Showing posts with label Mobile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mobile. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Can Samsung innovate?


If we're not there yet, we are quickly approaching the Samsung Era in handheld electronics.
The Korean giant sells more mobile phones, and more smartphones, than any other company. It competes in all markets, from the high-end down, and is pouring its record profits into expansion and advertising. Samsung is now among the most valuable brands on the planet.
Samsung rose to prominence by out-grinding rivals in commodity markets, and it approaches phones and tablets the same way, by quickly pumping out handsets with incremental tweaks and improvements.
The question now is whether Samsung can innovate, if it can deliver the kind of totally new devices that rival like Apple has.
There is no question about Samsung's ability to compete in many markets at the same time. Last week the company announced a new Galaxy Note tablet with an 8-inch display, and reports say its next Note smartphone will have a 6.4-inch screen.
This means that Samsung's smartphones and tablets will probably soon come in one-inch intervals at every size from 4 to 11.6 inches. These are sold at various specs for different markets and price points, meaning the company has many dozens of devices in play around the world.
"They are literally competing in all segments at all times, even competing with Apple before a product comes out," said Andrew Rassweiler, an analyst at IHS iSuppli. "Samsung has a horse in every race."
And Samsung's breadth has not come at the cost of its thoroughbreds. Its flagship Galaxy S line is the first to truly challenge the iPhone for dominance in high-end smartphones. It also revealed last week that it will soon unveil the Galaxy S IV, just 10 months after the S III was launched.
The company is wildly profitable and successful. Recent data show that Samsung is easily the world's dominant phone maker by units shipped and the global leader in smartphones. If you see a random person with an Android device, chances are it is a Samsung.
The company, however, has built this success directly on its history as a component maker, where it rose to prominence the same way. As Samsung Electronics was building momentum in the global mobile phone industry in 2004, then-CEO Jong-yong Yun expressed his feeling toward the devices in an interview:
"Speed is the key to all perishable commodities from sashimi to mobile phones. Even expensive fish becomes cheap in a day or two."
For Samsung, phones are not the "revolutionary product" that Apple promised when it launched the first iPhone. The company does not aim, as Steve Jobs once said of Apple, to "make our hearts sing."
Globally and in this article, "Samsung" refers to Samsung Electronics, the flagship firm of the Samsung Group, a massive chaebol, or Korean conglomerate, that runs everything from fashion brands to health care.
The group's electronics unit was originally founded in 1969 to make appliances like refrigerators and TVs, and was eventually merged with its semiconductor business. DRAM is where Samsung had its first real international success -- it started years behind rivals in the U.S. and Japan, but steadily outworked them, gaining ground with each chip generation until it took the technology lead in the early 1990s.
Long-time Samsung watchers say this intense focus on small, steady technical improvements is still the company's core approach.
"Samsung never comes up with any new products. It improves it and comes up with the next generation of product -- much better and much cheaper, and much faster," said Sea-Jin Chang, a professor of business policy at the National University of Singapore, who wrote a book about the company's emergence over now-struggling Sony.
"Samsung's success comes from this DRAM experience, because it was the first business they actually made any money in," he said.
The company's consumer electronics are now its largest source of profit. But it is still the world's dominant producer of components like NAND flash memory and DRAM, LCD screens and mobile processors.
Samsung still approaches both businesses the same way, Chang said. The "digital sashimi" philosophy holds across all of its product lines.
