It was a mad week with news pouring from everywhere more than we usually
get in a month. Microsoft was making biggest news presenting a tablet
family and Windows Phone 8 at two different events with another one in
Amsterdam all dedicated to Windows 8.The news that LG is quitting the tablet market passed almost
unnoticed in all this noise. The LG rep said that his company is going
to focus on smartphones and ditch the tablet program completely.
Apparently, LG is leaving tablet due to the immense competition on that
market. Besides, that market has gotten a bit tougher now that Windows
RT is about to be released.
Many of you liked the 44 meter NTT DoCoMo xylophone so today I want to share a video about it.
Every time I get down to the Spillikins I keep telling myself to
stay brief and every time there is a lot more I want to discuss. Just as
this time and I hope you will like my selection as I find it pretty
interesting.Last week Microsoft presented Windows Phone 8 and announced that current
WP phones will not be updated to WP8 causing a heap of problems for
Nokia. The only condolence for WP7 owners is the upcoming 7.8 update,
which is not bringing any big upgrades for WP7. The only purpose of the
7.8 update is to make it look like those who just got a WP7 phone did
not waste his money. In my WP8 article I did not mention the current WP7
sales as I should have.It is funny to watch how every Nokia PR campaign goes to no avail.
What seems at first as great news for Nokia comes back a boomerang and
hits the company hard. Nokia has been promoting the idea of its
leadership on the Windows Phone market making it look like a big
achievement even though they knew from the beginning Windows Phone was
going to be fragmented one day when WP8 is released. A result of this is
that today Nokia is heavily associated with Microsoft and its future
depends on MS. Any problem of Microsoft is a tenfold problem of Nokia.The news that the current Lumia family will never be updated to WP8
is not a very big deal for any WP manufacturer except for Nokia. Nokia
has only released Lumia 900 in Europe, the flagship of Windows Phone 7.5
till September when the first WP8 smartphones are released. So if you
bough a Lumia 900 this June you must be feeling cheated as the price has
already went down by 7% which is a part of the 2011-2012 trend of the
Lumia family. It has happened to Nokia 800, 710 and not its Lumia 900's
turn.Many European carriers doubted the point of releasing Lumia 900 at
all since the next gen WP devices are to be released in September
already. T-Mobile is one of the carriers who decided not to waste his
time with Lumia 900 for obvious reasons like very poor sales of all
Lumia products in Western Europe and no firmware updates in the future.
They would have to try and sell a quite expensive phone which is going
to lose half of its price in just three months.
Nokia's response was predictable and Lumia division head Kevin Shields in his said that firmware updates are not important as most people don't care about those things.I don't think so Mr. Shields. Besides, his words disagrees with
Nokia's stance on dying Symbian and their previous statements about
Windows Phone.Many journalists saw this Microsoft announcement as a backstabbing
for Nokia dooming Lumia sales to fail miserably in the summer. And since
the current sales data is depressing already (only 2.2 million Lumia
devices sold in Q1 2012 and only 970K of them sold in Western Europe
according to IDC) the optimistic summer scenario for Nokia is the same
level of sales. This makes Nokia's position uncertain even on the small
and unprofitable market of Windows Phone .In regard to this news very few remember that Samsung and HTC too
produce WP phones. But these two companies never bet their lives on the
success of Windows Phone so its failure is not a big deal for them. In
July Nokia will report Q2 data which promises to become the worst
quarter in the history of Nokia. And I guess it will be followed by an
even poorer Q3. I am sure that when in Q4 WP8 is released Nokia will
call it the beginning of a new story as if they would not have been
spending billions a year before trying to make Lumia popular.During the international Nokia Russia event Nokia announced closing
down their brand retail chain operated by Nosimo. I have covered this
story a few times in the Spillikins:By the end of the year all Nokia retail stores will be gone in Russia
unless their owners decide to continue running them at their own
expense. Nokia says that the reason they are doing it is because their
current retail partners are just doing a better job. It is actually true
when you have nothing to sell. And it is a perfect solution if your
products are popular what Nosimo has proved switching their stores to
Samsung brand retail chain. The first few weeks the new Samsung stores
were visited by former Nokia clients and as sales associates say it was
quite easy to make them interested in Samsung products. Right now the
newly born Russian Samsung retail is doing twice better than the Nokia
retail used to.And the last thing I wanted to mention in regard to Nokia: after
announcing another this time 10.000 big lay-off the CEO of Nokia Stephen
Elop
followed by two bodyguards. Until recently Elop had not been known to
use private security, Finland is a safe place and he lives in a well-off
district of Helsinki. In February 2012 Elop was giving a speech at a
Nokia factory located in the town of Salo, Finland. He was reassuring
the workers that they would not be fired. Most likely back then he knew
already it was not true so he was blatantly lying to the workers. That
might be the reason Elop feels unsafe these days.In April this year I
that Qualcomm was putting more and more efforts into promoting their
products. Apparently it was their reaction to NVIDIA with its Tegra.
