Inspite media reports, HP has no plans to shelve Palm smartphones.
“On the contrary,” insists Tim Pettitt, Palm’s senior product manager of smartphones at a briefing today in San Francisco, Calif. “Palm is going to be the mobility play for HP!”
Expect to see more smartphones coming from HP/Palm as well new mobile devices such as tablets/slates, printers and netbooks, all powered by the company’s mobile operating system, WebOS.
“Our goal is really to expand the form factor. We built WebOS to go on any device. So we knew we’re going to move off smartphones eventually… So definitely you’ll keep seeing things new coming out from Palm.”
It’ll be interesting to see if HP/Palm is able to break in the smartphone market, today dominated by Apple’s iPhone, Google Android and RIM. But you can forget about Nokia. The Finnish company just doesn’t get mobile Internet.
Remember the late 90′s, when Intel was throwing billions in its quest to become a telecommunication powerhouse, to finally write it all off?
Well, sounds that the chipmaker is at it again with the recent acquisitions of Infineon’s cellular and GPS technology as well as the assets of small 4G vendor Comsys.
Hopefully, the mastermind of Intel’s first telecom foray, Sean Maloney, might remember one or two things learned from his first failed attempt to build a communications empire!
As analyst Linley Gwennap writes it,
“Making it clear that money is no object in its quest to become a major player in the smartphone market, Intel plans to acquire the wireless operations of Infineon in a deal valued at more than $1.2 billion. Infineon’s cellular and GPS technology will complement Intel’s Atom processor and Wi-Fi expertise, allowing Intel to deliver a complete solution for the rapidly growing smartphone and tablet-computer markets.”
Infineon ranked fourth in cellular-baseband shipments last year with 10.7% unit share, according to a recent report from The Linley Group. Infineon is a major supplier to Apple, Nokia, and Samsung.
But “the German vendor lacks an application processor, however, making success in the smartphone market difficult, and it has struggled to sell its 3G baseband outside of Apple,” adds Linley.
The analyst adds that in a quieter but significant move, Comsys acquisitions brings a processor for WiMax phones and was working on converting that design to support LTE.
Intel’s secret goal (well not anymore!) is to merge Infineon and Comsys technologies to create its own 4G solution coupled to its Atom chip for smartphones.
“Intel is clearly focused on smartphones, leaving the future of Infineon’s popular 2G processors in doubt. This deal could end up helping vendors such as Broadcom, MediaTek, and ST-Ericsson, which could step into the breach with their own 2G processors. Conversely, the deal gives Intel the technology it needs to develop an integrated 3G-smartphone processor, allowing it to compete against vendors such as Qualcomm and Marvell,” says Linley.
Looks like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent might finally have a serious competitor in the wireless equipment market.
The Finnish Mobile manufacturing giant agreed to acquire the telecommunication network infrastructure business of Motorola, which makes gears that wirelessly transmits voice, data and video on both the CDMA and GSM networks, for $1.2 billion.
A fire-sale for some. To put this in perspective, the Motorola unit generates $3.6 billion in annual revenue and $300 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
Motorola’s wireless network equipment maker unit was also the last major one left in North America, after Nortel’s demise (based in Canada) and the Lucent’s buy-out by France-based Alcatel.
A move that would significantly bolster Nokia Siemens Networks’ (NSN) standings in the North American market, putting it in at number 3, after Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. There are now essentially five major vendors of wireless network gear in the world: Europeans Ericsson, NSN and Alcatel-Lucent; and Chinese Huawei and ZTE.
The acquisition will be completed towards the end of 2010 and would provide operators the freedom to choose from the existing mobile network equipment providers that include giants like Ericsson, Alcatel Lucent, Huawei Technology and NSN.
The deal would help NSN gain over 50 relationships and add an 7,500 more employees. This in itself can prove encouraging for NSN, given the fact that the manufacturer has been in hot waters; slashing employees and closing numerous offices in a bid to save cash. The major issue has been with the falling demand as well as fierce competition from Ericsson, Huawei in terms of prices.
Motorola on the other hand is eyeing for a broader and more profitable restructuring. The plan is to spinoff its Mobile phone unit as well as set top boxes operations over to Sanjay Jha the Co-CEO. The buyout is set to bring further relief to Nokia Siemens Networks as it would place the manufacturer at No. 3 in the USA, #1 in Japan. In a Press release, Bosco Novak the Head of Customer Operations at NSN said:
..the addition of the Motorola wireless network infrastructure business is targeted to ensure that we are well placed to meet those needs..we will utilize the combined strength of Nokia Siemens Networks’ TD-LTE solutions and Motorola’s WiMAX and LTE businesses, to better meet customers’ evolving technology and business needs.
