Kindle business for the last four years, Limp joined Amazon in 2010 after serving as the chief operating officer of Limbo, a mobile entertainment company. He's worked with hardware before. Prior to Limbo, Limp was the chief strategy officer for Liberate Technologies, a pioneer of using TVs for additional services, like shopping or checking email, and even further back, he was chief strategy officer for Palm's PDA business.

Like Bezos, Limp has both technical expertise as well as business smarts. A graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Limp holds a B.S. degree in computer science and mathematics, and a masters in management.

During his time at Amazon, the company moved from e-readers to Kindle tablets and streaming TV boxes with this year's release of the Fire TV and, now, presumably, to smartphones.

"Our philosophy, which hasn't changed even as we add a third category of devices, is we try to effectively break even on our devices when we sell them," Limp told The Seattle Times at the launch of the Fire TV in April. "We want to make money when customers use the devices."
All about Prime

Getting more customers to subscribe to Prime has been the primary reason behind Amazon's array of products. Amazon doesn't disclose how many Prime members it's garnered, saying only that the official tally of the service is in the "tens of millions."

The original Kindle e-reader drove e-book sales, and it has nearly dismantled the physical book retail industry. Amazon's line of Kindle Fire tablets, which run an altered, or "forked" version of Google's Android mobile operating system that omits key Google apps and services, presents Amazon services up front and even includes its own app store. The $99 Kindle Fire TV box also runs Amazon's variant of Android, and it's designed to take advantage of streaming video and downloaded media from Prime.

Amazon's smartphone is rumored to include a feature that displays images in 3D, which would make sense if the company views the device as an extension of its online store. 3D product images might entice more buyers to buy from their smartphone.

While Prime started as an option for fast, free shipping, Amazon has slowly layered more on top of the service, adding online movies, free e-books, and most recently a streaming music service, in a bid to secure the loyalty of its customer base. The company is highly motivated to sign up more Prime customers, who tend to shop more with the site.

"Every user that buys that device becomes your customer and then you own them," said Topeka Capital Markets analyst Victor Anthony. He estimates that of Amazon's 244 million active customers, roughly 25 million are Prime members.

Amazon's tactics in hardware show that Bezos is willing to bet big. While Apple boasts margins of more than 20 percent on its iPhone and iPad, and Google makes money from the advertising it delivers through its Android mobile OS, Amazon says it's happy to break even -- or even take a loss -- on its gadgets for the chance to win repeat customers who will keep coming back to the company's ecosystem and ultimately spend more money at its store.

Macquarie analyst Jeff Su called this the "Trojan Horse" approach to luring in customers.

Analysts say Bezos' strategy works. Kindle owners spend 30 percent more on Amazon than non-Kindle owners, according to a recent survey of 2,000 Amazon customers conducted by RBC Capital Markets. The results are even better for the company's main attraction: Amazon Prime members spend almost twice as much as non-Prime members.

Risks abound

A key dilemma for Amazon is what the company typically counts as an advantage: price.

Unlike other devices, smartphone pricing is skewed by the subsidies the devices enjoy. In exchange for a two-year contract with a carrier, what would be a $650 iPhone 5S ends up costing the consumer $200.

Even off-contract, there are a number of smartphones that offer plenty of bang for a reasonable buck. Both the Nexus 5 and the Moto X costs $349 unlocked. The Huawei Ascend Mate 2 phablet is available without a contract for $300 at GetHuawei.com.

The rumored Prime Data plan may offer customers an attractive way to save money in step with the growing popularity of streaming media, a service that increases the need for data. But it won't be easy.

Other non-telecom companies, such as ESPN and Disney, have released their own branded phones and services, but ultimately couldn't win enough customers to justify the devices or networks.

"There's a lot of corpses buried in the ground of companies who have tried and failed," said Julie Ask, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Still, there's room for growth in the smartphone market, and Amazon could capture some of the 70 percent of cell phone owners globally who haven't yet switched to a smartphone, according to Anthony, the Topeka Capital Markets analyst. In the US, however, that figure is less than half, with more people snapping up smartphones everyday.

Ultimately, it's not about selling more devices than Apple, or even getting Apple's customers to jump ship. It's about providing consumers with an affordable alternative, Anthony said.

And that goes back to Bezos' game plan: At the end of the day, Amazon doesn't care if it makes money off its devices as long as people shop more on its site.

"Amazon, no matter what ecosystem you use, they want you to buy their products," Anthony said. "Amazon wants you to shop no matter what device it is." ###

- Eric L. -

[Eric L] The Sprint/T-Mobile USA deal ... >> Sprint deal with T-Mobile USA nearing com...

Eric L — 6/6/2014 11:58:14 PM

The Sprint/T-Mobile USA deal ...

>> Sprint deal with T-Mobile USA nearing completion

Mike Hibberd
Telecoms.com
June 5, 2014

telecoms.com

A widely expected deal that will see US operator Sprint acquire its competitor T-Mobile USA is nearing completion, according to a number of reports citing inside sources. News agency Bloomberg said that an agreement on the price, capital structure and termination fee is close and that the deal would value T-Mobile at $40/share, or roughly $31bn. At the time of writing T-Mobile USA was trading at $35.20. The agency suggested a deal could be announced in July.

Such a deal would create an operator with the same scale as market leaders Verizon Wireless and AT&T. A combined Sprint-T-Mobile would have 103.53 million customers according to the latest figures from Informa’s WCIS Plus.

In May it was reported by the Wall Street Journal that German incumbent and T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom (DT) was demanding a $1bn break-up fee be written into any deal with Sprint, which is majority owned by Japan’s Softbank. The payment, from Sprint to Deutsche Telekom, would be required should an agreed deal be derailed; perhaps blocked by regulatory or competition authorities.

DT’s enthusiasm for the pre-nup is based on rewarding experience. In 2011 it walked away from the collapsed $39bn takeover of T-Mobile USA by AT&T with $3bn in cash, substantial spectrum assets and a favourable roaming agreement. It was able to invest that sum into its network and has performed well in subscriber terms since.

And yet the firm’s financial performance has not reflected this trajectory. In Q1 this year, despite claiming to have taken “virtually all of the industry phone growth” in the period, T-Mobile USA posted a $154m loss, down from a $106m profit for the same period in 2013. The firm cited increased customer acquisition costs as having a significant impact on its bottom line.From June 2012 to March 2014 the operator increased its subscriber base by 48 per cent, from 33.17 million to 49.08 million, according to figures from Informa’s WCIS Plus. Over the same period Sprint’s subscriber base dropped by 2.8 per cent to 54.45 million, while AT&T’s grew 10.3 per cent to 116.04 million and Verizon Wireless’ by 9.8 per cent to 121.29 million. ###

- Eric -

[zax] "The Samsung Z will no doubt help to boost the Tizen operating system though. Sa...

zax — 6/2/2014 10:22:52 AM

"The Samsung Z will no doubt help to boost the Tizen operating system though. Samsung already has Tizen-based devices in the market, after it used the operating system for its smartwatches — the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo – and just announced plans to introduce a Tizen-based SDK for smart TV products next month, but seeing it compete on smartphones will be a key test for the new operating system."

The Samsung Z is the world’s first Tizen smartphone, will go on sale in Russia in Q3 2014

thenextweb.com

Samsung has finally announced the world’s first Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z. It will be available in Russia in the third quarter of this year, and Samsung says there are plans to expand it to other markets.

Other than being equipped with the new Linux-based mobile operating system, the Samsung Z comes with a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display and is powered by a 2.3GHz quad-core processor and a 2600mAh battery. It also comes with a built-in fingerprint sensor, which Samsung first introduced in its Galaxy S5 flagship. The Samsung Z has an eight-megapixel rear camera and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera, while it also supports 2D and 3D graphics, and boasts a better scrolling experience and improved rendering performance for web browsing.

Read the rest here: thenextweb.com

[Eric L] Patent Peace? Google & Apple ... [graphic] Apple and Google have reportedly as...

Eric L — 5/17/2014 3:27:49 PM

Patent Peace? Google & Apple ...

Apple and Google have reportedly asked a federal judge to dismiss all patent litigation between the two companies after four years of legal battles.

Reuters discovered filings posted on Friday in a Washington federal appeals court requesting an end to the patent war. The myriad of legal spats were consolidated into a single action back in 2012, and Friday's filing makes it clear that that battle is now over.

"Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies," the companies said in a joint statement.

"Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross license."

Thus ends one of the most rancorous chapters in the patent wars currently being fought in courts around the world. Apple took on Motorola in 2010 as part of Steve Jobs' "thermonuclear war" against Android, with the Apple boss vowing to "spend my last dying breath if I need to."

A year later and he was gone, but Tim Cook and Apple's army of lawyers carried on the fight. Google bought Motorola in 2012, adding some much needed legal protection to the struggling smartphone vendor, and the Chocolate Factory and Apple have been duking it out in the courts ever since.

Judging from the carefully worded statement, this isn't the end of Apple's patent battles. It looks likely that Cupertino will carry on suing its competitors that use Google's operating system, unless some other deal can be struck with vendors such as Samsung.

That looks unlikely. Apple is currently beating Samsung like a red-headed stepchild in the courts, and secured a $120m judgment against the company earlier this month – although that is under appeal.

That sounds good, but the size of the settlement will barely cover Apple's legal bills in the case, and does nothing to stop Samsung from carrying on selling its Android-powered smartphones and fondleslabs.

It may be that Tim Cook, ever a man with an eye on the bottom line, has decided that going up against Google in court would be too expensive and show little financial benefit to Apple in the long term.

Those of you with seismology equipment may want to listen in California for the rumbling sound of Steve Jobs hitting 200rpm in his unmarked grave. ®

- Eric -

[Jurgis Bekepuris] I might buy Firefox phone when I am buying next... though currently company boug...

Jurgis Bekepuris — 2/24/2014 11:09:35 AM

I might buy Firefox phone when I am buying next... though currently company bought a phone for me, so that might last a while... :)

[zax] Firefox OS grows up with bigger, better phones and much faster software By Vla...

zax — 2/23/2014 1:53:26 PM

Firefox OS grows up with bigger, better phones and much faster software
By Vlad Savov on February 23, 2014 10:54 am

theverge.com

ZTE, Huawei, Alcatel, and LG have all brought Firefox OS devices to this year's Mobile World Congress, with the latest generation of both software and hardware looking much more mature, complete, and potentially compelling. Whereas the very first Firefox OS phones had tiny screens with horrible displays and intolerable lag, the 2014 editions are much smoother in operation and more attractive in look and feel. Alcatel is leading the charge with three new handsets and a Fire 7 tablet, while ZTE is introducing the Open C and Open II phones.

Mozilla is aiming for a $25 smartphone

Handling the new devices with the latest version of the platform is like a night and day experience compared to prior Firefox OS smartphones. Apps open up much quicker, there is little to no input lag, and the browser is something that is actually usable for viewing websites on the go. Underpinning Firefox OS' on-device search is EverythingMe, which provides contextual results from the device and the web when you search for something like music.

The ZTE Open C's display is much larger and higher resolution than we've seen on Firefox OS phones before, and while it won't give a high-end Android phone anything to worry about, it does at least feel modern enough to be called a smartphone. Overall, the whole platform feels as if it's grown up a lot in the past year, and Firefox has addressed many of the performance complaints we had at its initial launch.

[Eric L] The Openness of Android (Paul Thurrott) ... >> Android Is Not Really Open, Sec...

Eric L — 2/13/2014 4:53:51 PM

The Openness of Android (Paul Thurrott) ...

>> Android Is Not Really Open, Secret Documents Reveal

Don't be evil, indeed

Paul Thurrott
Windows IT Pro
February 13, 2014

windowsitpro.com

A recent leak of internal Google documents reveals that Google's dominant Android mobile OS isn't "open" or "open source," as the company claims. Indeed, licensing Android comes with a complex web of requirements that binds the hardware maker's devices to Google's extensive collection of online services and forces them to use Google apps as the default.

Put simply, Google is engaging in exactly the same product-bundling practices that got Microsoft in antitrust trouble around the world. But it is doing so with a far more invasive suite of services.

"In order to obtain key mobile apps, including Google's own Search, Maps, and YouTube, manufacturers must agree to install all the apps Google specifies, with the prominence Google requires, including setting these apps as default where Google instructs," Harvard University professor Ben Edelman writes in a blog post explaining Google's practices. "It's a classic tie and an instance of full line forcing: If a phone manufacturer wants any of the apps Google offers, it must take the others also."

The timing of this revelation is interesting, as European Union (EU) antitrust officials, having accepted a settlement of Google's sweeping antitrust charges related to search, are now investigating Android. I've alleged that Google has effectively "dumped" Android in the market—selling or licensing the mobile OS below cost, or at no cost, in order to quickly gain market share and illegally harm competition—but these documents reveal a new layer of wrongdoing: Google's agreements with hardware makers also come with important and potentially illegal strings attached.

With an ever-rising 80 percent market share in smartphones and 62 percent in tablets, Google is the dominant mobile computing platform and the obvious heir apparent to Windows, which still dominates the PC world. But there are many questions swirling around Android, including multiple accusations of intellectual property and design theft. Many believe that Android's dominance has come both unfairly and illegally.

The leaked documents hint at how Google monetizes something that is ostensibly free (not to mention "open," which it is not): Google requires hardware makers to agree to a Mobile Application Distribution Agreement, previously undisclosed publicly, that numerous Google mobile apps must be preinstalled on devices, that Google Search must be set as the default search provider, and that Search and Play Store icons must appear "immediately adjacent" to the home screen, with the other Google apps appearing no more than one screen swipe away. Because search is the main conduit for Google's only actual source of revenues—advertising—much of an Android user's daily activities feeds the Google financial engine.

In case it's not obvious, an intentional side effect of these requirements is that it places Google competitors, including Microsoft's Bing, at a disadvantage. And the only way to avoid the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement is to replace key Google services and create your own mobile app store—prospects that are obviously difficult and expensive, and beyond the capabilities of most companies. (Only Amazon has done so, and its store is a tiny fraction of the size of Google's.) Thus, Android licensees are locked into Google's web, as are Android users.

Professor Edelman ably explains how this practice harms everyone but Google: its partners, its competitors, and consumers. Even if a phone maker believes a competing mapping or search provider is better for consumers, they can't use it without losing access to all of the other Google services that make Android usable. This agreement "surpresses competition," he writes, because "alternative vendors of search, maps, location, email, and other apps cannot outcompete Google on merit even if a competitor offers an app that's better than Google's offering." And "consumers do not benefit when Google prevents phone manufacturers from installing apps in whatever combination consumers prefer."

Most chillingly, this product tying gives Google's weaker and otherwise uncompetitive services—Google Checkout, Google+, Google Shopping, Google Products, and so on—artificial prominence that could over time drive out the products and services that legally established themselves in their respective markets.

He cites Google Checkout as an example.

"Reaching users a decade after Paypal and competing with Paypal's huge user base, by ordinary measures Checkout should have been entirely stillborn," Edelman notes. "Indeed, Checkout's growth has been slow. But what would have happened if, rather than featuring a special logo only for AdWords advertisers who joined Checkout, Google had shown such logos for all popular payment intermediaries? Surely equal treatment of Checkout versus competitors would have reduced Checkout's adoption and harmed Checkout's relative prospects. Yet equal treatment would have provided consumers with timely and actionable information, and would have facilitated genuine competition on the merits."

That's Android, folks: everything that antitrust regulators complained about with Windows, but worse. And as a reminder, Microsoft was originally threatened with a breakup order in the United States for its own anticompetitive behavior. I'm curious to see what antitrust regulators think of this hairball. ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Forking Android: Ars Technica's Peter Bright Opines and Defines the Issues ... ...

Eric L — 2/8/2014 8:47:47 AM

Forking Android: Ars Technica's Peter Bright Opines and Defines the Issues ...

>> Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android. It’s unforkable.

Canning Windows Phone and using Android would be a huge mistake.

Peter Bright
Ars Technica
February 8, 2014

arstechnica.com

As happens from time to time, the suggestion has been made that Microsoft cancel Windows Phone, and instead fork Android. It's not the first time this suggestion has been made. It's probably not the last, either.

It's a poor idea. Google has worked to make Android functionally unforkable, with no practical way to simultaneously fork the platform and take advantage of its related strengths: abundant developers, and abundant applications.