As with the semiconductors used in memory and screens, which gradually increase in complexity with each generation, the current wave of smartphones and tablets can be seen as a steady progression. Each new model gets thinner, with better screens and faster processors, plus hardware add-ons such as NFC (near field communication) chips, but the overall concept doesn't change.
"Samsung is like the Japanese companies when they were at the their peak, pumping out tech products for cheaper and cheaper," said Hiroyuki Shimizu, an analyst at Gartner.
Shimizu said one way out of this spiral is software, but Samsung has had little success in developing its own. The company has largely abandoned its Bada OS, first announced in 2010, and is almost entirely dependent on Android for core content like maps, apps and video.
"Samsung emphasizes speed and execution. But this is contradictory to creativity. If you want speed and execution, you don't expect to create something new," said Chang. "Software is more individual and requires out-of-box thinking."
Still, Samsung has opened up new segments of the smartphone market.
While it has yet to create an entirely new type of device, its ready supply of components makes it easier to gamble on new slices of the market. When it launched the original Galaxy Note in 2011, a phone with an oversized 5.3-inch screen, the device's marketing phrase was "Phone? Tablet? Its Galaxy Note!"
Samsung later said it sold 10 million units of the "phablet" in nine months, creating a new sub-category, and is now gearing up for its third iteration of the device. A host of rival companies, including Korean competitor LG, Asus and Huawei, have since announced their own oversized phones, and IHS iSuppli now estimates that 60 million phones with screens 5 inches and larger will ship this year.
"It's a shotgun approach," said Rassweiler of IHS. "The best way to test it is to build it and see if they come."
Samsung's ability to make most core hardware components in-house, and its deep pockets, mean it can gamble on devices like the Note. They also give it a massive advantage over competitors.
When you make calls or flick the screen of an iPhone, the bits produced take a virtual tour around the tech world -- the screen may come from Sharp's factories in central Japan, the processor from Samsung's plant in Texas and the assembly completed at the massive Foxconn complexes in China.
In Samsung products, teardowns show that over 80 percent of components are made by the company itself. Consumers may be not able to tell the difference in a finished product, but this greatly reduces the time it takes to get a product to market.
"If you really look at it as who can compete with Samsung in terms of vertical integration right now, the answer is nobody. Nobody's even close," said Rassweiler. "No one can hold a candle to them in terms of in-house ability."
Some say that Samsung's status as a top component supplier can give its in-house products unfair advantages, such as first crack at new items in short supply. The company, which famously counts even bitter rivals like Apple among customers, maintains it is client neutral.
"Components like OLED displays have been monopolized by Samsung Mobile in the past," said Won Seo, an analyst at Korea Investment and Securities. "But even though there is some conflict in interest between its component business and handset business, Samsung so far has managed this quite well, with independent businesses."
A Samsung spokesman emphasized that the company maintains strict firewalls between its component and product businesses, and that the two operate completely separately.
Samsung's broad range of devices also means that it can compete in widely different markets. In smartphones, the company is strongly competitive in advanced markets in the U.S. and Europe, and is still the dominant vendor in emerging China, where Apple lags rivals.
In nearby brand-conscious Japan, however, Apple is now the market leader, while Samsung has struggled. The Korean company is pouring much of its recent record profit into marketing, however, and was recently named the strongest smartphone brand by researcher Brand Keys.
A few weeks ago, rumors that Apple is working on a "smartwatch" hit the mainstream press. Days later, images of a Samsung smartwatch also emerged.
Whatever the source or accuracy of the watch rumors, the message is the same as it has been for smartphones and tablets. Samsung is now matching Apple product for product, leak for leak -- anything Apple can make, Samsung can too, and probably better.
The question is whether Samsung can give us something new.


