* – offensive humor may vary

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is preparing to launch an iPad competitor in November, and it will be called the BlackPad, according to a report citing two people familiar with the company’s plans.…

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(Source The Register)

As London’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme launches, there’s already a third-party Android app to go with it

As sure as night follows day, mobile applications follow location-based public pronouncements.

It should come as no surprise then that canny Android developers Little Fluffy Toys have knocked up a widget to follow on the heels of London mayor Boris Johnson’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Cycle Hire Widget, a free application, uses a mixture of live Transport for London data and crowdsourcing to display the availability of bicycles at the nearest docking stations. Because TfL doesn’t currently share details about the availability of bikes at specific locations, the application screen scrapes TfL’s data and repurposes it for the app.

(From my chair at Kings Place, you’re probably not interested to know, the nearest docking station is 506m south west, with apparently only two bikes taken from nine slots.)

We spoke to Kenton Price, director of Little Fluffy Toys, to find out more about what’s behind the app:

“Many of the cycle apps that existed for other cities already, and to be honest a bunch of the new London ones, are really not much more than a Google Maps mashup of a bunch of locations superimposed on a map.
“We also chose the tiniest widget you can choose – a 1×1 that takes 1/16th of one of your home screen. Into that we’ve packed information about the nearest three locations, including the direction and distance, and the colour-coded known status of that location: Green for all OK, red for closed, orange for not enough bikes, yellow for not enough slots.
“But we expect most users will then click it again to open it up. And inside there we show more info about each location, including the best info we have about the status of the location. If we have recent live info from TfL, we will show the number of bikes and the number of slots, and the time at which we retrieved it.
“If we don’t have info from TfL then we can use crowdsourced info. If a user is within 50 metres of a hire location that doesn’t have recent TfL data, s/he will be prompted to report back on its status. That info is then shared with other users. You can select a location for walking directions to it. If for some reason you don’t want to show a location, perhaps because you know it’s closed whatever the buggy TfL feed tells us, long-press to exclude it from the widget.”

TfL relaxed its terms and conditions (find them here) in preparation for the cycle scheme launch, with the aim of encouraging third-party developers to create “innovative” apps based on “reliable and accurate information”. But Price claims his attempts to access TfL’s live data have been met with a wall of silence – TfL, on the other hand, said they have been in conversation with third-party developers from early on.

Price says: “We wrote to them the day they announced the locations were free-for-all, asking for free/busy status. They replied saying [there were] no plans. And that’s the last we heard from them. This £100m+ scheme that said it was reaching out to developers – and we haven’t had any replies at all to our emails since. We’ve done the best we can – the BarclaysCycle Twitter tag appears to be publish-only, no one gets responses from them.

“It’s very disappointing that we’ve basically filled in the blatant holes in their massively expensive scheme and we’ve had no thanks or even acknowledgement that we exist – although Boris started following us on Twitter the other day.”

A TfL spokesperson refused to comment on particular developers, but told the Guardian third-party developers will have access to more data in time. For the time being, TfL said, the “fundamental information [being used by developers] has to be right.”

“The up-to-date information listing all docking stations that are live in London is available on the developers’ area and must be used,” the spokesperson said. “The first thing is to get that information correct and have up-to-date information about where the docking stations are. It might sound slightly dull but the first port of call is that we know where they are and that the information is correct.”

There is no timeframe for the next bout of data rollouts, TfL said, but they are “forthcoming”.

For now, Price is happy. As he concludes: “It’s been a riot, I’ve loved it. My favourite moment so far was when CNet said we had all that geeky goodness with our crowdsourcing stuff – I practically burst with pride.”

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(Source The Guardian)

Back in May, Rupert Murdoch told investment analysts he would use a press conference “in about three to four weeks” to announce “an innovative subscription model” together with “a number of publishers, device makers and technology companies”.

The press conference never came. But that doesn’t mean News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) isn’t convinced enough of the chances online content subscriptions can work to make them a central pillar of its own business all by itself.


Photo by AMagill on Flickr. Some rights reserved

• About the same time, News Corp should have unveiled the subscription project, it made an alternative announcement… it acquired the IP to the Skiff e-reader platform…

• … And it took a stake in Journalism Online, the Steve Brill-Gordon Crovitz startup helping newspapers charge online. At the same time, John Houseman was appointed as president of News Corp’s digital journalism initiative, responsible for driving and managing new business efforts in “premium digital journalism”.

• The Times and Sunday Times newspapers websites relaunched and have become the first News Corp consumer titles to start charging. (News Corp acquired one of the most famed news subscription offerings in WSJ.com as part of Dow Jones and is expanding paid access to multiple devices.)

• iPad editions debuted for The Times (£9.99 a month) and The Australian, (AUS$4.99 a month) through iTunes in-app payments, each making a big splash initially and satisfying Murdoch’s big belief in mobility. The Times app has had some rocky moments with those in-app payments, with an unknown number of subs getting free months as a result.

• Hulu, in which News Corp has a stake together with Disney (NYSE: DIS) and NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), also launched its long-expected $9.99-a-month premium service for online, iOS and consoles.

• Fox Mobile offered up Bitbop, an unrelated subscription effort compared to Hulu for mobile.

• BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) took its iPhone TV app on to iPad, but at a premium – the same price as a satellite subscription.

• News Corp’s UK newspapers have been blocking the Meltwater search crawler for not paying one of two new licenses required for the privilege.

• And now MySpace Music is apparently considering adding a subscription music service.

