What's after touch? Non-touch of course. Gesture and voice and other forms of natural user interfaces are coming our way to complement ubiquitous touch.
Here's some interesting news from Israeli-based PrimeSense, the company that makes the 3D sensing technology behind Microsoft's Kinect, the one exciting device on the otherwise boring CE market. PrimeSense announced that it is introducing similar 3D input technology to market in a "revolutionary small form factor and low cost." This could mean Kinect-like interactions and gaming built into in smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other small places.
From experience, I know that it takes a few years between the introduction of new component technologies like this and their real-world implementation. But the journey to change is starting soon.
With technologies like (and also from companies such as Leap), are we heading towards a hands-off experience?
Coming soon to a phone near you?
Kinect the dots: PrimeSense's technology goes out on a limb:
Sony's Yuga, expected to be available early next year, is high on the tech specs charts: it has a 5-inch 1080p display, a quad-core Samsung processor, 2GB of RAM, LTE support, 12-megapix camera, and is water and dust resistant.
Plus it comes with 128GB of built-in storage. It's been years now since I've heard that the first terabyte phone would soon be available, so this isn't a technology breakthrough. And given the advances of virtual storage via cloud-based services, there are some smooth ways to get around on-device storage limitations these days.
Nonetheless, the first terabyte phone will come at some point allowing users to carry around an entire library of content in their pockets. With the Yuga, Sony is one of the first mainstream device vendors to take a step in that direction.
So, will big storage become a big trend?
SD storage roadmap from years back. Tera is coming.
Image source:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/01/panasonic-sdxc-01072010-1262922411.jpg
Samsung introduced a device which is in essence a lower-end Samsung Note. Called the Galaxy Grand, it runs Android on a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, has 5-inch LCD display, and an 8-megapixel camera.
The trend to note here is the availability of the device in a dual-SIM model.
For those who follow the mobile industry, please don't fall for the "six billion mobile subscribers" stories that have been floating around earlier this year. The proper word should be "subscriptions," not subscribers. Some estimates are that there are actually fewer than three billion global subscribers, and some say as few as two billion. Granted that's still an amazing number.
The math indicates that there are possibly more than one billion people, and likely a great deal more, who have more than one mobile account, and thus at least two SIM cards. This is not niche market.
I am still waiting for Microsoft to announce support for dual-SIM hardware in Windows Phone. Unfortunately I suspect a long delay which will cost them share when and where they need it most.
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.
Apologies. Actually I don't really have the handset market shares for Q4 2017 here. But I always think it's a good idea to do some scenario planning. It's useful to think outside the pie chart blocks once in a while. Call it a mental exercise.
So please forget linear for a moment. Forget slightly curved trajectories or minor market modification models allowing for demographic adjustments. Don't think small changes. Think big chunky market surprises. Think consumer boredom followed by new entrants and extreme excitement. Think new business models, and perhaps even new form factors.
Before looking at the market of 2017, let's look back a bit, say 20 years before that. In 1997 Motorola had around 25% global market share followed by Nokia at 20% and Ericsson at 15% and Panasonic at 8%. Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson had been and continued to be the reliable big three for years.
Five years later, in 2002, the market looked very different. Nokia became the dominant global handset vendor with around 36% global share, Motorola dropped to a distant number two with 15% and Samsung reached number three with 10%. Siemens was close behind and had surpassed the recently formed Sony Ericsson. Note that only half of the top-ten handset vendors of 2002 still exist as stand-alone companies, some being bought, others just disappeared.
Many top names came and went over the years. Sharp, Siemens, BenQ, BenQ Siemens, Philips, Alcatel, Sagem, Kyocera, Sanyo, Sony, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, NEC...
So, it's time to think new -- and old. Some fresh faces, some familiar. Some mergers. Some acquisitions. Of course I have no idea what the market will be like in five years, but experience tells me there will be bigger market changes than our minds will care to think about. So, here's my fun stab at the future of mobile market shares (all very unlikely, but do think just for a moment about how your company would need to adjust if changes this big were to take place):
So, it's time for the audience to fill in the blanks. Consider it weekend homework:
Who would have guessed that Android would so quickly become the extreme power of the smartphone universe? Who would have envisioned such market domination?
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said this week that it is now clear that Android is winning the mobile platform war against iOS and of course others. And according to analysts, Android has as much as 75% global share of the smartphone market.
It's about time we face reality: Android has basically exterminated most of the other competitors on the market. This is no laughing matter! Who will save us now?
Here's a potentially life-saving mobile accessory from AT&T. AT&T "Asthma Triggers" monitors surrounding air quality for potential air quality problems and uploads information via a gateway to a central AT&T service which in turn feeds information back to the user's devices such as smartphone, tablet, and laptop.
I've seen many working prototypes like this get stuck in a lap somewhere. It would be nice to see ideas like this make out into the real world. Such proactive health-monitoring services could be taken much further over the coming decades monitoring data over time and providing ongoing feedback about potential health problems. The power of sensors and the power of crowds used for good (and hopefully not evil).
I wonder if the inventor of the accelerometer envisioned this: an app used to create virtual crowds for supporting sports teams.
As part of its World Cup Japan 2012 sponsorship, Sony has released an app called Vamos Viewing which allows viewers anywhere to shake their Sony smartphones to show their team support. The shaking data is collected in real time and visualized with other fans. It's like creating a virtual crowd. Throw in some location data and you have some nice sensor fusion collusion going.