Then Qualcomm tried to make us think that it is not falling behind but
'focusing' on quality rather than quantity. Right now Qualcomm is doing
everything to catch up and I am sure that a company as big and as strong
can do a lot when it wants to. The processor market is turning another
milestone and we will see lots of good action in 2013-2014 when a
plethora of customized ARM processors with integrated GPUs hit the
market. Then we will see who was making the right decisions. I have
partly covered this story.The Snapdragon family will now be divided into several groups and
subgroups. In 2011 Qualcomm divided the family into four classes: S1 for
budget devices, S2 for more complex ones including home solutions, S3
even more powerful ones and, finally, S4 the top-notch flagship
solutions. The company used the performance as the main criterion for
this division and it may be logical but I think an average consumer will
find it rather confusing. Look at this promo image and tell me how much
time it took you to figure everything out:Unless you are a geek or a nerd I am sure you had some difficulties
with it. Compare this approach to NVIDIA promoting Tegra as a whole.
Very few people ever heard of chipset version of Tegra 3 like AP33 or
AP37 While Qualcomm I guess would have given each version a flashy name
to confuse us.
it has come to be that Qualcomm processor typology is incredibly
complex and diverse. On the one hand, it is a very good thing. But on
the other, it makes it very hard explaining why this or that product is
good. A year after they came up with the four classes Qualcomm
introduces subclasses inside the S4 class practically negating the point
of the previous classification. For example, MSM8255 used to be S2 but
now it belongs to S4. Confusing, right? They turned the already not so
clear thing upside down. So right now it looks like this:
- Snapdragon S4 Play – mass smartphones (budget solutions – MSM8625, MSM8225);
- Snapdragon S4 Plus – smartphones and tablets (different tier solutions - MSM8960, APQ8060A, MSM8660A, APQ8030, MSM8930, MSM8630,MSM8230, MSM8627, MSM8227);
- Snapdragon S4 Pro – desktop PCs, tablets, possibly smartphones(APQ8064, MSM8960T);
- Snapdragon S4 Prime – (MPQ8064) – TV consoles and other high performance solutions with no power limitations.
I find it funny how manufacturers has fallen in love with the word
'prime'. I can think of six products with 'prime' in their names.
Another whim of fashion.
I don't fancy this new Qualcomm typology at all and unless I am
given a brochure to carry around I will never remember which one is
which. Instead of making a proper promo Qualcomm created a multifaceted
monster with a very short life span. I am pretty sure I am not the only
one and most people will only be confused by all these names and
indexes. And I have not yet told you the worst part: inside those
subclasses possessors differ depending on the clock, number of cores,
and whether they can work with Adreno graphical accelerator. Just
wonderful.
I think Qualcomm should reconsider putting every processor they have
into ads and instead think about getting the message to the average
consumer and make them choose between reasonable two or thee choices. It
is your partners who care about exact specs not us users.
It has been almost a month since Galaxy S3 was released and it yet
premature to draw any conclusions but in terms of sales S3 has already
set a few records no one expected it to. I thought it would be about
twice more popular than S2 at the start. Then I learned about the
quantities Samsung was thinking in and realized they wanted to satisfy
all the demand however high focusing on the US in the first place. On
the release date about 10 million S3 had been manufactured. The issue
with the blue panels reduced the available quantity by the release a bit
and the very first day Samsung had itself a short supply. It was not
very big until sales began in the US. Carriers faced an avalanche of
orders they were not ready for.
AT&T had to postpone the release of their S3 to 25th due to the
incredible number of preorders – they did not even had enough handsets
to put on display in every store. The AT&T S3 preorders alone
covered all the carrier's supply for a week.
Samsung had planned a large number of ads and promo campaigns for
the second half of June when S3 was released in the US. Apple made an
unexpected gift to Samsung by filing a lawsuit demanding to ban S3 sales
in the US due to patent violation (the initial lawsuit concerned Galaxy
Nexus and two Apple patents). On June 14 a court in California
dismissed Apple's claim. This story was widely covered in the American
media and attracted a lot of attention to Galaxy S3 even before
Samsung's PR began to work its magic. A few people working for American
carriers told me that the number of preorders only increased with the
publicity of legal claims.
