The Smartphone Wars: Tomi Ahonen carpet-bombs Stephen Elop

The best strategic analysis of Nokia’s parlous position I’ve ever seen comes to us from ex-Nokia-executive and longtime company-watcher Tomi Ahonen: The Sun Tzu of Nokisoftian Microkia. It’s thorough, entertainingly written, and includes some instructive diversions into military history.

Cisco provides a lesson

In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom, which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom. Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open systems and… Continue reading Cisco provides a lesson

The smartphone wars: Inauspicious exits and debuts

RIM’s death rattle became audible a few days ago when its manufacturing partner announced that it would no longer be manufacturing Blackberries. And Nokia is entering the final stages of one of the most spectacular implosions in the history of business, taking the Windows phone down with it. So what’s Microsoft doing? Announcing a brand-spankin’-new… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Inauspicious exits and debuts

The Smartphone Wars: Oracle lawsuit’s final fizzle

OK, this is just weird. “Oracle agrees to ‘zero’ damages in Google lawsuit, eyes appeal” That vast lawsuit that, according to some idiots (including a few of my commenters), was going to destroy Android and sow the earth with salt in its wake? It’s done – but in a bizarre way that makes me question… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Oracle lawsuit’s final fizzle

Beware the vampire app!

This is a heads-up for all smartphone owners out there. A few days ago I read Buggy Apps Killing Your Smartphone Battery. And I can now certify that the problem is real.

The Smartphone Wars: Android loses share?

The April 2012 comscore results are out, and something very odd has happened. If they’re to be believed, Android has actually lost U.S. market share over the last three months – albeit by a statistically insignificant amount of 0.2% – for the first time in its history.

Making simple connections

About six weeks ago I asked How would you like to help fix the Internet? It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem. The discussion thread on that post was lively, but eventually… Continue reading Making simple connections

The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50%

The newest comScore figures, for February 2012, are out. Android has finally achieved majority market share in the U.S.. This is three months later than a linear fit to most of 2010 and 20111 predicted, but whatever happened in 4Q2011 to throw everybody off their previous long-term trend curves seems to be over. Android, in… Continue reading The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50%

The Smartphone Wars: Back to the Old Normal

It begins to look like the 2012 holiday-season was an anomaly. comScore’s new numbers (for Jan 2012) are out; Android is resuming its long-term growth rate after a temporary slowdown, and Apple’s market share actually dropped slightly.

Calling all open-source hardware engineers

How would you like to help fix the Internet? One of the efforts I’ve been contributing to during the last year is the Bufferbloat project, a group of experienced Internet engineers who believe that excessive buffering and poor queue-management strategies may be the real villains behind a lot of network problems commonly attributed to undercapacity.… Continue reading Calling all open-source hardware engineers

An Open Letter to Chris Dodd

Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand… Continue reading An Open Letter to Chris Dodd

The Smartphone Wars: The market share scramble and Apple’s long con

Mobile phone carriers have a crappy record of strategic planning – the history of the industry is rife with massive overinvestment in services consumers didn’t actually want, partly redeemed by massive unanticipated revenue from accidents of technology (I’m looking at you, SMS!). I’ve explained elsewhere that inflation-adjusted carrier ROI is negative. Even so, the latest… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The market share scramble and Apple’s long con

The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising

CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have. Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn’t… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising

Calling all hackerspaces

This is a shout out to all hackerspaces and engineering schools within easy reach of Philadelphia. I’ve got a nice little design-and-build project that would do the world some good, but I don’t have the skills or facilities to do it myself. The problem: build a ruggedized special-purpose test enclosure to be mounted on a… Continue reading Calling all hackerspaces