The outline of the "Microsoft should fork Windows Phone" argument is as follows: Windows Phone doesn't have huge developer buy-in or sales success, but Android has both. By forking Android, Microsoft could provide unique value—corporate integration with things like Exchange, Active Directory, and System Center or InTune; full Office support; a polished user experience—and make the platform depend on its own cloud services (Bing, Bing Maps, Azure) rather than Google's. But simultaneously, it would still have access to all the Android applications that people depend on.

The result should be a platform that's somehow more attractive to consumers, by virtue of the Android brand and all those Android apps, more attractive to developers thanks to the Android APIs, and cheaper for Microsoft to develop, since core operating system development can be left to Google.

Where this falls down is that there's no good way to use the Android platform this way. It's not designed for it. In fact, with each new Android release, Google is making a forked operating system less and less viable.

Not-very-open source

Broadly speaking, Google produces two big chunks of code. The first is the Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) codebase. This provides the basic bones of a smartphone operating system: it includes Android's version of the Linux kernel, the Dalvik virtual machine, and portions of the basic user interface (settings app, notification panel, lock screen). This part is licensed under a mix of the GPL and Apache license. Google produces periodic code release of these open source parts, though has been criticized for performing the actual development largely behind closed doors.

The second chunk is called the Google Mobile Services (GMS). (Or at least, sometimes it's called GMS. Sometimes it's called just Google Services, and sometimes it's Google Play or Google Play Apps; GMS is what it's called in the code, though, so that seems to be the most common name). This has two big portions. The Google Play Services provides a wealth of APIs and system services: APIs for Google Maps, Location, and in-app purchasing; Google+ integration; Remote Wipe; Malware scanning; and more. Then there's the Play Store collection of apps: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, and many more.

The GMS has a few important features. GMS isn't open source. Anyone can take AOSP and slap it on a phone. That's not true of GMS. To get GMS, the device has to meet certain technical requirements (performance, screen resolution, and so on), and it has to pass validation. Though Google says that the GMS suite is itself free, the validation process isn't, with reports that it costs around $0.75 per device.

GMS also seems not to be divisible: if your phone passes the GMS validation and can include GMS, it includes everything: both Play Services, and the various Google-branded apps that use those services.

The split between AOSP and GMS is not constant, either. Google has slowly been migrating more and more functionality to GMS. For example, in the latest Nexus 5, the core phone user interface—the thing that you use to launch apps and show icons—has been rolled into the GMS Search app.

Similarly, APIs have made the move. AOSP contains a location API, but GMS contains a newer, better one, with additional features. Google encourages developers to use the GMS API, and the AOSP Location API mostly dates back to Android 1.0, and hasn't seen any substantial changes since Android 1.5. The result is that many third-party applications are not merely "Android" applications: they're GMS applications, and won't run without the proprietary, non-open Google software.

Four ways to do Android

There are four ways that hardware builders can use Android on their phones.

The first is the way that Google really wants companies to use Android: by relying both on AOSP and GMS. Pass the certification, include all the Google services and Google apps. That's what companies like Samsung and HTC and LG do. Going this route still provides some facility for the OEM to customize. OEMs can provide their own apps to sit alongside the Google ones, for example. It appears that Google isn't completely happy about this—there are reports that the company recently made an agreement with Samsung whereby Samsung would reduce the amount of customization of the user interface and deprioritize or remove its apps that competed directly with Google-branded equivalents.

Taking this path provides the best compatibility with third-party applications by ensuring that they have both AOSP and GMS APIs available to them. It also provides the most consistent experience: in spite of the various customizations that are done, it means that Google's apps will be available, and those apps will work the same way on any AOSP+GMS device.

It also cedes most control to Google, and that level of control will only grow. Each new release increases the level of integration with Google's own services, and Google is moving more and more new functionality to GMS, leaving AOSP a barebones husk.

At the other end of the spectrum, you can ignore GMS entirely. Ship a phone with AOSP and perhaps some custom software on top of it to make the experience a little less rough for users, and call the job done. At the very cheapest end of the market, there are companies doing precisely this. If they choose, OEMs can provide their own stores and other services to fill the many, many gaps that omitting GMS leaves, but they're always at a disadvantage relative to GMS devices, because they won't be compatible with any third-party applications that use GMS' APIs. That's not a small category, either, since features such as in-app purchasing are in GMS.

The third option is the one that spans the two: ship a device with AOSP, and an equivalent to GMS that provides new implementations of substantially the same APIs. Provide workalike replacements for services such as location and mapping, but plumb into Microsoft services rather than Google ones. No company has really gone down this route. The closest is Amazon, which provides near-drop-in replacements for some Google APIs (in particular mapping), but which hasn't even begun to keep pace with GMS development in general.

Technically, however, a company with sufficient development resources could provide its own GMS replacement. The overhead would be not insignificant, especially as—to ensure optimal compatibility—the replacement would have to replicate not just correct functioning, but any bugs or quirks of the GMS implementation.

There are also lots of little awkward aspects of the GMS API; it includes such capabilities as "share with Google+" which few companies have any real counterpart to. Another example: there is an API for handling turn-based multiplayer gaming. A company could implement this API and have its own server infrastructure for managing the gaming sessions, but obviously these gaming sessions would be completely separate from Google's gaming sessions, fragmenting the player base in a way that game developers are unlikely to be keen on.

As an added bonus, should the ultimate resolution of Google's long-running legal battle with Oracle be that APIs are, in fact, copyrightable, this kind of wholesale reimplementation of GMS would become legally actionable. Google could, if it chose to, shut it down through the courts.

To these three options, one could perhaps add a fourth: use AOSP to provide a few essential services—support for hardware, telephony, and so on—but then build an entirely new platform and APIs to run on it. Aspects of Amazon's API support would fall into this category, with some of its APIs covering the same ground as GMS APIs, but in a completely different, incompatible way. It's not clear, however, that any manufacturer has entirely embraced this path, though one might argue that Ubuntu for Android is similar, at least in spirit.

You can have compatibility or control: Not both

The first of these options—AOSP with GMS—is the only option that provides the full Android experience. It's the only one that ensures developers can transfer their skills perfectly, the only one that ensures that the full breadth and variety of Android software is available. However, it's clearly not a good option for Microsoft, given that it would almost entirely cede control of the platform to Google—and judging by the advertising company's track record, it would cede even more control with each new Android release.

The second option—AOSP with a few extra custom extras—has the upside of providing an opportunity for Microsoft to integrate its own services. It would support some Android software, though exactly how much is unclear. It would certainly mean omitting any high-profile title using in-app purchasing, so, say, Plants vs. Zombies 2 or the latest iteration of Angry Birds would be out. If one were building a feature phone platform, this may be a somewhat reasonable path to take. When the phone is only really built for running the built-in apps (camera, browser, e-mail) the fact that many Android apps would be incompatible doesn't really matter.

The rumors of a Nokia-built Android phone suggest this kind of approach: AOSP under the hood, but with Nokia services, not Google ones, on top.

However, it's important to understand just how deficient this kind of device would be. Google has pushed very significant pieces of functionality into GMS, including messaging and the Chrome browser. The AOSP counterparts are buggy, feature deprived, and by at least some accounts, barely maintained. If a company wants to use AOSP without GMS, it has a lot of work to do if it wants to produce a high quality experience. The open source parts just aren't good enough.

Amazon's Kindle experience also demonstrates how even having an Android-like AOSP-derived platform is challenging. Kindle doesn't have the latest and greatest Android games, because their various developers haven't bothered making non-GMS versions of their games, even though the Kindle platform is very similar to Google's. In other words, the application challenge already faced by Windows Phone isn't solved by using AOSP. The only way to solve the application issue is to be not merely an AOSP platform but a GMS platform.

The third option—AOSP with a home-grown GMS equivalent—would solve this, but it would also maximize the development effort required by the forker. Providing equivalents to every GMS capability ensures at least that users get a decent experience. It would also reinstate the software compatibility that AOSP without GMS forfeits.

But this is a huge undertaking. For Microsoft, the effort required to build a GMS workalike on top of AOSP is going to be comparable to the effort required to build the Windows Phone shell and APIs on top of Windows. In fact, it's likely to be somewhat greater: Microsoft already has, for example, a browser engine that runs on Windows. It doesn't have one that runs on AOSP.

Moreover, it still implicitly gives Google control over the platform. Various aspects of how Android is used are determined by the underlying APIs: sharing between applications, for example, is done in a particular Android way. Any platform using Android in this way would have only a limited ability to take the platform in a different direction from the one Google chose.

The fourth option—use AOSP with an entirely new software stack on top—gives freedom and flexibility, but to what end? The kernel isn't the important bit. Microsoft already has a smartphone kernel. Windows Phone 8 already uses it. And strikingly, for Microsoft, ditching Windows Phone doesn't mean that the company can ditch development of this kernel. It's already being developed—for Windows! The kernel isn't the hard part.

Fork off

If Android were an open platform in the way that Firefox OS or Ubuntu for smartphones were an open platform, the forking suggestion would make more sense. The AOSP/GMS split wouldn't exist. Everything would be in AOSP, so piecemeal substitution of back-end services without having to reinvent vast tracts of code and without any major compatibility implications would be practical.

But it isn't. Not only is it not this kind of an open platform, but Google is actively working to make it functionally less open with each new release. The result is that a forker has to make a choice: they can give Google control and get the all the upsides of the platform, or they can snatch control from Google and get almost none of them.

Android isn't designed to be forked. With GMS, Google has deliberately designed Android to resist forking. Suggestions that Microsoft scrap its own operating system in favor of such a fork simply betray a lack of understanding of the way Google has built the Android platform. ###

- Eric -

[Uncle Frank] There's a new player in the phone business, Eric... Western. They've targeted t...

Uncle Frank — 1/5/2014 12:26:07 PM

There's a new player in the phone business, Eric... Western. They've targeted the younger demographic, and their revolutionary design doesn't require batteries!

[Eric L] Huawei Moving Upstream While Downsizing Its Smartphone Model base ... [graphic...

Eric L — 12/19/2013 12:59:43 PM

Huawei Moving Upstream While Downsizing Its Smartphone Model base ...

>> Huawei keeps its eye on higher end of phone market

wantchinatimes.com

-- Huawei executive Shao Yang (File photo/Chiu Wan-ren) --

Despite the hot sales of Chinese budget phone brand Xiaomi, leading Chinese mobile phone producer Huawei plans to keep its focus on the higher end of the market by bringing out one or two models priced at 2,600 yuan (US$430), competing directly with market leaders Samsung and Apple, said Shao Yang, vice president for terminal marketing of Huawei, on Dec. 12.

Shao made the remark at a year-end press conference in Beijing, in response to the news that Xiaomi had sold 10,000 of its low-priced Hongmi (Red Rice) phones in just 10 minutes in Taiwan last week.

Shao noted that Xiaomi has performed outstandingly well with its unique marketing approach and focus on a few "hot items," taking advantage of the desire of consumers for something different.

While Huawei is not considered as exciting as Xiaomi in the Greater China market, the brand is excelling in extending its global appeal, according to Shao, who added the company achieved remarkable sequential sales growth in many international markets worldwide in the third quarter, including 140% in Latin America, 50% in Southeast Asia, 45% in Western Europe, 45% in Russia and 50% in Africa.

Huawei plans to downsize its product range next year, when it will roll out only 10 or so models across the price spectrum, with one or two bearing a price tag of 2,600 yuan but boasting performance comparable to the high-end models of Samsung and Apple, Shao said.

Shao said Huawei will continue expanding in the US despite the company's well-publicized complications with the US government, saying that one advantage of overseas markets is that they work in line with commercial rules, rather than politics. ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Dogfight: Apple v Google ... [graphic] amazon.com The article below was exc...

Eric L — 12/19/2013 12:14:16 PM

Dogfight: Apple v Google ...

amazon.com

The article below was excerpted and adapted from the second chapter of Fred Vogelstein’s "Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution" (272 pages) which was published in hardcover. paperback, and a Kindle edition (which I purchased from Amazon but have not yet read) last month.

>> The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android

Google was building a secret mobile product to fend off chief rival Microsoft. Then Apple announced the iPhone, and everything changed.

Fred Vogelstein
The Atlantic
December 18, 2013

theatlantic.com

In 2005, on Google’s sprawling, college-like campus, the most secret and ambitious of many, many teams was Google’s own smartphone effort—the Android project. Tucked in a first-floor corner of Google’s Building 44, surrounded by Google ad reps, its four dozen engineers thought that they were on track to deliver a revolutionary device that would change the mobile phone industry forever.

By January 2007, they’d all worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code, negotiating software licenses, and flying all over the world to find the right parts, suppliers, and manufacturers. They had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year . . . until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.

Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”

For most of Silicon Valley—including most of Google—the iPhone’s unveiling on January 9, 2007 was something to celebrate. Jobs had once again done the impossible. Four years before he’d talked an intransigent music industry into letting him put their catalog on iTunes for ninety-nine cents a song. Now he had convinced a wireless carrier to let him build a revolutionary smartphone. But for the Google Android team, the iPhone was a kick in the stomach.

“What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.”

***

The cell phone industry in 2005 was the perfect example of a hairy Google-size problem. The software industry for mobile phones was one of the most dysfunctional in all technology. There wasn’t enough wireless bandwidth for users to surf the Internet on a phone without frustration. Phones weren’t powerful enough to run anything but rudimentary software. But the biggest problem, as Jobs had learned, was that the industry was ruled by an oligopoly: Few companies besides the carriers and the phone makers were writing software for phones, and what existed was terrible. Wireless bandwidth would improve and phone chips would get more powerful; but back then it looked as if the carriers and phone makers would control it all

“We had done a deal with Vodafone [the big European carrier] to try to get Google search on their phones,” said one top Google executive who would not give his name. “But the search they offered us was that we could put some results on, but that they would control most of them, and that our results would be at the bottom of every query. They didn’t have a good mobile browser. Ring-tones [that they were selling] sometimes got prioritized in search results. All the carriers were doing this. They thought they could provide all the services inside a walled garden [as AOL had in the 1990s], and that this control was the best way to make money.

The reason few developers built software for mobile phones was because anytime they tried, they lost money. There was no standardization in the industry. Virtually every phone ran its own software and set of applications, meaning software written for a Samsung phone often wouldn’t run on a Motorola phone, which wouldn’t run on a Nokia. Software platforms were incompatible even within companies. For example, there were a handful of different versions of Symbian. Put simply, the mobile industry screamed “money pit” to any enterprising developer. Most stayed away. The most lucrative business was not writing apps for phones. It was owning a testing company that would make sure your apps worked on all the phones in the market. Larry Page has never been shy talking about how frustrating those days were for him and Google.

“We had a closet full of over 100 phones [that we were developing software for], and we were building our software pretty much one device at a time,” he said in his 2012 report to shareholders. In various remarks over the years he has described the experience as both “awful” and “incredibly painful.”

But Page and the rest of Google’s executives knew that someone would figure out the mobile business eventually, and they were particularly concerned that that company would be Microsoft. Back then, Microsoft was still the richest and most powerful technology company in the world, and it was finally getting traction with its Windows CE mobile phones and software. Windows CE smartphones were still a niche market, but if consumers took to the platform en masse as they did later with the iPhone, Google’s entire business could be in jeopardy.

This wasn’t an exaggeration. Back then, Microsoft and Google were in the midst of a nasty battle of their own for dominance in search, and for top dog in the tech world. After two decades of being the first-choice workplace of top engineering talent, Microsoft was now losing many of those battles to Google. Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer had made it clear they took Google’s challenge personally. Gates seemed particularly affected by it. Once or twice he made fun of the way Page and his Google cofounder Sergey Brin dressed. He said their search engine’s popularity was “a fad.” Then, in the same breath he would issue the ultimate compliment saying that of all his competitors over the years Google was the most like Microsoft.

Google executives were convinced that if Windows on mobile devices caught on, Microsoft would interfere with users’ access to Google search on those devices in favor of its own search engine. The U.S. government’s successful antitrust trial against Microsoft in the 1990s made it difficult for the company to use its monopoly on desktops and laptops to bully competitors. It could not, for example, make Microsoft’s the default search engine in Windows without giving users a choice between its search engine and those from Google, Yahoo, and others.

