After strong Q3 showing, HTC sees nearly 20 percent drop in November revenue originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“There are over 400,000 apps in Android market, which is mind boggling,” Orange Group Devices vice president Patrick Remy said in an interview today. “We believe that there is a certain point where that level of choice will become a bit too much for our customers, that they’ll become a bit lost with that level of complexity.”

Orange polled its customers over what mobile data features would coax them into buying a smartphone. “One name kept coming back on a consistent basis,” Remy said. Several iterations of the Facebook phone have emerged from companies like HTC and INQ, but Orange opted to work with directly with Facebook and TCL, which makes handsets via license under the Alcatel Brand, to create its own line of devices. Remy said Orange wanted to make the phone Facebook-centric, but not Facebook exclusive. By allowing customers to utilize the fill capabilities of the Android platform, they would then gravitate to other applications and platforms.

But Orange is doing plenty to keep Facebookers happy. The phones are designed to make the device almost an extension of a customers Facebook account. Facebook birthdays are automatically loaded into the Calendar client, contacts are synched with Facebook friends and photos automatically populate the phones’ photo albums. A physical Facebook key allows performs a variety of functions depending on what the customer is doing on screen. If the customer is surfing the Web, a press of the Facebook button automatically loads a link. If pressed in the camera mode, the photo is posted as an update, and so forth. Many of the features are similar to those designed into the HTC Status used on AT&T’s network.

It’s first device is the Orange Vancouver (Orange has a thing for phones with city monikers like Boston and Monte Carlo), which will launch in Romania with a price tag of 100 Euros (USD 5) with 9 Euro monthly plan, including 50 minutes of voice, 200 SMS and 60 MB of 3G data. Facebook usage is excepted from the data limited, leaving social networks to update their statuses, send messages and upload and download photos to their hearts’ content. Orange plans to launch two other Android Facebook phones at even lower price points (though without 3G) will begin offering them in all of its markets from continental Europe to sub-Saharan Africa through 2012.

Unlimited Facebook access won’t be available in every market. So far, Orange is only planning to make that a basic feature in Tunisia and Romania, though in other countries customers can subscribe to special unlimited social networking plans. The idea is to make customers feel comfortable with data by not metering their data usage on their favorite application, Remy said.

It sounds simple enough, but customers might find themselves confused as to what exactly counts as Facebook and what doesn’t it. A link update, for instance, is no longer under the Facebook umbrella once a customer clicks on it and exits to the browser. A YouTube video embedded in friend stream could be particular problematic. Opening the video means opening YouTube’s Android app or website, and nothing can drain a 60 MB plan faster than streaming video.

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Except that Barnes & Noble kinda got it right before Amazon.  OK, sure, so maybe the Nook Color is technically categorized by B&N as an e-reader, but in reality it was a low-end Android tablet, priced cheaply with a curated approach to content.

But that’s all just a technicality now, because while B&N may have been ahead of Amazon with the Nook Color, the Fire will still blow every other Android tablet out of the water, including the Nook Color and the new Nook tablet, which B&N introduced last week as an answer to the Fire.

So what’s more interesting with the Fire is not where it leaves B&N, which is in a fairly predictable second-place position among high-end e-readers and Android tablets, but where the Fire leaves Google. After all, the Fire is Amazon’s audacious attempt to introduce another tablet upon Google’s platform, while taking away many of the advantages that Google has gained through investing in the Android platform.

What do I mean? Well, sure, technically the Fire is built upon Android, but Amazon’s curated approach will no doubt be more about Amazon than Google, which is best exemplified by the fact that Amazon puts its own browser on the device, displacing Google’s browser. By taking the browser away and giving the consumer a server-assisted browsing experience with Silk, it will be Amazon, not Google, gathering all the data about consumer purchase and social behavior.

So what should Google do? Well, there’s not much they can do, other than continue to push hardware providers like Samsung, HTC and, of course, Motorola and others to utilize a version of Android that has all the Google services that Google was intending for consumers to use with the release of Android.

Nothing to do, except maybe…

Why Google Should Buy Barnes & Noble

Yes, Google should acquire Barnes & Noble. Wait, you ask, didn’t Google just buy Motorola, another hardware company? Of course, but the thing is, B&N isn’t a hardware company. What B&N is is a content retailer.

Like Amazon.

And content is something that Google, as much as it likes to think it is, doesn’t get. At all. The examples are numerous. The failure of Google TV.  Google’s no-show in the music space despite making noise with Google Music. And finally, there’s Google eBookstore, which, from what I can tell, is even more of a non-factor than Google Music.

Why? Because Google, for all its efforts, just hasn’t done well in content sell-through. Compared to Amazon, which is a company with content retailing in its DNA, to say Google is clunky and uncertain in this regard is putting it kindly.  And now, with the Fire, it’s likely that Amazon will show Google — and even possibly Apple — what the dominant online content-retailer can do with its own tablet device.

