Nokia

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

HTC won't help its shrinking share by shrinking a phone

19 July 2013 by Steve Blum
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It used to be bigger.

Combined, Samsung and Apple are selling about half the world’s smart phones, with 30% and 19% market share respectively in 2012 according to IDC. Much of Samsung’s growth from 19% in 2011 came out of HTC’s hide. Its share was cut in half over same period, dropping below 5% and putting it more or less in a tie with Nokia and Blackberry.

At least it was still in the top five then.… More

Qualcomm's Jacobs fills CE thought leader gap

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs presented a vision of the future for the consumer electronics industry this morning, as he opened the first official day of the show with a thought provoking keynote.

The core of that future is mobile services and technology. “All consumer electronics business are either in the mobile business or soon will be”, said Jacobs.

This mobile transformation is most pronounced in the developing world, according to Jacobs. Emerging markets are increasingly mobile-centric. The… More

Live from CES, 8 January 2009

Last to first, real time tweets from Las Vegas…

  • WirelessHD press conference. Certification ready. 60GHz standard to link devices inside the same room to HDMI standards.

  • Clear thinker: Paul Liao, CTO Panasonic. Uses Maslow’s hierarchy to rate & rank tech features.
  • Clear, though, that there’s still a battle to be fought over how to split up content and application revenue in the wireless world.
  • Recognition that consumers will have lots of devices, but don’t want to pay lots of money to connect them all.
… More

Live from the Oulu wireless technology conference in San Jose

Real time Tweets from the Discover Oulu wireless technology conference in San Jose on 18 November 2008…

  • At Oulu wireless conference in San Jose, per Purnima Kochikar, Nokia biz dev: Indian mobile users buying 10 rupee (25 cent) prepay cards. Devices are status symbols in developing world, services aren’t. People will buy smartphone but not service, just to put the phone on a table at a meeting. 11:20 AM Nov 18th.
  • 1,000 radios per person in near term.
… More