BLU Ocean Strategy. Miami-based BLU Products finds a low-cost, dual-SIM smartphone niche in Latin America.

( With Chinese-made products of course. )


ENGADGET STORY >>

COMPANY SITE | http://www.bluproducts.com/

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KEY MOBILE TRENDS: commoditization, MediaTek, China

There are many smartphone vendors around the globe that I have never heard of. Most of them are based in China or India or other Asian markets. Here is one that is not. BLU Products. BLU who?

I don't think I had heard of BLU until earlier this month. According to the company's website, BLU was founded in 2009 "by Latin American entrepreneurs" and is headquartered in Miami. "More than one million BLU mobile devices have been sold in 25 countries throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and the U.S." These are not huge volumes for the handset market, but BLU seems to have found a niche.

BLU sells both feature phones and Android-based smartphones, all of which are certainly imported from a Chinese manufacturer. The newsworthy point here is the relatively low prices of their recently announced devices. One Android phone, called "LIFE Play," will sell for $229 on Amazon and other sites. Life Play is 7.9mm thin, has a 4.7-inch HD (720p?) screen, an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p recording, a 2 megapixel front-facing camera, a microSD expansion slot, and support GSM and HSPA networks. And apparently it's dual SIM. There's no LTE support, but this might not have much consequence in some target markets. This smartphone and other Android handsets recently announced by BLU are based on top of a MediaTek quad-core chipset.

Last week we saw a 5-inch, 1080p smartphone from a Chinese called Neo for around $145 in China. It's clear where things are headed.

BLU Products "LIFE Play," a dual-SIM, 4.7-inch Android smartphone for $229:

4G nation. Or notion. As “4G” has become a near meaningless term, will American lawmakers pick up where standardization bodies have left off?

Senators look into defining “4G.” STORY >>

4G, or not 4G, that is the deception.

So, can anything be done about generation inflation?

The term 4G has been vague from the beginning. But it’s been getting vaguer, especially in America, where every major operator has hung out a “4G” shingle. Given the lack of clarity, can the U.S. Congress be more consistent than the ITU in defining 4G?

ITU originally pointed to LTE Advanced (and above) and IEEE's 802.16m as two technologies that would meet the criteria of 4G. So at first, not even LTE (as opposed to LTE-A) was considered a 4G technology by the ITU, although most within the mobile industry did consider LTE to be the start of fourth generation wireless services.

But the definition and requirements for 4G were further redefined --and diluted-- by ITU late 2010. Suddenly not only did LTE meet ITU's requirements for 4G, but so did HSPA+, a 3.9G technology. Anyway, some operators who had been offering 3.9G services figured it was fair to round up anyway, so 3.9 became 4.0.

Given the rather meaningless 4G term, it’s somewhat encouraging to see several members of the United States Senate proposing the establishment of a firm definition of 4G mobile services. (I wasn't aware that a similar proposal was made in the U.S. House of Representatives this past June.)

So, as 4G has become a moving target, there has been consumer confusion and even, I think it’s fair to say, some deception. How does one operator’s 4G compare to another’s? How can LTE-A be 4G if HSPA+ is 4G?

It’s time to start talking numbers: like real download and uplink bandwidth. Perhaps Congress can make 4G the exclusive club it was intended to be. Otherwise the generation gap will only get worse.

America's largest 3.9G 4G network

European debt crisis? What about the growing European mobile crisis?

Don't get even, get angry (birds). And lots of them.

On September 29, Nokia announced the planned closure of their handset factory in Cluj, Romania. Manufacturing would be moved to other Nokia plants, especially those in China. To me this site closure was the exclamation mark on the de-Europeanization of the mobile industry. It's headed West. It's headed East. But it's not staying in the middle.

Back in the GSM heyday, in the mid-'90s, Europe became the center of the mobile world. Countries such as Sweden and Finland would brag of mobile penetration rates of greater than 25%, then 50% of the population.

And development happened on the Continent. Handset vendors and component suppliers of all sorts would gather in cities in France and the Netherlands, and other reasonably nice places across Europe to work on and influence wireless standardization, and mingle with the big European vendors and operators. There was Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Philips, Alcatel. There was ETSI and GSM. Those were glorious days for Europe. It was the center of the new mobile world as Europeans looked with pity and scorn at the U.S., a country with networks that could barely handle text messaging at the time. The U.S was in the the mobile dark ages.

I always liked to say, when it comes to mobile trends, Japanese teenagers do it first. But it truly happens big in Europe.

Now welcome to the new mobile century. Let's look at where things stand now:

All major smartphone platforms are from the U.S. (iOS, Android, WP). Symbian has thrown its hands up in defeat. (We could debate about RIM/QNX, Bada, here as well.)

Approximately 95% of handset industry profits are earned by vendors outside of Europe (using Q2 2011 numbers).

More than 80% of industry revenues are generated by non-European vendors. (I include half of Sony Ericsson's revenues in my calculations.)

Only 1.5 of the world's top-ten vendors are European (Nokia and Sony Ericsson.)

Standardization efforts are shifting to organizations such as W3C and IETF, as services take center stage.

About 95% of all handsets are manufactured outside of Europe.

European consumers upgrade their handsets at a slower pace than consumers in the U.S. and most key Asian countries.

America has become the center of mobile software and services. There's Android, there's iOS, there's Windows Phone and Facebook and Google and Foursquare. And not only does Asia have key handset vendors such as Samsung, HTC, LG, they also have the world's largest mobile manufacturing based out of China. There's Foxconn (a Taiwan-based company). There's Compal (a Taiwan-based company).

To be fair and clear, there certainly are fantastic on-going European success stories: ARM comes to mind. [I could also add Opera, Spotify, and Skype here.] And Nokia is still the world's largest handset maker in pure volume terms. And of course there's Finland-based Rovio, the maker of "Angry Birds."

But it will take a lot of angry birds to make up for lost opportunities. It seems that mobile development has flown the coop.

Is the sun setting on mobile Europe?