Topic: Smartphones
Bloomberg Confirms Existing Reports about Next iPhone (Apr 18, 2017)
Bloomberg has a report out today which basically just confirms all the existing reporting on the iPhone. Given that the Samsung Galaxy S8 goes on sale this week, this may be coming off the back of leaks from Apple itself, though the byline includes at least one reporter in Asia, suggesting there are supply chain sources too. There’s really nothing new here – the new iPhone is to come in three variants, with the high-end one getting an edge to edge OLED screen, with the glass but not the screen itself curved, and two other models similar to the existing sizes. At this point, this isn’t a surprise, but it’s good for Apple to have this news out there in the week the S8 goes on sale, because it’s been working on this shift to much smaller bezels for some time but has been beaten to the punch by several Android vendors, and needs to ensure that iPhone buyers are aware something similar is coming this fall. The big questions, which go unanswered in this piece, are about pricing and design differences between the new top-tier iPhone and the others. I continue to expect just another $100 or so price difference between the Plus model and the premium model rather than the $1000 iPhone many seem to think we’re going to get. But I’m curious to what extent the design of the two regular models evolves and how similar or different it is from the new high-end one.
via Bloomberg
LG Confirms Interest in its Display Business, Doesn’t Mention Google – Android Authority (Apr 12, 2017)
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Huawei to Create Cloud Business Unit, US Remains a Secondary Focus – Mobile World Live (Apr 11, 2017)
Huawei is holding its annual analyst summit in China this week, at which it offers an update on the different parts of its business. Two notable items are mentioned in this summary of the first day presentation by the CEO. Firstly, the company is creating a cloud business unit, which will sit alongside existing carrier, consumer (device), and enterprise business units. That’s a sign of the growing commitment of the company to the cloud, but also of the close ties between network equipment (and the telecoms operators who deploy it) and the cloud services which run over it. Separating cloud in this way is a public signal to operators that Huawei wants to provide more than just the guts of cloud services and wants to establish more of a partnership relationship, something which may be challenging, especially given its home base of China, which has already created issues in the US and elsewhere for its network business. Secondly, the CEO stated that (partly for the reasons I just mentioned) the US isn’t a focus for the network business, and even for the devices business it’s not a major focus, as Huawei continues to struggle to break into the mainstream here with its smartphones. Lastly, though there was strong growth in parts of Huawei’s business, the CEO didn’t address the lack of margin expansion, something which was reported on previously and was likely due to aggressive growth of the smartphone business at the expense of margins in 2016.
Samsung says Galaxy S8 pre-orders outpacing last year – Axios (Apr 10, 2017)
At this point, I’m pretty sure the only people still worrying about the Note7 and the impact the recall has had on demand for Samsung phones are reporters. All the evidence from consumer surveys right from the start has suggested that (a) no-one’s views on Samsung were changed all that dramatically by the recall, and more importantly (b) those with recent direct experience of Samsung products budged least in their views. In other words, if you’d used lots of Galaxy smartphones and they’d never blown up, you had reasonable confidence the next one you owned wouldn’t either. These new statements from Samsung back that up, and it looks like the phones are doing even better than last year’s, which shouldn’t be surprising because they really do look pretty compelling, at least on paper (reviews should be coming out in the next week or so and that may change demand for the better or worse). Given that sales are mostly going to be coming from existing owners of Galaxy S phones, none of this should surprise anyone. And I know from talking to them that Samsung employees are desperate to put the Note7 behind them, and quite reasonably so at this point.
