Tag: Nokia Page 11 of 15

Zeemote, the 3rd…

On 27/08/2008

My dear friends at Zeemote, I’ve been giving you a hard time on this blog in the past (first here, then here). Now, in my second post on the device (which is, for the ignorant few, a bluetooth connected controller for mobile phones) I issued two concerns, namely

distribution (which I suggested would only work with bundling) and
usage (the keys, wallet, phone dilemma).

You will have seen that my mood is somewhat mellowing, and this is indeed connected to the fun one can have with this little thing.

So it came as no surprise that on the first point, the good folks at Zeemote have been impressively busy in the recent months. They managed to strike a number of rather noteworthy deals, the perhaps most impressive one (to date) being with Nokia. At the Games Convention, they announced that they would bundle (see? I told you!) the Zeemote controller with some N-Gage-enabled devices. Here’s the clou though: it will be tied in through a dedicated little application in a way that allows users to control every game available on N-Gage via their Zeemote, even if the games and applications themselves do not have the precious lines of code in them. And that it is pretty cool indeed as it circumnavigates the dilemma of having a device that no software supports and which is therefore not being used. I played it, it works. Awesome!

A couple of weeks before, Sony Ericsson launched a bundle in a test market (see here), so they seem to be gaining traction indeed. I hear there’s more to come soon but I’ll wait till the news is out…

Now, as to the other question, namely if people would take it with them? Well, we’ll have to wait as only time (and hopefully many users) will tell. What is undeniable though is that the Zeemote lowers the threshold to play as it greatly facilitates access and controls when playing a game on mobile. If users get the device together with their new phone, I am rather sure that they’ll give it a try. The device will be best shown off (initially) with games and apps that are hard to control and where users are more likely to be put off playing them with the fiddly controls of a phone. If this is being put to work (which I trust the Zeemote folks are smart enough to embark on), there is a good chance, they’ll convince people enough to make them use it more and more. And once they’re hooked? The sky is the limit.

And then, there are also uses for it at home: you don’t have a Wii but 2 Zeemotes, a TV and a phone? Go on and play! Works! True! Check here.

Adobe Flash Opens Screens

By Volker

On 02/05/2008

Flash maker Adobe isn’t tiring on bringing out news these days: this time it announced the “Open Screen Project”, in which it is partnering with a plethora of mobile industry giants, namely ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia (see also here re Microsoft‘s Flash competitor Silverlight), NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson (see also their initiative to marry J2ME and Flash here), Toshiba and Verizon Wireless as well as major media players such as the BBC, MTV Networks and NBC Universal.

It said “the project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Adobe said it would open access to Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).” This will include:

Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Adobe says its Flash Player reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled PCs and more than 500m mobile devices today. It now expects more than 1bn handsets to ship with Flash technology by the end of 2009 (this means a year faster than previously forecasted). Flash technology is used to deliver vector graphics, text, interactivity and application logic, video and sound over the Internet. Currently, more than 75% of broadcasters who stream video on the Web use Flash technology (YouTube will be a big contributor to that number).

Following my many posts on mobile Flash (see e.g. here and here), this now looks like a real assault on the medium. Given that Flash reduces developer cost (less porting because of vector-based graphics) means it is a likely boost to the content industry: more and richer content at lower cost. Could this be it?

Carriers lose content sales to off-deck

By Volker

On 16/04/2008

I wrote about this phenomenon a short while ago here but now Business Week has some further stuff to tell us. They quote an analyst that the share of content sales via carrier decks versus so-called off-deck (or D2C providers) will drop from its current 80% to only 25% in 5 years time. And, interestingly, all of the sudden the carriers contend they had said it all along: now they claim that a single piece was not as meaningful as access. In the latter the juice is (Sprint Nextel). and now they claim that they never said that content would take over the workd (AT&T).

Do I hear bit-pipe? The article reports that revenue from wireless data, which includes mobile content and Web access, rose 53%, to $23 billion, in 2007, according to CTIA. And, yes, that’s the bit pipe. The carriers start to love it? Hooray!