There was no industry-wide consensus working together with News Corp, nor even any big joined-up News Corp-wide project apparent – no Times delivery bundled with a Sky TV subscription (as some folks speculated), for example. One partnership that News Corp is taking part in – Next Issue Media, often described as (what else) Hulu for magazines, finally appointed a chief executive but has yet to make any public progress toward an online subscription newsstand or advertising model.

But each of these developments reeks of “innovative subscription model”, just without the “number of publishers, device makers and technology companies” Murdoch described.

Murdoch’s suggestion did succeed in firing up a News Corp that already has ample experience building its own content businesses with continuous, multiple income streams. BSkyB is one of the most successful pay-TV businesses in the world, with average annual revenue per customer now at £503 ($769) a year, and Fox is well used to getting subscription revenue, albeit in the form of license fees from cable operators.

There’s little which links together any of these initiatives as far as consumers are concerned, and the model is often delivered in executed in different ways across the corporation’s many distinct media brands. But, inside News Corp, there’s an increasingly firm belief it can go on validating the recurring paid content model in its own image.

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(Source The Guardian)

• Quarterly figures show steep like-for-like decline
• Underlying profits also down 27%
• Sales rise 1% but handset prices are cut

Profits at Nokia have plunged over the last three months as the company continues to struggle against rivals such as Apple and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, in the smartphone market.

The Finnish handset maker reported today that profits fell 40% in the second quarter of 2010 compared with a year ago. Underlying profits were down 27%.

Although net sales were 1% higher at just over €10bn (£8.4bn), the profitability of its handset and service division slipped as the company cut the prices of its higher-end phones to make them more attractive to consumers.

Nokia’s failure to compete better against Apple’s iPhone and the growing number of handsets running Google’s Android platform has put chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in the firing line. The company is reportedly looking for a replacement, with analysts warning that Nokia needs to get its hands on a “European Steve Jobs” if it is to regain its dominant position in the mobile market.

Kallasvuo called for an end to speculation over his future, telling the US television station CNBC that it is damaging the company. “There has been a lot of speculation on my position, on myself, during the last couple of weeks and that is not good for Nokia and must be brought to an end one way or another,” Kallasvuo said. “At the same time, I’m not in a position here and now to really shed any more light on the topic so I guess this is a no comment. I really concentrate now on the task at hand.”

Kallasvuo also insisted today that Nokia, which makes roughly four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide, had reasons to be optimistic, although the company is only aiming to maintain its share of the mobile device market this year. “The global handset market has continued to grow at a healthy pace, led by some of the less mature markets where Nokia is strong,” he said.

Kallasvuo added that solid sales of cheaper phones to developing markets had boosted the overall performance of Nokia’s handset business.

The average selling price of a Nokia handset dropped to €61 (£52), from €62 in the previous quarter. For smartphones, average prices fell 8% quarter-on-quarter to €143, and are down 21% over the last year.

Today’s figures suggest that Nokia is having to cut smartphone prices to maintain market share at the expense of profitability. Its smartphone shipments were up by 12% quarter-on-quarter at 24m units, in line with Nokia’s estimate for the overall growth of the market.

The company is now pinning its fortunes on the new Nokia N8 smartphone, although its release has already been delayed until later in the year.

Nokia also maintained its prediction that the global handset market volume would grow by 10% this year.

Earlier this week, Apple reported its best ever quarter, partly due to strong demand for the iPhone.

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(Source The Guardian)

Data from the Android developers site suggests that lots of phones are running 2.1 – but there’s something missing from what we’re being told which may mean it’s exaggerated

How fragmented is the Android platform? Google knows. And it’s quite interesting. The problem is that it’s not quite ready to tell us in detail. Only with winks and nudges.

The chart above comes from data on its developer site about versions accessing the Android Market for apps. A point to note: there’s only one Android device out there which is running 2.2 (aka “Froyo”), and that’s the Google Nexus One. Which has been discontinued.

However, some of the other phones can be upgraded to 2.2; it will be interesting to see what sort of timescale there is on that.

But what must be encouraging for the folks at Google, and Android developers, is that 2.1 is so dominant in that pie chart. (There’s a tiny fraction, 0.3%, consisting of “incompatible versions” – not sure what those would be.)

Because certainly the biggest threat – and the biggest problem – for Android developers is platform fragmentation. Old version of Android can’t run apps that target more recent versions, though old apps can run on the new platform. (Think of it as being like Windows. Sort of.) But the later Android versions have all sorts of features that you don’t get on the others. (You can see the version feature comparison on Wikipedia.)

The timings of the version releases:

1.5: 30 April 2009
1.6: 15 September 2009
2.1: 12 January 2010
2.2: 20 May 2010

That means that this chart covers just one year (roughly).

The notable things that 2.2 has that 2.1 hasn’t? Adobe Flash 10.1 support [corrected]; “remote wipe”; Wi-Fi hotspot function; voice dialling over Bluetooth. So now the question is how soon operators (particularly UK operators) will be pushing 2.2 out to Android customers. The suspicion is that the answer is “not soon”, given that 2.1 only just made its way (via an over-the-air – OTA – update).

And be wary – very wary – of trusting these graphics as really indicating the preponderance of Android versions out there. What we don’t know, because these graphs don’t show us, is:

- whether people with newer versions of Android are more likely to access the Android Market (that would push the share for newer versions upwards: and it seems likely, since I’d be very surprised if Nexus Ones really were 3% of all Android phones sold)

- what proportion of Android apps are written for what version of Android. Although Android apps are forwards-compatible (ie if it’s written for 1.5, it will run on 1.5 and every successive release), you’d certainly be put off visiting the Market if you went there once on a 1.5 or 1.6 phone and found that pretty much everything required a later version: you wouldn’t go very much more. That would also push the numbers towards the later versions, and make it look like the more recent versions are doing better. (If you know any data about what proportion of apps in the Market target which version, do tell us in the comments.)

