MediaTekifikation. For those in the handset business who still haven't heard of MediaTek, it may soon be time to meet your maker.

Many people I speak with in the wireless industry have still never heard of MTK. To me, that's like meeting a kid who has never heard of Lego's.

Stories for your consideration:
— MediaTek & OmniVision tie-up for ADVANCED SMARTPHONE IMAGING >>
— Forbes: More Americans Learn About Taiwan's Amazing MediaTek >>
— Taipei Times: MediaTek’s chips transforming China’s smartphone market >>

...some thought continuation from my post about the "Chinafication" of the global handset industry:

Back in early 2008, in an internal report I wrote for Nokia management, I noted that a Chinese handset vendor named Tianyu had become a top-10 global brand. Even though I followed the industry closely, I had never heard of Tianyu before this. I decided to highlight the potential competitive threat of local vendors such as Tianyu who could appear out of nowhere in short order in vital growth markets.

I received some immediate feedback about my observations from one manager based out of Nokia's Beijing office: "Forget Tianyu: the company to really keep an eye on is MediaTek." That was a great tip.

Taiwan-based MediaTek may not be a direct competitor to smartphone vendors, but the company is an enabler of increased competition, lowering barriers to entry to the handset market. MediaTek offers complete chipset and software solutions allowing anybody with the desire to enter the handset business. It is MediaTek which enabled many of the "shanzhai" players to beat major vendors such as Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola to market with what appeared to be very similar-looking feature phones with risible brand names such as "Nokla" and "Sansung."

About two years ago, MediaTek announced their intentions of entering the market for smartphone ARM-based chipset solutions. The impact has been enormous: last year more than 110 million Chinese smartphones were based on MTK chipset solutions. This is greater than Qualcomm's market share in China.

MediaTek now offers solutions for both the higher-end of the smartphone market (quad-core) as continuing to enable very low-cost Android-based devices.

MTK has found its place in the mobile value chain. There are times when you shouldn't just look sideways to find your emerging competition, but at the bottom of the stack.

MediaTek's MT6575 optimized for low-cost Android 4 smartphones:

How low can they go? How will the market adjust to lower revs and margins?

CNET STORY >>

TECH CRUNCH on $50 Androids >>

Informa: 1 in 2 smartphones to be sub $150 by 2017

There were several interesting stories this week directly related to the on-going trend of smartphone commoditization and dropping ASPs. Forget the $100 laptop, we're entering the world of the $50 smartphone.

Let's look at MediaTek's plans to begin offering low-cost quad-core smartphone chipset solutions. Taiwan-based MTK says that their quad-core platform will be available during Q1 2013 and already one big-name smartphone vendor, Sony, is kicking the tires. MTK provides the guts for hundreds of millions of handsets per year. While most of these are feature phones, the company has been pushing into smartphones over the past few years. Expect more competitive disruptions to come and a plethora of even more new industry entrants.

At a conference talk, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales highlighted the popularity of a $50 Android-based Huawei smartphone in Africa. And that's street price according to Wales. Frankly, I wasn't aware prices had already come down so low as only a few years ago, the sub-$80 trade-price smartphone still seemed years off. But it's a nice story about the march towards the democratization of information.

Today, industry analysts at Informa released some info from an interesting report saying that 50% of "smartphones sold in 2017 will be priced below US$150."

Informa:

The average smartphone price will drop from US$188 in 2011 to US$152 in 2017 as a result of it balancing the huge demand for entry-level smartphones in emerging markets and the demand for “super-smartphones” in developed markets. The devices’ average gross margin is expected to remain flat – in the range of 20 -25%.

I suppose they are referring to retail prices. Informa believes that Apple and Samsung will continue to maintain profit margins well above average, which runs under the assumption that the value of those brand names will continue on a linear trajectory.

In the year 2012, it seems like a safe bet to state that Apple and Samsung will continue to be the mind-share leaders in 2017. But let's recall that the Motorola RAZR and Nokia's N95 were two of the market's premium devices about half a decade ago.

I am not sure about brands, but one trend is clear: smartphone prices and margins are coming down and it's time for vendors to adjust to the competitive environment. And what happens to the market for feature phones when smartphones are retailing for $50?

Wave hello to a new UI parameter: electrical fields feel 3D gesture input.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW STORY >>

MICROCHIP PRESS RELEASE >>

Some pedant scientists are quick to remind us that there really is no such thing as touch as we know it. The sense we call touch is actually an illusion. A misunderstanding. A method for the mind to simplify a more complex process of electron avoidance. We can hover and transfer electro impulses, but we never really reach out and touch someone. The universe is actually a very repulsive place.

As far as smartphone user interfaces go, we've been stuck in 2007 for five years now. The monoblock touch form factor now accounts for approximately 90% of all smartphones. The world is flat as a pancake it seems, full of dark dark black, rectangular screens.

When will the next UI shift happen? Follow the components.