However, on smartphones, few rules governed how fiercely Microsoft could compete. It didn’t have a monopoly there. Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines. This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google’s search engine and began using a competitor’s such as Microsoft’s, Google’s business would quickly run aground. Google made all its money back then from the search ads that appeared next to its search results. “It’s hard to relate to that [fear of Microsoft] now, but at the time we were very concerned that Microsoft’s mobile strategy would be successful,” Schmidt said in 2012 during testimony in the Oracle v. Google copyright trial.

***
On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.

“Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”

What the Android team had been working on, a phone code-named Sooner, sported software that was arguably more revolutionary than what had just been revealed in the iPhone. In addition to having a full Internet browser, and running all of Google’s great web applications, such as search, Maps, and YouTube, the software was designed not just to run on Sooner, but on any smartphone, tablet, or other portable device not yet conceived. It would never need to be tethered to a laptop or desktop. It would allow multiple applications to run at the same time, and it would easily connect to an online store of other applications that Google would seed and encourage. By contrast, the iPhone needed to connect to iTunes regularly, it wouldn’t run more than one application at a time, and in the beginning it had no plans to allow anything resembling an application store.

However, the Sooner phone was ugly. It looked like a Black-Berry, with a traditional keyboard and a small screen that wasn’t touch-enabled. Rubin and his team, along with partners HTC and T-Mobile, believed consumers would care more about the great software it contained than its looks. This was conventional wisdom back then. Revolutionary phone designs rarely succeeded. The Nokia N-Gage, which in 2003 tried to combine a gaming system with a phone and email device, often gets mentioned here. RIM had become one of the dominant smartphone makers on the planet by making BlackBerry’s unadorned functionality one of its main selling points: you got a phone, an incredible keyboard, secure email, all in one indestructible package.

The iPhone, in contrast, was not only cool looking, but it used those cool looks to create entirely new ways to interact with a phone—ways that Android engineers either hadn’t thought possible or had considered too risky. By using a virtual keyboard and replacing most real buttons with software-generated buttons on a big touchscreen, every application could now have its own unique set of controls. Play, Pause, and Stop buttons only appeared if you were listening to music or watching video. When you went to type a web address into the browser, the keyboard appeared, but it disappeared when you hit Enter. Without the physical keyboard taking up half the phone, the iPhone had a screen twice the size of virtually every other phone on the market. It all worked the same way whether the user held the phone in portrait or landscape mode. Apple had installed an accelerometer to use gravity to tell the phone how to orient the screen.

A lot was wrong with the first iPhone too. Rubin and the Android team—along with many others—did not think users would take to typing on a screen without the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard. That is why the first Android phone—the T-Mobile G1 from HTC, nearly two years later—had a slide-out keyboard. But what was also undeniable to the Android team was that they had underestimated Jobs. At the very least, Jobs had come up with a new way of interacting with a device— with a finger instead of a stylus or dedicated buttons—and likely a lot more. “We knew that Apple was going to announce a phone. Everyone knew that. We just didn’t think it would be that good,” said Ethan Beard, one of Android’s early business development executives.

Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus. Its launch was pushed out a year until fall 2008. Engineers started drilling into it all the things the iPhone didn’t do to differentiate their phone when launch day did occur. Erick Tseng, then Android’s project manager, remembers suddenly feeling the nervous excitement of a pending public performance. Tseng had joined Google the year before out of Stanford business school after Eric Schmidt, himself, sold him on the promise of Android.

“I never got the feeling that we should scrap what we were doing—that the iPhone meant game over. But a bar had been set, and whatever we decided to launch, we wanted to make sure that it cleared the bar.” ###

About the Author: Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes about the tech and media industries. He has been a staff writer for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News & World Report. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

While reader reviews of 'Dogfight' are generally quite positive The New York Times Sunday book review by Siva Vaidhyanathan is less so ...

"... Some books about technology emphasize the people responsible for firms and innovations. Others analyze the consequences of innovation. Vogelstein, a diligent and prolific journalist for Wired magazine, fails on both counts. As he concedes in an afterword, Apple offered him no access to its executives. As for Google, Vogelstein has interviewed Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and some project leaders and engineers for his Wired articles — but not Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This book breaks no news and recycles much of what Steven Levy wrote in the best book to date about Google, “In the Plex,” and what Walter Isaacson revealed in his huge biography of Steve Jobs. ... The next 10 years in Silicon Valley could be even more interesting and influential than the past 10 years. “Dogfight” might have served as a primer on the issues, personalities and technologies to watch. Instead, it’s a stale account of very familiar events and very famous men."

# # #

- Eric -

[Eric L] Samsung Integrates Smartphones and Camera Businesses within IM (IT/Mobile) ... ...

Eric L — 12/15/2013 9:01:48 AM

Samsung Integrates Smartphones and Camera Businesses within IM (IT/Mobile) ...

-- Samsung’s Galaxy NX Camera --

english.etnews.com

Samsung Electronics integrated the Digital Imaging Business Division, in charge of cameras, with the Wireless Business Division. Samsung Electronics began to create synergies between smartphones and cameras in a bid to capture the largest share of the global mirrorless camera market in 2015. Also, earlier this year, the company created the Enterprise Business (EB) Team, and turned the global B2B Center into a quasi-business division. Its intention is to reinforce B2B sales as the consumer goods market is saturated.

Samsung Electronics executed the reorganization on December 11.

Samsung Electronics maintained the 3-company business system: vice-chairman Kwon Oh-hyeon (DS: Device Solution), CEO Yoon Boo-geun (CE: consumer electronics) and Shin Jong-gyun (IM: IT Mobile). Global economic recession continues, but they performed excellently. We need to keep an eye on the IM Company during this organizational realignment. Samsung Electronics removed the Digital Imaging Business Division in charge of cameras. Samsung Electronics reshuffled it into the Imaging Business Team, and plans to make full use of the Wireless Business Division which has the leadership in the global market.

Samsung Electronics explained, “We will transplant the brand, sales networks, software competency and manufacturing competitiveness of the Wireless Business Division into the Camera Business Division, and integrate the technical know-how of the two business divisions into competency for differentiating our smartphones.” To increase its share of the camera market, it will take advantage of the networks and marketing know-how of the Wireless Business Division and enhance the camera competitiveness of smartphones at the same time. Under the Media Solution Center of the IM Company, Samsung Electronics created the Big Data Center. It looks like a measure to actively respond to changes in trends by means of Big Data analysis. Some business divisions, such as the Washing Machine Business Division, have already capitalized on the Big Data analysis technique to produce visible outcomes.

The DS Company will enhance its research competency. Its intention is to find future revenue generators like memory solutions, application processors (AP) and foundries. To this end, the Solution Development Office and the Modem Development Office were created in the Memory Business Division and the System LSI Business Division respectively.

Just a year after the establishment of the EB Team, the global B2B Center was elevated to a quasi-business division. It means that the company is reinforcing its overseas B2B sales and marketing. It looks like a measure to improve the profitability of the CE and IM Company. A Samsung Electronics insider said, “As it became a quasi-business division, manpower will be greatly increased.” Samsung Electronics, which has been concentrating on the consumer goods market, has been reinforcing B2B sales since 2011, and began to produce visible results this year. “The B2B Company is improving evenly in major markets around the world,” said a high-ranking Samsung Electronics official. “It is raising its market share by bringing B2B lineups to the market with a high level of reliability and brand awareness.” A representative example is that the Large Format Display (LFD) company saw its global market share go up from 12.0% in 2011 and 18.3% in 2012 to 25.5% in the first half of this year.

In the personnel shake-up, which was carried out on the same day, 5 out of 10 regional directors were transferred. Lee jong-seok, director in charge of North America (vice-president) will also serve as CEO of Samsung Telecommunications America (STA). Bae Gyeong-tae, director in charge of the Middle East (vice-president) will become director in charge of Korea, and Lee Chung-ro, executive director of the Digital Appliance Business Division, will become the director in charge of the Middle East.

Kim Seok-pil, vice-president in charge of Europe, will serve as head of the global marketing office and head of the global B2B Center, and Lee Seon-woo, head of the video strategy marketing team (vice-president) of the VD Business Division, will take charge of Europe. Lee Seon-woo will be replaced by Park Gwang-gi, vice-president in charge of Southeast Asia, who will, in turn, be substituted by Kim Moon-soo, executive director of Strategy Team 1 of the Future Strategy Office.

The vacant position of the HR Support Team will be filled by Park Yong-gi, executive director in charge of the HR Support Team of the Future Strategy Office, and Nam Gung-beom will become head of the Finance Team. Oh Gyeong-seok, vice-president in charge of the Development Office of the LED Business Division will take the helm as head of the LED Business Division. ###

>> Samsung Merges Camera And Smartphone Business Units For Tighter Synergy

Dave Altavilla
Forbes
12/13/2013

forbes.com

There’s absolutely no denying that mobile phone cameras are more than just a check-box item but have actually moved to the forefront of a product’s feature set for many consumers. Apple's AAPL -1.1% iSight cameras in the iPhone have been sort of an industry watermark for quality and performance for a long time, while Android and Windows Phone devices have tried to play catch-up. More recently Nokia and Microsoft MSFT -1.42% have stepped up their game with the impressive optics and sensor combination of the Lumia 1020 and even the more standard setup of the Lumia 925 can offer imaging better than most Android phones on the market currently. However, it appears that Samsung has been taking notes and made a move just yesterday, to bring the company’s full resources to bear in an effort to make a better smartphone camera and potentially to sell a few more digital cameras as well.

In a news release at Korea’s etnews.com [above], Samsung announced that the company is merging their camera and mobile phone business units in order to cross-pollinate technology, IP base, manufacturing and marketing capabilities between the two divisions. Specifically, Samsung noted ” We will transplant the brand, sales networks, software competency and manufacturing competitiveness of the Wireless Business Division into the Camera Business Division, and integrate the technical know-how of the two business divisions into competency for differentiating our smartphones.” In turn, Samsung’s Camera BU will tap into the Mobile Phone division’s vast marketing resources to better push Samsung digital cameras in the market as well.

The move makes sense and Samsung has been tap-dancing around with the two product camps for a while, introducing devices like the Galaxy NX prosumer camera that merges an Android engine and large touch display into a single package for on-board image processing and easy social sharing. And of course there is the Galaxy S4 Zoom that basically sticks a 16MP sensor and 10X optical zoom lens on the back of Samsung’s darling top-end smartphone.

It will be interesting to see what Samsung brings forth in next-generation smartphone designs as the new combined entity, which is already up and running reportedly, pools its resources to improve Samsung’s mobile digital imaging experience. Point-and-shoot cameras are becoming more and more an endangered species it seems, as smartphone camera image quality and capability continues to evolve and improve. Regardless, you won’t see me letting go of my DSLR camera anytime soon. Smartphone cameras would have to come a long way before I’d trust special moment shots and real work photography to any device that fits in my pocket. That said, for “good enough” and on-the-go snaps, those compact point and shoot cameras are becoming less interesting every day.

- Eric -

[Eric L] comScore's US Smartphone Subscriber Base Share for 3/mo average ending October ...

Eric L — 12/6/2013 8:41:35 AM

comScore's US Smartphone Subscriber Base Share for 3/mo average ending October 2013 ...

Reston, VA, December 5, 2013: comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from comScore MobiLens and Mobile Metrix, reporting key trends in the U.S. smartphone industry for October 2013. Apple ranked as the top smartphone manufacturer with 40.6 percent OEM market share, while Google Android led as the #1 smartphone platform with 52.2 percent platform market share. Google Sites ranked as the top mobile media property, while Facebook was the top individual app.

<skip>

###

- Eric L. -

[Eric L] El Reg Company Feature: ARM Holdings and the silicon IP that powers smartphones,...

Eric L — 11/29/2013 10:22:42 AM

El Reg Company Feature: ARM Holdings and the silicon IP that powers smartphones, tablets, and ...

theregister.co.uk

The chip designers at ARM Holdings have turned the computing world upside down, shaken Intel to its core, pulled AMD into its orbit, and broadened its range beyond mobile into every nook and cranny of the digital world, from toys to servers.

But where did this UK wonder company come from? How does it earn its living? And how did Apple help create the company that helped Steve Jobs save Cupertino from annihilation?

At the recent ARM TechCon developers conference, ARM's training and education manager Chris Shore answered those questions and more – such as what "ARM" stands for.

"ARM doesn't stand for anything," he said. "Officially, it stands for nothing. It used to stand for Advanced RISC Machines, which was the company's first name on its foundation. Prior to that it stood for something else – it stood for the Acorn RISC Machine, because the original architecture was actually designed by another company, called Acorn."

However, when ARM joined the NASDAQ and London's FTSE stock exchanges in 1998, the name was officially changed to ARM – which stands for, well, just ARM.

Shore said that he continues to be asked whether ARM makes chips – which, of course, they don't. They create and license designs for a broad range of chips. "If you phone us up and say, 'I'd love to buy a Cortex-A9, how much are they, please?' we can't quote you for a single device or even 10,000 devices – you'll have to go to someone like TI or Freescale or Samsung, who actually license and produce the chips, in order to buy one," he said.

"But we could quote you several tens of milions of dollars for a license to build one of your own, if you wanted to."

He also said that many people are surprised that ARM is a UK company [Some anti-UK prejudice, y'think? — Ed.], seeing as how they play in an industry that's dominated by the US and the Asia-Pacific region. ARM was founded in Cambridge, where its headquarters remain today.

Another misconception that people have about ARM, he said, is that many believe that the company knows all about how its licensees use its designs. "People put those into all kinds of end uses," Shore said. "They go into fridges, toys, wireless baseband modems, network switches, servers, tablets, phones – goodness knows what they go into."

Not only does ARM not track what its partners – Shore's preferred term for licensees – do with their designs, some of those partners wouldn't tell them even if they asked.

"We produce a lot of products in secure marketplaces for things like banking cards," he said, "and our partners in those fields are quite rightly very secretive about what they do. They certainly don't tell their customers that they use our IP, and very often they don't tell us what they do, either. They prefer to keep that very quiet, and keep it to themselves."
From little Acorns...

The ARM architecture didn't originate from ARM, the company. About five or six years before ARM was founded, a Cambridge company called Acorn Computers, which made desktop PCs primarily for the education market, was casting about for a processor for the next generation of their machines. Nothing on the market at the time quite suited their needs, Shore said, so they decided to design their own.

"That processor was designed by a very small team of only four engineers," he said, referring to the group led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber. "One of whom designed the instruction set, one of whom did the microarchitecture, and two others who assisted with the designing of the supporting chipset." That tiny team produced the processor in 14 months, and it first ran code in Acorn's offices in Cambridge on 26 April, 1985. "And ARM still occupies that office."

That architecture was called the ARM1, for Acorn RISC Machine, and went into a system that became wildly popular in the UK education market. "Everybody my age in the UK used one of those machines at school," he said – Chris is a middle-aged chap – but "they're long gone now."

Acorn is long gone, as well. "It split itself up towards the end of the 1990s, and eventually the final pieces of it were bought by Broadcom and it now forms the chunk of Broadcom's research group." Its legacy, however, lives on in ARM Holdings, which was founded in 1990, headquartered in a farmhouse 10 miles (about 16km) outside of Cambridge.

ARM's first CEO was Robin Saxby, who wasn't the founder of the company, but instead had been headhunted by the founders to run the show. Smart move, seeing as how Saxby came up with the licensing business model that has turned ARM into a global powerhouse.

That business model was born partly out of necessity. With only 12 employees, it didn't have the resources to turn its chips designs into products. "Very neat design," Shore said, "but putting it through a fab and actually turning it into a physical product was a huge risk and a very expensive thing to do, and they simply didn't have the resources to do that."

Those resources, by the way, were provided by ARM's first funders: Apple, Acorn, and VLSI. "It was well-funded, but not lavishly funded," Shore said, and so Saxby came up with the licensing model, which he essentially invented. "It's an industry that ARM has gone on to dominate. We effectively invented it, and for the last over 20 years we've been fortunate enough to dominate it."

How Apple helped create ARM, and how ARM saved Apple

Although Acorn was one of ARM's original funders, it was actually their chip design and Apple's ill-fated Newton that gave birth to the company. "Apple, looking for a processor for that particular design, hit on Acorn's processor and loved it," Shore said. "They wouldn't buy it from Acorn because Acorn was a competitor in the education market, so between them they cooked up this plan to found a separate company to give Apple access to the design."