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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Nokia offers paid upgrade to music service


Nokia plans to roll out in the first quarter of this year its Nokia Music+, a new subscription-based upgrade to its free-to-stream mobile music service.
The paid service will offer unlimited downloads of sets of tunes or "Mixes" for offline playback, and unlimited track skips, Nokia said on Sunday.
Nokia started offering last September in the U.S. its Nokia Music, a free music streaming service. The service will continue to be available free of charge, with no advertisements, registration or subscription to Nokia Lumia owners, Nokia said.
The upgrade service, tentatively priced at around US$3.99 per month, will also offer higher quality streams, allowing downloads at eight times the existing quality, Nokia said. Users can also set rules to only download higher quality audio when they are on Wi-Fi, for example. The price of the service will vary according to the territory in which it is offered, Nokia said in a blog post. The price in Euros for the service is also likely to be about 3.99 per month.
The free service has allowed users to download up to four Mixes, each of which contains hours of music, and play them without an Internet connection. The paid service removes that limit, Nokia said in the blog post.
Mixes are created by Nokia specialists who curate the genres or music types, Nokia said in June last year.
Under the upgrade service, users can have lyrics streaming for many tracks. They can also listen to Nokia Music through a Web app on Internet-enabled devices including a PC or tablet.
"It's the only smartphone music service out there offering access to millions of songs out of the box without the need to sign up, sign in, or suffer adverts in between enjoying the music," Nokia's vice president of entertainment, Jyrki Rosenberg, said in the blog post. "When you add in the ability to skip songs and save playlists for offline uses like the tube, you have something unique."
Nokia swung to a net profit in the fourth quarter of last year, partly on increased sales of its Lumia smartphones. Sales of the Lumia smartphones went up to 4.4 million units from 2.9 million in the previous quarter and 4 million in the second quarter. Nokia's portfolio improved with new models like Lumia 920, but the company still lacks a "true hero model" that can compete effectively with Apple's iPhone or Samsung Electronics' Galaxy S III, research firm Strategy Analytics said.
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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Friday, January 18, 2013

Wouldn't it be nice if you could always access your data from anywhere?


A business idea starts simply enough: You identify a need, and then you fill it. It seems that a number of innovative entrepreneurs have identified the need to access data from mobile devices no matter where it's stored, and we're seeing an explosion of solutions designed to address that need.
Where is your data? Mine is all over the place. I have data stored locally on my PCs and tablets, and data stored on external USB hard drives, and data stored across various cloud-based services including iCloud, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and possibly others I've forgotten about. Some of the data is redundant--duplicates of data stored elsewhere--and I do my best to consolidate the data I really need in one place, but there's still an opportunity there for a provider to give me a tool that just lets me access all of it no matter what device or platform I'm using.
Box is certainly striving to achieve such a vision. It may be viewed at face value as a cloud storage service, but the underlying philosophy that drives Box is the idea that people should be able to access and share their content from anywhere. Box is arguably closer to that goal than any other--providing access to data from Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and pretty much anything or anywhere with access to the Web. Box is also one of the first big players to develop an app for Windows 8.
I'm a huge fan of Box, and I use Box on most--if not all--of the platforms it's available on. It is my primary repository for the data I need access to. However, Box is a Box-centric solution. I only have access to the data that I have stored in the appropriate folder to be automatically synced, or that I have taken the time to manually upload to the cloud. If I need a file that I saved to the desktop of my MacBook Air while I'm away from my desk, Box won't help me.
Younity recently saved me in this exact situation. Younity scans the data on your Windows and Mac OS X PCs, and makes that data seamlessly available to your iPhone and iPad via an iOS app. Younity is limited, though, in that it only scans local drives--so data on my external drives is not indexed, and the app is strictly iOS, so it won't help Android or Windows Phone users.
There are a couple new approaches in the works that promise more ubiquitous cross-platform access to data. First, there's Documents.Me. Documents.Me is also iOS-centric. It claims to provide access to data from your computer, as well as data stored in Dropbox or Google Drive, and it will scan your email, too. It has slightly broader application than Younity, but not by much.
YouSendIt has its eyes on a bigger, "cloud-nostic future" as the company has dubbed it. YouSendIt already offers a data storage and file-sharing platform a la Box, and the company recently acquired Found Software. Found develops technologies to enable users to find and discover their files and data across devices and cloud services. Blending YouSendIt with the capabilities acquired with Found could be a big step toward a more platform-agnostic approach.
In a perfect world all of your data would be available to you no matter where you stored it, and no matter what operating system or mobile device you're trying to access it from. We're not there, but it seems there are some startups that are at least trying to keep us heading in that direction.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