via Axios
LG G6 review: LG’s “personal best” still can’t compare to Samsung – Ars Technica (Apr 5, 2017)
The Ars Technica view I’m linking to here is fairly negative on LG’s new flagship, while the Verge review also linked below is a little more positive. Both note that this is really the first widely available flagship phone to go down the “much smaller bezels” route, but while the Verge review focuses on that fact, the Ars review suggests that it will quickly be overshadowed by the Samsung Galaxy S8. The fact that this phone is launching to the public a week after the Samsung event certainly doesn’t help – almost anyone considering it has to at least be thinking about the S8 as an alternative – but until reviews are out, writing off the G6 so quickly feels premature. At least some early indications suggest that there may be one or two concerns with the S8, though I’ll withhold judgment until more thorough reviews are out. Both of these G6 reviews, though, highlight some flaws, notably some odd design choices in the hardware (poorly rounded display corners, tricky home button/sensor placement and size) and counter-productive software customizations on top of stock Android. This definitely looks like a better phone than last year’s G5, but I’m not convinced it’s going to help LG have a much better year this year than last as a result. One more thing worth noting – it seems LG has a version it’s selling in Korea with an integrated DAC which dramatically improves audio quality, but that won’t be available in the US, an odd decision.
via Ars Technica (see also the Verge review)
Android overtakes Windows as the internet’s most used operating system – TechCrunch (Apr 3, 2017)
This is an interesting counterpart to last week’s item about revenue from Android apps surpassing revenue from iOS apps in 2017. That news had been a long time coming, because Android has long since been way out in front of iOS in terms of user numbers, but revenue for developers has lagged anyway. This week, the news from Statcounter, which measures online traffic, is that Android has surpassed Windows as the source of the greatest share of online traffic by operating system. That, too, is likely a lagging indicator for the number of people using Android versus the number of people using Windows, but for a different reason – much of online usage on mobile is in apps, whereas on a PC it’s almost all web-based, so PCs will always over-index on web usage relative to mobile devices. There’s a good chance that Android has hundreds of millions more users than Windows already.
via TechCrunch
Xiaomi Billionaire CEO Is Doubling Smartphone Bet on India – Bloomberg (Mar 31, 2017)
The first part of this article gives too much credence to Xiaomi’s CEO’s projections about its future growth, taking them as given even though Xiaomi has struggled to meet its targets for smartphone shipments and growth for the last several years. But the rest of the article is interesting for what it says about where Xiaomi’s focus will be geographically going forward. Importantly, whereas one of the biggest questions about Xiaomi in recent years has been when it would come to the US, it seems to be moving in the opposite direction, doubling down on emerging markets like India rather than pushing into more mature markets. That will limit both its overall addressable market and the average selling price of its phones, given the disposable incomes in those markets and its product focus there, so Xiaomi’s future certainly won’t look very much like the one it projected a number of years ago, as a premium Android-based alternative to the iPhone.
via Bloomberg
Samsung’s DeX dock for the Galaxy S8 costs $150 and will ship in April – The Verge (Mar 30, 2017)
I actually excluded this DeX solution from my various comments on the Samsung announcements yesterday, not deliberately, but probably because it seemed like the least important thing Samsung announced and I simply forgot about it. These solutions have been around for years, and they’ve never done well, only in part because they’re clunky but mostly because the compelling use cases are pretty hard to find. Anyone who regularly travels almost certainly has a laptop they could plug into a similar setup (or use independently), while anyone who doesn’t would be unlikely to justify the investment in not just this $150 dock but also several hundred dollars’ worth of monitor, keyboard, and mouse too for occasional use. I did spend this morning with Samsung’s enterprise team and saw some impressive demos of virtual Windows desktops from Citrix and VMware running on this solution, and those are slightly more compelling than the Android hybrid this thing runs by default as a desktop experience, but the caveats all still apply. This still feels like a very niche solution which very few people are actually going to find useful.
via The Verge
The Samsung Galaxy S8 voice assistant Bixby can’t recognise British accents – Business Insider (Mar 30, 2017)
This is a great example of something I wrote about on Techpinions this week, which is that here in the US we often assume technologies available to us are ubiquitous globally, but that’s actually rarely the case. In this case, it’s the Bixby assistant / interface that ships with the Samsung Galaxy S8 which not only won’t work in languages other than English and Korean but won’t offer voice services at all in the UK, where of course accents are different. (Another tidbit in this piece is that it won’t actually work in US English until May). Building voice interfaces is tough to begin with, but localizing them for different accents and languages is another massive layer of work, often made harder by the fact that voice recognition technologies are trained on single languages like US English.