That separate company was ARM. "It's interesting to see that ARM had three founding fathers, if you like, or three parents – Acorn Apple, and VLSI – and we've actually outlived two of those," Shore said. "Acorn and VLSI are no more, and we've arguably saved the third."

Shore is referring to the fact, as outlined in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, that when Jobs returned to Apple and shortly took control of the company in the late '90s, Apple was in dire straits financially. As part of the turnaround that he helped engineer, Jobs raised a boatload of cash, Shore said, "by selling Apple's stock holding in ARM, which was worth a considerable amount of money. So arguably we've outlived two of our parents and saved the life of the third."

According to Shore, although Apple's Newton was key to creating ARM, it wasn't the most important early licensee that the company snagged, "because the Newton wasn't a particularly successful product." That key licensee distinction goes to Texas Instruments, which licensed ARM IP for a mobile phone GSM chipset it was developing for Nokia, the first chip that combined both the application processor and baseband processor onto a single piece of silicon.

"Nokia back then was the king of the mobile-phone industry," Shore said. "Sadly that's not the case anymore. Unfortunately, we're watching the slow death of the company, I think."

TI's single-chip, ARM-based solution was so successful that Nokia soon adopted it across its product line. Soon, the chip was adopted by the rest of the mobile-phone manufacturers, and by the end of the '90s, ARM had a share of about 97 per cent in that rapidly growing market. "And that's a position that we still have," Shore said. "There are very few mobile phones that are not based upon our solutions."

We ... have ... liftoff

The year after joining the NASDAQ and FTSE in late 1998, ARM moved into its present Cambridge headquarters. Robin Saxby retired from the company after 10 years as CEO in 2001, and was succeeded by Warren East, who remained CEO for a dozen years. Simon Segars took over as CEO earlier this year when East retired.

Those years have seen explosive – and accelerating – growth. In 2007, ARM announced that its licensees had shipped 10 billion processors, and in the six years since then they have shipped over double that number. In the third quarter of 2008, ARM had its first billion-processor quarter, and 2.4 billion processors were shipped in the second quarter of 2013.

As of late October's ARM TechCon, the company had signed a total of 954 licensing deals, had 29 offices worldwide with major development offices in Cambridge; San José, California; Austin, Texas; and Bangalore, India. It was worth about £13.7bn ($21.9bn), and its partners had shipped 34.8 billion processors.

"We entered the FTSE 100 in 2010," Shore said. "The FTSE 100 is like the Standard and Poor's index, it's the index of the 100 most valuable companies on the London Stock Exchange. And we're currently – the last time I looked – we are about number 35 in the top-valued companies on the London Stock Exchange; we're slightly more valuable than Rolls-Royce and slightly less valuable than Sainsbury's, the supermarket."

ARM's IP – not just application processors, anymore – is everywhere. "If you look inside a typical ARM-powered product, whether it's a toy or a DVD player or a mobile handheld device, inside that you will find typically an ARM processor, possibly more than one – the average processors per mobile phone from ARM is approaching three these days," Shore said.

"You will also find ARM physical IP in terms of cell libraries and memory compilers; and you'll also find ARM development tools and our modeling solutions that will have gone in to help the development of that product. So we produce more and more components that people use to produce ARM-powered products."

All that IP adds up to big bucks. "Here's a really big number," Shore said, "$913m – that is our revenue for 2012," he said, "the last full year that we reported. I'm sure we'll break a billion this year, but $913m..."

So where does all that mazuma come from?

If ARM doesn't sell actual, physical products, how does it rake in a billion bucks a year? "Everything we ship is essentially virtual," Shore said. "If you buy a licence from ARM, you get a massive tarball full of RTL," referring to the chip design's register transfer level description, which describes exactly how each circuit on the chip will behave and how each circuit is interconnected, "and from that it's your job to create a working processor design that can go into a working product."

ARM doesn't need to worry – as does rival Intel – about spending billions of dollars designing and staffing chip-fabrication plants, aka fabs. How and where their processor designs are fabbed is up to their partners, who then sell the chips to middlemen, OEMs and ODMs.

So how does ARM take its cut? "We make a large charge for the initial license – that is measured in millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars for a licence to use one of our designs in a particular product or number of products," Shore says.

But that's not the only way that ARM makes money – in fact, it's not even where it makes the biggest chunk of its change. "Every time a company ships a device incorporating a bit of ARM IP," Shore said, "we charge a small royalty. That royalty is measured in cents per device" – averaging around 10¢ per device, he estimates.

But do the maths. With ARM's partners' shipments approaching 10 billion per year, all those dimes – excuse us, 10-pence pieces – add up quickly. And not only do those royalties add up quickly, they also allow ARM to project profits into the future, seeing as how it gets money up-front when it charges IP licence fees, then pulls in royalty fees after that IP is turned into chips that make their way into products.

Not a bad business model. Thank you, Mr Saxby.

But from Shore's point of view, ARM is a bit of a boutique outfit when compared with the rest of the semiconductor industry. "We're used to working with companies that don't just have tens of thousands of employees, in many cases they have hundreds of thousands," he said. "And they have fixed-asset registers measured in tens and even occasionally hundreds of billions of dollars. In contrast – although we're the centre of a kind of spider's web within the industry, at the centre of this great partnership – we are actually a surprisingly small company."

Only in the semiconductor industry could a company worth $21.9bn with annual earnings of around $1bn be considered "surprisingly small".

Bootnote

When discussing his company's 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, Shore revealed that ARM-licensee Apple's implementation of it in its A7 processor came as a surprise to many at ARM. "Our fruity friends earlier this year stunned the world, actually, and stunned most of ARM's employees, in fact, by releasing the latest version of the iPhone supporting and including a 64-bit processor," he said. "They'd done that incredibly secretly and ended up stealing a march on the whole of the rest of the industry. It was quite a staggering achievement, to be honest." ###

- Eric --

[Eric L] Google: Regaining Control of Android (Vision Mobile) ... It had become painful...

Eric L — 11/22/2013 2:00:21 PM

Google: Regaining Control of Android (Vision Mobile) ...

It had become painfully clear to Android’s executives: they had officially lost control. Something had to be done. There was only one option: to strip Android naked. Senior Analyst Stijn Schuermans explains how Google made it tough for ambitious rascals to fork Android and dump Google.

>> The Naked Android

Stijn Schuermans
Vision Mobile
November 19 2013

visionmobile.com

It had become painfully clear to Android’s executives: they had officially lost control. The operating system had been forked by Amazon and too many Asian handset makers. Worse, it had become too easy to replace Google Play with a proprietary app store yet leverage existing Android apps; too easy to replace Google’s services (Maps) with 3rd party alternatives (Nokia’s HERE). Even the Android brand wasn’t the king of the hill anymore, being eclipsed by Samsung’s Galaxy.

Something had to be done. There was only one option: to strip Android naked.

And so that’s what Google did. It let go of control over Android-the-OS. Instead it consolidated control on the APIs needed to make apps, consolidating them within the Google Play Services app. If any rascals want to fork the Android operating system, let them: they can no longer take the entire app ecosystem with them.

Google’s control of Android is eroding

Several years ago we wrote a post criticising Google’s openness statements around Android. Our 2011 study on the Open Governance Index found that Android is the most closed of all mobile open source projects. We were also the first to document the Android control points in 2010, three years before the EU finalised its antitrust investigation. Android has been open to developers, but not to handset makers who have had to comply with Google’s draconian certification and bundling of their apps and data mining software.

Despite the open source and zero-priced nature of the Android OS license, Google could not easily be bypassed. OEMs needed Google for the trademark, Google’s killer apps that leverage its online services and identity (GMail, Maps, and many others) and the Play Store, to get access to the hundreds of thousands of apps that end-users demanded. By cleverly closing down those parts of Android that matter, Google had gained a large amount of control over those who wanted to make an Android handset. A reaction was inevitable.

Over time, Google’s control points were systematically attacked and eroded. Amazon and Yandex, to name just a few, successfully replaced the Google Play store with their own app and content stores. The One Platform Foundation (led by Yandex and Opera) attempted to liberate in-app payments and the app store packaging format from Google’s control, so that you can publish an app on multiple stores with a single click. Nokia HERE (formerly known as Navteq) provided a decent licensable alternative to Google Maps. Samsung spent a lot of effort in recreating all of Google’s services. Samsung also spared no expense in creating its own Galaxy brand, which is becoming as well-known as Android.

With Google partially losing control over Android’s app ecosystem, the advertising giant had to do something. It decided to strip Android naked (a term coined by Nicolas Sauvage). It did so by shifting the control points one level up.

Closing down the APIs

Instead of gaining control through operating system certification, Google moved more and more critical APIs out of the open source operating system and into its proprietary Google Play Services software. [Update: VM just learned Google will ship Android 4.4 without the Chrome browser or any other browser, just the WebView. The emulator has it but not real devices. It’s up to each vendor to create a browser app using the WebView (such as Samsung) or to get license to preinstall Chrome.]

This had an immediate advantage: it reduced the fragmentation problem that had been plaguing Android for years.

Google Play Services is a piece of software that Google can update silently (without the user’s action or even knowledge) and over the air. Google no longer depends on handset makers and operators to update the software that app developers depend upon. Many users might (and do) have old Android versions on their devices: 26% of devices still use v2.3 Gingerbread, released almost three years ago, while only 2,3% uses v4.3 Jelly Bean, released in July 2013 (source: Google, Nov 1, 2013). Over 99% of devices, however, can run the latest version of Google Play Services. It is this which matters most to app developers.

But this was just the start.

Controlling app development

Many developers will now be using a mix of OS and Google Play Services APIs; the former being available on any Android fork, the latter not. Before, the API gap between Google’s version of Android and forks of the OS was mostly in-app billing (the problem that OnePF was trying to fix). Now this gap includes many important services that a lot of developers depend upon: authentication, location APIs, messaging, to name just a few. Developers will now be forced to rewrite parts of their app for each Android fork they want the app to be distributed on.

ARS Technica has done a good job of documenting the end-user implications of this move. Yes, you have your photo, email and other apps in Android public codebase (AOSP), but they are poor cousins of their Google-supported versions. Google seems to prioritize APIs that add innovation and end-user value to their services, so that AOSP apps look outdated. But beyond the effect on end users, the implications for device makers are far more widespread and lasting.

Google’s move puts up the pressure on Amazon and other Android spinoffs to provide alternatives APIs on top of Android to replace those incorporated in Google Play Services. Some are trying: Amazon for example recently added analytics and split testing capabilities to a list of APIs including login, backend services, billing, push messaging, ads and of course the Amazon Appstore for distribution. Amazon and other are taking great pains to making migration to new APIs as easy as possible, e.g. by showing how to match the Maps APIs with theirs.

Even so, companies who fork Android will have to convince developers – who have limited resources and attention spans – that their version offers a large enough user base to be worth supporting. Only a few, if any, will succeed.

The endgame for Google: flatten, expand, mine

The “Android ecosystem” has become a misnomer. It really should be called the “Google Play Services ecosystem”. (Sadly, it doesn’t’ have the same ring to it.) Google has re-established firm control over the apps that drive Android’s success as a platform.

Android as an operating system is still important to Google in the light of its defensive strategy to flatten everything standing between the user’s eyeballs and Google’s ad inventory. Android has succeeded, and will continue to succeed, in preventing any mobile platform from becoming a monopoly in the way that Microsoft Windows was on the PC.

But Google’s strategy has two more pillars: to expand its footprint across the user journey with more services, and to increase the value of its ads by data-mining the user’s behavior. Not Android, but Google Play Services is now driving Google’s expand and mine imperatives.

Google has certainly shown mastery in making open source work to its advantage. Of course, we can’t assume that this is the end of this story. If you were Amazon, Yandex or Samsung, how would you react? ###

- Eric L. -

[Eric L] Kantar Worldpanel Comtech US Smartphone Sales Table and PR Report for 3 m/e Sept...

Eric L — 11/5/2013 11:58:41 AM

Kantar Worldpanel Comtech US Smartphone Sales Table and PR Report for 3 m/e September 2013 ...

>> LG rockets to third in U.S. Smartphone sales

Kantar Worldpanel Comtech
November 4, 2013

kantarworldpanel.com

LG grew to 7% of smartphone sales in the U.S. market in the 3 month period ending September 2013, marking its highest share of sales over the past year. With a growth of 2.6% points, LG was able to capture third place in U.S. sales, according to data released today by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

The sales growth comes as a result of strong sales amongst first time Smartphone buyers on T-Mobile, Sprint and the MNVO’s. The Optimus L9 helped drive much of the sales growth on T-Mobile “no-contract” plans and the wider availability on Metro PCS. The Optimus L4 on Verizon also helped fuel the increase vs. Q213.

In smartphone sales, Android has retained its lead for the 3 month period ending September 2013, with a 57.3% sales share of the smartphone market. iOS follows with 35.9% sale share, an increase of 1.3% versus the same period a year ago.

Windows saw an uplift in sales share in the latest period with share up to 4.6%, with the budget Lumia 521 selling well on T-Mobile amongst consumers who do not want to be tied into a contract.

Verizon is the top carrier, with a 34.9% share of smartphone sales in the 3 months ending September 2013 (seeing growth of 6.8% points). AT&T maintained second at 22.0%, with T-Mobile and Sprint virtually tied for third with 14.4% & 14.2% of smartphone sales respectively.

The data is derived from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech USA’s consumer panel, which is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel of its kind in the world, conducting more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone. ComTech tracks mobile phone behavior and the customer journey, including purchasing of phones, mobile phone bills/airtime, and source of purchase and phone usage. This data is exclusively focused on the sales within this 3 month period rather than market share figures. Sales shares exemplify more forward focused trends and should represent the market share for these brands in future.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Global Strategic Insight Director, Dominic Sunnebo states, “Q3 is traditionally a quiet quarter for Apple as consumers wait its new flagship iPhone and this has been no different-strong sales of the iPhone 5S/C at the end of September did not manage to make up for a dip in August as consumers awaited the new product release. The full impact of the iPhone 5S/C launch will be felt in the Christmas quarter, where share is expected to bounce back strongly in the U.S., with AT&T set to benefit the most.” ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Latest Complete Kantar Worldpanel Sales Share Tables (9 markets + EU5) for 3 m/e...

Eric L — 11/4/2013 2:21:23 PM

Latest Complete Kantar Worldpanel Sales Share Tables (9 markets + EU5) for 3 m/e September 2013 ...

>> Nokia and Windows global momentum continues

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech
04/11/2013

The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, for the three months to September 2013, shows Windows Phone now makes up one in 10 smartphone sales across the five major European markets¹, has overtaken iOS in Italy, and is gaining momentum in emerging markets. Android remains the dominant operating system across Europe with 71.9%, an increase of 4.2 percentage points compared with the same period last year.

¹ The big five European markets includes UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Windows Phone, driven almost entirely by Nokia sales, continues to make rapid progress in Europe and has also shown signs of growth in emerging markets such as Latin America.

Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, comments: “With the smartphone market in developed countries so congested, it is emerging economies that now present manufacturers with the best opportunity for growth.

“Nokia dominated in Latin America for many years, and while its popularity declined with the fortunes of Symbian it now has an opportunity to regain the top-spot. The majority of consumers in Latin America still own a Nokia featurephone and upgrading to an entry level Lumia is a logical next step. Price is the main barrier in developing markets and the budget Lumia 520 opens the door to smartphone ownership for many.”

In Britain, Windows accounts for 11.4% of the market. Android is still the number one operating system with 58.4% while BlackBerry now only has 3.1%. Apple’s iOS has dipped by 1.0 percentage point to 27.0%, although it is expected to strengthen at Christmas.

Sunnebo explains: “August is traditionally a quiet month for Apple as consumers wait for the release of new models, and strong sales of the iPhone 5S and 5C at the end of September did not manage to make up for the lull. The full impact of the new iPhones will be seen at Christmas when iOS is expected to bounce back strongly in Britain, the US and Australia.”

Local brands growing in China

China is increasingly dominated by Android which accounts for 81.1% of the market, up 14.6 percentage points from last year. Domestic manufacturers made up 44% of smartphone sales in the latest period, compared to just 30% the previous year. Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo and Coolpad handsets are particularly popular outside of China’s largest cities and represent a more value-for-money option than global brands.

