Archive for the ‘Windows Mobile’ Category
Samsung may launch Omnia Pro in July
According to rumors flying around, Samsung is preparing a new phone to add to its Omnia family, called the Omnia Pro. This new phone will have a full QWERTY slider behind the touchscreen Omnia. It will also include a 5Mpxl camera with autofocus, flash, image stabilizer and video recording and will operate on Windows Mobile 6.1 upgradable to 6.5. The phone is expected to retail for €500 ($662) and expected to launch in July.
What is your mobile platform strategy?
In the beginning there was the PalmOS mobile platform, and then there was Symbian, then Windows Mobile and RIM’s Blackberry OS. Then came the juggernaut iPhone OS from Apple. That was followed by Android from Google. Soon Palm will launch another mobile platform called the WebOS. All these different platforms lead to a question: How many mobile platforms can your company support?
That is just the operating systems. Already the mobile industry is fragmented with dozens of smartphone manufacturers. Add in the different features of the handsets themselves, like accelerometer, GPS, camera, etc, and you have a whole matrix of feature sets that need to be accounted for.
It is amazing how often entrepreneurs and product managers at smaller companies have said to me that this is their strategy. Then I ask them how soon they will be on all these platforms and I get a vague answer of as soon as we can. Given this situation, how long can companies justify developing products for all platforms?
Companies really need to evaluate their strategy against their resources. Building and supporting products on multiple platforms is costly and labor intensive process, just ask all those who build and support PC and Mac products. The complexity increases multiple-fold in the smartphone space. As an entrepreneur or product manager, you don’t have the time to wait until the product has been tested on all the platforms. You need to be out in the market before your competition.
Considering the limited funding and resources, you have to decide on one or two “hero” platforms as Tim Westergren, founder of the popular Pandora music service calls them. He has decided that iPhone is the “hero” platform they will focus on and when WebOS from Palm is available, that will be its second “hero” platform.
There are definite benefits in this strategy: You can develop a product that leverages the various features of that platform. You are able to conserve your resources by developing on few platforms. You can become the “best-in-class” on the specific platforms.
On the flip side, though, you have to weigh how successful are your target platforms going to be. iPhone has done phenomenally well and therefore could be a no-brainer for a lot of us. However, if you were targeting say Android or even the much-anticipated WebOS from Palm, you just have to look back at all those folks who jumped on the PalmOS bandwagon and decide if the rewards outweigh the risk and what is the likelihood of the platform surviving a few years.
Once you have decided on the platforms, like all good strategists, keep evaluating them and your strategy. Tim Westergren did not embark on his strategy right from the get-go. In fact, for two years Pandora was available on AT&T and Verizon Wireless’ application stores where it languished. Only when iPhone came along and Tim decided to launch his product on that platform did he found success.
Mobile World Congress Day 1 recap: Nokia Ovi Store, LG GD900, Arena, Windows Mobile 6.5, Samsung OmniaHD
Here is a recap of the top news story on this the first day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona:
Nokia announced 4 new phones and the Ovi App store which will be available in March for publishers to upload content and on the N97 when it comes out in June. There are two new E-series devices: Nokia E75 and Nokia E55 with revamped email interface. The Navigator series got two more devices too: Nokia 6710 Navigator, and the Nokia 6720 classic. As the name suggest the 6710 Navigator is GPS centric device while the 6720 classic has advanced noice cancellation and form factor designed to fit around the face. Nokia, in an unusual move, announced its N86 phone far from the action in Singapore. This 8Mpxl camera phone is an update to the to-be-launched N97 with similar form factor and dual-sliders.
LG and Microsoft announced a partnership wherein LG will launch 50 new Windows Mobile based phones by 2012. I am sure a lot of these phones will see the S-Class treatment which we saw in LG Arena (also announced today with March availability in Europe). LG also announced the GD900 which has a transparent keypad slider with a very thin, 13.4″ thick casing, and have 7.2 Mbps HSDPA.
Speaking of Microsoft, it also announced the availability of Windows Mobile 6.5 with its honeycomb home screen; MyPhone, its cloud-based backup solution; Recite, the voice memo organization tool; and its own marketplace called Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which will be available on all phones running WinMo 6.5 and above.
Finally, Samsung had the best news of all: the new OmniaHD (review here), its Symbian S60 OS-based,12.7mm thin beauty with a huge 3.7″ glass AMOLED touchscreen display, an 8 Mpxl camera that shoots 720p video, HD video out, video calling, Wi-Fi, GPS and 8 to 16GB internal storage plus microSDHC support with aluminum body. It also announced the BeatDJ (see video review) with Bang & Olufson audio, 3 megapixel camera, DivX support, a 2.8″ AMOLED touchscreen and DJ features which allows the user to record tracks, scratch and add effects.