Here’s how the access has changed, according to Google. But again, the same uncertainties prevail: how many? Are people put off? What’s the real growth?

True, Android sales have accelerated this year and 2.1 is getting more prevalent. But that comparatively big chunk of 2.2 accesses indicates, to me anyway, that this is a distorted picture of what handsets out there are truly running.

Of course Google could help us to dispel this all by publishing how many accesses there actually were, and how many downloads. Whereas Apple likes throwing out numbers from the App Store, which gets lots of people going “ooo!”, the problem is that there’s nothing much to compare it with. Come on, Google, get into the game. You said there were 160,000 activations per day. Now tell us about Android Market transactions. It’s the least you could do.

Well, that, and pushing the network operators and/or handset makers to push out version 2.2.

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(Source The Guardian)

Reports that phone-maker Nokia has launched top-level search as it struggles with falling profits and declining market share

Nokia is reported to be searching for a new chief executive as its CEO for the past four years, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, struggles with the company’s falling profits and market share, notably in the smartphone market.

The report in the Wall Street Journal of the top-level search follows reports on Bloomberg at the end of last week that the board of the Finnish company was calling for changes after seeing the company’s value slump by $77bn (€60bn) – about 67% – in the three years since 2007, when first Apple’s iPhone and then Google’s Android platform have transformed the smartphone market.

Although Nokia is the world’s largest phone-maker, and has the largest market share in smartphones at about 41%, it has issued two profit warnings in the past three months and seen its stock fall by 25% this year alone as it was forced to delay newer smartphones.

Nokia’s last big success in the smartphone market came four years ago with the N95, which boosted profits in its smartphone division to 21%. But since then Apple, Android and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, have eaten away at Nokia’s profitability, so that the division’s profit in its most recent figures was just 12%.

James Kelleher, an analyst at Argus Research in New York, told Bloomberg that a new chief executive is “the first order of business”. Nokia’s share price has dropped to €6.83, from €20.81 on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone went on sale.

The Android platform also poses a considerable threat to Nokia: Google announced earlier this year that it was activating 160,000 Android phones every day.

An analysis by Goldman Sachs earlier this month comparing smartphone companies’ profitability in 2007 with 2009 suggests that Apple has grabbed a growing slice of profit from the handset industry. While total profits remained static in total at about $14bn since 2007, the American company took up to $8bn in 2009, and is expected to take more than half the industry’s profits in 2010 and 2011 – despite selling far fewer handsets than its rivals.

Earlier this month the new head of Nokia’s Mobile Solutions division, Anssi Vanjoki, wrote a combative blogpost on Nokia’s “Conversations” blog in which he declared that “the fightback starts now” and said that “I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices. Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm.”

He also insisted that there were no plans to adopt Google’s free Android software platform; Nokia will instead remain with its own open-source Symbian and Meego mobile operating systems: “Symbian and MeeGo are the best software for our smartest devices. As such, we have no plans to use any other software. Despite rumours to the contrary, there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia,” he wrote.

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(Source The Guardian)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s attempt to smooth over a controversy surrounding its iPhone 4 failed to impress investors, as the computer maker’s shares stumbled on a day when technology stocks rose.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

LONDON (Reuters) – Speech-recognition software maker Nuance is launching software apps for the Apple iPhone in Britain as the company grows more confident that its voice-to-text technology is ready for global markets.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Microsoft should abandon or entirely reboot its mobile strategy because its latest product is barely as good as the iPhone from 2007 on the present developer offer

The as-yet unreleased Windows Phone 7 is a “waste of time and money”, a “disaster” that Microsoft should kill as soon as possible. So says Galen Gruman of Infoworld, who has watched an in-depth demonstration of the new phone software at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partners Conference which has been going on all week at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Windows Phone uses a “contact-centric” approach, where rather than doing “tasks” (in the iPhone app way), you are presented generally with contacts, and informed when someone has done something (updated their Facebook/Twitter feed, called you, etc). My personal first impression of the screenshots was “that’s really not going to scale to the point where you have 300 people in your contacts book and 20 Facebook friends and 50 emails and 100 people you follow on Twitter and 30 apps”, but I thought that was just me not following the thinking behind it.

But it looks like I may have been right.

Gruman started the year being impressed with early demos of Windows Phone 7 – but that’s worn off in a big way.

“Announced to much bravado in February as the platform that would breathe life into Microsoft’s mobile ambitions, Windows Phone 7 looked based on very early previews as if it might bring something new and exciting to the table. Back then, I noted that I was impressed by what I saw — with the caveat “so far.”

“No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.”

Ouch. What’s happened, Galen?

“The early demos were intriguing due to the use of the card metaphor to organize apps and information, providing a possible fluidity among apps and information that would let users swim through their business and social activities. And the distinct UI — though based on the unsuccessful Zune media player — looked as if it would stand out from the crowd of mobile devices that have largely copied the iPhone UI, such as Google’s Android, RIM’s touch-oriented BlackBerry Storm, and Palm’s WebOS.”

Hmm.

“But that was just the lipstick. Now, in Microsoft’s in-depth demo this week at the Mobile Beat conference, there’s no mistaking the big pig behind the gloss. Seeing the UI in action across several tasks, not just in a highly controlled presentation, shows how awkward and unsophisticated it is — I had the same feeling you get when you got a movie based on a great trailer, only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess. A pig, in fact.”