It has been almost a month since Galaxy S3 was released and it yet
premature to draw any conclusions but in terms of sales S3 has already
set a few records no one expected it to. I thought it would be about
twice more popular than S2 at the start. Then I learned about the
quantities Samsung was thinking in and realized they wanted to satisfy
all the demand however high focusing on the US in the first place. On
the release date about 10 million S3 had been manufactured. The issue
with the blue panels reduced the available quantity by the release a bit
and the very first day Samsung had itself a short supply. It was not
very big until sales began in the US. Carriers faced an avalanche of
orders they were not ready for.
AT&T had to postpone the release of their S3 to 25th due to the
incredible number of preorders – they did not even had enough handsets
to put on display in every store. The AT&T S3 preorders alone
covered all the carrier's supply for a week.
Samsung had planned a large number of ads and promo campaigns for
the second half of June when S3 was released in the US. Apple made an
unexpected gift to Samsung by filing a lawsuit demanding to ban S3 sales
in the US due to patent violation (the initial lawsuit concerned Galaxy
Nexus and two Apple patents). On June 14 a court in California
dismissed Apple's claim. This story was widely covered in the American
media and attracted a lot of attention to Galaxy S3 even before
Samsung's PR began to work its magic. A few people working for American
carriers told me that the number of preorders only increased with the
publicity of legal claims.
It has been almost a month since Galaxy S3 was released and it yet
premature to draw any conclusions but in terms of sales S3 has already
set a few records no one expected it to. I thought it would be about
twice more popular than S2 at the start. Then I learned about the
quantities Samsung was thinking in and realized they wanted to satisfy
all the demand however high focusing on the US in the first place. On
the release date about 10 million S3 had been manufactured. The issue
with the blue panels reduced the available quantity by the release a bit
and the very first day Samsung had itself a short supply. It was not
very big until sales began in the US. Carriers faced an avalanche of
orders they were not ready for.
AT&T had to postpone the release of their S3 to 25th due to the
incredible number of preorders – they did not even had enough handsets
to put on display in every store. The AT&T S3 preorders alone
covered all the carrier's supply for a week.
Samsung had planned a large number of ads and promo campaigns for
the second half of June when S3 was released in the US. Apple made an
unexpected gift to Samsung by filing a lawsuit demanding to ban S3 sales
in the US due to patent violation (the initial lawsuit concerned Galaxy
Nexus and two Apple patents). On June 14 a court in California
dismissed Apple's claim. This story was widely covered in the American
media and attracted a lot of attention to Galaxy S3 even before
Samsung's PR began to work its magic. A few people working for American
carriers told me that the number of preorders only increased with the
publicity of legal claims.
Apple has inadvertently stimulated S3 sales by failing to fail it.
Apple's PR department is working day and night trying to smear S3 in any
way and I think it tells us that Apple take Galaxy S3 very seriously. I
am sure that until October S3 is going to be very popular then we will
have to see what the next iPhone looks like.
Terry Gou, the CEO of Foxconn, at one of his recent board meeting
gave a speech and mentioned that Foxconn has started working with Sharp
in order to defeat Samsung on the LCD TV and monitor market. He was
using rather harsh expressions and said I quote 'I respect the Japanese
and especially like their execution and communication styles. Unlike
the Koreans, they will not hit you from behind'.
Many journalists have posted his quotes one stronger than another like.
A month ago Terry compared his employees to animals because they are so
easily manipulated. He also mentioned then that Foxconn is going to do
something concerning TV for Apple.
I am pretty sure that it was the very same meeting when Terry Gou
described to his board just how savagely iPhone 5 is going to beat
Galaxy S3 in his irrational rivalry with South Korean manufacturer. It
is not about Apple vs. Samsung but rather about Samsung TVs vs. Foxconn
TVs. But for S3 it is just a little bit more of publicity.
Walt Mossberg, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has given a rather warm.
S3 release was postponed by a week till June 27 for the same
reason: an unexpected and huge short supply due to the large number of
orders. Some American vendors like FutureShop and BestBuy were giving a
small discounts for S3 preorders and as a result of this they stopped
taking orders for S3 on June 12 already because they ran out of their
own orders for S3.The Windows Phone 8 presentation was a heavy blow for RIM and its latest
Blackberry 10 OS. Well, to be precise it happened a bit earlier when
Nokia purchased Scalado and all its digital photo technologies. At
Blackberry World 2012 RIM was focusing public attention on how important
media is in Blackberry and made a presentation on Scalado technologies
to be featured in Blackberry 10 which impressed many people.
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