via Business Insider
Microsoft touts Microsoft-customized edition of Samsung Galaxy S8 – ZDNet (Mar 30, 2017)
This is an interesting little announcement – it’s short on details, but it appears Microsoft will be selling a version of the Galaxy S8 with more of its apps pre-installed. The big downside is that this seems to be a highly manual process and the devices are only available at full price from Microsoft rather than through carrier stores and installment plans, so that’s going to dramatically limit the addressable market. But it’s interesting to see Microsoft deepening its investment in Android at a time when its own mobile devices continue to be all but irrelevant.
via ZDNet
Samsung Debuts Galaxy S8 and S8+ (Mar 29, 2017)
Samsung today announced its next-generation flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S8 and S8+, at an event in New York, which I was able to attend in person. I’ll post separate comments on some of the other announcements made today. The phones look really solid, with a great new design that quite dramatically changes the relationship between screen size and device size, in much the same way as Apple is expected to do later this year. The new design is much more comfortable to hold than last year’s fairly angled efforts, but it has two tradeoffs: the fingerprint sensor is now on the back, and the aspect ratio is very long and thin, which may cause compatibility issues with apps and will mean letterboxing with videos. There are a few software features worth noting too: the new assistant Bixby, which combines voice control with some clever camera recognition tricks and proactive notifications, and broader application of Samsung Pay and Pass (the latter uses biometrics to log the user in to websites and apps). While the hardware is clearly impressive at first glance, we’ll have to wait until reviewers have spent some time with the software and services to know whether it’s as good as advertised – this has been an area of weakness for Samsung in the past, so there’s a steep hill to climb here. The other thing worth noting is that Samsung is pricing these devices around $100 higher than all its previous entrants in this line, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage relative to other flagships, and may offset the sales benefits it might have otherwise achieved from what looks like a strong effort here. All this should finally help move the Samsung news cycle beyond the Note7 and into a more positive narrative for a while.
via Techmeme (see also my media comment on today’s announcements)
Apple just made a historic and risky change to all iPhones — and you probably didn’t even notice – Business Insider (Mar 28, 2017)
Apple this week pushed iOS 10.3 to iPhones and iPads, and although there were various other headline features, the big under-the-hood change was the upgrade from Apple’s historical HFS+ file system to the new Apple File System trailed a while back at WWDC. That this upgrade went off seemingly without a hitch is remarkable given just how disruptive it might have been to devices and the apps that run on them, and given that Apple has had one or two buggy iOS releases in the last couple of years, including one that bricked a lot of phones. I suspect Apple deliberately rolled this update out off the usual big annual schedule because people tend to adopt these point releases more slowly, so that if something did go wrong it could pull it before it did too much damage. But Apple is also benefiting these days from the extensive developer and public beta programs, which get its releases into many more hands (and onto a wider range of devices used for a wider range of tasks), which likely helps iron out some bugs before they ever get to wide release. But it’s arguably been underappreciated this week just how big a change this was and how flawlessly Apple seems to have executed on it. That’s a good counterpoint to some recent suggestions that Apple’s quality control around its software has suffered lately.
via Business Insider
Samsung confirms the Note 7 is coming back as a refurbished device – The Verge (Mar 27, 2017)
This feels like a huge misstep, especially announced the week of the S8 launch, which could otherwise have been the moment Samsung finally put the Note 7 debacle behind it. While the desire to minimize the environmental impact is admirable, and Samsung would no doubt benefit financially from refurbishing the phones, it would have been better off simply doing what it originally said it would and abandoning the line entirely and merely recouping parts. Another story that both keeps the Note7 in the news and raises the prospect of people actually buying them again (even if under a different name) just seems like a terrible tradeoff to make for those benefits. Ironically, this was the week when Samsung also finally issued a software update which will kill the remaining devices still in use in the US, yet another milestone in moving past this whole mess.
