mobile

Sony sees but doesn't raise the mobile game

15 October 2013 by Steve Blum
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Coincidentally, it costs $200.

As the last MobileCon opens in San Jose, Sony announced today that it’s launching three mobile products in the US: the Xperia Z1 and Z Ultra smartphones and its new Smartwatch 2.

I don’t see any Wow! factor. The smart phones are standard, high-end Android devices and the smart watch seems more or less in line with Samsung’s Gear, although the fact that it can be used with any late model Android device (or so they say) and is a hundred bucks cheaper is a competitive advantage.… More

Fitness for Christmas is a mobile game

12 October 2013 by Steve Blum
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Old school only gets you so far.

About half of the annual sales of consumer electronics products will come between now and the end of the year, so manufacturers are feverishly trying to get their new products in front of consumers. Fitness applications, particularly ones built around smart phones, are getting an increasing amount of attention as the holiday selling season builds.

There’s no question that mobile phones are part of the standard kit for athletes (although hopefully not during races).… More

LG and Samsung give Apple a case of the bends

8 October 2013 by Steve Blum
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LG and Samsung muscle their flex.

LG and Samsung are firing press releases at each other, each claiming to have the first flexible OLED smartphone screen. Samsung teased their new technology at CES earlier this year, while LG unveiled its flex screen yesterday. Regardless of who is first, it’ll create marketing buzz for both companies as they build speed through the fall selling season.

A flexible screen means you can do cool things with design, like offering more useable screen real estate in more interesting ways.… More

A roach clip for Blackberry

28 September 2013 by Steve Blum
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The familiar scent of Blackberries.

Wall Street investors seem happy to take what Fairfax Financial Holdings is offering for Blackberry and let the dwindling mobile phone company waft away in the wind. Subtract out the cash that Blackberry is holding, and the net sale price is about $2 billion, a sad end to a psychedelic slide that began at $83 billion five years ago.

Like Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia, Fairfax’s offer seems to be based on the chemically impaired notion that Blackberry isn’t in the final stages of a terminal crash.… More

Android anxiety drives Microsoft's purchase of Nokia

14 September 2013 by Steve Blum
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When you have to buy corporate affection.

Finally, there’s a plausible explanation for Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia last week: an Android phone was under development, on the only major mobile product line that supports its Windows operating system.

It couldn’t have been because Microsoft wanted to hire away the management team that took Nokia from world domination to being a life member of the sub-five percent market share club. I believe that Steve Ballmer thinks that he can scream loud enough to make Finnish engineers turn out hip, frictionless iPhone clones.… More

Samsung 2, Apple 1

10 September 2013 by Steve Blum
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Sell me another one, not like the other one.

Apple’s reality distortion field did not die with Steve Jobs. Much of the press coverage of today’s announcement of two new iPhone models concluded that the iPhone 5c is aimed at defending global Apple’s market share by moving away from the saturated high end of the smart phone market.

The problem with that idea is that the cheapest unsubsidised 5c costs $549, well north of the low end smart phone offerings of Samsung, ZTE, Huawei, LG and others, which come comfortably under $200.… More

U.S. group drafting standards for industrial strength Internet

31 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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Sorry. I thought you said the castanet of things.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is coordinating an effort – with broad industry support – to create security and operating standards for industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) data communications.

There are already a couple of efforts underway amongst mobile carriers and equipment makers to standardise protocols for wireless segments of those networks. The expectation is that billions – 50 billion by 2020? – of devices will communicate directly back to the Internet of Things via mobile data modules.… More

ZTE might get some developer love with cheap Firefox phone

17 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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Or it might be chasing its tail.

ZTE isn’t big in the U.S. Only the least of the four major mobile carriers – Sprint – offers a branded ZTE smart phone on its website and then just a single model. Its only distinguishing feature is the number of flaming negative reviews written by unhappy buyers.

With little to lose, ZTE is bypassing mobile carriers and going direct-to-geek by selling an unlocked $80 phone – the Open – running the new Firefox mobile operating system on eBay.… More

Buyers might have to settle for stems and seeds, but Blackberry CEO won't

16 August 2013 by Steve Blum
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It was a lot bigger before I took a hit.

In the week when Apple is giving its new iPhone a final bath in unicorn tears and Samsung begins a campaign to put a mobile phone on every wrist, Blackberry went on sale. And for rolling a big fat one for shareholders, CEO Thorsten Heins will get $56 million.

He’d already pretty much given up on phones. Blackberry can’t sell much of anything to anyone who isn’t already using their devices.… More

Intel selling heavy metal thunder to a lightning fast market

25 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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The next industry standard.

After playing with an Atom-powered smart phone at CES this year and hearing execs talk up Android, I saw glimmers of hope that Intel was finally coming to grips with the mobile world. It seems I had it backwards: the mobile world is tightening its grip on Intel’s corporate throat.

Long the dominant player in PC and big server processors, Intel is all but shut out of smart phones and tablets, a billion unit market, and has no presence at all in the machine-to-machine space, which could be five or ten times that size in the next handful of years.… More