TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

I’d file this report straight into the under-reported but interesting category. When it came to CPU’s, QualComm was a nobody a few years ago – in the last two years, it became hard to find a non-Qualcomm mobile device.

The CEO of the company now stated the following according to Mobile Business:

Qualcomm’s chief executive Paul Jacobs said he sees the number of wireless chip providers shrinking either through consolidation or players disappearing, reports Dow Jones Newswires. “Consolidation will happen or people will leave the market,” he said.”We’re trying to make that happen sooner.” He also appeared to rule out the prospect of buying rival ARM.

Given that ARM is a fabless IP core vendor, and that Samsung has already all but left the market, this essentially targets one vendor: Marvell.

They bought up Intel’s assets a few years ago, and never got much out of it – Intel’s XScale CPU’s dominated the market, whereas Marvell’s new processors are almost invisible.

QualComm buying up ARM, on the other hand, would be a total GAU scenario. As ARM holds tons and tons of patents for ARM processors, it would allow QualComm to effectively stop competing chip vendors from creating ARM-based processors…

Roaming has recently caused quite a bit of headlines due to EU intervention – the EU commission used its power to topple over free-market prices on roaming (info for US readers: the EU has powers which significantly exceed those of the federal government).

While I am not against this in any way, I think that it will not solve the problem. The solution will IMHO come from another side – traditional, former governmental carriers.

If you look at Austria, you see our former governmental carrier is in a terrible mess. Outdated Ericsson transmitters consume insane amounts of electrical power, and over 4000 employees who can’t be fired make operations unaffordable. Small and agile carriers like Hutchison have fun f##king them over here and over again…

But: A1 also has some strengths. For example, a law required by the carrier was passed by the government within 7 days – Hutchison was lobbying for the same law for ages. Furthermore, A1 is a member of a large global alliance similar to the Star Alliance in airlining.

Hutchison has offered free roaming in its networks for ages – but as it has but 7 countries covered, the offering is of limited value. A1’s alliance, on the other hand…you get the idea…

Thus, I see the solution coming from somewhere else. If legacy carriers are pressured enough in their home market, they will look offshore in an attempt to find value.

For A1, offering “global roaming” is a question of an email or two (they already do it for governments and large entities). This would then lead to closer cooperation between smaller carriers (see Airberlin and Hainan)…

What do you think?

P.S. Orange has already started the trend by giving its customers complimentary free minutes to call phones all over Europe…

TamsS60 recently covered Ovi exclusivities – or, rather, the lack thereof.

Long-term follower John Doe replied with the following:

What you don’t seem to get is that Nokia only sells to Nokia customers, SE only sells to SE customers and Samsung only sells to Samsung customers. As such, there is no reason for Nokia to stop you from selling to the others or to give you incentives for better deals.

You don’t really imagine that your app truly makes a difference in terms of swinging a phone buyer’s brand preference based on whether the brand has your app in the store or not, do you?

On sites such as Handango, addressing the overall free and open market of the Symbian ecosystem, they would have all the reasons to stop you from going to another content aggregator.

Even though I deeply respect John Doe, I have to continue to disagree: we need to look at the issue as an economy of scale. Tamoggemon LocaNote and TouchCalc definitely don’t make a difference – but if 100 houses provide their stuff on Ovi only, things look different!

The opportunity here is to “starve” other manufacturers of content, thereby creating an impression that “Nokia handsets do more than Sony Ericsson handsets”.

What do you think?

In the mobile industry, all things go in waves: things are cool, get forgotten about and come back again. Apple’s iPhone made stylusless touchscreens cool – come the winter, the coolness stops.

The image below hits us via kottke.org:

According to him, more and more South Koreans now use sausages to allow them to tap on their iPhone’s screen without undressing their gloves. Insane, but true…

The point is this: a stylus is better in various usage scenarios ranging from hitting small targets to on-screen writing and note taking. After all, humans don’t dip their fingers into ink when it comes to writing…

Just in case anyone of you has still been living under a rock: the Apple tablet has just been released, and it will be called iPad (not iSlate). Those of you needing a bit of technical information can find it below – the rest of this piece will look at the reasoning behind the box.

Hands-on with the iPad
Price information

First of all: the folks at Palm’s will likely jump over their house door backwards three times. The iPad is no danger whatsoever to their new devices – no multitasking and no keyboard mean that the device is almost unusable for business. Other manufacturers don’t have to worry either…

Apple’s iPad also doesn’t target the existing tablet PC crowd: these devices also cater to a completely different audience. Business folks and note takers are not the target here…

When it comes to mobile usage, the box also can’t achieve much: it is too big to be truly portable, and offers too little to replace a notebook. So no cheese here, either.