Sunnebo comments: “Chinese consumers are prepared to make a huge investment in their smartphone, with some spending up to 70% of their monthly salary on a new device. With such a high investment, Chinese consumers want to get the best value for money and are increasingly opting for a high-spec local brand over a low-spec global equivalent. The message for global manufacturers is clear – Chinese consumers demand value, and overpriced entry-levels models no longer cut it against increasingly impressive local competition.”

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech: Urban China Smartphone Sales Data to Q313

Smartphone % penetration in Great Britain stands at 68% in September, with 87% of devices sold in the past three months being smartphones. ###

- Eric L. -

[Eric L] Samsung to hold a rare analyst day on Wednesday ... "Though the share price ha...

Eric L — 11/3/2013 10:12:23 AM

Samsung to hold a rare analyst day on Wednesday ...

"Though the share price has recovered [from an early June through mid-July slump], Samsung is trying to address lingering concerns in the market. It has invited 350 analysts and institutional investors to a special meeting Wednesday at a Seoul hotel for a rare gathering with the company’s top management. While other big technology companies routinely hold such sessions, it is Samsung’s first “analyst day” since 2005, and only its second one ever."

More on the Samsung and Wireless board here: Message 29206170

- Eric L. -

[Eric L] Strategy Analytics Smartphones Sell-In by OS in Q3 2013 ... 'Microsoft Hits 10...

Eric L — 11/1/2013 12:22:46 PM

Strategy Analytics Smartphones Sell-In by OS in Q3 2013 ...

'Microsoft Hits 10 Million for First Time as Android Reaches Record 81 Percent Share of Global Smartphone Shipments in Q3 2013'

>> Android Captures Record 81 Percent Share of Global Smartphone Shipments in Q3 2013

Strategy Analytics
October 31, 2013

blogs.strategyanalytics.com

According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service, global smartphone shipments reached 251 million units in the third quarter of 2013. The Android operating system reached a new record of 81 percent global share, mainly at the expense of BlackBerry and Apple. Microsoft Windows Phone doubled its marketshare and it is currently the world’s fastest growing major smartphone platform.

Global smartphone shipments grew 45 percent annually from 172.8 million units in Q3 2012 to 251.4 million in Q3 2013. Growth was driven by robust demand for Android and Microsoft models in developed and developing markets, notably Europe and Asia.

Android’s domination of global smartphone shipments reached a new peak in Q3 2013, with four out of every five smartphones now running Google’s OS. Android’s gain came mainly at the expense of BlackBerry, which saw its global smartphone share dip from 4 percent to 1 percent in the past year due to a weak line-up of BB10 devices. Apple also lost some ground to Android because of its limited presence at the lower end of the smartphone market. Android will need to take further shipments from Apple if it wants to keep growing in the future, but this is unlikely in the near-term as the new iPhone 5s model is proving popular and it will help Apple to regain volumes worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Microsoft shipped more than 10 million smartphones worldwide in a single quarter for the first time ever in its history during Q3 2013. Microsoft has doubled its global smartphone marketshare from 2 percent to 4 percent in the past year. Microsoft grew its smartphone shipments by 178 percent annually in Q3 2013 and it is currently the world’s fastest growing major smartphone platform. Microsoft’s growth is almost entirely due to Nokia and its steadily improving Lumia portfolio across Europe, Asia and the United States. However, Microsoft is clearly still at a low level of share worldwide and it is struggling to gain serious traction in several major markets like Japan, South Korea and Africa.

The full report, 'Microsoft Hits 10 Million for First Time as Android Reaches Record 81 Percent Share of Global Smartphone Shipments in Q3 2013,' is available to subscribers of Strategy Analytics’ Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service now. ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Q3 2012 Tablet Unit Sell-In and Share (IDC) ... [graphic] Table Note: Year-ov...

Eric L — 10/31/2013 9:06:58 AM

Q3 2012 Tablet Unit Sell-In and Share (IDC) ...

Table Note: Year-over-year growth calculations are based on preliminary shipment data and may vary from estimates based on rounded figures above.

“White box tablet shipments continue to constitute a fairly large percentage of the Android devices shipped into the market”

>> Android Growth Drives Another Strong Quarter for the Worldwide Tablet Market, According to IDC

IDC
San Mateo, Calif.
October 30, 2013

Worldwide tablet shipments grew to 47.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013 (3Q13) according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. While slightly below the firm's forecast, the number still represents 7.0% growth over the previous quarter and 36.7% growth compared to the third quarter of 2012. Android products once again drove much of the shipment growth in the market as iOS growth stalled and Windows tablets continued to struggle to win over consumers.

With no new iPad product launches in the second or third quarter to drive volume, Apple experienced a quarter-over-quarter decline in shipments from 14.6 million in 2Q13 to 14.1 million in 3Q13. Year over year, iPad shipments grew less than one percent. Apple's slowing growth—caused in part by its decision in late 2012 to move its product launches from earlier in the year to the fourth quarter—has caused the company's tablet market share to slip to 29.6%, its lowest share to date. However, with the new iPad Air shipping November 1st and the refreshed iPad mini with Retina scheduled to roll out later in November, IDC expects Apple to enjoy robust shipment growth during the fourth quarter.

"With two 7.9-inch models starting at $299 and $399, and two 9.7-inch models starting at $399 and $499, Apple is taking steps to appeal to multiple segments," said Jitesh Ubrani, Research Analyst with IDC's Tablet Tracker. "While some undoubtedly hoped for more aggressive pricing from Apple, the current prices clearly reflect Apple's ongoing strategy to maintain its premium status. It's worth noting that Apple wasn't the only one to increase the price of its small-sized tablet during this product cycle: Both Google and Amazon increased the price of their newest 7-inch tablets from $199 to $229 to cover the higher costs associated with high resolution screens and better processors."

Samsung once again secured the second position with shipments of about 9.7 million units. The company, which owes a measure of its tablet success to its ability to bundle them with other successful Samsung products, such as smartphones and televisions, grabbed 20.4% of the worldwide market. ASUS, which makes the Nexus 7 for Google, shipped about 3.5 million total units during the quarter for a third place finish and 7.4% market share. PC powerhouse Lenovo moved into the number four tablet spot with shipments of 2.3 million units and a 4.8% share. Finally, Acer rounded out the top five with 1.2 million units shipped and a 2.5% share. Notably, vendors from outside the top five were responsible for over one third of the shipments in 3Q13. IDC tracks dozens of tablet vendors, and this quarter "Others" represents a combination of major vendors (such as Amazon, Microsoft, HP, and Dell) and lesser-known, so-called white box vendors that typically sell ultra-low cost Android devices at often unsustainably low margins.

"White box tablet shipments continue to constitute a fairly large percentage of the Android devices shipped into the market," said Tom Mainelli, Research Director, Tablets at IDC. "These low cost Android-based products make tablets available to a wider market of consumers, which is good. However, many use cheap parts and non Google-approved versions of Android that can result in an unsatisfactory customer experience, limited usage, and very little engagement with the ecosystem. Android's growth in tablets has been stunning to watch, but shipments alone won't guarantee long-term success. For that you need a sustainable hardware business model, a healthy ecosystem for developers, and happy end users."

About IDC Trackers: IDC Tracker products provide accurate and timely market size, vendor share, and forecasts for hundreds of technology markets from more than 100 countries around the globe. Using proprietary tools and research processes, IDC's Trackers are updated on a semiannual, quarterly, and monthly basis. Tracker results are delivered to clients in user-friendly excel deliverables and on-line query tools. The IDC Tracker Charts app allows users to view data charts from the most recent IDC Tracker products on their iPhone and iPad.

About IDC: International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. For more than 49 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. You can learn more about IDC by visiting www.idc.com ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] LG: Mobile Sales in Q3 2013 ... LG Electronics reported its first operating lo...

Eric L — 10/29/2013 5:01:39 PM

LG: Mobile Sales in Q3 2013 ...

LG Electronics reported its first operating loss at its mobile unit in a year.

Android not so lucky for Lucky Goldstar.

• 12 million smartphones, down from 12.1 million QoQ.

• 18.3 million total handsets, up from 16.2 million total handsets QoQ.

• LG's mobile comm business up 24 percentYoY to ~$2.86 billion with a $75.3 million operating loss.

>> LG posts first loss in mobile unit in a year as competition intensifies

Phil Goldstein
Fierce Wireless
October 24, 2013

fiercewireless.com

LG Electronics reported its first operating loss at its mobile unit in a year. The loss is likely due to intense competition and higher marketing costs for the company's flagship G2 smartphone.

The company maintained its momentum in the smartphone market, selling 12 million smartphones in the period, only down slightly from the record 12.1 million it had in the second quarter. LG spokesman Ken Hong said the company sold 18.3 million total handsets (smartphones and feature phones) in the quarter, up from 16.2 million total handsets in the second quarter and 14 million handsets in the year-ago period.

Overall, sales in the company's mobile communications business jumped 24 percent year-over-year to around $2.86 billion. However, the unit reported a $75.3 million operating loss, its first since the third quarter of 2012.

LG said that its profitability and average selling price were affected by increased competition and higher marketing investments. The company said it improved LTE device sales by 31 percent from the second quarter due to the launching of the G2. However, 3G-only device sales declined due to intensified competition in developing markets.

"What worries me is that although its mobile unit saw increased sales in the third quarter, it registered a loss," Choi Nam Kon, a Seoul-based analyst at TongYang Securities, told Bloomberg. "That's a signal the market is becoming increasingly competitive and difficult. LG has to slash handset prices further in order to survive in this cutthroat battle."

Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ), AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T), Sprint (NYSE:S) and T-Mobile US (NYSE:TMUS) are supporting the G2, giving LG an opportunity to get broad carrier distribution for a single high-end smartphone model, something it has not previously been able to do, and that its competitors have. Verizon and AT&T started selling the phone in September for $199.99 with a two-year contract; T-Mobile is offering it for $0 down with monthly payments of $25 per month for 24 months, and Sprint has the phone online for pre-order for $99.99 with a two-year contract and after a $100 credit promotion.

The smartphones has 5.2-inch 1080 IP IPS HD display and is powered by Qualcomm's (NASDAQ:QCOM) quad-core 2.26 GHz Snapdragon 800 processor. A key design feature of the phone is that its front and sides have no physical buttons, with the volume and power controls on the back of the phone, in what LG calls the "rear key." LG said this change gives users more control since the buttons are located where users' index fingers normally sit when holding the phone. Some reviewers have panned this feature.

Andy Kim, senior vice president of marketing at LG's mobile unit, told Bloomberg that marketing costs for the G2 were the biggest in company's history. Looking at the fourth quarter, LG said it will face intensified competition but plans to increase sales in the premium segment with the full-fledged global launch of the G2, while enhancing marketing for both mass market LTE and 3G smartphones "in order to maximize sales during the peak season and to improve brand power and market position." ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] IDC Preliminary Estimated Handset and Smartphone Sell-In for Q3 2013 ... [grap...

Eric L — 10/29/2013 2:07:47 PM

IDC Preliminary Estimated Handset and Smartphone Sell-In for Q3 2013 ...

>> Record Smartphone Shipments Grow the Market 38.8% in the Third Quarter of 2013, Making Way For A Strong Holiday Quarter, According to IDC

IDC
Framingham, Mass.
October 29, 2013

assets.fiercemarkets.net

The worldwide smartphone market grew 38.8% year over year in the third quarter of 2013 (3Q13), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. Vendors shipped a total of 258.4 million smartphones in 3Q13, establishing a new record for units shipped in a single quarter by more than 9.0%. The previous high was 237.0 million units shipped in the second quarter of 2013.

In the worldwide mobile phone market (inclusive of smartphones), vendors shipped 467.9 million units in 3Q13 compared to the 442.7 million units shipped in 3Q12, representing 5.7% year-over-year growth. Third quarter shipments were up 7.0% when compared to the 437.4 million units shipped in 2Q13. "The third quarter was up substantially over the previous quarter, which was also a record quarter for shipments, showing the real momentum of the smartphone market," said Ryan Reith, Program Director with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. "Price points have declined significantly, driven largely by low-cost Android solutions. This has helped China to become one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, accounting for more than one third of all shipments last quarter. We expect this trend to continue going forward."

The Android smartphone platform has created vast opportunities for new vendors to get into the
smartphone space and, in turn, has produced new competitive pressures at the top of the market.
Smartphone shipments from vendors outside of the top 5 grew from 33.7% of the market in 3Q12 to
41.3% in 3Q13.

"Beyond Samsung and Apple at the top of the rankings is a tight race of vendors trying to break out from the pack," says Ramon Llamas, Research Manager with IDC's Mobile Phone team. "In 3Q13, Chinese vendors Huawei and Lenovo moved past LG, and not far behind are two more Chinese companies, Coolpad and ZTE. Any of these vendors could change position again next quarter. But in addition to having close shipment volumes, they all have one key ingredient in common: Android. This has been a huge factor in their success, but it also speaks to the challenges of differentiation on the world's most popular platform."

"Looking ahead, we anticipate strong momentum going into the fourth quarter, and another record quarter and year in the worldwide smartphone market," added Llamas. "With already strong growth in 3Q13 and multiple vendors launching flagship models, the market will be poised to reach one billion units for the year. It's a significant milestone considering the market shipped just half a billion units in 2011. Moving forward, what remains to be seen is how the various companies and platforms will stay differentiated and relevant in the increasingly competitive market."

Smartphone Vendor Highlights

Samsung easily maintained its leadership position, shipping more units than the next four vendors combined. Samsung's flagship models received the lion's share of attention during 3Q13, with more carriers adding the Galaxy S4, continued demand for the Galaxy S III, and the introduction of the Galaxy Note 3. Despite the popularity of those models, it was the company's long line of mass-market smartphones that helped fuel volumes to reach a new record level.

Apple's total volumes speak to the early success of the iPhones 5S and 5C, and the softening demand of older devices prior to the new models launching. The iPhone 5S lived up to the hype of the gold case and the fingerprint sensor, and the iPhone 5C with an array of colors. At the same time, limited usability on the fingerprint sensor and higher-than-expected pricing on the iPhone 5C drew mixed reactions. Still, this did not prevent Apple from enjoying a record 9 million units shipped in their debut.

Huawei returned to the list of top five vendors after a one-quarter hiatus, narrowly beating out Lenovo and LG. In fact, less than a million units separate Huawei from the next two vendors, underscoring how tightly contested the market has become following Samsung and Apple. Huawei relied on Asia/Pacific for the bulk of its shipment volumes, but the company continued to make headway into Europe and the Americas with volumes exceeding one million units in each region.

Lenovo posted the largest year-over-year increase among the leading vendors, enough to push past LG to claim the number four position worldwide. The company relied on its stronghold in Asia/Pacific, and particularly China, where the overwhelming majority of its smartphones went. Lenovo has also made continued progress in other markets, pushing into Latin America and EMEA.

LG slipped to fifth place, but nevertheless posted strong double-digit year-over-year smartphone growth (72.2%). Although volumes were flat from the previous quarter (12.0 million units), LG's product portfolio shows continued maturity at the high-end of the market. Key to its success was the launch of the Optimus G2 and a continued strong reception for the Optimus G and the Optimus G Pro. In contrast was LG's performance in emerging markets, where 3G competition intensified.

About IDC Trackers: IDC Tracker products provide accurate and timely market size, vendor share, and forecasts for hundreds of technology markets from more than 100 countries around the globe. Using proprietary tools and research processes, IDC's Trackers are updated on a semiannual, quarterly, and monthly basis. Tracker results are delivered to clients in user-friendly excel deliverables and on-line query tools. The IDC Tracker Charts app allows users to view data charts from the most recent IDC Tracker products on their iPhone and iPad.

About IDC: IDC is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For more than 49 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. You can learn more about IDC by visiting idc.com

# # #

- Eric -

[Eric L] Strategy Analytics Smartphone Sales in Q3 2013 ... >> Samsung & Huawei Outperf...

Eric L — 10/29/2013 10:33:08 AM

Strategy Analytics Smartphone Sales in Q3 2013 ...

>> Samsung & Huawei Outperform as Global Smartphone Shipments Reach Quarter-Billion Units in Q3 2013

Neal Mawston
Strategy Analytics
October 28, 2013

blogs.strategyanalytics.com

According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service, global smartphone shipments grew 45 percent annually to reach a record 251 million units in the third quarter of 2013. Samsung captured a record 35 percent share of all smartphone volumes worldwide, while Huawei jumped into third place in the rankings.

