mobile

Android is the best hope for making wearables into sellables

15 March 2014 by Steve Blum
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Good intentions meet the harsh light of day.

The buzz this week around the announcement that a reasonably high profile fitness band – Jawbone’s UP24 – is finally supporting Android as well as iOS phones is a bit overheated. Launching without Android support is a huge minus for any wearable device. Unless the feature set, connectivity and server-side support is limited. And that’s a good description of the Jawbone UP24. It’s a simple product that’s attractively designed, but it doesn’t do anything particularly innovative.… More

New CEO seems unlikely to win Microsoft's test

8 February 2014 by Steve Blum
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Sometimes the best you can do is watch the stumps.

Instead of seeking fresh leadership, Microsoft’s board of directors has opted to double down on the status quo as the company struggles to regain relevance in a world that’s moved away from the personal computer and toward mobile devices and cloud services.

The choice of Satya Nadella as Microsoft’s CEO was an exercise least-worse decision making. His most recent assignment in his 22 year career at Microsoft was running cloud and enterprise services, where he produced mediocre results.… More

Sony axes legacy PCs, TVs to focus on mobile

7 February 2014 by Steve Blum
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Innovation deficit.

Sony is distancing itself from the soon-to-be-legacy television and personal computer markets, in a effort to play catch up in the mobile device game. The company that redefined color quality in the 1970s is spinning its television business off into a separate subsidiary, and is selling its Vaio computer brand to a Japanese corporate restructuring specialist. It’s a response to what it calls “drastic changes” in the global PC industry…

Sony has determined that the optimal solution is to concentrate its mobile product lineup on smartphones and tablets and to transfer its PC business to a new company.

… More

Microsoft CEO candidate understands the danger

16 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Vestberg living large at CES.

“It’s normally not given that the winners in the first phase are the winners in the second phase”, said Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson at CES last week. It might be that someone on the Microsoft board was listening hard, because the rumor of the day has Vestberg on the shortlist to be its new CEO, replacing Steve Ballmer, who announced his impending resignation last year.

Vestberg was talking about the challenge in front of Ericsson, which was an early behemoth of the mobile phone business, but has remade itself as it fell far behind in handset manufacturing and its infrastructure business lost ground as voice networks were upgraded to handle broadband.… More

FCC chair Wheeler says it's time to cowboy up

13 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Be careful where the bull throws you.

“This is not my first rodeo. I played in the formulating of the rules for the very first spectrum auction”, said FCC chair Tom Wheeler, at CES last week. “I went around with my hair on fire talking about the end of western civilisation if they don’t do it my way”.

Wheeler was CEO of the National Cable Television Association from 1979 to 1984 and of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 to 2004, the Washington DC-based national trade associations for the cable television and mobile phone industries.… More

Consumer electronics collapse into the mobile phone

12 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Copernican model of consumer electronics.

Smart phones, tablets and wearable bits of networked silicon dominated the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, as the television was declared dead, high end audio and desktop computers were invisible in the flagship booths of major manufacturers and laptops were indistinguishably grey.

The week began with an analyst with the Consumer Electronics Association – the show’s organiser – projecting that smart phones, feature phones and tablets will, together, account for 45% of industry revenue in 2014.… More

FCC puzzles mobile broadband crunch and spectrum auctions

10 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Washington works by twists and turns.

“I keep describing it as a Rubik’s cube”, said FCC chair Tom Wheeler as he answered questions at CES about plans to auction off television frequencies for mobile broadband use. Like a Rubik’s cube, it’s a constantly moving problem on three axes: a reverse auction to buy back TV channels and a regular auction to sell the bandwidth to mobile phone companies, all while repacking television stations into less spectrum.… More

International passengers make voice calls on planes, politely

9 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Can’t we all just get along?

“At Delta, we’re very much promoting cellular transmission on airplanes but not voice calls”, said Kirk Thornburg, an engineering executive for the airline. Chuck Cook, his counterpart at JetBlue, agrees. “We do not support the use of cellular voice airborne, that’s customer driven”.

In fact, nearly everyone on this morning’s CES panel discussing consumer electronics on airplanes agreed that passengers should be able to use cellular data services in the air, but shouldn’t be allowed to talk on their phones.… More

Yahoo CEO puts mobile first

7 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Mayer steps out at CES.

“Mobile takes the things that Yahoo has excelled at, like news and mail, and puts them in your pocket”, said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, as she walked onto the keynote stage at CES this afternoon and launched a mobile makeover of the company. “Mobile is all about growth”.

Yahoo now has 400 million mobile users every month, she said. And that’s not even counting Tumblr. On average, smart phone owners are spending five times as much time using their devices now, than they did three years ago.… More

Samsung ditches phones, pitches 4K televisions at CES

7 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Samsung positions itself with curves.

Samsung is the dominant smart phone maker, accounting for around a third of annual unit sales world wide. But mobile isn’t at the top of its agenda at CES this year. It’s not introducing any new smart phones, preferring to save the buzz for the mobile industry’s powerhouse show next month in
Barcelona. “CES is traditionally a slower show for phones and such”, a company spokesman said.

Instead, Samsung is highlighting the increasingly also-ran television category, showing huge new ultra high definition screens – 4K capable it says – including prototypes that can curve and bend at a consumer’s whim.… More