Instead, the iPad is a passive media consumption box. It is a large personal media player more than anything else – users are expected to take the critter to bed or to the couch and look at TV, do some casual web surfing or listen to music. Active input will take place someplace else.

The device thus ties in perfectly into Apple’s existing ecosystem, and will likely sell like the AppleTV did. But it IMHO won’t have much of a lasting impact on the mobile world as whole…

What do you think?

Newspapers all over Austria have gone bonkers about Google’s decision to pull out of China. The company got loads of good press for one reason: they care about human rights.

Even though human rights are not per se something bad, they most definitely are not the real reason for Google’s retreat plans. Instead, they are IMHO used as a cover-up for the real reason, which has but five letters: Baidu.

While the rest of the world is still firmly in the hands of the boys with the G, the Chinese market is all but out of control: recent numbers state that Baidu has a market share of about 60%, with Google struggling to stay around the 35% margin. And the situation is getting worse for Google every day.

So, why risk “getting run out of the country” wearing the donkey hat if you can also “call it quits” and get loads of good press in the west. As the downward trend is clearly visible, Google most probably doesn’t have much to loose in terms of revenue.

On the other hand, getting run out of a country would have intolerable and unfixable effects on Google’s reputation as “search giant”.

What do you think?

Editor’s note: please consider yourself made aware of our “no political comments” policy!

It’s this part of the year yet again: a stupid, boring New Year’s eve party straight ahead, and loads and loads of thoughts rotting in the brain of yours truly. As usual, this is the time for our “New Year’s eve” post series – what has happened in the industry this year?

Looking at the market in general, we see little except for stagnation: except for Palm, nobody really did anything of significance this year. This has helped the Symbian ecosystem, which is currently restructuring itself.

Symbian’s key partners are not particularly healthy, either. Samsung is on its way off (Palm OS,anyone?), Sony Ericsson is swapping platforms like a headless chicken, and Nokia, well, Nokia…

On the one hand, their recent releases are not bad – but the company is also pretty headless on other fronts. Start off by looking at the plethora of operating systems they have to maintain, and move on to look at their sub-par performance as an ESD.

Nobody is really able to live off Symbian software and do so comfortably: the Ovi Store is little more than a farce, with spotlights being handed out exclusively to free craplet-type stuff.

Nokia itself definitely has the cash and the resources – it’s a question of willingness and management.

For the Symbian economy, 2010 is an important year: if they manage to get back on track as a whole, their future looks bright. If they, on the other hand, continue to emulate the oft-mentioned and unfortunate animal – you get the idea…

P.S. If you are interested in other platforms, hit the links below – our sister sites contain similar editorials:
2009@TamsPalm – from a Palm head’s point of view
2009@TamsPPC – Microsoft, what were you doing?
2009@TamsIJungle – in an Apple’s peel
2009@TamsBlackBerry – on the RIM of destruction due to boredom?

Network issues have plagued carriers all over the world. After AT&T made headlines, the issue is now more or less universal.

An FT.com interview now quoted a O2 head as follows:

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The head of O2 has apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because the mobile operator’s London network was overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

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O 2 ran into difficulties in the capital during the second half of 2009 as customers with smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone ramped up use of applications that repeatedly pull data off the internet at short intervals.

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Even though the iPhone definitely is a bandwidth hog, reports of O2 bandwidth issues were covered by industry journals like Mobile ever since 2008.

IMHO, the iPhone is not to blame – instead, blame the overselling of mobile broadband. Today, many households are sold mobile bandwidth rather than wired service and a WiFi router without actually needing it.

This causes large-style network loads (think Windows updates) which are completely unneeded – and much more significant than one or two iPhones.

IMHO, the iPhone is used as a scapegoat here – what do you think?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / HMRC

So far, I thought that Nokia is interested in keeping its Ovi store alive. Unfortunately, this is only partially true – one developer posted the following at Forum Nokia’s:

I’m still waiting for more than one week that Ovi sends to me a simple form to become premium publisher. At least they could send me a delivery confirmation, but not, only silence.
It’s curious, the process to become publisher it’s very straightforward. You fill out a form, pay 50e, Ovi receives the payment and then… Ovi disappears.
Absolutelly nothing of my requests or questions sent to Ovi by e-mail have getting a reply… Is it a joke? or may be a poor customer service?
I’m a serious and experienced developer looking for a good platform to publish but I’m a little confused and disappointed right now. Is there someone with problems about this concerns or is it happening only to me?