This is rather sweet in some ways if shaken in moderation. I'd like to see more like it.
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?
Yesterday I had the pleasure of being a guest lecturer at a master's business class at Lund University, a large university in southern Sweden. (Thanks to the course arrangers for the invite.)
My talk was about some of the lessons I learned during my decade and a half working with Nokia including the dangers of taking the cash cow for granted while pursuing stars, the threats of egocentrism, and the threat of dismissing wounded competitors.
I found it interesting that included on the course's required reading list was a Harvard Business Review article from November 2001 entitled "Skate to where the money will be" by Clayton Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Matt Verlinden. (I know that there were many Christensen fans in Nokia and his business theories influenced many managers in the company.)
The article used the ice hockey metaphor of the importance of skating to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is now. The article points out that it was such a foresighting instinct that made Wayne Gretzky a great player. Similarly, businesses should have the foresighting ability to go to where the action will be. It does make for a good business-world metaphor.
Ironically that same HBR article was practically required reading within Nokia for many years. The article was widely circulated around the company and the "skate to where the puck is going" metaphor was widely quoted both inside the company and externally by upper Nokia management. (Perhaps not surprising coming from a Finnish company given the hockey culture.)
But let's throw out some scenarios. What if you have the foresighting instinct to see where the puck is headed but aren't too good at skating (bad at implementing), or you are looking a bit too far ahead and you waste time waiting for the puck to come to you (bad timing).
A company called 3Com introduced the "Audrey" tablet computer back in the year 2000. The device was a bit bulky and awkward to use (implementation) and many of the enablers weren't quite ready at the time like the screens and wide WiFi adaption (timing), but we have to give them credit: they certainly were skating to where the action would be -- about ten years before it got there. They were waiting there with hockey stick in hand until the product and later the company died of boredom. The road to oblivion is sometimes paved with good inventions.
I've deviated Woody Allen's success quote before on this blog. I will do it here again: 80% of success is showing up at the right time and in the right style.
In the mobile game, the ultimate goal is not just to make a goal, but to win the title match season after season. That's the real trophy. That's the real trick. But if you don't realize when you are skating on thin ice, it might be time for the coach to call a timeout. Or it might be time to replace the coach.
Y2K problem? The Audrey tablet device (picture below) from the year 2000.
3Com (three who?) skated to where the puck would be a decade too early.
When it comes CoIP (communications over IP) news, I follow The CoIP Blog. It's run by a guy who knows his CoIP. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he coined term "CoIP."
That blogger, who was Nokia's in-house communications over IP expert for many years, has been providing some great coverage of WebRTC developments. Web Real-Time Communication being developed by the W3C could become an incredible enabler for open-standards based live communications over the web including live voice and video. Of course there are solutions on the market now, but the APIs being developed by the W3C could lead to some interesting new, low-cost communication approaches.
Below is a good video of VoIP things to come thanks to the coming WebRTC APIs. Will those mobile operators who are now blocking Skype packets begin blocking pages that use the WebRTC APIs? Legacy fightback can be such a bummer.
Most dual-SIM smarties are Android based. So, where's the Dual-SIM Windows Phone? (Could be called "Dual-WIN" or maybe even the
"Win-Win phone" if it ever arrives.)
There's really not a thing exciting about this smartphone other than the fact that it has a feature that is going to excite a lot of potential smartphone users around the world: two SIM slots.
The new "Sony Xperia E dual" runs on a 1GHz single-core Snapdragon processor, which is rather tame by 2013 standards. It has a 3.5-inch HVGA display, ships with Android 4.0 ICS, has a 3.2 megapixel camera, supports HSDPA (not LTE), and ships with 2GB of user accessible storage. No prices provided. Sony says this device will start shipping during Q1 2013.
This isn't the first dual-SIM smartphone from Sony, but this is another signal that there's a market developing out there. Many bloggers and news sites say that such devices are great for business people who travel a lot, but in reality, much of the demand is coming from SIM-card jugglers who have become experts in squeezing value from different operators.
Dual SIM demand is moving from feature phones to smartphones. All mobile platform vendors should be prepared to double down.
I've been looking for something like this for a long, long time. Oh Stick-n-find, where have you been hiding all my life?
So, are you a loser like me? Do misplaced things cause you to lose your mind? Don't lose heart: technology is here to save the day.
To be honest, this concept is nothing new to me. I once found a great product idea like this being developed in a lab. I found it exciting. And I waited for it to come to market. And I waited some more. But unfortunately that product idea got lost in the shuffle.
Anyway, check out this cool mobile accessory that allows you to mark and track people, pets, and things. And if the company behind "Stick-n-find" is looking for a spokesperson, they need look no further than this blogger: I'm misplacing things all the time -- my phone, my keys, my wallet, even my kids. And of course there's the ultimate paradox, the misplaced eyeglasses. I've been looking for a way to look for things for many years now. And I know I'm not alone.
Yes, Stick-N-Find is exciting for losers like me. For scatterbrains and the disorganized. It allows you to track items using coin-sized, low-power Bluetooth tags with a range of around 30 meters/100 feet. The company says the batteries in the Stick-N-Find tags last around a year. An iOS app assists in locating the tagged items using a radar metaphor giving hot-or-cold indications. And misplaced items can be buzzed and even flash.
Ironically I couldn't find any pricing info for Stick-n-find as the product is still in development. Please don't lose your way Stick-n-find. I do hope you find what you're looking for. (Funding.)
