Feb 23

The Smartphone Wars: Bricks and Battiness

After the high drama of the last couple of weeks in the smartphone arena, it’s refreshing to encounter some good old-fashioned low comedy. We’ll get to more serious fare, but let’s take a look first at how astonishingly Microsoft just screwed the pooch.

Microsoft’s very first update to WP7, adding no features but intended “to improve the update process”, fails on some phones (requiring a manual reboot) and irrecoverably bricks others. Oh, yeah. Let’s just take as read the cheap jokes about very few users being affected because who bought a WP7 phone in the first place? I’m thinking those 50%-to-80% return rates we heard rumors of are about to go up, big-time. I’m also thinking that if I were a Microsoft stockholder I’d be eyeing the exits, and that if I were a Nokia shareholder I’d be running for them at full panic speed. This is what’s supposed to save Nokia’s bacon sometime in the future indefinite?

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Feb 18

The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop

An excellent article on the future of smartphones puts hard numbers to a trend I’ve been watching for two years. In so doing, it points out one of the fundamental competitive drivers in the smartphone market. More than that, it displays a powerful if sometimes less than obvious advantage of open-source software, and implicitly relates that to a seminal concept in military theory called the OODA (observe/orient/decide/act) loop.

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Feb 16

Collabortage

Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it and bring it to market.

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Feb 14

The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt!

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few hours ago I was speculating in a comment thread that Stephen Elop’s cozy deal with Microsoft Microsoft might lead to a fairly near-term shareholder revolt, and lo, it has occurred. Welcome to Plan B.

This is pretty dynamite stuff. A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an attempted coup at the May 3rd general meeting. They want to start by firing Elop and his henchmen, then reframe the Microsoft tie-up as a tactical play for the U.S. market, then put the company fully behind MeeGo as their bid for the smartphone future.

The question is, can it possibly work?

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Feb 11

The Smartphone Wars: Nokia’s Suicide Note

Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire.

No, the choice that seals Nokia’s doom isn’t the tie-up with Microsoft (though that’s problematic enough, and I’ll get back to it). It’s the way Elop has failed to resolve Nokia’s drift and lack of a strategic focus. Instead of addressing this problem, Elop plans to institutionalize it by splitting the company into two business units that will pursue different – and, in fact, mutually opposing – strategies.

After the brutal clarity of the “burning platform” memorandum, this is deeply disappointing. And not viable. One of my commenters voiced my very thought: the death spiral begins now.

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Feb 10

The Smartphone Wars: iPhone 4V Falls To Earth

So the Verizon iPhone arrives, iOS is finally multicarrier, and consumer first-day reaction is “meh…not interested”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this.

Yes, I predicted, based on looking at AT&T’s 4Q2010 numbers, that Verizon iPhone sales would be “anemic”. There are statistical clues that AT&T has already largely saturated the market of people who really want an iPhone. But the way I was expecting things to play out was for a strong initial burst of sales to true believers to be followed with an unusually rapid fall-off. This is not the result we got.

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Feb 09

The Smartphone Wars: Elop’s Burning Platform

Wall Street Journal’s TechEurope is running the full text of an astonishingly candid memo by the CEO of Nokia. Read the whole thing, in which Elop says Nokia’s performance and strategy over the last few years has been a disaster and it’s time to jump off the burning platform before the company is consumed by flames.

I think we can deduce three things from this memo. First, Elop’s appreciation of how bad a fix Nokia is in is complete. Second, he’s going to jump Nokia to WP7 or Android when the promised strategy announcement happens in two days from now. And third, there are some subtle pro-Android clues in there.

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Jan 31

The Smartphone Wars: Android hits #1

The technology press is abuzz with news of a report from Canalys that Android is now the #1 smartphone platform in the world, with its 33% share of sales edging out Symbian’s 31% and far surpassing Apple’s 16%. In the U.S, Android smartphones are now 53% of all sold.

Once again, I was expecting this, but not so soon. As volume production of cheap Android handsets in Asia drove down prices the doom of the aging and stagnant Symbian platform was sealed, but I wasn’t expecting actual market share crossover until the end of 2Q2011. Once again, Android has exceeded expectations with eye-popping growth.

The pressure on Symbian just ratcheted up another notch. It’s reported that Nokia has scheduled a “strategy announcement” for Feb 11. Investors will be demanding a bold move to counter the catastrophic erosion in Nokia’s market share – this time last year they were #1 at 44%.