Forum Nokia user petrib then stated the following:

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You can be a “regular” Ovi Publisher, by paying the registration fee, but only for apps and such. If you want to publish wallpapers and ringtones, you have to be one of the select few premium publisers (which does not seem to be an option open for everyone).

…

From my point of view, this is a very clear statement from Nokia and ties in very well with their past behavior. For example, big content houses mainly use J2ME – and the requirement that each and every J2ME file must be signed was dropped in less than a New York minute. Compare, S60 heads still need to f### around with Symbian Signed.

Now, indies were in the position to enter the lucrative ringtone market for the first time – and Nokia immediately closed the door on them. One can only speculate why this has happened, but, well, I don’t think that this is much more than a no-brainer.

Unlike Apple, Nokia definitely is biased towards large content houses and their needs. Small, indie developers and small software houses are, at best, second-class citizens in the Ovi Store.

Being a stylus head to the bone, I have never understood why users were excited to loose an extra way to control their handset. However, the market demands capacitive – and capacitive they will get.

However, Nokia’s EVP of services seems to have a similar opinion to yours truly. When asked about why Nokia is as weak in the US as it is, he stated the following:

…Yes, we’ve been lacking here in the U.S. In other parts of the world, we’ve done a better job capturing the consumers’ needs and closer to what they want. Here is a good example. Look at touch screens. We went with a resistive touch screen first, not because we didn’t think of using capacitive technology, but because we thought people would rather use a stylus to write Asian characters and send SMS messages. It wasn’t like “Oh Gee, we hadn’t thought of that.” Rightly or wrongly the decision was to put consumers’ needs first.

…

I personally think that many applications (e.g. note taking and sketching: strategy games) still demand a stylus, and hope that manufacturers will continue to provide these with touchscreen devices.

What do you think?

Symbian’s recent Horizon announcement left me puzzled. I had no idea what the guys in yellow were talking about, but subscribed anyways…only to find my program (which was featured at their MwC booth) booted out of the shortlist. A quick inquiry (press, pressure, you know the game) revealed the following:

At Symbian Horizon, we don’t do any actual marketing for you.

All we do is behave like a book publisher, and that’s what we want to be. We get the app into as many software stores as possible, and that’s that.

Let’s let that sink in. Symbian sings your app, and puts it onto as many stores as possible.

As I am sitting here enjoying my insomnia and a glass of cheap fruit juice, my mind travels to the past weeks. Representatives of Handango and Tamoggemon Software worked together on the release of a PalmOS product called tIRC; and ended up with a very effective promo cooperation after a bit of negotiations and some legal hassles. Neither me nor the folks at Handango’s did their best – but we managed to cook up something tasty.

Another story which comes to mind looks at my long-term friend David Schoenbach from Mobihand. We have worked together on many releases in the past, getting both ourselves and a former client (who, incidentally, never understood playing this game) good revenue. My assistant Simon could sing a LOOONG song on Mobihand, but will likely not do so as he is working hard on webOS stuff.

Having a good relationship with your ESD pays. Even though I am definitely not going to disclose all the tricks involved due to sheer length of the post (hey, I need some consulting revenue ), I invite you all to think from Symbian’s perspective. If you had 300 apps from different manufacturers, how much time and effort can you invest into each app in a financially reasonable fashion?

For a book publisher, every author is “a valued author”. His value is about the equivalent of the strawberry juice I just drank – it is very very low (my wife assumes 15 euro cents, which is a quarter buck). Of course, scoring a bestseller eventually gets them knocking on your door…but all they do is usually sell some overpriced ad space and chuckle about the idiocy of developers who buy at the rate card price.

If there is one thing to take away from this post, then it is a message Seth Godin would approve of: build relationships of mutual benefit with your distributors. Symbian Horizon might make things (especially signing) a lot easier and starts to get the $ rolling in – but building relationships to distributors yourself is much more fulfilling and pays out more in the end.

What do you think?

P.S. Symbian Signed is broken. But this is for another post…

A recent press release from Nokia’s Network manufactureing division NSN (short for Nokia Siemens Networks) claims the following:

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Nokia Siemens Networks has transformed its North American business under the leadership of region head Sue Spradley. The company announced on July 20, 2009 it had won a contract with the new Canadian mobile operator Globalive Wireless for the roll-out of a 3G network in Canada. This marked the fourth such agreement in just over a year following deals with Bell Canada, TELUS and Videotron in 2008.

Momentum also continues to build in the U.S. where Nokia Siemens Networks has a leading position in long-haul optical networks and is building its business with both cable and wireless operators as illustrated by recent key deals for IMS technology with Time Warner and with Verizon Wireless to support the roll-out of LTE.