There’s plenty more; it’s worth reading in depth. Gruman says that as well as resting on old technology, Windows Phone 7 is simply outdated:

“The bottom line is this: Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone. It’s as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don’t realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced, and that competitors such as Google Android and Palm WebOS have also pushed the needle forward. Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era’s iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.”

Gruman went along to a presentation at WPC (which has been generally described as “lacklustre” – and certainly seems to have been much smaller than in previous years by all accounts) and was worried by what seemed like poor responses to the handful of outside developers who had come along.

Arguably, WPC is not the place where you’re going to find the hottest WP7 developers; it’s more about geeing up the people who will resell Microsoft products. But the fact that only a few months short of the grand launch of WP7 it can’t wow even developers for the platform sounds bad. Gruman’s description of the presentation makes it sound like one of those uncomfortable events where the tumbleweed was always at risk of rolling past.

And as for the “locked in a bunker since 2007″ jibe – don’t forget the Kin, which seems to have been the victim of political infighting at Microsoft, as the incoming developer team from Danger (which Microsoft bought to produce the Kin) found themselves mired in layers of management that effectively brought them to a dead stop. Read the full horror of it at the Mini-Microsoft blog (by a disaffected Microsoft manager, but the comments are from ex-Danger staff and others).

Back to Gruman, who points to the flaws with the “tiles” method:

“… the big tiles quickly eat up screen real estate (about four fit), so you don’t get the compact access to apps that all the other major mobile operating systems provide. I bet this will depress app sales for those poor souls unlucky enough to get seduced by the Microsoft brand or the inevitable discounts at the cellular stores as the carriers try to dump these devices in January 2011 for $25 (shades of the unlamented Kin).

“Plus, Microsoft has done its usual trick of gumming up the UI, even though this one is relatively simple. There are two ways to navigate through tiles: in panorama mode and in pivot mode. In both cases, the tile continues to the right, and you swipe to see more. In panorama mode, cut-off text on the right indicates there’s more (at Mobile Beat, a developer asked if users knew what that cut-off text was for, and the Microsoft rep essentially admitted they didn’t get it was a way to say “more”). In pivot mode, each tile is self-contained, and there is an icon to indicate there is more. It’s a subtle difference: Using a panorama basically means the tile continues because it won’t fit on screen, while using a pivot means you have a series of what are essentially pages. I bet developers and users will get confused very fast.

“Visions of Vista’s litter of control panel dialog boxes, Microsoft Bob, the Office ribbon, Clippy, and Windows 3 flew through my head — not that Windows Phone 7 looks like any of these; it just shares the same flaw of being obtuse.”

And that’s only for starters. Other complaints: the browser, IE7 with a bit of IE8, doesn’t support HTML5; there’s no multitasking except for Microsoft’s own apps (Android and, now, the iPhone both support cooperative multitasking by all apps); there doesn’t seem to be interapplication communication for third-party apps; there’s no copy-and-paste (emphasis added) – even though Apple was roundly and rightly criticised for not introducing it until summer 2009, and Windows Mobile 6.1 did have it.

Gruman says there’s going to be no come-from-behind take-over-the-world for Microsoft if this doesn’t succeed: RIM (prepping BlackBerry 6), Android, Apple and Nokia will all eat its lunch and dance on its grave.

At this point, people usually begin an ad-hominem, to ask whether Gruman is biased or (sigh) in the pay of company X or Y. Judge for yourself from the Infoworld author bio and item list.

Meanwhile, if anyone else has had a hands-on with Windows Phone 7 – via the developer kit or other methods – we’d love to hear about it. Good? Bad? Indifferent? What’s it really like?

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

With iPhone and iPad sales responsible for the majority of Apple’s revenue, the company is losing interest in what was once its keystone product

In the technology world, the name Mary Meeker is one to conjure with. Her official job title is managing director at the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Unofficially, her title (granted by Barron’s, a specialist financial publication) is “Queen of the Net”. This is mainly because her regular research reports on “internet trends” have become required reading for anyone interested in understanding what’s going on in the networked economy.

But it also has something to do with the fact that she’s been around a long time. In August 1995, for example, her employer was the lead manager on the Netscape IPO which triggered the first internet boom, and she was the firm’s leading research analyst. In August 2004, Morgan Stanley also led on the Google IPO – and guess who was their leading analyst then too. Given the seven to one ratio between internet and calendar years, this means that Ms Meeker has been watching the industry for about 105 internet “years”.

Her latest “internet trends” presentation is a powerpoint essay so overloaded with data it would cause Edward Tufte, the celebrated expert on data visualisation, to faint. For me, two charts in particular stood out. The first shows sales of smartphones and PCs on the same timescale. It suggests that, sometime in 2012, sales of the phones will exceed those of PCs. The second chart contains two pie-charts which capture the distribution of Apple’s revenues in 2007 and 2010. The differences are striking.

In the second quarter of 2007, for example, 47% of Apple’s revenues came from its Macintosh range of computers. The iPod accounted for 29% of revenues and iTunes for 11%, while “Others” accounted for the remaining 11%. The iPhone brought in 0% for the simple reason that it didn’t go on sale until that summer.

Spool forward to the first quarter of 2010 and, according to Meeker, the iPhone now brings in 40% of Apple’s revenues, while the iPod and iTunes together account for 24%. Sales of Macintosh computers are now responsible for only 28% of the company’s sales. These are the numbers which underpin Steve Jobs’s recent assertion that Apple had become a “mobile devices” company.