So how would B&N help Google? First, it would give them a division that understands how to merchandise content, both online and offline.  It would also possibly help them revive their moribund Google eBookstore as well give them an answer to the Kindle business, which is much more than just the hardware line. The Kindle is an entire ecosystem, or book industry in a box, including a growing publishing services. B&N has many of these same offerings, such as its PubIt platform, which Google could simply make its own.

Lastly, Google could also put B&N’s network of physical storefronts to good use.  Sure, Google lives in the cloud almost exclusively, but as Apple has shown, it often pays to have stores where consumers can “touch the company,” and for Google this might be even more important given that it’s hard for a company that is almost all-cloud to build trust as a lifelong content partner. Other benefits, such as encouraging adoption of Google Wallet and selling other Google hardware like the Nexus smartphones, are fairly obvious ones.

A few closing thoughts. Some would argue that buying B&N would mean Google would be competing with its partners, but that concern was put to rest with the Motorola acquisition.  And the cost of B&N would be just a fraction of the Motorola buy, given the book retailer’s sub- billion market cap. Lastly, Kobo’s acquisition by Rakuten for 5 million took maybe the only viable alternative to B&N off the market, and is another reason that Google would be wise to snatch up B&N quickly.

So what are they waiting for?

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We are obviously going through a heady time in relation to the cloud and cloud computing services. However, at the same time that we are appropriately amazed at the growth of the cloud and eagerly welcome services such as iCloud, at the same time that we cheer the arrival of new Samsung Galaxy models, the latest HTC entry or the arrival of the iPhone 4S, we forget to look both backward and forward at the evolution of mobile devices and networks. This is especially important since some of the worldview of the cloud seems to assume that the devices on the edge, particularly mobile devices, don’t need to be too smart. And although we believe these new devices to be smart today, we need to begin to focus on how staggeringly powerful and capable devices will be in the future.

A quick look at the cost of storage

I have three data points to use as illustrations, all three of which unfortunately date me as having been around a while. The first mobile business PC I ever had access to was a 1983 Kaypro 10, a CPM-based machine with a 2.5 MHz processor (yes, MHz) and a 10MB hard drive. A machine that promptly crashed due to hardware, or — more likely — user error.

Skipping ahead to 1993, I was living in Europe and needed a new hard drive for the Dell desktop I had brought with me for my expatriate assignment. I found a mail-order hard drive (from the back of PC Magazine), a bargain at 0 for 250 MB.

The third data point was in 1999, when I bought my first digital camera (2 megapixels) and bought my first CompactFlash card, which cost for 16 MB — my first truly “mobile” storage.

Fast-forward to today, as we read the plethora of announcements on the latest smartphones with gigahertz plus dual-core processors and1GB and more RAM, utilizing small expandable SDHC storage that costs barely more than per GB. Or news about larger solid-state drives (SSD) for notebooks at about 0 for 512 GB or hard drives that cost a terabyte. Sometimes we don’t think through the future implications.

So let’s think it through, but let’s not be backward about it. Yes, solid-state media has gone from 00 per GB to about per GB in 12 years. And spinning media hard drives have gone from ,800,000 per Terabyte in 1993 to per terabyte today (and yes, I know there are probably other ways of looking at this, but it’s just an illustration).

The 16 MB solid-state card I bought in 1999 has increased in storage size by 2,000 times in 12 years yet the cost has remained roughly the same (actually, if you factor in inflation, the cost is lower). The 250 MB hard drive I purchased for 0 in 1992 has increased in storage size by 2,000 times for the 512 GB SSD, or 12,000 times for the 3 TB hard drive that is one-sixteenth the cost in 2011 dollars!

The cloud is going to need some help

So what does this have to do with the cloud? A lot. Elements of the “cloud is all” ecosystem view in relation to mobile devices is that we all will have ubiquitous, unlimited, low-cost connections from our “really really really smart phones” of the future.  And this view often does not take into account the nature and realities of the mobile network or the rapid progression of device capability. And our wireless networks won’t be able to handle this on their own. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for GigaOM on problems with persistent wireless apps, and a piece last year on Verizon’s potential of overpromising of LTE.

I love LTE (even with carrying extra batteries), HSPA+ and all my cool devices. However, available wide area bandwidth defines the wide area network capacity available to any individual user on a loaded wireless network. This will always be problematic in relation to the power of the cloud. The problem will be how we get massive volumes of increasingly broad and pervasive forms of content from our devices to the cloud, and the cloud is going to need some help. A key part of the answer will be to increasingly leverage the power of the mobile device, the storage of the mobile device, and the power of the applications in our hands. This will not be a “nice to have,” it will be a necessity. Amazon gets this concept with the introduction of Amazon Silk. Google gets it with the recent introduction of Google Offline Mail (disclosure: 12 years ago, I was GM of Qualcomm’s Eudora Email Group, so Google’s announcement is sort of “what was old is new again” to me).