The two are also looking ahead into exploring better global relation in the area of public safety. It will be interesting to see how the partnership progresses for the and that the integration can bolster their standings in the market.
With the economy expected to continue improving, analyst firm Forward Concepts forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 24% for Smartphones to the 496 million unit level in 2014.
Follows some of the key findings of the Forward Concepts latest study.
Smartphone shipments worldwide grew 18% in 2009 to 171 million units at a $67 billion level. The Smartphone semiconductor and display revenue reached $11.7 billion.
Nokia continued to lead Smartphone shipments in 2009, with a market share of 36.4%, followed by RIM at 19.4%, Apple at 14.9% and HTC at 6.3%. Sharp follows with a 3.5% market share, then Samsung at 3.4%. 18 other Smartphone vendors constitute the remaining 20% share.
Western Europe has overtaken Japan to be the leader in Smartphone consumption, with a 23% 2009 market share. However in 2010, North America is forecast to become the leading Smartphone market, driven by iPhone and Android phones, with a 22% share, closely followed by Western Europe at 21.6%, and fast-growing China at 17%.
Symbian continues to be the leading Smartphone operating system, with an estimated 43% unit market share in 2009, while RIM’s Blackberry OS (19%) and Apple’s OS X (15%) has supplanted Microsoft Windows Mobile (13%) for the #2 and #3 positions. Linux variants, including Android, reached 8%, followed by, Palm’s WebOS with 2%. In 2014, Forward Concepts analysts predict that Android will grow to the #2 position, followed by OS X in 2014.
Apple's latest New York store, it's 4th, in the Upper West Side district
Before kicking off the “meat” of his keynote i.e. introducing Apple’s iPad tablet, CEO Steve Jobs started with an update on his company’s latest achievements.
250 million iPods sold since 2001;
284 retail stores;
50 million visitors went to Apple’s retail stores last quarter;
Apple opened its 4th store in New York City;
App store: 140,000 apps and 3 billion downloads in 18 months;
Apple has a “run rate” of $50+ billion a year.
A last figure, that gives Steve Jobs the bragging right to claim the #1 spot as the world’s largest mobile devices company.
Selling more mobile devices – iPods, iPhones and Mac laptops – than Sony (camcorders, walkmans, cell phones…), Samsung and Nokia!
Later in his presentation, Jobs added the following numbers:
75 million iPod touches and iPhones sold so far. Meaning 75 million customers that already know how to use the iPad!
The AppStore has 125 million active accounts with credit cards all ready for one-click purchases
Finally, Apple sold 12 billion products through its AppStore and they’re ready to take orders from iPad customers buying music, videos, ebooks and more!
The head of HTC's business in the Americas, Jason MacKenzie, explains why competitors' App Store strategy is a crime to developers!
In a keynote style that reminds me of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, HTC’s head of the Americas went as far as accusing his competitors (Apple, Motorola, Nokia or Palm) of committing a crime on developers with their App Store strategy.
“A lot of OEMs, a lot of manufacturers talk a lot about apps… Apps, apps, apps, great, cool apps. But what do they do? They relegate all of your hard work and your application to a simple little icon that is in a sea of a hundred of other icons… But unless you’ve got the best icon graphic in the world, when I hold that phone here [about 2 feet away from this eyes] yours look no different than anybody else. We think that’s criminal. Literally,” said Jason MacKenzie, VP Americas at HTC, in his keynote speech the Sprint Open Developer conference yesterday.
On the other hand, the Taiwanese phone maker promotes its Sense framework that let developers put their applications and widgets in front of users, mingled with the smartphone (Android or Windows Mobile) user interface. “We believe that your application should breathe and live on the device and that’s why we developed Sense,” adds MacKenzie.
Early next year, HTC promises to release the Sense SDK (software developers’ kit) for developers to create their own widgets and personalised screens.
Follows the video excerpt where MacKenzie talks about competitors’ app strategy and HTC Sense:
Finland produces lots of innovative startups, and not only in mobile!
Here I am in Helsinki, Finland invited by Finnfacts - an independent media service agency financed by Finnish companies – that brings foreign journalists and now bloggers, to meet with local firms.
HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web: an all-in-one printer glued to an iPod touch, with a capacitive touchscreen and an App Store!
It’s been a very very long time since I was exciting about using a printer. A bit like using an uninterruptible power supply or a backup system!
But with it’s latest all-in one printer/scanner/fax, H-P makes printing cool again.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web (with the money H-P spends in marketing, it could have easily found a more shorter and sexier name!) uses the same printing engine than the currently shipping Photosmart Premium C8180 – a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth multi-function printer which it will be replacing – but with an iPod touch-like capacitive touchscreen instead of the current smaller screen and series of buttons, and combined with H-P’s Apps Studio; yet another applications store.