via The Verge
Google Provides an Update on Android Security (Mar 23, 2017)
This is a year-in-review post from the Android security team, and it’s supposed to be reassuring on the state of Android security. However, there are several fairly worrisome data points in here worth pulling out. Google says 0.71 percent of all Android devices had a “potentially harmful app” installed at the end of 2016, so almost 1% of the roughly 1.5 billion Android devices in use, which amounts to almost 11 million actual devices, and that number has risen rather than fallen in the past year. Secondly, even though Google has been working with carriers and OEMs to push security updates to devices outside the very slow OS upgrade cycle, about half of devices in use at the end of 2016 had not received a platform security update in the previous year. Given how frequently Android exploits are discovered, that’s pretty worrying. On the plus side, Google has reduced installations of malware from the store by around 50% across several categories, which is obviously good news, but the fact that it acknowledges some of the apps installed from the official store still contain malware is a sign that it isn’t doing its verification job well enough.
via Google
After Google Phone Fizzles, Huawei Turns to AT&T for U.S. Expansion — The Information (Mar 21, 2017)
Based on the headline, I thought this was about Huawei finally being able to sell phones through AT&T’s postpaid business, because that’s the holy grail for Chinese manufacturers, and remains stubbornly unavailable to them at AT&T or any other major US wireless carrier. Where the Chinese vendors have had some success is in the prepaid business, and AT&T currently carries several ZTE phones on its GoPhone prepaid brand, as well as one Huawei phone in a partnership with Walmart. However, what’s actually happening here is that AT&T is certifying Huawei’s own chipset for use on its network, which is really just a possible first step to getting more Huawei phones onto AT&T store shelves. Huawei’s lack of brand awareness in the US continues to be its single biggest challenge – something that hasn’t really changed over the years. I remember having conversations about this with Huawei executives at CES at least six years ago. Until that changes, there’s very little incentive for AT&T to give over shelf space reserved for familiar brands consumers recognize to a relative unknown like Huawei.
via The Information
Secretive Billionaire Reveals How He Toppled Apple in China – Bloomberg (Mar 20, 2017)
The whole framing of this article feels very much driven by its subject, Duan Yongping, who runs the conglomerate which owns Oppo and Vivo, two of the world’s largest smartphone brands. The idea that these brands have somehow toppled Apple in China isn’t really borne out by the facts, and it appears the (unnamed) author rather took Duan’s word for it on this and other points. Apple has absolutely seen falling sales in China, but that’s as much about a saturating market and the drop-off from the huge iPhone 6 launch as about any local competitors. It’s also fairly clear that Oppo and Vivo compete in a very different segment of the market from the iPhone, though many who buy those devices plan to buy an iPhone next, per some recent Morgan Stanley research, suggesting that these are customers which aspire to buy iPhones rather than having switched from them. There’s no doubt Oppo and Vivo have achieved impressive market share in China, and therefore also globally, but it’s far less clear that their strategy is sustainable – after all, we’ve seen other Chinese brands (notably Xiaomi) do very well in the short term and then fizzle. In China in particular, the Apple brand is highly aspirational, and that will continue to drive a lot of sales.
via Bloomberg
Amazon puts Alexa inside its main iPhone app – VentureBeat (Mar 16, 2017)
Alexa’s single biggest flaw today is that it’s a shut-in: for the most part, it can’t leave the house. That means competing in a broad-based way with Siri and the Google Assistant requires getting onto smartphones, and now we have Amazon putting Alexa into the Amazon shopping app on iOS. Job done? Well, no. Because just having an app on a phone doesn’t mean people will use it. And if it’s buried inside a shopping app, that’s a steep hill to climb relative to just holding down the home button to summon Siri. On the one hand, I get the logic of putting Alexa in the Amazon app – it’s an app many of the company’s most loyal users already have installed and likely use frequently, but it also means it’s going to be several clicks away. I can see some parents with kids using it to keep them quiet with jokes, but it’s hard to imagine people using an Alexa buried in a shopping app as their main assistant while away from home. Integration within the smartphone and its operating system is the key here, which will be impossible on iOS but more feasible on Android, as we’ve already seen with Huawei and Lenovo’s integration plans.