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Jan 27

The Smartphone Wars: AT&T CEO reveals all

Well, well, well. A hot-off-the-press AP article, “AT&T CEO: We’ll push Android phones”, finally sheds light on the vexing question of why AT&T let Apple out of its exclusive a year early. It’s just stuffed full of revelations, but the implication the reporter fails to draw is bigger than any of the fascinating facts on exhibit.

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Jan 26

The Smartphone Wars: The Fall and Fall of Windows Phone 7

And now, for a bit of comic relief, let us examine the state of Windows Phone 7. It launched just over three months ago in a cloud of hubris – Microsoft’s first-ship party featured pallbearers lugging a huge mockup of an iPhone (and the rest of what you need to know about that moment was that the video was caught by an Android phone). Just how is Redmond’s bid to escape irrelevance doing?

Not well enough for Microsoft to want to disclose sales figures, apparently. While Google reports 200K Android phones a day are shipping, Microsoft is reduced to gamely insisting that it is confident Windows 7 will eventually succeed. At least one of its channel partners is, shall we say, less sanguine.

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Dec 27

The smartphone wars: Fortune catches up with me

Fortune magazine says 2011 will be the year Android explodes and makes a number of predictions that track what I’ve been writing on Armed & Dangerous for the last year so closely that I have to wonder if their correspondents have been reading this blog.

Nice work, guys, even if you are a bit late to the scene. Me, I kinda thought 2010 was the year Android exploded, what with posting several quarters of market share growth in the 600% range and overtaking Apple in the U.S. userbase figures. But the article isn’t just old news presented as though it were breaking; there’s some fascinating info about a new chip from Broadcom that’s going to blow a Jupiter-sized hole in the price floor of the smartphone market.

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Nov 29

The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand

Some drastic change of direction is about to take place in Nokia’s smartphone strategy. We can predict this because Nokia has shut down the Symbian Foundation. What we can’t tell yet is what direction they’ll jump, and there are at least four somewhat plausible scenarios. I’m going to list them in what I think are roughly decreasing order of probability and then explain my reasoning.

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Nov 23

First impressions of the G-2

As a very happy user of the G-1 back when it was the only Android phone available, I was keenly looking forward to what HTC and T-Mobile would do for an encore in the G-2. Especially when T-Mobile promised it would run stock Android with no skin and no unremovable crapware. I was seriously planning a first-day upgrade when the G-2 came out, just to get the higher data speeds.

Great was my disappointment when they shipped a crippled phone. T-Mobile kept the promise not to add crapware, but they disabled tethering and hotspot – two absolute must-haves for me. By the time these features were un-disabled in a firmware update, I’d discarded my plans to upgrade. The Nexus One is still a very nice phone and a pleasure to use.

But, quite by accident, I now have a G-2 for evaluation. No, T-Mobile didn’t send me one; I ran into a friend at the Philadelphia Science Fiction convention who’s replaced his G-2 with an Android tablet and wants to sell the former. So he lent it it to me to try for a while; the theory is, if I like it after a couple of weeks, I’ll give him fair market minus 15% for depreciation and we’ll both be happy.

The surprise is that, rather to my own bemusement, I’m leaning towards giving it back.

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Oct 23

Tetris, Torture, and the Gorilla-Arm Problem

Every time computing technology changes, we learn something new about the affordances of being human. I got my most recent lesson when I discovered DroidTris, a clone of the popular falling-blocks game for Android. As it turns out, a touchscreen version of Tetris works really, really well – and in doing so, it sheds new light on one of the classic ergonomic blunders of computing history.

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Sep 28

The smartphone wars: Android thunders on

My prediction months ago that Android would pass Apple iOS in total share in the fourth quarter of 2010 is looking more prescient all the time. this ComputerWorld reports IDC’s conservative prediction that global (not U.S. share) will reach 16% for Android, 15% for iOS at the end of 2010.

More interesting is the report from ChangeWave that corporate IT buyers now favor Android over iOS in new purchases. The installed base of corporate iOS devices is about double that of their Android counterparts, but Android’s recent growth in that space is a factor of twenty larger than iOS’s. In fact Android is perceptibly eroding the position of market leader RIM’s blackberry line even among corporate IT buyers, RIM’s core market.

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