{"id":3117,"date":"2011-04-14T17:26:34","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T21:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3117"},"modified":"2014-03-17T06:35:29","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T10:35:29","slug":"the-smartphone-wars-nowin-deal-more-takeover-than-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3117","title":{"rendered":"The Smartphone Wars: NoWin deal &#8220;more takeover than deal&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this week&#8217;s installment of &#8220;As the Smartphone World Turns&#8221;, we hear dire rumors from Nokia and see (more) evidence that RIM is circling the drain. We finish with a fascinating dispatch from the Android front.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>First up, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techeye.net\/business\/nokia-will-lay-off-up-to-6000-next-week\">Nokia will lay off up to 6,000 next week<\/a>?  (Hat tip to Richard Herrell.)  OK, this is a thinly-sourced story in the category of &#8220;rumor&#8221;, but dismissals that size are hard to hide in a country as small as Finland.  If the layoffs happen on schedule, that will be at least partial evidence for the rest.<\/p>\n<p>A &#8220;senior figure&#8221; at Nokia has reported as saying &#8220;This isn&#8217;t a deal between Nokia and Microsoft, this is a Microsoft take over.&#8221;  Which would certainly be consistent with Microsoft&#8217;s past history. It is also rumored that Symbian is being handed to Microsoft for development.<\/p>\n<p>Symbian, handed to the managers and developers who have made WP7 so wildly successful that Microsoft now has <em>less<\/em> smartphone share than it did a year so. Oh, <em>there&#8217;s<\/em> a prospect to gladden a Nokia shareholder&#8217;s heart.  Not.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll take &#8220;Formerly respected companies circling the drain&#8221; again for $400, Alex.  Answer: RIM.  Bing!  &#8220;What company just had the product it was betting on to reverse its catastrophic market share decline <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2011\/04\/14\/technology\/rim_stock_falls\/?section=money_latest\">roundly panned<\/a>?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Yes, the RIM Playbook is out and nobody is impressed. Turns out the most interesting functions require it to be &#8211; wait for it! &#8211; <em>tethered to another Blackberry<\/em>.  (Best-snark award to David Pogue at the New York Times: &#8220;RIM has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do e-mail. It must be skating season in hell.&#8221;)  <\/p>\n<p>Business-saving advice to RIM: hunt down the genius who planned this and shoot him through the head.  That is, if you can still afford the bullets by the time you find him.<\/p>\n<p>Really, with competition like this, what&#8217;s going to stop Android from blowing past 55% in Q3 &#8211; a giant-meteor strike?  Aside from Apple, its smartphone competitors seem to be contending mainly for the epic-incompetence award &#8211; and Apple hasn&#8217;t been doing so hot itself since the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, 7-inch Android tablets now ship for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pickegg.com\/wholesale-search\/android-apad-tablet-pc\/1-0-0-60-2-1.html?welcome=5000&#038;gclid=CObhhcS3nKgCFUXe4AodsDl2Gg\">less than $90<\/a> quantity 1.<\/p>\n<p>Mind you, this is <em>before<\/em> the Android SoCs are shipping in volume.  This tells us three things:  first, my previous price projections were way, way too conservative &#8211; $85 tablets now implies $50 tablets by year end.<\/p>\n<p>Second, the price of low-end smartphones is about to crash <em>hard<\/em>.  Yield problems with the displays (and thus their cost) scale as the square of the size; when 7-inch displays are cheap enough to fit in an $85 retail price, it&#8217;s likely HTC could already build a $50 smartphone around the 4-inch displays that are midrange now.<\/p>\n<p>Third: By year end, the price pressure on anything non-Android in the smartphone and tablet markets is going to be <em>brutal<\/em>.  Unsurvivable for RIM; stick a fork in them, because their growth prospects are toast.  Even for Apple, maintaining share will be tough uphill fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this week&#8217;s installment of &#8220;As the Smartphone World Turns&#8221;, we hear dire rumors from Nokia and see (more) evidence that RIM is circling the drain. We finish with a fascinating dispatch from the Android front.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[34],"class_list":["post-3117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-smartphone-wars","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3117"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5534,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3117\/revisions\/5534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}