The power of the cloud needs to leverage the power of the device

So, a thought experiment. It’s 2020 or 2025. Our N-Core, multi-gigahertz processor handheld device(s) have terabytes (1000 GB) to tens of terabytes of local storage. All the music anybody might want to hear can be stored in a few hundred gigabytes, or at most few terabytes (even uncompressed). Hundreds of full-length movies aligned with an individual’s preferences are stored locally for a few more terabytes, ready to be unlocked and viewed at some “to be determined” cost. For gamers, all the hottest 3D games are already resident on the handset ready to be purchased and streamed wirelessly to the nearest display. Hundreds of gigabytes of personal photos and videos are at your fingertips. The print collection of the Library of Congress, not that we would need it, would be another 10 terabytes. How about having all the relevant content of our favorite websites and social media also resident on the device? Probably not as much heavy lifting as the Library of Congress!

We’ve solved lots of problems in wireless in the last several decades, but for wide area networks, we are getting closer to Shannon’s, which defines just how efficient a wide area network can be for a given amount of spectrum. So how will these hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes of data be delivered to the device(s)?  Probably from fat local area wired or local wireless network pipes.  Which by definition starts making us think about parsing content between real time delivery leveraging limited and costly wide area capacity vs. preloaded/background loaded/resident content delivered on local networks with less costly economics per gigabyte delivered.

Will it be the carriers, Amazon, Netflix, Apple or new entrants doing the preloading or side-loading? Or if you don’t believe there will be tens of terabytes in mobile devices — maybe only a few terabytes — what if those devices can talk to one another in a peer-to-peer or mesh network? What’s the aggregate power and capability of billions of these things, especially if there will be ways for them to work with and talk to one another both alone and in conjunction with cloud-based services? There’s probably money to be made here in the next 10-15 years!

The moral of the story is to recognize that the nature of the cloud is the nature of all processes of centralization and decentralization, and in my almost three decades in the tech world there have been several in the IT space. The realities and costs of the cloud in relation to wireless services and devices, especially when those devices will be limited by the nature of wide area wireless, and those pesky things called radios, will be a challenge. However, when that power is appropriately aligned with the massive processing power and storage that will be in our hands tomorrow, it may well shape a future which will be beyond the cloud.

Jeff Belk is Managing Director of ICT168 Capital, LLC, investing and working with wireless firms globally. He spent almost 14 years at Qualcomm, in roles including SVP, Global Marketing, and SVP, Strategy and Market Development.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Tomorrow Never Knows.

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This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here’s some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of October 24, 2011:

• Fan of white phones? Here ya go: the BlackBerry Bold 9900, Curve 9360 and Torch 9810 can be pre-ordered on Phones4U. If white doesn’t do it for you, the Curve 9300 will be available in pink. [Stuff]
• HTC has announced its partnership with Dropbox, which means you can get 5GB of available storage on any of the company’s Android devices. [Twitter]
• A few customers on Verizon’s family plans have noticed a peculiar addition to the company’s #DATA service; when the text showing the data usage arrives, it now mentions “shared,” which may be an indication that Big Red’s on its way to offering shared data plans in the near future. [Droid-Life]
• Rumors have flown for some time about LG’s attempt at reviving the Prada series by introducing the K2 (aka the P940), and now we’re finally starting to see images of the Android device leak out. Apparently, it’ll be less than 9mm thin, offer an 8MP camera, 1.3MP front-facing cam, 21Mbps HSPA+ and have a 4.3-inch display with 1,000 nits of brightness. [PhoneArena via UnwiredView]
• Research in Motion announced BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, which extends Microsoft Exchange Online to the BlackBerry lineup. It’s geared toward midsized businesses and enterprises. Head to the source for the details. [Microsoft-News]

Mobile Miscellany: week of October 24, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Offering to play matchmaker between your high-end camera and smartphone, XEquals has extended support for its BlueSLR remote control beyond iOS. Yes, Blackberry and Android users can now download their respective app and pair this Bluetooth dongle to their (still Nikon-only) DSLR. The compatible dongle and free app will land later this month, but before you lay down the requisite 9, it’s worth checking that both your camera and phone models are supported. As it stands, compatible Android phones are limited to some HTC or Samsung models. While Android support is likely to expand in the future, there’s no word on a Pre 3 version.