Nokia Siemens Networks is well positioned to transition its leadership in 3G into long-term success in LTE throughout the network from the core IMS system it is building for Verizon Wireless to the Radio Access technology it is supplying with partner Panasonic to NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Nokia Siemens Networks has enjoyed recent wins in both Asia and Europe for LTE and is working on other prospects with customers across the globe.

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I am walking on thin ice now, but chances are high that this carrier will use loads of Nokia handsets. This prediction is based on two things: past experience and supply chain logic. First of all, let’s look at Hutchison Austria. They use NSN hardware, and sell loads of Nokia handsets. This is only too logical, as they already have an established supply chain with Nokia…so why shouldn’t they reuse it?

Of course, all of this is a wild prediction as of this writing – what do you think?

What do you think?

Symbian’s recent Horizon announcement has been misunderstood all over the industry – some including the BBC even went as far as to assume that Symbian would get into application development itself. I have taken a bit of time to go over it, and would now like to present you my view of the topic.

First of all: Symbian WILL NOT CODE. Developers can keep their hair on – Symbian will not start cloning promising ideas and competing when them when it comes to mind share and revenue.

Their program is intended to do one thing: Reduce publishing costs for small developers. Getting your first Symbian app out can cost you over 1000 Euros for certification, founding of a company and so on…if you don’t have VC backing, I see many small developers balking at the proposal especially when other platforms are much cheaper.

Horizon will take developer’s hands and assist them with getting their app out onto the market at a significantly reduced cost. If I understand them correctly, they handle signing for you…which means that the expense for a company formation and certificate are mostly deferred away from the developer to a central point (where they become less).

Applications will furthermore be pushed across multiple stores, thereby making life easier for customers. Don’t get me started on the horrors of getting a Palm Os app out – if it isn’t on all major distros, it is dead for a large percentage of users.

In the end, I don’t see much reason for small developers to fear this offering…it should make life easier for you, not harder.

What do you think?

Nokia Maps is a source of endless frustration: buy a 700€ N96, and it will not let you navigate out of the box. Users loath it, carrier reps are unable to explain it to customers, and store clerks tell your truly that it barely sells – but Nokia nevertheless remains committed to the product.

Their latest attempt is pictured below:

Even though Ovi Maps 3.0 adds a few features which are extremely useful for developers, the latter are nevertheless advised to stay far away from the product: many extremely popular handsets which sell loads of software are unsupported. For example, users of the E51, N93 and N73 handsets are left in the rain…these devices remain extremely popular and sell well. As for Samsung and LG boxen: don’t ask…

Let’s now assume that I switch LocaNote to this product rather than Google Maps. This will alienate all customers who use an Omnia HD – as most of these are bought unlocked by freaks, the financial impact there is more than one may think it is at first glance. No matter how much better Ovi Maps is: I am in the business to make money – and if I have to invest 10 extra hours to get loads of extra customers, you can guess what I will do.

Nokia is in the unique position of being able to earn money whenever their product gets used…and then throws this opportunity out the window. If Nokia wants to get developers off Google Maps, they need to offer their API for all popular devices – until this happens, Google Maps reigns supreme…

Nokia’s recently-announced partnership with Intel has caused concern for quite a few key players in the industry: is Nokia planning to give up on S60, Maemo or anything else? Is this a game-changing move? Or is it just a matter of maximising marketshare and revenue? Read on for the full scoop!

In order to understand what is going on here, we IMHO need to take a step back and look at how the majority of netbooks is being sold nowadays. The little critter pictured above (yours truly’s MSI Wind U100) was purchased directly from the manufacturer: which is a way very few people go. It is furthermore used as a subnotebook (and is also referred to as such)…and generally does a formidable job.

Most people get and use their netbooks in a completely different fashion. For them, the device does what a smartphone does for us – and simple always-on internet (no tethering) is a must. Thus, they head to the places where wireless internet can be had: every “fat” Austrian carrier is now selling netbooks. This has allowed companies like Acer to enter the mobile phone market with relative ease: carriers already bought netbooks with them, so why not simplify the supply chain by also getting netbooks?

Nokia obviously wants to keep carriers bound to its brand – and thus has to keep other manufacturers out of the game. Providing netbooks allows Nokia to close a gap where other manufacturers could enter into their market segment…which is something the company definitely wants to avoid. If the netbooks sell well, the better – but it IMHO is like Starbucks and chocolate…

P.S. S60 users could maybe benefit from Nokia’s subnotebooks – I imagine that they might provide excellent integration between S60 and their devices like IBM did to its WorkPads…