He followed up with a new metaphor, likening PCs to “trucks” – ie things that companies need to have but which few individuals own. This kind of talk prompted journalists to wonder whether his long-term strategy was to get out of the computer business altogether. In a nicely ironic touch, a blogger wrote a “Dear John” letter from Steve to the Mac (you know the genre: “It’s been lovely knowing you but I feel that the time has come for us to realise our individual potentials separately…”). This triggered a terse, irritable response from Jobs. Suggestions that Apple was thinking of dropping the Mac were, he emailed, “completely wrong. Just wait”.

Well, we’re waiting. Some seasoned Mac users are beginning to get impatient. Dan Gillmor, the prominent Silicon Valley observer and evangelist for “citizen journalism”, has been a Mac user for many years, but recently announced that he’s moving to Linux running on the beautiful new ThinkPad laptops emerging from Lenovo. Other Mac users are beginning to mutter about whether Apple has essentially lost interest in what was once its keystone product. Sure, the company continues to make incremental improvements in the MacBook, Mac mini and iMac lines, but somehow the fire has gone out.

In a way, that’s not surprising. Companies go where the commercial opportunities are. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Apple’s recent history is that the spectacular growth opportunities are in mobile devices, not deskbound computers or even laptops. The iPad is selling at a rate of a million a month. More than 1.4 million of the new iPhones were sold in the first four days. And the pace seems to be increasing. It took the first iPhone 74 days to reach its first million. The iPad got there in 28. Only things like the Nintendo Wii (13 days) shift faster. Then there’s the small matter of the 40% contribution the iPhone now makes to Apple’s bottom line. In those circumstances, if you were Steve Jobs, what would you focus on?

For the rest of us, the thing to focus on is the way smartphones are overtaking PCs as the gateway that most people will use to access the internet. There are now only three players in that game – Apple, Google (via the Android operating system) and RIM (makers of the BlackBerry). Until recently, I would have said that the (open, permissive) Google/Android system would win out over the (closed, tightly controlled) Apple device. But sales of the new iPhone lead one to wonder if it will be Apple, and not Google, which replaces Microsoft as the company we love to hate.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Introduced in April as the result of the Danger acquisition, the Kin phones are already history and will not be sold in Europe. Now everything hinges on Windows Phone

Microsoft has taken the Kin – a shell-shaped mobile that emerged from its purchase of the Danger brand – out to the back and shot it.

Slow sales in the US mean that it’s not going to be released in Europe (sorry, Windows Mobile fans) and that instead Microsoft is going to focus on Windows Phone 7, its upcoming revision to its entire mobile operating system.

In a statement to CNet News, which got the story first, Microsoft said “We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned… Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.”

The Kin had a lot of advertising behind it in the US, including TV, web, print and radio ads. But it didn’t make any difference.

The Kin was unveiled only in April, to be sold through Verizon in the US and slated for Vodafone in the UK in Europe in the autumn.

Among the elements that were being pushed by Microsoft as putting the Kin ahead of the pack were “deep social networking integration”. However, it was never part of the main thrust of Microsoft’s mobile strategy, which now revolves around the as-yet unreleased Windows Phone.

Michael Gartenberg, a consumer analyst, said he suspected part of the reason for the poor sales was Verizon’s data pricing plans.

The Kin was part of a project being run within Microsoft called Pink, which was developed in parallel to the Windows Phone 7 project, whose products are scheduled to be released later this year.

However Microsoft’s decision to kill the Kin means that for now it will struggle even further to maintain market share in the smartphone market, where it has been losing out to Apple’s iPhone and especially to Google’s Android platform, while Nokia has maintained its lead, with RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, holding its own in second place.

The Kin devices, which had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, were made by Sharp, but Microsoft determined the software, online services and hardware.

At the unveiling in April, Patrick Chomet, group director of terminals at Vodafone, said “Kin has a unique and intuitive way of engaging with the user, enabling them easily to share experiences and stay in touch with their friends.”

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Chief executive Steve Jobs hails ‘most successful launch in Apple’s history’ despite reported problems over phone reception

Apple says it sold 1.7m iPhone 4s in its first three days, a record for the newest version of its top-selling product, and the company could have sold more but for production constraints. The latest model features video calling and an updated body, although some users have reported problems with reception, apparently due to a design flaw.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, called the iPhone 4′s launch “the most successful in Apple’s history” but added: “We apologise to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

Research in the US by the analysts Piper Jaffray and in the UK by AQA suggests that 77% of iPhone 4 buyers queueing outside stores on the first days were upgrading from previous models – implying that 23% of buyers were new to the platform.

The record sales have come despite shortages of the smaller-capacity 16-gigabyte version of the iPhone, which is coloured white. Apple apologised last week and said it would be unable to fulfil early demand for them. By comparison, the previous iPhone 3GS model, launched a year ago, sold 1m in its first weekend.

Apple is competing for market share in the smartphone arena with RIM, maker of the BlackBerry brand; Google’s Android software, which is used by multiple handset makers; and Nokia, which has the lion’s share of the smartphone market but which has seen its share and profitability shrink since Apple and Google entered the market in 2007.

Analysts reckon Apple will be able to sell plenty more of the devices: Colin Gillis of BGC Partners in New York and Andy Hargreaves of Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon, project that Apple will have sold 2m to June 26, the end of the company’s fiscal quarter. Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis, had previously estimated 1m to 1.5m.

Apple had a difficult time getting enough touch screens to meet demand for the device, said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw in New York, so the early sales figures may not be an accurate reflection of demand. “It’s too early to say if this is negative,” said Kumar.