With D2C giants like Jamba, Thumbplay or Zed all reporting (or being said to record) very meaningful revenue numbers (Zed reported $500m in revenues last year), and OEMs on the move into a more service-driven model (with Nokia as the spearhead; see here, here and here), the pressure onto the carriers seems to have mounted so much that they now look to what they have traditionally been doing best: provide network access and bandwidth (be it for voice or data).

Enter: flat-rate data, walled gardens are so yesterday…

iPhone 2.0 – it is not only the Enterprise, baby, it's the mix!

By Volker

On 25/03/2008

In Apple, OEM

I know, I know, I know: it is all a bit tiring and I just wrote about the iPhone vs Blackberry thingee a couple of weeks ago but there is a nice new piece by one of my favourite columnists on this, namely the NY Times’ David Pogue. He considers the software update (nick-named iPhone 2.0) as more significant as the phone itself as it opens the thing up into 2 dimensions:

1. An attack on the enterprise market with MS Exchange support, push-e-mail and everything else RIM‘s Blackberry, Palm‘s Treo and all the others already have (although Pogue also readily concedes that the absence of a QWERTY keyboard might mar its success a bit; see here for Apple’s intro on it)

2. the awakening of a mobile phone as a true multi-purpose entertainment device (through the introduction of the developer programme and release of the iPhone’s SDK – which, incidentally – also extends to the iPod Touch).

Now, I have covered the first point but the let the latter one on the wayside. And, one could say, rightly so: all existing phones, J2ME, BREW, i-mode and all, have had – more or less – readily available SDK’s for (wireless industry’s) eons. And did it make it a mass market tool? No, it did not. Also today with all the super-powerful phones around, only a (growing) fraction of users actually make use of these things. Why should this change with the iPhone? Well, possibly for the same reasons that made the iPod such a success – in conjunction with iTunes that was.

What Apple managed with the iPod was two things: it brought a device to the market that even my mum could use (and she is rather technophobic) and it provided a clear-cut, transparent, easy-to-use retail model for the contents to be meant to be stored and played on that thing, and that was iTunes.

Now, incidentally, these two challenges are indeed the very ones mobile content often faces today: intuitive UI on mobile phones is still only to be found rarely (“the application you are trying to download is untrusted. Do you want to continue?”) and the retail space is cluttered and dominated by companies who excelled in building highly evolved technical networks but have rarely sparkled with superior consumer understanding. Apple is good at both…

Number 3 would then be discovery and here Apple’s novel business model with tight integration and control may actually bear rich fruit: because of the huge amount of influence (and commercial participation) Apple apparently retains with its chosen carrier partners, it is much easier for it to guarantee the placement of the app store on its phones. Other OEMs have a much harder battle at hand there: carriers routinely request that any number of applications, games, etc are being removed for phones they order; because of the huge power the large carriers have (in most countries handsets are subsidised by the carrier), OEMs struggle to assert themselves (although Nokia seems to be making at least some headway with its Ovi portal; see e.g. here and here). For Apple this is a home-run though, which is a significant advantage.

The only relief would then be that Nokia would still appear to be selling the amount of handsets Apple sells in a year within one week or so. Still…

Mobile Content on the move!?

By Volker

On 23/03/2008

According to a report, mobile content is moving off-deck. The consumer survey (presumably for the US market only) found out that today’s consumers use a mix of sources for their mobile content, namely the web, side-loading (called “their own collections”) and the carriers.

When it comes to watching video on their phone, 35% of the consumers would choose YouTube vs 31% who would go for the carrier’s own offering and 28% who side-load.

For music, side-loading leads overall with 48% of the total followed by 35% who bought off the carrier deck.

With games, the situation is yet different: 60% of consumers would only play the games that are pre-installed on their phones.

The report expects this diversification of content sources for mobile phones to increase, which sounds reasonable: just look at what Thumbplay does in the US or Jamba and Zed in Europe! Check out Nokia‘s Ovi initiative (including “Comes with Music“) or Sony Ericsson‘s PlayNow Arena. Falling walled gardens and a general move to flat-rate data will contribute to consumers looking for alternative shop fronts, in particular as carriers have not always shown to be the best retailers out there – at least not for content… No big surprises then.