SAP cozies up to Windows 8 with mobile apps, platform support


SAP said Tuesday that it plans to roll out a series of mobile applications for Windows 8, a move that underscores the companies' deep partnership at a time when many observers believe Microsoft's new OS is in for a tough ride.
In addition, SAP is planning to add support for Windows 8 mobile application development for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 through its SAP Mobile Platform, which has been renamed from Sybase Unwired Platform, according to the announcement, which was made at the Sapphire and Tech Ed conferences in Madrid.
SAP has also renamed the Sybase Afaria mobile device management platform. It is now called SAP Afaria and will also support Windows 8. Intel-based Windows 8 tablets are now certified for SAP Afaria as well.
The six Windows 8 mobile applications SAP plans to roll out will be "for use on devices of various form factors," according to a statement.
These include WorkDeck, a "persona-centric app that offers contextual integration of various information sources and processes into a role-based view," SAP said.
Other applications include Manager Insight, which provides employee profile information; Learning Assistant, a training application; Interview Assistant, for coordinating employee searches and hiring processes; Customer Financial Fact Sheet, which provides data about clients' finances and order activity to sales representatives; and GRC Policy Survey, with which employees can "review and acknowledge relevant policy changes and fill in surveys to ensure they understand the policies," SAP said.
Trial versions of all the products will be available for download.
In addition, developers will be able to create HTML5 and JavaScript-based mobile applications inside Microsoft's Visual Studio, then deploy them through SAP's mobile platform, which provides advanced security, authentication and high availability, according to a statement. SAP intends to give partners the ability to develop Windows 8 applications on the platform and is also making a free developer trial of it available.
Wednesday's announcement also noted that SAP will develop Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 applications, but didn't provide any specifics. Nor did SAP give availability and pricing dates for its Windows 8 applications.
Still, SAP's move should provide a significant albeit not entirely surprising endorsement of Windows 8, which has been dogged by reports of slow initial sales.
SAP and Microsoft, while competitors in some areas, have engaged in many high-profile co-development efforts over the years, such as Duet, an integration between SAP's business software and Microsoft SharePoint.
Critics such as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff have even predicted that Windows 8 will be the "end of Windows."
Such talk, however, doesn't reflect the reality of how deeply ingrained Windows and other Microsoft technologies, such as Office and Active Directory, remain inside corporate IT environments. Should SAP fail to support Windows 8, it could face some blowback from its customers that decide to upgrade to the new OS.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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Cisco to build small cellular base stations, Chambers says


Cisco Systems plans to build small cellular base stations, building upon its fast-growing business in Wi-Fi base stations for mobile operator networks, Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on Tuesday.
The move will bring the networking giant into a major part of communications infrastructure that until now it has left mostly to the handful of major manufacturers that are steeped in the cellular world, such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Alcatel-Lucent. But Cisco won't build the full-size "macro" base stations that have formed the basis of that business until now, instead focusing on so-called "small cells" that cover smaller areas.
Mobile operators can deploy small cells in densely populated areas to increase their networks' capacity to carry calls and data services. With proper coordination between the small and macro cells, carriers can serve more subscribers using the same amount of radio spectrum, which is at a premium in many areas.
Cisco executives have said in the past that the company was studying how it might participate in the cellular radio market. On a conference call Tuesday about Cisco's first-quarter financial results, Chambers gave a definitive answer.
Responding to an analyst's question about radio-access networks, Chambers said Cisco has had great success so far with Wi-Fi access points it makes for mobile operators. Revenue in that business is only about US$100 million per year, a relatively small number for Cisco, but that figure roughly doubled in the quarter from a year earlier on the strength of several new deals with carriers, Chambers said.
"Then, we're going to move into small cell, and then we're going to combine small cell with [service-provider] Wi-Fi, with 3G, with 4G, with our architectural plays," Chambers said. While specifying that Cisco won't make "traditional" base stations, the large radios that are typically found on towers, he said Cisco would make the kinds of base stations designed to go on top of light poles. That's the type of deployment envisioned for public, outdoor small cells.
Cisco has been selling itself in the mobile carrier arena as a provider of unified end-to-end infrastructure that ties the wireless edge of the network to fast wired connections and network management capabilities on the back end. But until now its wireless pitch has been limited mostly to Wi-Fi access points, a technology that Cisco dominates in homes and offices and which is starting to play a crucial role in mobile carrier networks. Where service providers can use Wi-Fi, they tap into unlicensed spectrum that can carry customers' data traffic at speeds comparable to 4G, easing the burden on their expensive licensed frequencies.
Cisco is not entirely new to cellular base stations, having worked with partner ip.access on the AT&T MicroCell, a tiny "femtocell" designed for use in a consumer's home. But entering into the public small-cell business will expose Cisco to both a much bigger opportunity and a long list of technical and sitingchallenges that are still being worked out. Key among these is the ability of long-range macrocells to coordinate with small cells so that the two can deliver the maximum efficiency and not interfere with each other.4
Combining small cells with Wi-Fi in the same access point may be a natural move for Cisco and is one that other vendors are already working on. A hybrid cellular and Wi-Fi access point holds the promise of both simplicity for location and mounting and flexibility for serving subscribers with the best possible technology in a given situation.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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Saturday, November 10, 2012

