Monday, June 27, 2011 at 5:04PM If you’re worried your industry is about to be overrun by the Chinese, you’re definitely not in software.
China hi-tech, Huawei, MIIT, ZTE, software Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 2:09PM China’s MIIT has reportedly drawn up a plan to allow private investment in telecom infrastructure.
MIIT, investment, regulation Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 9:35AM A portent? Just as Nokia admits that its Windows Phone 7 strategy could cost it market share, its new partner has admitted defeat with Zune.
A Microsoft spokesman told Reuters the current 16GB and 32GB Zune music players would be the last, although the software would continue to be supported “across Microsoft platforms.”
Zune has been moderately well-reviewed but has gained negligible market share since debuting in 2006, ceding a five-year head start to the iPod.
With Zune, as with its latest mobile partnership, Microsoft was trying to win from a long way back. That’s a challenge when your targets are Apple and Google.
Technically, Nokia had the biggest smartphone market share in 2010 and, technically, Microsoft is actually one of the handset OS pioneers, with a (mostly-forgettable) record back to 2000.
But as Microsoft sees off Zune, Nokia has warned that its expected two-year transition to WP7 “may prove to be too long to compete effectively in the smartphone market.”
Nokia said in an SEC filing:
“The Windows Phone platform is a very recent, largely unproven addition to the market focused solely on high-end smartphones with currently very low adoption and consumer awareness relative to the Android and Apple platforms, and the proposed Microsoft partnership may not succeed in developing it into a sufficiently broad competitive smartphone platform.”
Nokia also cautions that the MS partnership may harm its brand identity and the company may be unable “to change our mode of working or culture to enable us to work effectively and efficiently with Microsoft.”
Apart from that, it’s all good.
Friday, March 4, 2011 at 4:15PM Cellcos openly fear becoming dumb pipes, yet they miss tricks that customers love: like the SPB Wireless Monitor, which tells users how much data they've consumed.
GigaOm's Kevin C. Tofel took the Android app for a test drive:
You set personalized alerts based on an amount of data, or the cost of your data, and the application quietly monitors the data used by your smartphone or tablet... When the software sees that your data use has crossed a threshold, it immediately creates a standard, local Android notification to alert you.
Any operator who offers it will immediately have one over competitors who don't. Customers will use more data once they know exactly how far the meter has ticket over. Simple.
Android, mobile data in Mobile Friday, March 4, 2011 at 3:32PM With more than 90% of the market, Apple has been streeting the tablet field. With the early release of iPad 2 it’s disappeared over the horizon.
A price war seems inevitable. Even the iPad 2 – which starts at $499 - is priced below Motorola’s Xoom, but the heavy blood-letting will be among the lower orders. As WSJ reported a couple of days ago:
By the end of 2010 there were already 30 different tablets for sale, according to research company PRTM. The company now counts 102 tablets from 64 different makers that are either available now or in development.
Another Journal story points out that Apple keeps its costs down by pre-paying for components and buying manufacturing capacity, as well as the fact that a third of its sales are through its own retail outlets.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s declaration that it will be ready for the tablet wars some time in 2012 says something about how far ahead Apple is. Though it also tells us much more about how far Microsoft has fallen behind.