Is the iPhone the new Black(berry)?

By Volker

On 04/03/2008

In Apple, OEM

Here’s an interesting one: we will soon all be Cupertino-loving black turle-neck fashionistas whilst going on about our cold-nosed business. This is at least what this article ponders (following Apple’s announcement to add “business features”; could it really get push-e-mail?) .

The article has some interesting facts to offer: user satisfaction for Apple‘s iPhone is dramatically better than for anyone else (a distant first at 59% “very satisfied” users). And, somewhat noteworthy, the Blackberry had a drop of 8% in “very satisfied” users (47%) according to a recent survey — the first decline in its history. Nokia follows with 40% with the others behind.

Apple has only 5% of the smartphone market but, given it is only out on one carrier per country and only launched some 9 months ago, that is rather honourable. And user satisfaction is absolute key to business phones though: price is, for corporate IT buyers, less an issue than for the consumer. And no IT manager thrives on the thought of a mad manager breathing down their necks over an IT or phone glitch. So user satisfaction might in fact be an important lever to push it higher in the business smartphone sector, which is a sweet one with very high ARPU. The article concludes that there is “anecdotal evidence that Apple’s market share is growing. FTN Midwest analyst Bill Fearnley Jr. said that according to his checks, iPhone sales were helped in February by the introduction of a corporate iPhone plan that allows AT&T to bill employers directly.”

So an interesting battle at hand. It is also interesting (and may send shivers down open-source spines) as the two leaders in user satisfaction both run on rather contained software ecosystems. But it does show that it helps when things indeed work (comparatively) seamlessly and painlessly on a device.

I am yearning to see Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel in black turtlenecks wielding an iPhone (Sarko and Obama [do I even need a link for him?] are a given of course). Oh brave new world…

T-Mobile shuts the door on Nokia's Ovi… Or did it?

By Volker

On 03/03/2008

Funny little press reports today tell us that T-Mobile “ditched” Nokia handsets that are capable of supporting the Finnish giant’s Ovi (Finnish for door) multimedia portal. The German originator of these news is slightly more cautious: they also report that T-Mobile denied this and merely point out that T-Mobile has less Nokia phones on offer than a week ago and has – quite noteworthy indeed – removed all those that were “Ovi-enabled”.

The background is of course Nokia’s move into the multimedia service area (on which I first wrote about here). Nokia scored some early successes, namely with Telefonica (see here) and Vodafone (see here) but the threat to operator-driven content offerings was clear from the start. Whilst Telefonica and Vodafone were quite content on having the Ovi portal to music, video and games offered from Nokia’s platform, on their desktop alongside their own offering, T-Mobile allegedly sees this as a threat to its own plans. It is, hence, yet another iteration of the fight of carriers for their ground in the media sector.

T-Mobile might feel strong in the media space due to its iPhone monopoly in Germany but even if (and I suspect that that is not the case), it would be a somewhat desperate attempt: if such drastic moves as locking out the market leader’s handsets are required to keep customers on its own content offerings, is it then not a clear sign that such offerings might not actually be cutting it? In particular when the competitor is an OEM that in itself does not really enjoy a particular flair of creativity and buoyancy in media terms…

I would suggest that Nokia is (only?) a noteworthy competitor because of its market share in the OEM market, and not because it is such a good media company. Constraints with a view to placement on the phone’s “desktop” as well as walled gardens and consumer fear for super-high data charges (see an absurd example here) drive people to what is there, not what is best. This is not even disrespectful to the fine folks at Nokia; it merely is to demonstrate that a lot of players are not even there yet, so that it is too early to say who is best. The desperate moves of the carriers as well as historical performance on the content side suggests, however, that carriers may not be the best suited ones. Given that content is only a fraction of their data revenues, this may not actually be a bad thing: could it not be pointing them to do what they’re really good at, i.e. operating a network. If you want to call it a pipe, fine, but just make it a very, very smart pipe, and everyone (most importantly your customers) will love you!