While Apple has some production constraints, the company “has a captive audience”, he said. “Demand for the iPhone 4 is not yet satiated so it just gets pushed out into subsequent quarters.”

The iPhone sales results follow Apple’s statement last week that it sold more than 3m of its iPad tablet computing device in the first 80 days. With the iPad, introduced April 3, and the three-year-old iPhone, Apple has widened its business beyond the Macintosh computer and iPod media player.

Sales of the iPhone accounted for 40% of Apple’s revenue last quarter. The device has shown an upward trend in sales: the first sold 700,000 on its first weekend in June 2007, despite a high price that was later cut. In 2008, the iPhone 3G sold 1m in its first week.

Apple’s share price has more than doubled since the original iPhone’s release on 29 June 2007, and it passed Microsoft as the largest technology company by market value late in May.

Some iPhone 4 customers have reported trouble with the new antenna design, which uses a stainless steel band on the outside of the casing. The phone signal drops when users cover the bottom left corner of the device with their palm.

Apple responded by recommending holding the phone differently or using a case to solve the problem. Customers in the five countries began lining up days in advance to buy the device. Apple said the iPhone will be available in 88 countries by the end of September.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

The transcript of the phone call earlier this week with Google’s chief reveals the real signals he’s sending out: Android wants to be the Windows of mobile phones

Android is getting too big to ignore. Photo by mathrock on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Below is a transcript (taken with shorthand, contemporaneously) of a conference call with Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, on 23 June. There may be some inaccuracies. After that, there is an analysis of what Schmidt said – and where the mobile market is.

Also on the conference call were journalists from Germany, the UK and Brazil. I won’t indicate here who asked what questions; see if you can work it out.

Call begins

Eric Schmidt: Verizon is just announcing the Droid X made by Motorola, its fourth Android phone. We have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of Android. This is one of the best phones ever made, on the very fastest network.

We’ve now got 160,000 new users per day. That’s a 60% increase per month [compared to the 100,000 figure per day that was given at the Google I/O conference in May]. If you get an increase like that going on, well, I’ve done the maths, and it looks like an incredible trajectory.

[That equates to 58m per month, a 60% increase month-on-month would mean that by the end of the year there would be about 16m Android phones being activated every day, or 480m per month - which doesn't really sounds feasible. Obviously it is going to tail off or even slow down at some stage.]

Counting the number of apps, there are 65,000, compared to 50,000 a month ago. So the growth is accelerating. OK, questions?

Q: How large is Android in the US market and European market compared to the iPhone, because it hasn’t done too well in Europe?

ES: I prefer not to talk about the iPhone as a competitor. The growth rate is very very strong, but I don’t think it’s really appropriate to make claims about market share.

Q: What’s driving that acceleration?

ES: having multiple hardware partners – LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola. The thing is it’s a totally open platorm, so open that the source is available too. Any application can run on Android as long as it doesn’t damage the network.

Q: Android is lagging in Europe compared to the US – why do you think that is?

ES: I don’t know that it’s lagging; I would have to look at the numbers. It was launched first in the US but we have enough European partners. The Droid phone was a big driver.

Q: Have you made any contacts with Nokia to discuss Android on Nokia?

ES: We have talked to everybody… I don’t want to talk about any specific companies. [A rather odd response which tailed off amid expectation.]

Q: What sort of revenues are you seeing from Android?

ES: We make zero from it. Because it’s free. (Q: but you get advertising revenue from it…) We don’t break out what our mobile advertising revenues are… [in general] we make money when people have powerful broadband devices so we invest in Android so that people can invest in it. But our mobile revenue growth is very very quick.

We know that there will be a great deal of money made in ads from the mobile industry.

Q: Do you think Android can become for mobile what Windows was for the PC?

ES: well, the thing about Android is that anybody can use it.. Android in many ways is better than Windows because it’s free, rather than Windows which had an ever-increasing price point. So anybody can build on Android, and it’s free.

Also Android has GPS and a full media stack [possibly misheard], so it can do things that even the ordinary PC doesn’t have and might never have.

Q: Who is your biggest competitor in this fight – Apple, Nokia, who?

ES: I try to spend time not focussing on those questions. Nokia has the largest market share, certainly. Apple, I was a proud board member there, I respect them. Nokia and Apple are both highly organised to be competitive.

Q: Isn’t a problem with Android that of fragmentation of the platform – that some handsets can’t update from earlier versions either because of the networks or the phones, so people are stuck on older versions which means you’re trying to cope with a broad range of versions?

ES: That’s a very good question. The first thing to say is that the networks are quite interoperable. Some phones shipped a year ago can’t be upgraded. But most can be, to 2.2, though it might take some months to roll out.

The argument about fragmentation has been used by competitors of open source for years. But we agree to support compatibility at the platform level. It’s important to understand this. Android apps will work on the current generation; any Android app written for one version will run on any phone with that version. That prevents fragmentation. Apps are written on a per-OS basis. But of course not every app written for any version will run on every version of Android – otherwise the platform couldn’t evolve.

Q: A team at Larva Labs estimated that while Apple has paid developers $1bn from App Store revenues, the comparable figure for the Android Marketplace is about $200m. Is enough money going to developers to make Android attractive?

ES: Well, I haven’t seen those figures, so I can’t talk to them. The thing is, developers go where the volume is. That’s the most important lesson from platform economics. It’s about scale and volume. It’s very important that developers get to a scale where they can see the ability to get to a very large audience. We believe we have done so.

Q: We’ve seen other companies talking about Android-based tablets – does Google intend to produce a tablet running Android?