Global smartphone shipments grew 45 percent annually from 172.8 million units in Q3 2012 to 251.4 million in Q3 2013. This was the first time ever that smartphone shipments exceeded a quarter-billion units in a single quarter. Smartphones accounted for 6 in 10 of all mobile phones shipped worldwide. The smartphone industry’s robust growth is being driven by strong demand for LTE models in developed regions like the US and 3G devices in emerging markets such as China.

Samsung grew 55 percent annually and shipped a record 88.4 million smartphones worldwide, capturing a record 35 percent marketshare in Q3 2013. Samsung shipped over two times more smartphones than Apple during the quarter. While shipments of the flagship Galaxy S4 model softened, solid demand for the new Note 3 phablet and for mass-market devices like the Galaxy Y helped to lift Samsung’s volumes.

Apple shipped 33.8 million iPhones worldwide in Q3 2013, up from 26.9 million a year earlier. Apple grew just 26 percent annually during Q3 2013, which is around half the overall smartphone industry average of 45 percent. Apple’s global smartphone marketshare has dipped noticeably from 16 percent to 13 percent during the past year. Nonetheless, we expect Apple to rebound sharply and regain share in the upcoming fourth quarter of 2013 due to high demand for its new iPhone 5s model.

Huawei was a star performer as global shipments grew 67 percent annually to 12.7 million units in Q3 2013. Huawei captured 5 percent marketshare and became the world’s third largest smartphone vendor. The popular P6 and G610 models have been among the main drivers of Huawei’s success. Huawei remains very strong at home in China, but its position is less robust in other major markets like the US and Europe. Huawei will need to expand aggressively in the American and European markets if it wants to seriously challenge the big two of Samsung and Apple next year.

Other findings from our research include:

* LG shipped 12.0 million smartphones worldwide for 5 percent marketshare in Q3 2013. LG grew 71 percent annually, making it the fastest-growing vendor among the top five brands. LG has been expanding rapidly in Europe, but China and India remain weak spots;

* Lenovo shipped 10.8 million smartphones worldwide for 4 percent marketshare and fifth position in Q3 2013. Lenovo is popular among mass-market consumers in China and it is expanding internationally. Two of the world’s top five smartphone vendors came from China -- Lenovo and Huawei.

The full report, Huawei Reaches Third Place as Global Smartphone Shipments Reach Quarter-Billion Units in Q3 2013, is published by the Strategy Analytics Wireless Smartphone Strategies (WSS) service, details of which can be found here: tinyurl.com ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Samsung's Android: Fork Google ... >> Samsung is pulling another Android, but ...

Eric L — 10/29/2013 9:43:50 AM

Samsung's Android: Fork Google ...

>> Samsung is pulling another Android, but this is even bigger

Kevin C. Tofel
GigaOm
October 28, 2013

gigaom.com

Summary: As Samsung built up a global audience for its Android phones and tablets, it pushed internal development on its own Galaxy features and functions. Now that third-party developers can code for them, Samsung is gaining more control over its flavor of Android.

As much as Google likes and touts that Android is open, that freedom may come with the cost of some control over the platform. Amazon may have started the first truly successful “fork” of Android, but Samsung is going after the whole place setting.

Samsung kicked off its first Developers Conference on Monday and based on the keynote message, I wouldn’t be too happy if I were Google. This is no small effort from Samsung, which sells the most Android devices by a large margin compared to its peers. An announced 1,300 event attendees are on site in San Francisco and heard that Samsung is releasing five new SDKs for various devices ranging from phones to tablets to televisions.

To give an idea of what Samsung is doing, just look at the new Mobile SDK: It supports Samsung’s pen, gestures, multiwindow and motion features with 800 APIs available to developers. If that number doesn’t grab you consider what Samsung said about opportunities for developers. Simply by adding the digital pen to a phone in the first and subsequent Galaxy Note handsets, more 1,800 pen-enabled apps were created. And the company sells two televisions every second. Clearly, Samsung is trying to entice developer attention for its platform.

Wait, isn’t Samsung’s platform Android? Absolutely! Samsung has effectively built an individual, closed environment of apps and features on top of the open Android. Amazon has done much the same with its Fire OS on Kindle Fire tablets but the approach was a little different.

Amazon didn’t start out with Google Android, but instead used the Android Open Source Project — software without core Google apps and services — for the Kindle Fire. In contrast, Samsung used the full Google Android software to build up a huge global audience and now it’s going to make sure it, not Google, owns those customers. I barely heard Android mentioned in the keynote, in fact.

Samsung’s approach doesn’t just end with its popular phones and tablets though.

As my colleague Janko Roettgers reported earlier, Samsung’s new Multiscreen SDK applies to another Samsung product — televisions:

“The new SDK, once adopted by developers, will make it possible to press a button on your phone to launch an online video stream, or even a game, on your TV. Sound familiar? That’s not really a coincidence — but Samsung thinks that it can one-up its competition.”

That last phrase is central to what I heard during the Samsung Developer Conference Keynote. Samsung has clearly become successful and profitable by pushing Android devices as well as adding its own add-on features and functions. That’s clearly not good enough for the company now because Android by itself can only take it so far and doesn’t give Samsung total control over its own destiny. In addition to the above mentioned SDK’s, Samsung also offered ones for Multiscreen Gaming, Smart TVs and KNOX, the company’s enterprise grade security software.

At this point, Samsung is taking advantage of its dominant position as the Android device leader to become the “de facto” Android phone and crush any remaining competition. And I’m not sure what Google can do about it save for pulling more and more key functions out of the Android software and instead make them standalone apps in the Google Play store. Even if it does, the damage is already done from where I stand: Samsung has built its mobile business on Android and can now push forward with less “help” from Google.

As long as Samsung remains a helpful partner in the Android ecosystem and properly licenses Google apps and services for devices, it’s not as if Google can wrest Android away from Samsung. And Google has zero control over the extra features that Samsung has added to devices such as digital inking with the S-Pen, S-Voice for text input, Samsung Wallet for payments and gesture-based navigation using sensors.

The overall strategy Samsung has employed so far is clever: Build up a massive global audience for products using someone else’s software while also creating your own apps to start taking the place of integral Android features across smartphones, tablets, televisions and even smartwatches. Thanks to Android, Samsung hasn’t needed to develop an operating system of its own. Why should it when it can slowly transition developers and users to create software for its own hardware? ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] GSMArena's Best of the Best 3 Way Shootout (Part 2) ... >> Apple iPhone 5s vs....

Eric L — 10/14/2013 11:02:48 AM

GSMArena's Best of the Best 3 Way Shootout (Part 2) ...

>> Apple iPhone 5s vs. LG G2 vs. Nokia Lumia 1020: War of the worlds

GSMArena Team
GSMArena
8 October 2013

gsmarena.com ###

Winners, Runners Up, and 3rd Place Contenders in 13 Categories

In the articles text the GSMArena Team compares the 3 smartphones in 13 categories and in each category picks a Winner, a Runner Up, and a 3rd Place contender. The summaries in each category are excerpted below. I've summarized each contender in the matrix below awarding 3 points to the Winner, 2 points to the Runner Up, and 1 point to the 3rd place contender, then totaled the points awarded. A different result would, of course be obtained if each category was weighted to suit personal preferences.

• Exterior and Build

Winner: Apple iPhone 5s. To be clear, it's the handling and premium feel that we rate in this one. The iPhone's design may've been used on a few generations already, but it's still relevant, to say the least. Apple's flagship looks, as usual, more like an elegant accessory than a working tool. And it's not just the looks, the iPhone 5s is built to perfection, with great attention to detail. You can easily say the same about the other two as well but theirs is a classic example of looks being second to power and performance.

Runner-up: Nokia Lumia 1020. The polycarbonate unibody has enough of a premium feel and, while the handling might be awkward at first, the solid build and the fact that Nokia integrated such a vastly superior camera tech into a phone's body, help it clinch the second spot.

Third place: LG G2. Certainly not by a mile, though - the LG smartphone is probably the most practical of the three, delivering the highest screen estate to footprint ratio and an ample battery. The lack of any controls on the front to spoil the looks also means that while not as pretty as the other two, the G2 is certainly not a smartphone you'd mind being seen in public with.

• Display Comparison

Winner: LG G2. LG G2 has the biggest, brightest display with the highest resolution. Quite expectedly the G2 screen is really sharp with the excellent 424ppi ratio and its color reproduction is more accurate than Lumia 1020's AMOLED. All those wins are enough to compensate for its unspectacular performance in direct sunlight.

Runner-up: Nokia Lumia 1020. The AMOLED screens are still among the best on the market and the extra punch they provide is preferred by many. It is bigger than the 4-inch Retina and with better contrast. This is, along with the larger size, is enough to easily overshadow the iPhone 5s victory on the sunlight test.

Third place: Apple iPhone 5s. The 4" Retina is a great screen with excellent image quality, but when you put it next to the much ampler displays of the other two, it just can't compete. It's no longer at top of the food chain when it comes to density either, so it only has the top-notch sunlight legibility going for it in this battle.

• Battery Life: Talk time, Web browsing, Video playback

Winner: LG G2. Despite a very respectable performance by the Nokia Lumia 1020, the LG G2 is the clear winner here. It outscored the Lumia 1020 on the call test, beat it on the web browsing test by a mile, and it also remained on par with it when playing videos.

Runner-up: Nokia Lumia 1020. The Lumia 1020 overall battery endurance rating is just an hour less than the LG G2, however it's a long way behind when it comes to web browsing and calling endurance and only marginally better in video playback, which is what really matters to power users (and those are usually the ones shopping flagships). The Lumia 1020 has to be given credit for offering the most efficient stand-by of the trio, though.

Third place: Apple iPhone 5s. Posting the lowest endurance rating and showing that irritating stand-by drain bug, the Apple smartphone is some way off its competitors here. Its excellent web-browsing endurance that puts the Lumia 1020 will provide some consolation, though.

• Software

Winner: LG G2. The Android OS is highly customizable and with functionality that the other two can't come close to. It has an open file system, file manager, best multi-tasking and huge developer community. Its last standing problem was the sub-par performance, but that stopped being an issue when the 4.1 Jelly Bean release came out.

Runner up: Apple iPhone 5s. The iOS 7 might have lots of restrictions, but it is very easy to use, looks great and gives you access to the world's top-grossing app and content stores. It's got excellent after-market support, too, with each iPhone getting timely updates for at least three years.

Third place: Nokia Lumia 1020. An awful long time has passed since the last major update of the Windows Phone 8 OS and for a platform this young this is pretty bad news. The app catalog also pales in comparison to the the other two platforms. Software-wise the two major selling points of the smartphone are the complete MS Office suite and the offline navigation, but those are just not enough to give the Lumia 1020 anything but third place here.

• Performance Benchmarks

Winner: Apple iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s topped most benchmarks and with iOS 7 designed around it, it provides the best experience for general use, gaming and web browsing.

Runner up: LG G2. The LG G2 lost a few synthetic benchmarks, but works smoothly all the same. We did expect four 2.26GHz cores to stack up a little better against the two 1.3GHz custom Apple cores though.

3rd place: Nokia Lumia 1020. While the gap between iPhone 5s and LG G2 is almost negligible, the Nokia Lumia 1020 is tangibly behind both in terms of 3d and web performance. Yes, the UI and apps run smoothly, but the old chipset is limiting to developers.

• Image Galleries

Winners: Apple iPhone 5s and LG G2. The iOS and G2 galleries share great looks, awesome sharing features, and great organization. Photo Stream is an awesome perk of the iPhone 5s, but it's balanced by the very enjoyable experience that is browsing photos on the 5.2" screen of the G2.

Third place: Nokia Lumia 1020. The Windows Phone gallery offers less sorting and viewing options and looks stale.

• Video Players

Winner: LG G2. Quite obviously LG G2 has the most capable, feature-rich and powerful video player among the three.

Runner up: Lumia 1020. Windows Phone 8 offers USB mass storage and supports a lot more codecs than its iPhone rival. Even if you get a more versatile third-party player for iOS, the iTunes-dependency is still an issue, which the less than lightning-fast cloud transfer cannot quite make up for.

Third place: Apple iPhone 5s. The latest Apple flagship definitely has the worst video capabilities among all three smartphones. Its video player hasn't been improved in ages and should definitely be higher on the priority list for the iOS 8 development.

• Music players and Radio

Winner: LG G2. The G2 music player might not be the best looking, but it offers customizable equalizer presets, handy search and sorting options. The G2 also comes with an integrated FM tuner.

Runner-up: Nokia Lumia 1020. Nokia Lumia 1020 comes with a free music streaming service, just like the iPhone 5s. It also comes with a skilled music player with equalizer presets. What it has over the iPhone though is a regular FM radio.

Third place: Apple iPhone 5s. The iPhone offers free music streaming, the music player is quite the looker with its simplistic design, but it lacks customizable equalizers or other value-added features and the 5s has no FM radio.

• Loudspeaker

Winner: Nokia Lumia 1020. It's a simple game of numbers here and the Nokia smartphone wins it.

Runner up: Apple iPhone 5s. Three second places in the three tests secure the iPhone 5s the silver medal here.

Third place: LG G2. Consistently the quietest of the three.

• Camera Features

Winner: Nokia Lumia 1020. The manual controls of the Nokia Lumia 1020 are of interest to photo enthusiasts, while the lossless digital zooming will benefit casual users. The audio is great too and Nokia has some of the best hardware OIS. The one major complaint is the slow shot-to-shot time.

Runner-up: LG G2. The LG G2 has goodies like dual-shot, VR Panorama, Time catch shot, face effects and audio zoom, not to mention the hardware OIS - even if you use only half of them, that's still more than what the iPhone offers.

Third place: Apple iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s has a great camera but it's the embodiment of the point-and-shoot mentality. Apple still ignores things like selectable image resolution, let alone adjustable image properties like white balance or saturation.

• Still Photos: Good Light

Winner: Nokia Lumia 1020. The Nokia Lumia 1020 produces amazing 5MP photos and that's that. The full resolution shots look good too, but 5MP is quite enough for virtually all displays. It still pays to shoot full res shots as they allow you to enjoy zooming, cropping and reframing on the phone later on.

Runner-up: LG G2. The LG G2 photos have accurate color rendering and the higher resolution allows it to capture more detail than the iPhone 5s.

Third place: Apple iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s features an improved camera over the iPhone 5 and photos do look very pleasing to the eye, but having 40% fewer pixels than the G2 (and no supersampling to rely on), takes its toll.

• Still Photos: Low-Light

Winner: Nokia Lumia 1020. The Nokia Lumia 1020 had the best shots with and without flash hands down. The OIS could have helped a bit more, but the 1020 is the clear winner here.

Runner up: Apple iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s does very well for a 7.6mm thick smartphone that doesn't have the benefit of a huge sensor, a bulky xenon flash or optical image stabilization. Photos without flash were a bit underexposed, though.

Third place: LG G2. The LG G2 beats the iPhone 5s when the flash is off, but its single-LED flash proved too weak to be in any help in our test scene.

• Video Recording

Winner: Apple iPhone 5s. The iPhone 5s videos look great and though they lose some field of view (due to the digital stabilization). Our only major complaint here is the audio, there's no excuse for mono sound.

Runner up: Nokia Lumia 1020. The Lumia 1020 has more detail in low-light and the best audio of the three by a mile, though the image processing and compression could use some work. It may be the runner up here, but it's a close call.

Third place: LG G2. The LG G2 video is good, but the focus hunts too much, the exposure is way off and it doesn't have as much detail as the other two. A firmware update or two with some fine tuning to the processing, along with the 60fps mode might help it climb higher, though.

Summary Matrix of Winners, Runners Up, and 3rd Place Contenders in 13 Categories

I've summarized how the contenders placed in each of 13 categories in the matrix below awarding 3 points to the Winner, 2 points to the Runner Up, and 1 point to the 3rd place contender, then totaled the points awarded.

                              Nokia                 Apple
                           Lumia 1020    LG G2    iPhone 5S
                           ==========    =====    =========
Exterior and Build              2          1          3
Display                         2          3          1
Battery Life                    2          3          1
Software                        1          3          2
Benchmarks                      1          2          3
Image Galleries                 2          1          1
Video Player                    2          3          1
Music Players and Radio         2          3          1
Loudspeaker                     3          1          2
Camera Features                 3          2          1
Still Photos: good light        3          2          1
Still Photos: low-light         3          1          2
Video Recording                 2          1          3
                           ==========    =====    =========
Total Points                  28/39      26/39      20/39

# # #

- Eric -

[Eric L] GSMArena's Best of the Best 3 Way Shootout: Nokia Lumia 1020 v. LG G2 v. Apple i...

