Extreme phone makeover. Android lovers, is it time to meet your maker? Check out Motorola's new "Motomaker" service. Customization is in style.

"As you like it" Shakespeare once said, so I'll take mine in teak with the front cover in red.

From shabby chic to shoes for your feet, the goal these days is to make it unique. And this is what Motorola does with their "Motomaker" service for their new "MOTO X" device. Your phone, your design. The evolution from "as long as it's black" has been a bumpy one in the handset business, but Motorola might be the vendor to drive this mainstream.

Customization started almost two decades ago in the handset business. Ericsson offered changeable covers in the very early '90s. And then came ringtones and wallpaper downloads which enabled soft solutions to differentiation. And Nokia took things further with printable faces and 3D printable cases. Heck, Nokia even offered a Motomaker-like service back in 2008, allowing fans to design their own Supernovas using the online "NokiaBuild" tool. (That Nokia service was tested in a few European markets and wasn't taken further as I can recall.) To give credit where it's due, Nike's NIKEid may have been an inspiration for such customization. And Nike may have been inspired by large-scale PC and automakers and small-scale tee-shirt vendors.

No, Motorola wasn't first with the one-off. But handset vendors would be wise to keep an eye on consumer acceptance and expectations here, especially as devices and accessories become more wearable and more variable. Lean mass customization might not be unique for much longer.

Motorola's Motomaker. Check it out:


Nokia's 3200 from 2003. From print your own faces...


...to print your own cases. Download and print your own Lumia case from Nokia.


NokiaBuild from 2008. Design your own Nokia 7310 Supernova.



Shoes to fit the person and personality: Nike, Converse, Vans...

Samsung's Sweet Sixteen Ambitions. Samsung aims to ship 500 million handsets during 2013. That's 16 phones every second of the year.

Question of the day: Are Samsung's economies of scale becoming insurmountable to other vendors?

GSM ARENA STORY >>

KEY MOBILE TRENDS: logistics, economies of scale, vertical integration

Already back in 2009, Samsung started chatting about becoming the world's largest handset vendor. Given Nokia's dominant position in the market at the time, it was easy to dismiss Samsung's talk as being slightly delusional. I know I did.

Back in 2008 Nokia reached a long-term goal of its own by claiming 40% share of the global handset market. For the full year 2008, Nokia shipped almost 470 million units. It was an amazing number and many within the company liked to talk about the amount of devices shipped per day (almost 1.3 million) and even per second (~15). It really was a logistical achievement.

So now Samsung is talking about shipping 500 million handsets during 2013 which would be a 25% increase from its 2012 volumes. This is in addition to its tablets and Windows & Chrome laptops.

Half a billion units per year would amount to almost 16 units per every second of the year. Most handsets have more than 100 components, some much more. But to be conservative, let's say that each handset is built with 120 components, from box to battery. This would require management of 1,900 components per second. How many companies could manage this?

No other handset vendor that I can think of enjoys the same level of vertical integration that Samsung does. Nonetheless, many components in each handset are sourced. Given its massive volumes, Samsung's leverage with suppliers --including platform vendors-- is reaching omnipotent levels allowing it to push deep and bargain hard. Samsung's influence and economies of scale are reaching levels that few companies in any hard industry have ever enjoyed.

Samsung has established itself as the power player in the handset industry. But as we've learned, power can fade quickly in this business. So, do other vendors have a second chance?

Putting the pieces in place.
Can other vendors chip away at Samsung's powerful logistical advantages?

image via Gadget tweet

^Tweet

Breaking news: Microsoft still isn't going to buy Nokia. And Franco is still dead.

An old friend contacted me a few days ago wishing me a merry Christmas -- and asking me if I thought Microsoft was finally going to buy Nokia. That's the second time I received that question in a week, and the third time in a month.

The Microsoft-buying-Nokia rumor goes way back. The rumor actively floated around inside of Nokia for many years when I worked there even going back to a time Nokia was at the top of its game, and Nokia's enterprise value was more than five times what it is now. There was no evidence, just some people's gut instinct. And Friday-morning, market-trading rumors of course.

The rumors popped up now again, but talk really went wild when former Microsoft exec Stephen Elop was hired as Nokia's CEO in late 2010, and again when Nokia announced its partnership with Microsoft to bring out smartphones based on MS Windows Phone.

Some say Microsoft needs Nokia's brand and distribution in order to make it big in the mobile world, others say it's Nokia's IPR, others say it's Nokia's design skills, and still others say it's Nokia's maps.

But the key argument I've been hearing is that Microsoft needs a manufacturing base and when it comes to mobile logistics, who in the world is better than Nokia? There's no doubt that few companies can put handsets together like Nokia. The company assembles something along the lines of 10 handsets per every second of every day of the year and each handset requires more than 100 components. It takes a well-oiled machine to pull all these pieces together.

But let's note the trend. Manufacturing is heading East. Over the past few years, Nokia has closed or is in the process of closing handset factories in Germany, Romania, Finland, and Mexico and moving production closer to the components.

And contract manufacturers such as Foxconn, Compal, Quanta, and Flextronics are literally picking up steam. Handsets, laptops, televisions, cameras, Blu-ray players, remote controls. If you've never heard of any of these companies, look around your living room and your kitchens for one of their products. A handful of assembly firms in the world almost certainly made that CE stuff you see. (Foxconn is so big, that during the financial crisis of 2008, the company announced layoffs of 100,000 and nobody really noticed.)

(NOTE: I am aware of the stories of Apple possibly bring some PC manufacturing to the U.S. and perhaps in-house.)

So the news of the day is that Microsoft still isn't going to buy Nokia. One large, rather slow-moving company of 92,000 is not going to buy another large company of 45,000 (105,000 if you include NSN) hoping to become more nimble and quicker to market.

In my opinion, it's always been a strange rumor. The pieces just don't fit together.