Here's an interesting story in MIT's Technology Review about a new technique for devices to sense 3D gesture-based input for devices. Rather then using cameras or accelerometers, Microchip Technology has introduced a way to used electrical fields to sense 3D movment. Microchip calls this enabler "GestIC Technology," and could lead to some interesting user interactions in devices a few years down the road. Picture an accurate gesture-based UI in a car, or perhaps under the car. In the kitchen, or in the garden.

A touch replacement? Probably not. But it's clear that handsets are becoming more sensitive. And thanks to the magic of sensor fusion, data from the growing number of device sensors can be made to work together in wonderful ways.

Perhaps we won't be waving goodbye to touch, but rather hello to another step towards the UI of the future.

3D input cubed. Concept video from Microchip:

Is four the new two? Mobile quad core arrives right on time. Two, we hardly knew ya.

APPLE INSIDER STORY >>

Putting some hot new dual-core chipset in that new smartphone you’re designing? Sorry to tell you this, but it looks like dual is like so five minutes ago.

It seems like it wasn’t more than a year ago when dual-core processors in handsets were the absolute cutting edge. A speed war was brewing among smartphone vendors. There was chest pounding of specs: “1 GHz dual-core.” But there wasn’t much talk of actual benefits. But just as the megapixel arms race morphed into a speed race, the core battle is now upon us.

The other day, NVIDIA officially announced its Tegra 3, a quad-core mobile processor with five cores! The Tegra 3 is based on ARM’s Cortex A9 CPU with each single core running up to 1.4 GHz, supports full HD 1080p video playback and 7.1 surround sound audio, and it runs a 12-core GeForce GPU for what NVIDIA says will lead to three times the video performance. When you start talking a dozen cores, you’re bound to get some early adopter interest.

Pay for four cores, get the fifth for free!
An interesting development with the Tegra 3 is the introduction of what NVIDIA calls the “Companion Core,” a fifth lower-power and slower (500 MHz) core to provide CPU support to for less-intensive tasks such as stand-by. This is a clever way to drive battery efficiency. In face, NVIDIA is claiming the Tegra 3 supports up to 12 hours ov video playback on the device, a 60% increase in battery performance over the Tegra 2.

We’ll soon be seeing some intense video, audio, and gaming experiences on tablets and smartphones thanks to chips like this.

So, is it a dual to the finish? And soon a finish to the dual?

HP ARMs servers. How worried should Intel, AMD be?

via PCWORLD >>

PRESS RELEASE >>

ARM processors in HP servers? Pretty cool. Literally.

It’s interesting to see that ARM-based chips aren’t just being tested in laptops and tablets but also in servers. In general, they’re more energy efficient and run cooler than processors from vendors Intel and AMD, so there could be consider savings in energy and space.

So, here’s news of HP testing ARM-based processors in servers. These test machines will be based on what HP calls the “Redstone” platform, rack-mounted hardware with 72 small server boards, each with four 1.4GHz ARM Cortex-A9 design-based processors made by Calxeda. The server will be running a 32-bit version of Linux.

Glenn Keels, director of marketing for HP’s Hyperscale Business Unit: “We want to get the technology out there so that people can start testing their applications for suitability.”

A farewell to ARM? Not likely. The PC-Mobile clash has gotten white hot. All chips are in.

For more than a decade, Intel has been trying to get into the mobile market. But now it looks like the mobile market is about to get into Intel. And for Microsoft, there appears to be an inverse correlation to spend and success in mobile.

The clash between the mobile and PC milieus reached a peak this week with public displays of affection between Google and Intel. And between Microsoft and ARM. To me, these deals highlight the long-term failures of both Intel and Microsoft to break into the handset market in any significant way. Sure, an Intel chip made its way into the first Nokia Communicator back in 1996. But not a heck of a lot has happened since. And Microsoft's share of the smartphone market has reached a record low --under 3%-- last quarter. This despite having two mobile platforms on the market and some heavy ad spending.


The announcement from Google & Intel that Intel-powered Android smartphones will be coming out next year is certainly an interesting development for the market. And this means an additional boost for Android at a time when the platform has already taken 50% of the market. Intel's jumping on a bandwagon, and we should see more converged devices running Android including tablet- and laptop-like form factors.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the counter press release from Microsoft & ARM with additional cheerleading by processor vendors such as NVIDIA have ARM-based Windows PCs coming out in the near future. Porting Windows to run on ARM could be the shot across iPad's bow. Microsoft's use of the tile-based Metro UI in Windows 8 indicates that mobility and touch are leading the way. Windows 8 looks a lot like Windows Phone 7. Metro is the new WIMP. Introducing such an entirely new interface in Windows is a risky bet by Microsoft, but the software vendor knows it needs to do something to pull itself forward.

In reality the above announcements are not new. But at this point they stress the changes in the market: the partnerships, the form factors, the paranoia.

The collision course between PCs and mobile devices is all set. Let's see if something tasty comes out of all this:

Hey! You got mobile in my PC...
Two great tastes that taste great together?