Category: Industry

Mobile Computing Industry

China Unicom Says It Will Introduce own smartphone OS by Year-End

The UPhone will run on a “totally new” operating system that Unicom developed based on Linux, Zhang Zhijiang, who heads the company’s technology department, said in an interview today at the Mobile Asia Congress in Hong Kong. The phone is being developed with Okwap, Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp., he said.

via China Unicom Says It Will Introduce Self-Developed Smartphone by Year-End – Bloomberg.

Operators are still considering bespoke operating systems.

See also: European Operators contemplate own OS. Why not just fork Android?

Warner Music waits for Godot

You really can’t stress this point enough: We’re a decade past Napster, but the music industry still runs on CD sales. In Warner’s case, digital now accounts for 25 percent of overall revenue.

via Warner Music Renews Spotify’s European Deal, Waits for Google | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

What’s even more amazing is that after ten years not a single industry participant has found a new job for which its product can be hired by consumers.

The music companies wait for Apple, Google, Spotify to  “invent” some new consumption model from which they can extract a rent.

Operators' last stand: payment platforms.

Operators “had high hopes until 2007 or 2008,” said Patrik Karrberg, a researcher in the London School of Economics’ Department of Management. The hopes dimmed after the emergence of iPhones and improved data speeds that made the Internet directly accessible on handsets.

“They gave up the idea of controlling the entry point,” Karrberg said. “That was the death of the portal.”

via Vodafone, France Telecom Push to Regain App Edge From Apple – Bloomberg.

It looks like a payment platform may be one of only a few opportunities remaining.

Is Android fragmented by design?

When I wrote about the absence of copyright enforcement on the Android marketplace, I was trying to point out that Google did not have the interests of copyright owners at heart. This attitutde is also apparent in many ways from the absence of desktop sync for Android (and hence the absence of discovery or acquisition of commercial media) to the absence of protection for the app developer.

Moreover, recently Google TV was blocked from all major US TV content and Google faced litigation from copyright holders in print publications and before that for YouTube infringements and before that from newspaper publishers for Google News’ unlicensed reuse of their content.

Therefore it should not come as a surprise the following revelation that Android lacks any common DRM framework. Continue reading “Is Android fragmented by design?”

Google Nexus S

Google Nexus S is real, gets leaked by Best Buy [U] | Electronista.

Can you imagine Microsoft launching a Microsoft branded phone to compete with its Windows Phone licensees? When Microsoft launched the Zune, their licensing model (PlaysForSure) was quietly folded up.

A Google phone makes little sense, but then again Google does not seem to care much about its ecosystem or relationships with Android device vendors. They even claim that they have no idea how many phones are being built using Android and, except for activations, have no way of measuring the number sold.

From their point of view, if Motorola feels it’s unfair to have to compete with a Google branded Samsung (or HTC) designed phone then too bad. There’s lots of white label vendors lined up to make these with or without anyone’s blessing.

In fact, the biggest opportunity for Android growth seems to be the large unlicensed (and illegal) grey market which seems to be rapidly expanding.

Visualizing smartphone platform growth

None of this should come as major surprises, but Gartner’s data allows for a bit more granular detail in the overall view of the market. Here are new points derived from Gartner’s sell-through data:

The largest Android vendors

Gartner released sell-through data for the handset market. In the release appears an estimate of total Android 3Q Smartphone sales (20.5 million). Combining this with what some of the vendors have reported in terms of units sold, we can estimate the share of Android by vendors.

Note that this is a rough estimate. We don’t have data on Sony Ericsson’s smartphone units sold and we don’t know the mix of HTC’s Windows Mobile vs. Android.  I’m also assuming LG as part of Others. The data from Gartner is claimed to be sell-through whereas vendors report sell-in so there is more roughness about each vendor.

Regardless of these potential sources of error, it’s a very safe bet that Samsung and HTC are the largest Android vendors by a fairly large margin.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that both are also committed Windows Phone vendors. According to pdadb.net here is the count of Windows Phone SKUs by vendor:

  • HTC 12
  • LG 5
  • Samsung 2
  • Dell 2
  • Toshiba 1

Motorola is keeping its Windows Phone options open, leaving “Others” as the only likely exclusive Android vendors.

Were Nokia and Symbian always inter-dependent?

Several readers pointed out that in my discussion on the market share of modular vs. inter-dependent market shares for smartphones, Nokia was incorrectly classified as having an inter-dependent software architecture since the Symbian platform is/was a modular component.

The problem is that the relationship between Symbian and Nokia is not that of independent modules. Nominally, the two are independent and mutually exclusive, but, in practice, Symbian has always been so heavily dependent and influenced by Nokia that it’s never been possible to declare its governance fully independent. Continue reading “Were Nokia and Symbian always inter-dependent?”

Android remains the only mobile OS still patterned after Microsoft's 2002 vision of the mobile value chain

Belfiore wasn’t shy about criticizing Google’s Android OS. Even though Google currently dominates the mobile OS market, its strategy of licensing the Android OS to manufacturers is similar to Microsoft’s previous approach with Windows Mobile: It’s open-ended, and there are few restrictions on how manufacturers can use or modify the OS.

As a result, Android is suffering from some of the same issues as Windows Mobile did: Android works better on some phones than others, manufacturers are shipping different versions of the OS on different phones, some Android phones are shipping with bloatware made by carriers, and some app developers complain that it’s difficult to make software because of the hardware and OS fragmentation.

via How Microsoft Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Phone | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

Continue reading “Android remains the only mobile OS still patterned after Microsoft's 2002 vision of the mobile value chain”

HTC to re-bone Android?

Peter Chou, chief executive of HTC, had previously said he saw “little value” in HTC running its own application store. But he has also said that it was no longer enough for HTC to simply customise the standard Android user interface with its own “skin”: “It is not enough to be skin-deep. We need to go bone-deep.”

via FT.com / Technology – HTC to target online app store.

HTC was the world’s biggest Windows Mobile vendor, at one time claiming to have sold over 80% of all WinMo phones ever made.

Continue reading “HTC to re-bone Android?”