On Technology and the Future: Education, IoT, AI, Mobility, Games

Tag: RIM Page 5 of 6

Finally: a new Palm

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On 09/01/2009

In OEM

After bloody ages (and 425m Elevation dollars later) Palm came out with a bang yesterday at CES by unveiling the Pre and its new WebOS. Palm’s shareholders will be chuffed as the stock surged in the hours afterwards. Now, what is it? And does it have legs? One of the first reports (even containing a minute-by-minute live-blog of the presentation) notes that

‘its form factor is a blend of the HTC Touch and the iPhone. The software looks an awful, awful lot like that of the iPhone — multitouch, gestures and so on. Many of the apps also have a very strong likeness to the iPhone […].”

That in itself is of course not a bad thing. And other reports confirm high hardware quality and nice UI. However… Aren’t they a bit late? And where will the content come from? Palm used to have a faithful following on his Tungsten and Treo product lines but this is a while ago now and there have been some awesome devices in the interim, some of which – most notably the iPhone and the G1 as well as RIM‘s Blackberries and the higher-end Nokia devices – have amalgamated a great device with a great UI and commercial environment into a huge following. Apple AppStore, Android Market, N-Gage and Ovi, Blackberry Application Center, etc, are all there or there about. And Palm will be up against that. The fact that it has – at least initially – tied itself to Sprint only will not be much help there.
WebOS is said to be easy to develop for. Allegedly HTML, CSS and some other stuff known from the web would be enough to develop for it. But will anyone do it unless there is a device base large enough to make it a compelling commercial case (which even seems to hit platforms like Nokia’s N-Gage; THQ has just apparently dropped its “Worms World Party” development for this).
It’s nice to see they’re back but I think that the jury is still out on the success of this.

RIM eats Chalk

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On 11/12/2008

In OEM

Blackberry maker Research in Motion is acquiring mobile content deployment solutions provider (quite a mouthful!) Chalk Media for $18.7m in cash. Chalk to what they call “pushcasts”, which – if I understand it correctly – is basically pushing podcasts to smartphones. The Vancouver-based company is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, so it still requires shareholder approval, and the deal is therefore not closed yet.

The move is a neat one: podcasts are increasingly used in the corporate environment for staff communications of all sorts, and the enterprise being the stronghold for RIM, it makes a lot of sense to strengthen its service offering by adding such a tool.
RIM has of course got under fire by Apple‘s iPhone and this will presumably continue being the case also by the higher-end Android-based phones who have been nibbling away (see here and here) on the Blackberry’s pedestal as the businessman’s (and woman’s) favourite gadget. A lot to defend then, and the price would therefore not seem to be excessive at all… Stringent rationale, me thinks…

Lower Handset Sales in 2009

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On 03/12/2008

In OEM

The financial crisis will – what a surprise – also catch the handset manufacturers. A report tells us that handset sales are bound to fall in 2009, by 5.6% or 1.215 billion units, to be precise. The backend of 2008 already sees the impact, too: growth predictions have been reduced from 10.4% year-on-year to 8.9%.

This is in line with reports from Blackberry maker RIM who reduced its forecasts today. Even mighty Nokia is expected to lower its forecasts.
It can probably be expected that this will also impact the mobile content market: it is widely accepted that consumers tend to spend on mobile content in the first 3 months after they got a new phone. So: no new phone, no new content… Moreover: the above reduction in growth does not actually show the whole picture. Mobile content uptake is much higher on high-end phones. However, these are normally bought by way of upgrades, and it is there that the most severe drops are being predicted.

“While new subscriber additions are continuing at a healthy pace and are poised to grow by 563.9 million in 2008 and by 506.5 million in 2009, an overwhelming majority of the new subscribers are coming from the rural areas of emerging regions,” Teng said. “These subscribers primarily are purchasers of low-cost, entry-level handsets. However, the pricier feature-phone and smart-phone market segments are driven by existing subscribers who are upgrading their mobile devices to take advantage of new features and advanced data services. As the economic climate deteriorates, these customers are delaying their purchases.”

All doom and gloom then? Well, maybe not: others predict that the recession (at least in the US) will actually drive the number of wireless-only households. And, after all, a mobile game at €/$/£ 5.00 a pop is not the world, is it?

Google to be a force in mobile, too

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On 02/12/2008

In OEM

More research predicting world domination for Google! Well, somehow anyway. According to a new report, Google will succeed with its expansion into mobile. Now, I thought they were there already and had been doing a bit of business there for a while: they’re the search engine of choice for quite a number of network operators already (although the jury is still out if this works: see e.g. here), and besides keep adding nifty apps to the mix (their mobile versions of Google Maps and Google Mail apps, well or at least for the Blackberry are pure bliss!). The latter are – for the time being – only an extension to their web apps without, notably, the ads; but this is only a question of time, I think: screen resolutions make AdWord a little awkward these days but higher resolution phone screens (such as for the new Blackberry Bold, which has widescreen QVGA) will likely change that. Google does offer AdSense for mobile already although there, too, no data on uptake or revenue is available (cf. press release).

On the carrier deck search side, I understand that this as well is more a question of land grab rather than actual revenues so far but the above applies, too. That is hearsay more than confirmed fact though.