Continue reading BlueSLR dongle arrives for BlackBerry and (some) Android phones

BlueSLR dongle arrives for BlackBerry and (some) Android phones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wired Top Stories

It’s no back to school roadmap because, hey, you’re already there. Still, this leaked sales sheet from TmoNews shows Magenta stacking its shelves for an abundant fall mobile harvest. So, let’s dive right in as there’s a lot of two-year contracted bounty to cover. Starting things off on October 19th are a trio of high-end, 42Mbps-capable 4G handsets: the HTC “Ruby” or Amaze 4G at 9, Samsung Hercules (that would be this) at 9 and the Huawei Wayne at (which comes pre-loaded with Spaghetti Westerns, we presume). Following just a week later, is Samsung’s Arnold tablet — a.k.a the Galaxy Tab 10.1 — which’ll run along the carrier’s faux-G and retail for 9. But the real wireless bonanza takes place on the 2nd of November, when six new phones will bow. LG’s Maxx QWERTY and Maxx Touch at 9 apiece are the sole 3G-only units in the bunch, leaving the HTC Omega (better known as the Sensation XE overseas) at 9, LG Flip II at 9, Huawei Tallsome slate at 9 and the low-end Samsung “Ancora” to surf along at 4G speeds. Making a late appearance to this Autumn party are the last two of the bunch: Samsung’s Robin (which looks to be the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus) at 9 and RIM’s Dumoine QWERTY slider. That enough options for you? We thought so.

T-Mobile’s fall roadmap leaks, cornucopia of mobile goods on the horizon originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging to get updated. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it’s easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don’t escape without notice, we’ve gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery from the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!

Official Android updates

• The top story this week revolves around the HTC Thunderbolt’s long-awaited Gingerbread OTA update. It was finally rolling out, which was exciting news for owners of the device — until it had to be pulled because of some rather significant bugs. The largest of them all was that voicemail notifications no longer worked properly; video chatting through Google Talk was also slightly messed up as well. No word on when we can expect to see it come back with those bugs fixed. [Droid-Life]
• Unfortunately, the Thunderbolt isn’t the only phone falling victim to pulled revamps; the LG Optimus S on Sprint had its Gingerbread update kiboshed, though users have had two weeks to get it — plenty of time for anyone to experience some of the bugs, which included the phone not charging, the SD card not being recognized when the phone’s connected to the computer, no access to data services, and predictive text on the virtual keyboard stopped working. It’s disappointing to see this happen so soon after the Kyocera Echo update went through a similar debacle. [SprintFeed]
• LG Optimus 3D: V10K firmware update, enables phone to convert OpenGL-capable 2D games into stereoscopic 3D. Note: this still runs Android 2.2.2, so we’re still waiting for Gingerbread. [AndroidCentral]
• Motorola Xoom WiFi: Android 3.2.1 is beginning to roll out. [AndroidCentral]
• Dell Streak 7: Honeycomb update rolling out now to unspecified regions [AndroidCentral]
• Asus Eee Pad Transformer: Revamped to Android 3.2.1, adds other bug fixes [AndroidCommunity]
• Casio G’Zone Commando: Gingerbread rolling out now [Droid-Life]
• Motorola Droid 3: Minor maintenance refresh; enhances Google Talk with video chat support, several other fixes. [PhoneDog]
• T-Mobile Samsung Nexus S: OTA install (with option to manually install) to Android 2.3.6; doesn’t appear to break tethering. [AndroidCentral]

Unofficial Android updates, custom ROMs and misc. hackery

• The Android 2.3.5 ROM for the global Samsung Galaxy S II leaked early this week. [Pocketnow, SamFirmware]
• You can now download the Android 2.3.4 SBF for the Motorola Droid X2, courtesy of XDA. [Droid-Life]
• If you have a Sony Ericsson Xperia-branded device from 2010 or 2011, CyanogenMod7 support will most likely come included as part of an upcoming update. Ten Xperia devices will be added, though a timeframe for release wasn’t announced. Check here to see if your device made the list. [XperiaBlog]

Other platforms

• Check here to see if your phone is ready to receive Windows Phone Mango.
• The ultra-rare AT&T HP Pre 3 just received an OTA update to 2.2.3.2207, right after a new webOS Doctor became available for the same refresh. [PreCentral]

Refreshes we covered this week

• Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update now rolling out
• How to force Mango to your phone right away
• Samsung Taylor receiving Mango?

Refresh Roundup: week of September 26, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not only is Apple shipping the most smartphones, it’s also shipping the best smartphones — if you believe the stats in J.D. Power and Associates’ latest US customer satisfaction survey. It gave the iPhone a score of 838, versus HTC’s handsets in second place with 801 and an industry average of 788. Sammy got a disappointing 777, but we guess it might have fared better if the Galaxy S II had been quicker to cross the Atlantic. Hapless RIM got shunted into fifth place, having come second in 2010. You’ll find plenty more factoids in the PR after the break, including evidence that people just love 4G. Well, we could have told you that.

Continue reading Apple tops J.D. Power customer satisfaction survey, grim reading for RIM and Nokia

Apple tops J.D. Power customer satisfaction survey, grim reading for RIM and Nokia originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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