via VentureBeat
ZTE to Pay $892 Million to U.S., Plead Guilty in Iran Sanctions Probe – WSJ (Mar 8, 2017)
This case has been going on for a long time, and is another example of the tensions between US and Chinese tech companies, in the wireless space in particular. Though this case has nothing to do with the concerns about back doors in wireless networks I mentioned in the context of Huawei yesterday, it highlights another concern: that Chinese tech companies have often been willing to sell technology to some of the world’s repressive regimes, and have often had to cover their tracks in order to do so. ZTE got caught doing this in Iran a few years back and the US has taken action over breach of sanctions, as ZTE was incorporating US components. The worst case scenario here was that ZTE would be banned from exporting any US technology to use in its own products, which would have included Qualcomm chips apart from other things and would likely have been devastating. It avoided that outcome, but still has to pay a fine equivalent to its last two years of profits, which is pretty bad by itself. None of this is likely to make US wireless carriers more likely to place Chinese smartphones on their premium shelf space.
via WSJ
Americans Don’t Care About Nokia (or Huawei) – PCMag (Mar 7, 2017)
This is good from Sascha Segan, explaining why “Nokia” (really HMD Global) and its new 3310 are irrelevant in the US, but also in some ways more interestingly why Huawei (and other Chinese manufacturers) have long struggled here. With Nokia/HMD, it’s a long-standing lack of investment in the unique requirements of the US market including CDMA networking technology, whereas with Huawei it’s a more complex geopolitical issue involving Huawei’s networking gear. It’s easy to dismiss the US government’s objections to Huawei equipment in networks covering US network traffic as scaremongering or protectionism, but in a previous job I heard from very reliable sources about Chinese gear (not Huawei’s) in telecoms networks which had backdoors installed – these concerns can’t just be dismissed out of hand. But even beyond that, there are significant other reasons why the Chinese brands don’t succeed here, including notably the fact that those brands simply aren’t known, and in many cases the companies aren’t doing enough to change that. The one place where some of the Chinese brands do reasonably well in the US wireless market is the prepaid segment, were several have made a decent business. But that’s much less brand- and much more price-sensitive than the much larger postpaid market.
via PCMag
Lenovo is Re-emphasizing the Motorola Brand, Doubling Down on Mods – CNET (Mar 1, 2017)
I’ve changed the headline here to reflect two key points from the article: that Lenovo has done an about face and decided to re-enshrine the Motorola brand as the main brand for its phones globally, rather than de-emphasize it as previously planned; and that the company is doubling down on its Moto Mods concept, rather than abandoning it as LG has. The branding decision is a no-brainer: it always seemed odd to take an iconic brand like Motorola and retire it in favor of the Lenovo brand, which has far less (and less positive) recognition among smartphone buyers globally. The Mods decision is an interesting one – this article has one of the first numbers I’ve seen on how well they’re selling – it sounds like roughly half of Moto Z phones are bought with at least one Mod, which is actually a pretty decent attach rate (no pun intended). But Lenovo’s latest financial results say the Z is on track for just 3 million shipments in its first year, relative to Lenovo’s 51 million total smartphone shipments in 2016, so this flagship is still a tiny fraction of its total sales. And that’s a problem, because the rest of Lenovo’s sales haven’t been going nearly as well, and those that have been are very low-end focused. That’s not a great recipe for eventual profitability in smartphones, something that’s remained elusive for Lenovo since it bought Motorola.
via CNET