Eric L — 10/14/2013 10:51:59 AM

GSMArena's Best of the Best 3 Way Shootout: Nokia Lumia 1020 v. LG G2 v. Apple iPhone 5s (Part 1) ...

GSM Arena just published a rather comprehensive 12 section comparison of what they consider to be the best Model that Android, iOS, and Windows Phone have to offer. It makes for interesting reading. In the introduction they state:

One thing's certain, the Apple iPhone 5s, the LG G2 and the Nokia Lumia 1020 just don't mix. The three platforms are usually targeting a completely different set of users. But each of these gadgets is the best of its species and that's the cross section of everything the industry has to offer at this point. ... It's not like each of those phones is only as good as its weakest spot, but it's not as straightforward either as simply praise this one's camera, that one's app store or the other one's full-HD screen. This can easily get out of control and into a three-ring circus, but we're gonna give it a try anyway.

>> Apple iPhone 5s vs. LG G2 vs. Nokia Lumia 1020: War of the worlds

GSMArena Team
GSMArena
8 October 2013

gsmarena.com

Introduction (page 1): You know what they say - three is a crowd. On a second thought though, no one here's got romance on their mind. The three-horse race has had its highs and lows, but it's the playoffs and we got a front-row seat. It's not about heroes and villains anymore, everyone's a bit of both. Each phone here will look at the other two and see the worst of both worlds. Now, can we keep a cool head and try and see the whole picture?

... < Very BIG Snip ... see text at link above > ...

Final Words (page 12):

Are these the top three phones you can get? Well they certainly are in the running, but that's not the point here. It was a panorama instead of the best the three smartphone platforms have to offer. Luckily for the three - Apple iPhone 5s, LG G2 and Nokia Lumia 1020 - they are so different that they are not really in direct competition for the same buyers. We probably don't need this disclaimer, but it was worth pointing it out. ... < Big Snip > ... Each of these three smartphones has their strengths and weaknesses, and while the best always lies ahead, these three are like a snapshot of how far the three competing OS have come and they will surely stay at the top for a while. Shame such an impressive combination of features has to be split three ways. On a second thought, thank goodness the smartphone future is multiplied by three. ###

Winners, Runners Up, and 3rd Place Summary Matrix

In the articles text the GSMArena Team compares the 3 smartphones in 13 categories and in each category picks a Winner, a Runner Up, and a 3rd Place contender. I've summarized each contender in the matrix below awarding 3 points to the Winner, 2 points to the Runner Up, and 1 point to the 3rd place contender, then totaled the points awarded. A different result would, of course be obtained if each category was weighted to suit personal preferences.

                              Nokia                 Apple
                           Lumia 1020    LG G2    iPhone 5S
                           ==========    =====    =========
Exterior and Build              2          1          3
-----------------------------------------------------------
Display                         2          3          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Battery Life                    2          3          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Software                        1          3          2
-----------------------------------------------------------
Benchmarks                      1          2          3
-----------------------------------------------------------
Image Galleries                 2          1          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Video Players                    2          3          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Music Players and Radio         2          3          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Loudspeaker                     3          1          2
-----------------------------------------------------------
Camera Features                 3          2          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Still Photos: good light        3          2          1
-----------------------------------------------------------
Still Photos: low-light         3          1          2
-----------------------------------------------------------
Video Recording                 2          1          3
                           ==========    =====    =========
Total Points                  28/39      26/39      20/39

In a follow up post I'll clip the text of each category's summary of GSMArena's justification for ranking the contenders but there is a lot of meat for each summary that I have not included and its worth a review in the original text.

- Eric -

[Eric L] October 22nd: A Busy Day ... Retail Sales of Microsoft's Surface 2 Begin in th...

Eric L — 10/10/2013 9:09:47 AM

October 22nd: A Busy Day ...

Retail Sales of Microsoft's Surface 2 Begin in the USA

Apple refreshes its high-end desktop and tablet ranges

Nokia Devices and Services hosts the Nokia World event

- Eric -

[Eric L] The Commercialization of IT in the Enterprise: A Bob Egan Interview ... ... ti...

Eric L — 10/8/2013 10:54:57 AM

The Commercialization of IT in the Enterprise: A Bob Egan Interview ...

... titled "The Future of Enterprise Mobility" conducted by Kevin Benedict the Head Analyst of SMAC (Social, MOBILE, Analytics and Cloud) at Cognizant Technology Solutions.

The 1st 10 minutes of this 29 minute interview focuses on the demise of Blackberry. Kevin then discusses some initial issues with iOS 7 he has experienced with his iPhones and the conversation moves on to cloud computing. It's definitely worth a listen.

The video above is part 2 of 2 interviews with Bob from Kevin's 'Mobile Expert Video Series' and part 1 was posted to the Nokia board here along with an excellent article on the challenges Microsoft faces with the integration of Nokia Devices and Services once it clears regulatory approvals. That original post is here: Message 29099528

Anout Bob Egan: Bob is a Mobile Industry Analyst, Executive Advisor and Wi-Fi Pioneer. He is the CEO and Founder of the The Sepharim Group, a mobile industry research and enterprise consulting firm. He was formerly a CEB Research Head and Advanced Technology Director at DEC and then VP of Mobile at Gartner. The origins of The Sepharim Group date back to 2002 when Bob Egan built the successful consulting boutique and industry analyst firm – The Sepharim GroupMobile Competency. With the acquisition of Mobile Competency in 2005 by TowerGroup, Bob spent the next six years as the CRO for their MasterCard division (now owned by CEB). In 2010 Bob formally founded The Sepharim Group to renew his commitment as a leading expert and trusted executive advisor for all things mobile: sepharim.com

In re the demise of BlackBerry which Bob discusses with Kevin in the video above, Bob recently wrote an article titled "Requiem For BlackBerry" for Forbes and I've posted it on our Blackberry board here:

- Eric -

[Eric L] HTC's Q3 2013 Loss ... >> HTC posts first-ever quarterly losses as troubles m...

Eric L — 10/3/2013 11:00:12 PM

HTC's Q3 2013 Loss ...

>> HTC posts first-ever quarterly losses as troubles multiply

Michael Gold and Faith Hung
Reuters (Taipei)
October 4, 2013

uk.reuters.com

Taiwan's HTC Corp slid into the red for the first time in the third quarter, with sales hit hard by fierce competition in the smartphone market, supply chain constraints and internal turmoil.

Underscoring a dramatic decline for a company which boasts award-winning smartphones but has failed to develop a durable brand of handsets, it posted an operating loss of T$3.5 billion as sales for the quarter tumbled by a third from the same period a year earlier.

At a net level, it booked a loss of T$2.97 billion ($100 million), bigger than an expected loss of T$1.8 billion, according to Thomson Reuters SmartEstimates. That compares with a net profit of T$3.9 billion in the same quarter last year.

Its shares were down 2.3 percent in early trade.

HTC lacks the scale of bigger rivals Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and its troubles this year have only multiplied.

In addition to internal feuding and executive exits, sources have said that it is facing casing shortages for its HTC One Mini. It has also lost some patent cases and media have reported that three of its design executives have been arrested on suspicion of leaking trade secrets.

HTC's share of the global smartphone market has plummeted from a peak of 9.1 percent in 2011 to 2.6 percent in the most recent quarter, according to research firm Gartner and analysts have said it needs a wholesale reevaluation of its strategy in order to survive. ###

>> HTC Posts Wider-Than-Estimated Quarterly Loss as Sales Slump

Lulu Yilun Chen (Hong Kong) & Adela Lin (Taipei)
Bloomberg
October 3, 2013

bloomberg.com

HTC Corp. (2498), Taiwan’s biggest smartphone maker, posted a third-quarter loss wider than analyst estimates as its handsets lost market share to devices from Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co.

The company had a net loss of NT$2.97 billion ($101 million) in the three months ended September, Taoyuan City, Taiwan-based HTC said in an e-mailed statement today. That compares with the NT$1.71 billion average loss of 16 analyst estimates and is the first on a consolidated basis since at least 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

HTC’s flagship One has failed to arrest sliding sales amid product delays and changes to strategy as it faces intensifying competition from Chinese producers including Huawei Technologies Co. The company, which wasn’t among the top five producers in the second quarter, plans to boost promotion with actor Robert Downey Jr. and add cheaper devices to revive growth.

“HTC needs to figure out if it just wants to focus on the high-end market or the mid- to low-end segment, and right now it is missing out on both,” said Wang Wanli, a Taipei-based analyst at CIMB Securities Ltd. “In the fourth quarter many new products are in the pipeline, including iPhone, Samsung and Huawei, HTC only has one new model so they won’t see a strong pick up.”

Shares of HTC fell 0.8 percent to NT$132 as of 9:51 a.m. in Taipei. The stock has lost more than 80 percent of its value in the past two years.

Slumping Sales

The operating loss in the third quarter was NT$3.5 billion and sales were NT$47 billion, the company said today. Analysts had projected an operating loss of NT$2.2 billion on sales of NT$ 54 billion.

HTC, the first maker of phones using Google Inc. software, in July forecast an eighth straight drop in quarterly sales as it struggles to compete with Apple and Samsung.

The company was ranked ninth in the global smartphone market during the second quarter, with 2.8 percent share compared with 5.8 percent a year earlier, according to data from Bloomberg Industries and IDC. That compares with 31.7 percent for Samsung, 13.2 percent for Apple and 4.8 percent for Lenovo Group Ltd. (992)

HTC was a contract manufacturer before it began promoting its own brand in 2006. The company had a short-lived reign at the top of the U.S. market in the third quarter of 2011, when it accounted for 24 percent of smartphone shipments, according to researcher Canalys.

The company in February 2012 said it had “dropped the ball” on products, pointing to weaknesses in design and engineering. The HTC One, which was supposed to herald a reversal of fortune, has so far failed to stop a slide in the company’s sales since the phone’s introduction was delayed to the same timeframe as Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S4.

HTC lost the early momentum of unveiling its HTC One in February prior to Samsung’s Galaxy S4 as a shortage of camera components forced it to delay shipments. ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Kantar Worldpanel Comtech US Sales Table and PR Report for 3 m/e June 2013 ... ...

Eric L — 9/30/2013 2:59:55 PM

Kantar Worldpanel Comtech US Sales Table and PR Report for 3 m/e June 2013 ...

>> T-Mobile sees growth in sales on strength of iOS in the US

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech
September 3, 2013

kantarworldpanel.com

T-Mobile grew to 13.2% of smartphone sales in the U.S. market in the 3 month period ending August 2013, marking its highest share of sales over the past year, and realized a growth of 1.1% points, reversing an on-going trend of year-on-year decline, according to data released today by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

The sales growth comes as a result of strong iOS sales and strategic discounts, based upon analysis by the company.

In smartphone sales, Android has retained its lead for the 3 month period ending August 2013, with a 55.1% sales share of the smartphone market. iOS follows with 39.3% sale share, an increase of 5.4% versus the same period a year ago.

Little movement is seen among the other operating systems in the market. Windows saw 3.0% of sales in the August period, while BlackBerry was down to 1.8% of sales.

Verizon is the top carrier, with a 37.1% share of smartphone sales in the 3 months ending August 2013 (seeing growth of 6.9% points). AT&T maintained second at 21.7%, and Sprint third with 14.6% of smartphone sales.

The data is derived from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech USA’s consumer panel, which is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel of its kind in the world, conducting more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone. ComTech tracks mobile phone behavior and the customer journey, including purchasing of phones, mobile phone bills/airtime, and source of purchase and phone usage. This data is exclusively focused on the sales within this 3 month period rather than market share figures. Sales shares exemplify more forward focused trends and should represent the market share for these brands in future.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Global Strategic Insight Director, Dominic Sunnebo states, “When iOS first debuted on T-Mobile in mid-April, the majority of sales came from consumers upgrading from a featurephone to their first smartphone. However, looking at those who purchased an iPhone in the August period, 56% of those consumers came from another smartphone, including 38.5% from an Android device.”

For the 3 months ending August 2013, the iPhone 5 remained the top-selling smartphone at T-Mobile, with 17.1% of sales.

Still, the majority of phones sold on T-Mobile run Android, including the Samsung Galaxy series, and the HTC One, which saw deep discounts in August.

As part of T-Mobile’s ‘uncarrier’ strategy, smartphones are being offered at a smaller up-front cost, with the ability to pay off the rest of the phone over the next two years. The HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 were debuted for $99.99 up front, $100 less expensive than other major carriers with a 2 year contract. In August, both of these phones were offered at $0 down, and saw sales increase.

Sunnebo continues “The discounts seen in August may have been in response to AT&T and Verizon, which have followed suite with similar programs, debuting at the end of July and August, respectively. With these carriers once again on a level playing field, it will be interesting to see if T-Mobile can continue its upward trajectory.” ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] Latest Complete Kantar Worldpanel Sales Share Tables (9 markets + EU5) for 3 m/e...

Eric L — 9/30/2013 11:18:09 AM

Latest Complete Kantar Worldpanel Sales Share Tables (9 markets + EU5) for 3 m/e August 2013 ...

Windows Phone nears double digit share across Europe

>> Windows Phone nears double digit share across Europe
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech
September 30, 2013

kantarworldpanel.com

The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, for the three months to August 2013, shows Windows Phone has posted its highest ever sales share of 9.2% across the five major European markets¹ and is now within one percentage point of iOS in Germany. Android remains the top operating system across Europe with a 70.1% market share, but its dominant position is increasingly threatened as growth trails behind both Windows and iOS.

¹ The big five European markets (EU5) includes Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Windows Phone has hit double digit sales share figures in France and Great Britain with 10.8% and 12% respectively – the first time it has recorded double digits in two major markets.

Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, comments: “After years of increasing market share, Android has now reached a point where significant growth in developed markets is becoming harder to find. Android’s growth has been spearheaded by Samsung, but the manufacturer is now seeing its share of sales across the major European economies dip year on year as a sustained comeback from Sony, Nokia and LG begins to broaden the competitive landscape.”

Dominic continues: “Windows Phone’s latest wave of growth is being driven by Nokia’s expansion into the low and mid range market with the Lumia 520 and 620 handsets. These models are hitting the sweet spot with 16 to 24 year-olds and 35 to 49 year-olds, two key groups that look for a balance of price and functionality in their smartphone’.

Across the globe

In the United States, Apple continues to grow strongly year on year and now makes up 39.3% of sales. This is set to spike in the coming months with the release of the iPhone 5S & 5C.

Apple and Android have recorded almost identical shares of sales in Japan – 48.6% and 47.4% respectively. However, news that the new iPhone range will be available on Japan’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo, for the first time, makes it likely that Apple will pull ahead of Android in this key market.

BlackBerry’s troubles continue; the operating system now accounts for just 2.4% of sales across the big five European markets and 1.8% in the United States.

Smartphone % penetration in Great Britain stands at 67% in August, with 85% of devices sold in the past three months being smartphones. ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] 64-bit Processors for Samsung Galaxy Smartphones ... [graphic] "Our next smar...

Eric L — 9/14/2013 1:40:02 PM

64-bit Processors for Samsung Galaxy Smartphones ...

"Our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality.” - Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung -

>> Samsung's Upcoming Galaxy Smartphones to have 64-Bit Processors, Will Expand in China

Samsung wants to stay on its A game to beat Apple

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
September 12, 2013

dailytech.com

Samsung sees that Apple is making an aggressive push into China, and will pump up the competition with powerful new 64-bit Galaxy products in order to keep Apple at bay.

Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung’s mobile business chief, confirmed that Samsung wants to expand its business in the Chinese smartphone market during a meeting in Seocho-dong, southern Seoul.

“Samsung understands that Apple intends to boost its mobile business in China, as well as in Japan, meaning that we should try harder in these countries,” said shin.

Apple will sell its latest iPhones through China Unicom and China Telecom while also talking with China Mobile, which has a customer base over twice the size of the U.S. population. In fact, Chinese regulators gave the final required license for the iPhone to work on China Mobile Ltd's mobile network this week.

images.dailytech.com

Samsung plans to pursue the market with competitive products in hopes of swaying users from buying Apple's iPhones. For instance, Shin said the next set of Samsung Galaxy smartphones would feature 64-bit processors for more power and speed.