ES: We’ve seen a number of announcements from other companies about tablets running Android. It’s a reasonably obvious product extension that people have announced. We haven’t announced any form of Google tablet.

[end of interview]

Analysis: the timing of this announcement – on 23 June, just as Apple’s iPhone 4 was reaching its first customers – was clearly aimed at taking some of the shine off the iPhone announcement by implying that even if Apple activates 1m iPhones in the first sales burst, Android will almost match that in a working week. (Do the maths.)

That of course leaves out all sorts of maybes, gotchas and provisionals: are the activation figures volatile? What’s the churn like – how many of the activations are new customers, and how many are renewing customers? An interesting calculation from the analysts Piper Jaffray, via Fortune suggests that (in the US, at least) 77% of iPhone 4 customers were existing iPhone users.

You can look at that two ways: what an enormous number of renewals! Or you could look at it from the other end: wow, Apple grew its customer base for first-day iPhones by 23% – among people who had to wait in enormously long lines. What’s the last consumer product you recall people queueing through the day for? I recall how Microsoft managed the hype machine perfectly for Windows 95, with midnight store openings; rather less so for every subsequent OS release. The Xbox 360 got some dedicated queuers too.

But in truth, Schmidt really isn’t looking at iPhone sales; he’s not trying here to court buyers dithering between iPhone and Android. This was actually a piece of dog-whistle PR aimed at mobile developers.

Unfamiliar with dog-whistle PR? It’s like dog-whistle politics: aimed at a particular group, couched in terms which don’t say a lot to the average person, but which zero in on that target group and make them sit up. The people who Schmidt wanted to hear this latest bit of PR are mobile developers. He wants them to multiply 160,000 by 5 (working days – perhaps 6), and then by 4, to reach about 4m Android phones being activated per month, and to get them to think that this is a really good platform to be building for.

That’s the point of his “platform economics” answer. Google can only capitalise on mobile advertising once it gets Android to a specific market share. It seems like that it has already crossed it, since it’s by all accounts bigger than Apple in smartphone share in the US (and may even be challenging RIM, though still some way behind Nokia). What the numbers are like for Europe – well, we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the end of the quarter for all those numbers.

The interesting challenge though will be whether the Android platform will indeed become the Windows of mobile. That could cut both ways: sure, the handset makers don’t have to pay a levy to use Android (as PC makers do to Microsoft). But when they go to the networks (who are the equivalent, in this scenario, of PC purchasers) they may find that they’re forced to bid down, and that their margins get eroded as more rivals pile into the market.

Apple, meanwhile, can be entirely happy with not having the lion’s share of the market, yet making a colossal profit from both the hardware sales (because nobody else can make an iPhone) and the app sales. It does exactly the same in the computer market: it has about 5% market share worldwide, yet makes a stonking profit on every computer sold. PC manufacturers, by contrast, have long since reached the point where price-cutting to win share simply opens a vein in their profits.

Android could thus win – and for Nokia, the idea of using Android must look ever more enticing, since it would cut costs and let it use its heft with the networks to win back share – and yet the hardware makers would lose. That’s a great danger – not imminent, but it exists – for Schmidt, Android and Google. By creating a flourishing ecosystem of app developers, Android could make life better for the handset makers.

Oh, and the company we haven’t mentioned here at all, except in passing? Microsoft. If you look at what the Android and iPhone platforms are now doing, you have to ask how on earth Windows Phone – which will have a paid-for licence – is ever going to attract any handset makers. Schmidt’s Android dog whistle might be loud for iPhone developers annoyed at the company’s capricious treatment of their apps, but it must be loudest for developers considering whether the shrinking, forwards-incompatible pool of Windows Mobile phones is really worth bothering with.

Between the handset makers pondering the economics of paying for a Windows Phone licence, and developers wondering why they should write code for a platform, Windows Phone, that’s presently activating zero phones a day – because it hasn’t been released – versus one doing 160,000 per day, Microsoft has a real problem with Windows Phone. Apple can survive Android because it has that 77% base of loyal customers. Android has an expanding customer base.

But what on earth has Microsoft got?

* I asked the questions about fragmentation and Larva Labs.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

‘Dear Mr. Jobs’

US lawmakers are grilling Steve Jobs over recent tweaks to Apple’s privacy policy allowing the company and its partners to collect and share “precise location data” of all iTunes and App Store customers.…

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(Source The Register)

Chief executive Eric Schmidt says both takeup of operating system and number of apps are growing rapidly

Google is now activating 160,000 mobile phones using its Android software a day, equivalent to 4.8m a month, according to the company’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt.

The number is also accelerating, having been put at 100,000 a day in the third week of May during Google’s annual I/O conference, Schmidt said – indicating sales growth of 60% per month.

“We have seen a tremendous increase in adoption,” Schmidt said in an interview exclusive to the Guardian in the UK. “We’ve also seen a growth in the number of apps available for Android – there are now approximately 65,000 compared to only 50,000 a month ago.” He believes that that means Android could have reached the volume necessary to become an essential mobile operating system – and perhaps the equivalent of Windows on PCs.

At those numbers, roughly 15m Android smartphones would be sold every quarter, compared with a worldwide total of 54m sold in the first quarter of 2010, according to the research company Gartner.

Though Schmidt’s announcement was clearly timed to steal some of the thunder of Apple’s launch in five countries of the iPhone 4 on Thursday, Schmidt declined to compare the Android platform’s market position against its better-known rival. Apple has said that it had orders of 600,000 in a single day for the iPhone 4 last week, and was unable to keep up with demand.