H-P takes a page from the iPhone playbook and starts an Apps Store for printers
And just as with the iPhone, Palm Pre, etc., it will soon be possible to download apps for your printer!
At the launch event earlier today hosted at Al Gore’s Current TV studios in San Francisco, H-P showed apps from USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews as well as the company’s online site Snapfish.
With these apps, you’ll be able to customize, choose, print… daily news, maps, coupons, coloring pages, movie tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a finger.
Under the hood, the Web printer is running Linux with Nokia’s Qt application and graphical-user interface framework.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web will be available in the U.S. in September for $399 (the current Photosmart Premium, model C8180, is being discounted at less than $250 on Amazon.com) and next year for the rest of the world.
Here’s an excerpt of our exclusive interview with product marketing manager Ravikiran Adusumilli, going into more details on the printer capabilities (Wi-Fi setup, touchscreen, micro-transactions, auto-duplex printing…) that took 1.5 years to get to market:
MotherApp creates native mobile phone applications from Web sites
Looking for a recession proof business? Try mobile applications, and more specifically for the Apple iPhone.
In just a little more than 9 months, Apple will serve the one-billionth iPhone application from its App Store.
A gold rush that left many companies on the starting blocks, incapable of building their own application, either because of a lack of expertise in Objective-C – the computer language used to develop iPhone applications – or of available iPhone developers.
The Hong-Kong base 7-people startup offers a an automated service that will take any Web application and turn it into a native app for the iPhone, Google Android and/or Windows Mobile devices.
Support for the Blackberry is coming in July and in September for Symbian/Nokia.
All you need is a web site to build a iPhone app!
“MotherApp is a kind of compiler and it’s a 2 step process. First you develop a Web site using our HTML standard that includes some proprietary extensions to access the mobile phones special hardware, like the GPS radio or the camera. Then send us a link to the Web site and a day or two later, we send back the native application for any or all of the supported mobile platforms,” explains Ken Law, one of the three co-founders and an ex-Googler (pre-IPO) that I first met earlier this month at the Web 2.0 Expo conference.
A MotherApp application costs $1,000 per mobile platform.
The biggest stumbling block in MotherApp service is that customers have not access to the native mobile application source code. “But they can modify it as much as they want for 6-months for free and we are thinking of a business model where companies would pay a $99 a month subscription for example which will let them change their applications as much a they want,” responds Ken.
The other limitation of MotherApp’s technology is the kind of applications that MotherApp can actually “compile.”
“We are focused on client-server applications, like the Facebook, Youtube or LinkedIn apps. And they can be pretty complex like OpenRice, the Yelp of Hong-Kong. But we can not handle “fancy” applications like video games,” confides Law.
Although MotherApp raised an Angel round from Googlers, the startup is mostly self-funded by the 4 wealthy ex-Googlers co-founders and is already profitable.
The company is looking to expand in Silicon Valley, seeking to partner with Web developers with expertise in developing Web sites and gadgets/widgets and looking to offer mobile apps as well, and Web 2.0 companies wanting to turn their web site into native mobile applications.
For Law, MotherApp’s main competitor is open source development tool PhoneGap.
“The PhoneGap is embedding a browser inside the native application. So instead of learning Objective-C, you can use Web standards like AJAX and CSS. But it’s not a true iPhone app and you can not use the camera or access the device’s file-system for example,” warns Law.
Here’s a video excerpt of my conversation with Law in a Mountain View, Calif.-cafe:
Dell's aspiration to enter the smartphone business might be short lived
Entering the highly competitive mobile handset market with a poorly conceived product and little carriers support surely spells trouble for Dell, told Collin Stewarts analyst Ashok Kumar in a note to clients today.
“Dell plans to enter the smart handset market in a unique manner, by launching its products directly to the retailer… Dell committed itself to the handset business with a poorly planned feature set and cost targets,” wrote Kumar.
Although Dell is a newbie in the mobile phone space, the head of its consumer business – Ron Garriques – is no less than the former chief of Motorola’s handset division.
And talking to Garriques on a visit last year at Dell’s corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas, the ex-Motorola executive is focused on not repeating the mistakes done under his watch at Motorola.
But will consumers buy a product that carriers think is not good enough, asks Kumar. “The early verdict appears to indicate that Dell’s handset is more like a “me too” product with a cost structure that offers little advantage over established players like Apple, Nokia and RIM,” suggests the analyst.
On a related news, Dell is reported to launch its smartphone in China, rather sooner than later. What may be a flop in the U.S., may find a public in China, where Dell enjoys a good reputation.
Of course, time will tell. But if H-P was unsuccessful attracting carriers and customers (even its own employees!) to its Windows Mobile phones, its hard to imagine Dell having better luck to crack the world’s mobile market.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 3 months ago
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