[Via Boy Genius Report, Engadget Mobile, Mobile Review, UnwiredView]
Toshiba to launch the slimmest, largest touchscreen phone in Barcelona
Toshiba is set to announce the launch of its new TG01 phone based on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz chip. This phone is 9mm thick and has a 4.1 inches touchscreen, more than 3mm thinner than iPhone and a whole inch bigger than the iPhone. It runs Windows Mobile with Toshiba’s custom, striped Tosh GUI and comes with Office, Internet Explorer 6 and DivX support. The phone will launch in two weeks at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and will be available sometime in summer. No pricing has been announced yet. Here are some pictures of this hotness.
You can see more pictures at ElectricPig and Pocket-Lint.
[Via EngadgetMobile]
T-Mobile to get New Year’s gifts from HTC
Rumor has it that T-Mobile is getting two very good gifts from HTC in the new year. HTC is working on G2, a follow-up to its popular, Android-based G1, code-named, Sapphire. Another device is code-named Rhodium, which is the follow-up to the Wing, a Windows Mobile based phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. There is not much else that is known about these phones yet except for these images.
[Via Engadget Mobile]
Get ready for browser wars, again.
That’s right browser wars are coming. Only this time, they are coming to a mobile phone near you. So far we have Microsoft Mobile IE, Apple’s Safari, Opera, Google’s Chrome and the Blackberry’s proprietary browser. Add to that mix the recently announced and currently undergoing alpha testing, Fennec, the mobile browser from Mozilla, the maker of Firefox open source browser.
Given all these browsers, there is bound to be a shakeup. However, on the flip side of it is the fact that there are so many mobile platforms, Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone OS, Google’s Android, Symbian and Blackberry OS. So, one could argue that each of these are walled gardens and therefore the browsers work in these walled gardens. However, two of the above-named browsers, Opera and Fennec are not tied to any specific platform, though they may not work on all platforms yet. Not to mention, all the big players, except maybe RIM, have the resources to quickly make their browsers platform independent. So, while I don’t expect the browser wars to start right away, I fully expect them in maybe late 2009, early 2010.
Apple, RIM win smartphone marketshare from Nokia
According to a report published by Canalys, a market research company, Apple and RIM are winning market share in the smartphone category from Nokia. By Q3 2008, 40 million smartphones were sold worldwide. This represents a 28% growth YoY compared to 3% growth for the larger mobile phone market.
Nokia lost significant ground YoY in Q3 down from 51.4% in 2007 to 38.9% in 2008. Nokia uses the Symbian platform which as a result also lost significant ground. Here are the top 4 smartphone platforms and their market share:
- Symbian 46.6% down from 68.1% in Q3 2007
- Apple 17.3%
- RIM 15.2%
- Microsoft 13.6%
Since the bottom three vendors are so close, there is going to be continued fight for the second spot. It is likely that RIM might overtake Apple in Q4 with its upcoming release of Blackberry Storm and also the recent release of Blackberry Bold.
[Via Reuters]
Motorola to hitch its fortune to Android
In a major change in strategy, Wall Street Journal is reporting that Motorola’s new CEO Shanjay Jha has decided that going forward it will streamline on three OSs for its phones. He will announce these changes as early as today during the earnings call. Motorola will use Google’s Android platform for its consumer targeted smartphones, ditching Symbian OS. It will uses its own P2K OS for feature phones and for the business focused phones, it will use Microsoft Windows Mobile platform. Also, Motorola is looking to outsource some of its Window Mobile based phone production to third parties. Motorola is expected to release its first Android-based, social networking focused smartphone in Q2, 2009.
Let’s hope the struggling Motorola can find its mojo with these changes. However, I am not optimistic about their chances. As I recently wrote, the mobile industry is starting to face some headwinds which are expected to get stronger in 2009. Just today, BusinessWeek reported that according to a survey by mobile application portal GetJar, 76% of users globally are actively looking to reduce their wireless bills and 78% are delaying their new phone purchase.
[Via UnwiredView]
Microsoft envisions mobile collaboration
In a recent patent application, Microsoft describes how multiple mobile phones (presumably running Windows Mobile, of course) can be brought together to form a single system which would pool the otherwise limited resources of individual phones. According to this patent, one could dynamically bring together several phone screens that would act as a single big screen. This type collaboration is not limited to just phone screens, but also to the CPU, memory, and other resources to form interesting collaborations. This type of collaboration will have several usage including video which is described in the patent as:
The collaborative architecture applies an adaptive video decoder so that each mobile device can participate in playing back a larger and higher-resolution video across combined display screens than any single mobile device could playback alone.
In addition to video display aggregation, Microsoft also envisages following scenarios:
- drag and drop file transfer
- microphone aggregation
- speaker aggregation
- camera aggregation
- antenna aggregation
Clearly, Microsoft is eyeing the future of mobile devices coming together to form ad-hoc network for collaboration at various levels. I certainly hope that this patent becomes a reality in some future version of Windows Mobile.
HTC officially unveils the HTC Touch HD
Along with officially releasing the HTC Touch 3G, HTC also unveiled the HTC Touch HD. The Touch HD, as I had written earlier, is an all-touchscreen phone like the iPhone and has two keys like the Blackberry Storm. The full specs for the Touch HD are:
The HTC Touch HD will be available across major European carriers in Q4 2008 and be introduced in other global markets thereafter. No pricing has been mentioned.
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