Google is notified whenever a smartphone using the Android operating system is activated by a mobile network. In the US, a number of different models are sold on different networks from different manufacturers, including Motorola, which on Wednesday unveiled its latest Droid X phone on the Verizon network. “It’s the best phone ever made on the fastest network,” Schmidt said – which could be seen as a dig at AT&T, which has the exclusive contract to sell the iPhone in the US but has struggled to satisfy users’ demands for mobile data bandwidth.

Asked whether he saw Apple or Nokia – which has the largest market share of smartphones – as Android’s biggest competitor, Schmidt said: “I try to spend my time not focusing on those questions.”

Android is a free mobile operating system which any handset maker can use and alter to produce a new version, while developers are able to write apps which will work on any specific version of the system.

However, while Apple has maintained a tight focus on its App Store, which has roughly 250,000 free and paid-for apps available, Google offers them via a “Marketplace”, and allows any app to run on Android “as long as it does not harm the network,” Schmidt said.

But calculations by a company called Larva Labs, which develops for Android, suggest that iPhone developers may be faring better financially than those on the Android Marketplace. Steve Jobs said earlier this month that Apple has paid out $1bn to developers through a revenue split (which has earned Apple roughly $420m).

By contrast, Larva Labs reckons that Android developers have only earned $20m in total from the Marketplace. Schmidt said he had not seen the figures, but added: “Developers go where the volume is. That’s the most important lesson of platform economics: it’s all about scale and volume. It’s very important that developers get to a scale where they can see the ability to get to a very large audience. We believe we have done so.”

Asked whether Android could become the equivalent of Windows for PCs – the dominant operating system – Schmidt said: “The advantage with Android is that anybody can use it. In many ways it is better than Windows because it’s free, rather than Windows which had an ever-increasing price point.”

He declined to say whether Google has been talking to Nokia about the possibility of an Android-driven Nokia phone, or whether Google would release its own tablet computer similar to Apple’s iPad, which has sold 3m units in 90 days.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

UK company calls foul

A UK chip maker has asked the EU to look again at Qualcomm’s business practices, despite the chip giant having cleared itself last time by settling with the complainants.…

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(Source The Register)

Apple sees sales of 600,000 units on Tuesday, with demand in Germany 10 times ahead of that for last year’s model

Apple has reported overwhelming demand for its new iPhone 4 model, selling more than 600,000 in a single day on Tuesday which saw ordering websites crash in the US and UK.

In Germany, demand for the new model, which was only unveiled by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs at the start of the month, is running 10 times ahead of that for last year’s model, the iPhone 3GS, reported Deutsche Telekom.

By comparison, when the iPhone 3GS went on sale last year, 1m were sold in its first three days. But that debuted in eight countries, whereas the iPhone 4 has gone on sale only in five.

Apple has apologised to people who tried to order the phone and gave up in frustration, saying demand was far higher than it expected. “We hope that they will try again.. once the iPhone 4 is in stock.”

Since its debut in June 2007, Apple’s smartphone has taken a huge chunk of the smartphone market and forced companies such as RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, and Nokia, which has the lion’s share of smartphone sales, to play catchup. Nokia issued another profits warning on Wednesday, and its share of the smartphone market is falling every quarter.

In the UK, where Apple is offering the phone without a contract through its online store, Apple’s website crashed as people tried to order it. And in the US, where it is only available with a contract from AT&T, the telephone company’s website froze as it tried to cope with an avalanche of orders each of which had to be verified on its own servers. That also led to problems in which some customers saw details of other peoples’ accounts – a reminder of the flaw exposed by a security group last week in which hundreds of thousands of Apple iPad users’ emails were stolen via weak security on AT&T’s site.

As a result of the heavy demand Apple has had to push back the delivery date for phones ordered online, and on Wednesday AT&T suspended orders, citing “unexpectedly high demand”.

Apple said “it was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions.”

Last year in the UK O2 had exclusive rights to sell the new iPhone, and said then that more of those handsets were sold in the first two hours of trading than all handsets in an average day.

This year Apple is selling the iPhone 4 without a contract – at £499 for the cheapest version – and O2, Vodafone, Orange and 3 are competing to offer it on contract terms. However neither O2 or 3 have yet announced prices, or allowed customers to pre-order the phone.

However the new contracts being offered for the phones have sparked anger among web users, who say that the carriers’ use of the word “unlimited” for the amount of data that can be downloaded through the smartphone is misleading. The companies impose a “fair use” cap, while describing the service as “unlimited”.

Now, a formal review by the advertising regulator could be about to put a cap on the practice.

This could mean that fixed-line and mobile operators will not be able to use the term “unlimited broadband” unless they are offering a genuinely unlimited service – and that means nothing in the small print that lets the provider send warnings to customers if they reach a certain threshold.

The review is being led by the Advertising Standards Authority, reports New Media Age, which will work with two ad industry bodies to make a comprehensive assessment of industry claims and consumer complaints on both broadband speeds and “unlimited” tariff penalties.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

TAIPEI/HONG KONG (Reuters) – iPhone maker Foxconn International Holdings Ltd said it will seek higher prices from clients to help offset wage increases at a plant in southern China that has been hit by a series of suicides.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

TAIPEI (Reuters) – iPhone maker Foxconn has offered workers at its Shenzhen manufacturing hub in China a 66 percent performance-based pay rise as it tries to deal with the fallout from a spate suicides there.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

TAIPEI (Reuters) – A worker at iPhone maker Foxconn’s southern China manufacturing hub, the scene of a string of employee suicides this year, died late last week from what his family said was overwork, a claim the company denied.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)