“Not in the shortest time. But yes, our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality,” said Shin.

In addition, Samsung will hold a launch event for its latest 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 3 "phablet" in China.

Apple, on the other hand, just recently announced its iPhone 5S, which also features a 64-bit processor (the ARM-based A7). This will offer the market a high-end smartphone with enough power to run complex games and applications.

As of the end of the second quarter, Samsung was the top smartphone seller in China with 19.4 percent of the market while Apple’s share was just 4.3 percent.

Source: The Korea Times:http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=29112700 ###

- Eric -

[Eric L] 5by5 Special Event (#22) Audiocast: The Apple iPhone 5c and 5s Launch Event... ...

Eric L — 9/12/2013 1:21:40 PM

5by5 Special Event (#22) Audiocast: The Apple iPhone 5c and 5s Launch Event...

5by5.tv

Dan Benjamin is joined by Haddie Cooke (5by5), blogger/writer's Christina Warren Benedict Evans (UK), and Horace Dediu (Finland), to discuss their thoughts on the September 10th Apple Event announcing the iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, and more.

Duration is 1 hour and 30 minutes. It's one of the better discussions of the event and products that I've listened to.

- Eric -

[waitwatchwander] With 64-bit capability, you gotta figure Intel should now be concerned that Appl...

waitwatchwander — 9/11/2013 3:11:15 PM

With 64-bit capability, you gotta figure Intel should now be concerned that Apple's preparing to use their own ARM processor inside their Macs and AirBooks. That certainly makes more sense than solely developing a 64-bit processor for use in phones and tablets.

[Eric L] Mobiledia: The Downfall of RIM and Blackberry in 3 Parts ... ... by Allen Tsai...

Eric L — 9/11/2013 12:08:22 PM

Mobiledia: The Downfall of RIM and Blackberry in 3 Parts ...

... by Allen Tsai (September, 2013)

Long with several videos and definitely worth a read.

• I. Origins: The Birth of BlackBerry | mobiledia.com

• II. Origins: A Nation of BlackBerry Addicts | mobiledia.com

• III. Origins: How BlackBerry Fell | mobiledia.com

- Eric -

[Eric L] The Dawn of 64-Bit Mobile Computing using ARMv8 architecture: Apples A7 >> The...

Eric L — 9/11/2013 10:16:16 AM

The Dawn of 64-Bit Mobile Computing using ARMv8 architecture: Apples A7

>> The real reasons Apple's 64-bit A7 chip makes sense

Don't swallow Apple's marketing lines that 64-bit chips magically run software faster than 32-bit relics. What the A7 in the iPhone 5S does do, though, is pave the way for Apple's long-term future.

Stephen Shankland
C|Net
September 11, 2013

news.cnet.com

Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller touts the advantages of the A7 processor used in the iPhone 5S.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Apple injected a lot of marketing hyperbole into its claims about the wonders of 64-bit computing when it showed off the A7 processor at the heart of the new iPhone 5S. But there are real long-term reasons that Apple is smart to move beyond the 32-bit era in mobile computing.

Apple did indeed beat its smartphone rivals to the 64-bit era with the A7, and the processor may indeed vault over its predecessor's performance. The hyperbole came when Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller, speaking at Apple's iPhone 5S and 5C launch event on Tuesday, linked those two accomplishments.

"Why go through all this?" Schiller asked, referring to the new chip and 64-bit versions of iOS 7 and Apple's iOS apps. "The benefits are huge. The A7 is up to twice as fast as the previous-generation system at CPU tasks," Schiller said, and up to twice as fast at graphics tasks, too.

Indeed, there's a reason the computer industry is shifting to 64-bit computing; the main benefit is memory capacity that can exceed 4GB. But just as we saw with 64-bit personal computers arriving over the last decade, 64-bit designs don't automatically improves performance for most tasks. In fact, there can be drawbacks: it's likely that 64-bit versions of programs will be bulkier than their 32-bit equivalents.

But Apple is smart to lay the foundations for 64-bit mobile computing now, for three reasons. First, large memory capacity is an academic issue in the mobile market today, but it won't always be. Second, the the 64-bit transition happens to come along with other chip changes that are useful immediately. And third, it gives Apple more flexibility to build ARM-based PCs if it chooses to embrace an alternative to Intel chips.

What is 64-bit computing?

A 64-bit chips can handle memory addresses described with 64-bit numbers rather than 32-bit ones, which means a computer can accommodate more than 4GB of memory, and that chips can do math with integers that are a lot bigger and floating-point numbers that are more precise. The 64-bit transition doesn't have any effect on a lot of computing performance at all.

With servers, 64-bit chips are crucial, because they often need gobs of memory for running many tasks simultaneously and keeping as much of it as possible in fast-response RAM. With PCs, 64-bit chips are useful to avoid bumping up against 4GB memory limits, which is about where the mainstream market is today.

On mobile devices, though, the 4GB limit has yet to arrive. Even though having more RAM is really useful, it's got big drawbacks in the mobile market: it's expensive, it takes up room, and most problematic, it draws a lot of electrical power and therefore shortens battery life. The Samsung Galaxy Note 3, an Android phone, has an unusually large 3GB of RAM, but it's also got an unusually large size to handle a bigger-than-average 3,200mAh battery.

Higher-precision 64-bit math is helpful for tasks like scientific simulations, but it's not a big deal on mobile.

At Apple's event, Epic Games executives were gleeful about the A7 performance playing Infinity Blade 3, and there's no reason to doubt their statements that they could draw a dragon with four times the detail. But that performance improvement is likely to come more from the new graphics abilities in the A7 and from its support for the richer OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics-acceleration interface, not from its 64-bit design.

Schiller touted processor performance improvements in the iPhone 5S, which uses Apple's new A7 chip, but didn't detail which speed tests he was using. (Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Why bother with 64-bit mobile chips?

Even if 64-bit computing isn't some across-the-board speedup technology, there's a very good reason to adopt it: the future.

But here again, we have to splash a little cold water on Schiller's enthusiasm.

"The PC world went through the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit, and it took years," Schiller said. "Today you're going to see that Apple is going to move the mobile computing system forward from 32-bit to 64-bit in one day."

In fact, it only took a couple hours for Apple to announce the iPhone 5S and the A7 processor. But the full 64-bit transition will take years in mobile, just as it did in the PC market.

Indeed, the transition already has been going on for a couple years. In 2011, after four years of behind-closed-doors work, ARM Holdings announced its 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set for the chip designs it licenses to Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and many other makers of mobile chips. Apple's A7 uses the ARMv8 architecture.

The hardware change is only the first part. After that comes software. Apple has retooled iOS 7 -- the kernel a the heart of the software, the libraries of pre-written code that it and other software draw upon, and the device drivers the kernel uses to talk to hardware like the network and touch screen -- so it's 64-bit software. And it's got a version of its Xcode developer tools so that programmers can build 64-bit versions of their iOS products.

But it'll be years before the whole software ecosystem makes the move. Old software likely will never make the change, which is why it's good ARMv8 chips can run older 32-bit software seamlessly. And programmers will still need to build 32-bit versions of their software for older iPhones -- as well as brand-new 32-bit models like the iPhone 5C.

Given how long it takes to make the transition, it's important to lay the hardware foundation early enough that the software market can move gracefully. Even though adding more RAM is hard in mobile devices, it'll happen. It might well happen sooner on iPads, too, which can handle faster processors, bigger batteries, and more elaborate software. And it's possible that computing engineers will successfully commercialize some other form or memory that's not as power-hungry.

ARMv8 benefits

A nearer-term reason the Apple A7 might appeal to programmers has nothing to do with its 64-bit nature: the ARMv8 architecture brings some real advantages.

One of them is a larger number of registers -- tiny on-chip storage areas where the processor stores data for very fast access. ARMv8 roughly doubles general-purpose registers from 16 to 31, which means the chip needn't fritter away as many cycles swapping things into and out of memory.

The ARMv8 architecture used in the Apple A7 chip brings several improvements in addition to a 64-bit design, including more registers to store data, better double-precision math, and built-in cryptography features. (Credit: ARM Holdings)

When AMD pioneered 64-bit computing on x86 -- a transition it pushed while Intel was distracted with its Itanium designs -- it got a big speed boost from increasing the number of registers. But 32-bit x86 chips were hobbled by having only four registers, while 32-bit ARM chips have a relatively abundant 16; that could mean the performance boost won't be as good with the ARM transition.

ARMv8 also has some other significant changes. It's got much better mathematical abilities, especially when performing the same operation on a lot of data. And it's got built-in encryption processing abilities, which should speed a lot of secure communications and cut battery usage.

New Apple options

Apple surprised the world when it moved its Mac line from PowerPC processors to Intel processors, and there have been rumblings it might move to or at least embrace ARM chips for Macs, too.

The A7 processor or its rumored higher-end A7X sibling might not have enough oomph for a full-fledged personal computer, but it was hard to miss Schiller boasting that the A7 has a "desktop-class architecture." And even if there's never any ARM-based Mac, it's still possible Apple could take iOS into something more laptop-like. The company, which made iWork free with new iOS devices and threw iPhoto and iMovie into the bargain, clearly likes the idea of customers creating content on iOS devices, not just consuming it.

If Apple chose to build ARM-based PCs, having more than 4GB of memory could be very useful. Thus, it would be a big asset to have a mature 64-bit ARM chip design with an accompanying operating system and app collection.

ARM-based Apple PCs would be a dramatic shift indeed. Intel is working furiously on lowering the power consumption of its x86 chips to compete better against ARM, and an ARM-based Apple PC would have serious difficulties running Mac software for x86-based machines.

We need not invent reasons for Schiller's 64-bit A7 enthusiasm besides that it makes a good marketing line, something that sounds like progress and that's easy to see missing from Android competition.

But even if it's mostly just an iPhone marketing line for now, Apple's change to 64-bit ARMv8 designs does make sense in the long run. ###

- Eric -

[Jurgis Bekepuris] Wow, great answer. You did all the work. :) Thanks a lot. I personally find the...

Jurgis Bekepuris — 9/10/2013 1:40:38 PM

Wow, great answer. You did all the work. :) Thanks a lot.

I personally find the GoogleRola and NokiaSoft integrations and the challenges and opportunities they present to be exceptionally interesting.

Yeah, they are interesting, but mostly to watch from aside. At least for me. :)

I sold my NOK position.
I don't have GOOG position for some time already, since I think it is too expensive. I do understand its strong position and moats in multiple areas, so I know that probably I am wrong in not holding it.
I have MSFT position. I am deciding whether to exit it before coming turmoil.
I also have a smallish AAPL position.

Overall, I think that I'd rather be in other places during the integrations, platform wars, etc. But I understand that people who make right decisions can make a lot of money in this field.

Regards :)

[Eric L] PCMag Business Choice Awards 2013 ... pcmag.com Posted by Zax in nicely forma...

Eric L — 9/10/2013 12:06:26 PM

PCMag Business Choice Awards 2013 ...

pcmag.com

Posted by Zax in nicely formatted fashion with graphics here: Message 29104203

I found this particular graphic from the above very interesting if not necessarily surprising ...

Thanks Zax.

- Eric -

[Eric L] Motorola Mobile: A Google company ... [graphic] Hi Jurgis, << Honestly, I ha...

Eric L — 9/10/2013 11:55:33 AM

Motorola Mobile: A Google company ...

Hi Jurgis,

<< Honestly, I haven't followed Moto inside Google. >>

I had not myself until very recently despite the fact that I've been adding chunks of GOOG on big dips to what was originally a very small position for about 8 years. Prompted to do so by the Microsoft bid for Nokia Devices and Services, I've spent time over the last week digging back through the quarterly reports of Motorola Mobility LLC (mobile devices and Home) from before the acquisition was completed in mid-Q2 2012, and of Google from Q2 2012 forward. I also went back to look at Interbrand's comparative annual brand rankings growth/decline for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung for the last decade and sales and share growth/decline for each.

Right now I simply have raw notes from the exercise that is about 80% completed, but I will probably attempt to put them together in reasonably coherent format and post an abstract here -- most likely in multi-parts but when I do so I'll link each part back to this post.

One thing I am convinced of is that Google did NOT buy Motorola Mobility simply for its patents. Like Apple (albeit on much smaller scale today) they are in the devices (and services) business as is Microsoft. Over time the business models of both will change to some degree as a consequence, and it's about time for both the young Google and the aging Microsoft, IMO.

<< My guess is that the company is in downside spiral (but then who aside of Samsung and Apple isn't?). >>

Since acquisition Google has been cleaning out Motorola's device pipes and stale Motorola designed products. They have also been house cleaning the subsidiary they purchased, shedding assets and employees. It's now lean and mean and free of the former parent's baggage and the Moto X is the 1st of Google's devices.

<< How much marketshare did it lose since it was acquired? >>

Under Dr. Sanjay Jha's leadership Motorola's quarterly device shipments increased from 8.5 million in Q1 2010 to a peak of 12.9 million in Q3 2011 and declined from there in each and every quarter since.

In the final quarter before acquisition (Q1 2012) Moto had ~2% unit market share, down YoY from 3% in Q1 2011. In the 2012 1st quarter Motorola Mobility sold in 8.9 million mobile devices worth $2.2 Billion ($247 ASP): 5.1 million Android smartphones (57%) and 3.8 million (43%) feature phones or entry level devices.

In Q2 2013 (according to ABI Research) Google's Motorola sold-in 3.5 million Android smartphones which translated to less than <1% (0.8%) unit market share of mobile devices and ~2% of smartphones shipped in the quarter. Motorola Mobile revenues from devices, accessories, and other was $998 million ($351 ASP).

I suspect we'll start to see slow Motorola unit share growth starting this quarter and I also suspect that growth will be choppy just as Nokia's Windows Phone growth was. At some time I suspect it could grow faster than the smartphone market just as Windows phone growth is now doing and should continue to do despite Nokia's transition to new ownership.

<< How much money did it lose? >>

Lots ... but I haven't added it up yet. I intend to on both a GAAP and pro forma basis and also look at what the actual net cost of the acquisition was after divestures and netting down cash acquired. That net cost of acquisition turns out to be less than $7 billion not including losses incurred in the last 5 quarters, or restructuring charges in that period and going forward. Motorola headcount has been dramatically reduced by Google and virtually all manufacturing eliminated.

Below is Google's GAAP and Pro Forma operating losses for Q2 2013 (and Q1 2013, and Q2 2012).

<< Of course, Google has money to keep it on life support and even engage in DARPA'y research. But ultimately: does it deliver? :) ??

Eventually I suspect it will deliver and as the Wired article stated it's a long term goal, not a short term one:

Building Motorola itself into a profitable entity is not an immediate objective. “Of course we can’t be a drain on the company forever,” says Woodside, “but the goal is not necessarily to make massive amounts of money in a short period of time—we have a much longer time horizon than that.”

On this general topic ABI Research had this to say about the commencement of the Google/Motorola device generation ...

Q2 2013 could be considered the quarter that Motorola cleared out its old device pipes to get ready for the its new "Google-designed" devices. The newly announced Moto X device does show some ingenuity and unique thought around what an Android OEM should be doing, yet the new Motorola devices will have much to prove. Luckily, Google is willing to support Motorola with a reported $500 million marketing budget for the new devices. ABI Research is not convinced that "Made in the U.S.A." and some gesture/voice UI innovations are game changers, and there is a risk that this new UI approach could end up like Apples Siri: interesting at first but not used in the long run.

It will be interesting to see if Nexus 5 will be a Google Motorola product (or LG's, or another's).

I personally find the GoogleRola and NokiaSoft integrations and the challenges and opportunities they present to be exceptionally interesting. Once a LT core hold since '94 I've been out of MSFT since 2000. Its now back on my close watch list.

Cheers,

- Eric -

[Jurgis Bekepuris] Lots of hype. But does it deliver? Honestly, I haven't followed Moto inside Goo...

Jurgis Bekepuris — 9/9/2013 5:34:14 PM

Lots of hype. But does it deliver?

Honestly, I haven't followed Moto inside Google. My guess is that the company is in downside spiral (but then who aside of Samsung and Apple isn't?). How much marketshare did it lose since it was acquired? How much money did it lose?

Of course, Google has money to keep it on life support and even engage in DARPA'y research. But ultimately: does it deliver? :)