Now, the aforementioned report thinks that Android-powered phones will grab 3% market share for smartphones in 2009 (corresponding to 8m devices). This is respectable. However, Apple’s iPhone is said to hold 17% of the global smartphone market and it is predicted to ship 45m iPhones in 2009. Shouldn’t Android phones be able to do more? I mean: Android is not only Google, it is also a gazillion other molochs of the mobile telecoms world (see e.g. here and here). Even if those numbers were right, they wouldn’t give Google world domination (remember Nokia? They hold some 40% of the world market…).

Then, say see local search being key, with which I agree. In their own words:

Local search will be key to market growth: innovations in mobile search and advertising will allow for improved local search, directly competing with ‘yellow pages’ type proximity marketing services. The challenge for Google is to encourage consumers to start performing functions on their mobile browser that they would previously have done on their PC in already established markets.

So: opportunity = local search and connecting this to Google’s fantastic capabilities in “normal” search. Threat = no uptake. I would add: getting local relevance and context right is not as easy as one should think (when I walk through London’s SoHo, do you think I am looking for media companies (Fox, Sony, etc.) or for Agent Provocateur?
I do think though that Google is indeed best positioned to get this one right: they solved the tough bit of the puzzle, and that is to sift through the vast arrays of the Internet to rank the “right” pages. To limit these to local relevant ones only, is surely “only” a question of adding another condition to your algorithms…
Also: the whole Android idea makes a lot of sense, and Google clearly has the lead in the Open Handset Alliance. So they “just” have to keep up with the innovative speed of the markets then… 
Note: I do not get paid by either Google or RIM (unfortunately) but I do use their services…

What's a Smartphone?

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On 17/09/2008

In Apple, OEM

Application vendor Handango published its 2008 Yardstick report, which one might slag off as some (rather shameless) PR on content consumption on “smartphones”. According to this, 

[t]he Games category leaped from fourth place at year-end 2007 into the second spot behind the Entertainment category.

It also reports that

‘Ringtones’ was the most searched term in the first half of 2008, and ‘games’ was a near second, up from number three in the second half of 2007. ‘Themes,’ ‘GPS,’ ‘weather,’ and ‘music’ also make the list of the top 10 searches.”

Surprisingly then, in none of the measured platforms (RIM, Palm, WinME, Symbian) does a single game make it into the top 10… Now, does that mean that places 11-98 were all games? Hmm…

 I then asked myself what the heck is a smartphone? Mobile advertising guys Admob note that

[t]here is no standard industry definition of a smartphone. We [Admob] automatically classify a device as a smartphone when it has an identifiable operating systen and continually update our list as new phones with advanced functionality enter the market.

Globally, Nokia rules the pack: the top 4 smartphones are all from the Finnish giant (Admob numbers), and all N-Series devices, namely the N70, N95, N73 and N80. In the US however, there is not a single Nokia phone (or rather, as they would put it, “multimedia device”) amongst the top 20 smartphones. According to Handango, 2 Blackberry devices (8830 and Curve) were the top 2 devices, according to Admob (not representative), it was the Blackberry 8100, the Palm Centro and the Blackberry 8300). Globally, these don’t really feature: Nokia has a market share of a whopping 62.4%!  

The more interesting facts are unfortunately from confidential information from the likes of M:Metrics. Without giving too much away, the top devices for games consumption (downloaded) are the iPhone and Nokia’s N95, both with quite some margin ahead of everyone else (and the iPhone with quite some margin ahead of Nokia’s performance monster). This does indeed show that a powerful handset (or at least one with powerful UI) promotes content consumption, which is, I’m afraid to say, old news indeed.

So, no news then?

Micro-Blogging et al… Are they Really There Yet?

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On 26/03/2008

In Social

I’ve been a fan of those “bloggers on speed” of the likes of Jaiku, Twitter, etc for a while but I am not entirely happy with the interfaces yet: the services live of proximity and timeliness in that is then that they unfold their true power. Otherwise, the old-fashioned web accessed from an old-fashioned computer with 10x more bandwidth and a proper keyboard might actually be superior. Mobile blogging however is relatively clunky so far. There are a few guys out there who offer mobile little J2ME apps, (mobile) browser plug-ins, widgets, you name it (see for some solutions here) but, let’s face it, they’re not really as slick and seamless as they could (and should?!) be. Tellingly therefore, both Twitter and (now Google-owned) Jaiku use SMS as the prevailing interface to communicate with the world through their networks via your mobile phone. Is that really it? Look at the Facebook Blackberry app: so slick in comparison!

UI, accessability and discovery are the key drivers for mass user adoption – and this what all social media lives of (apart, perhaps of the institution of marriage, which seemingly works best in micro-communities of 2), so why do they not tackle this bit more aggressively? The answer might be that, whilst they realize that mobile is a major contributor to their value-add when compared to other web apps, they are not actually mobile companies; they are web companies.

The idea of utilising the power of web 2.0 and its wealth of widgets and applets contributed by a gazillion of independent developers and fan boys might all be very well but it slows adoption: Facebook apps only became successful after Facebook itself was such a huge community, they did not drive that growth (although they now arguably contribute significantly). Therefore, it would seem to me, it would be required that the originators/owners of those networks contribute more energy and resource into optimizing the user interfaces to use the actual service before falling back on third-party add-ons. Alas, it is impossible to find a Google widget (for iGoogle or Google Desktop) even for Jaiku, which Google acquired. Tellingly, the only available widget was produced by fans… There’s quite a bit to be done, I think…

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