The Week in iOS Apps: A better Facebook


This week's roundup of iOS apps offers new ways to shop, track your life, and make new websites. Already this week we brought you news of the Angry Birds Star Wars game, word of updates to theClear and FreshBooks apps, as well as the announcement that Microsoft Office may finally be available on iOS in 2013.
Here are other new and updated apps that caught our eye this week.
Apple Store: Siri: Buy me a new iPad mini! OK, so we're not sure that gadget shopping will be quite that easy, but the latest update to the Apple Store app for iPhone does let you use Siri to shop around and compare prices on Apple products. (Of course, you'll have to have a Siri-enabled device--an iPhone 4S or 5, or a third- or fourth-generation iPad--to take advantage of the new features.) The updated app also lets you buy gift cards and have them emailed to friends from within the app--and those cards can even be loaded into the recipients Passbook. Apple's technology has finally found its best purpose: To make it really easy for you to buy more of Apple's technology.
EvernoteThis free app for iPhone and iPad--which lets you save pictures, notes, and clippings from just about everything that you read or experience--has long been one of the best-selling offerings in the App Store. Now it's received a massive overhaul to its user interface, with a new homepage that allows easier access to notes, notebooks, tags, and premium features. (On the iPad, there's also homepage access to your most recent notes.) And the note list has been reconfigured to a "card style" to showcase the content therein. What's more, geotagged notes can be displayed on a map to show when and where you collected them.
Facebook/TumblrFacebook's free app for iPhone and iPad hasn't always been popular--and the company's inability to "get" the mobile arena has arguably hindered its success on the stock market--but this week's update has some notable improvements, making it easier to find friends online and chat them up immediately (see the photo at top), along with the improved ability to share multiple photos quickly. Elsewhere in social media, the Tumblr iPhone app has also been updated, bringing a new dashboard and gesture-based navigation. Telling people way too much about yourself is easier than ever.

Petfinder MobileHow much is that doggie on my iPhone? (Arf, arf!) I browsed to its waggly tail! How much is that doggie on my iPhone? (Arf, arf!) I can share its details via Facebook, Twitter, or email!
Summly: This free news aggregator app for iPhone really boils down the news, offering 400-character summaries of the top stories in the subject areas you choose. (You can click on the story and go more in-depth with the longer articles from the source.) Version 2.0, launched this week, addressed user complaints with a thorough overhaul of the navigation, cleaning up story lists.
Webr/Zapd: You probably don't need convincing that the iPhone is a content-creation machine, but here are two more reminders. Version 2.0 of Webr, a website-making app, lets users add video and audio links to their sites; it also offers new themes and the ability to create and manage up to three websites. Version 2.0 of Zapd, a similar offering, now lets you collaborate with other users in website creation, and offers new website themes, with additional themes being added every month.
Other apps of noteReeder for iPhone now lets users post to App.Net and Quote.FM ... the best-selling novel War Horse is now available as a standalone multimedia iPad app, as is Goodnight Moon, the beloved children's classic ...  and Scanner Pro now lets users batch-upload multiple images to their account.

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