MWC 2013: The Chinese are coming - and you ain't seen nothing yet When the signs at an international trade event are in Chinese first, you know things have changed. This was only true of the photocopied signs posted all around Hall One at this year's Mobile World Congress, home to the giant Huawei hospitality booth - but expect to it spread. The Chinese have barely got started. "Why are we …
If they are gonna pitch at Apple prices, the battle is settled. People will buy Appl e instead.
If they pitch low & Realistic (£250 being the sweet spot) , the operators are going to have their margins and pound of flesh. So nothing below £400 levels?
Look what they did to Google Nexus 4.
Unles they embark on a marketing blitz and bamboozle smaller players.
"If they are gonna pitch at Apple prices, the battle is settled. People will buy Appl e instead."
Not really true, plenty of people buy high end Android phones, whilst plenty of Apple phone sales are made up of older iphones. Even at a high price, I'd bet Andoid still comes first.
And when you look at the specs - 5" screens, full HD, maps that work - why not? The iphone 5 just brought it in line with Android phones 18 months earlier.
Bigger competition is likely Samsung, who produce similar high end Android phones, but seem to be a lot more well known than Huawei.
Though yes, it's frustrating to see what's happened to the Nexus 4.
A bigger screen only for makes a better phone if that's what the individual user
prefers. Choice is good, though.
Didn't that big tease Google announce they would release GoogleMaps for iOS after all? And didn't Nokia say they were going to do the same with their well regarded map product? Just saying.
Not everyone wants a 5in brick as their phone you know.
Even my old (and now disused) HTC Sensation was too big for me and I have hands the size of dinner plates.
No one USP will satisfy ALL of the market. What might be essential for one person is a big 'no-no' for another.
NFC and 5in screens are big turn offs for me but there again, I'm a grumpy old man and not a hip young thing that needs to be seen with the latest 'shiny shiny' toy.
Huawei are definitely an up and coming company in the consumer market but they still have to make it easier for the uninitiated. I have had their media pad tablet for at least a year now and it was a decent bit of kit that easily competed with the samsung galaxy but for half the price. Small snag is when I want to update the firmware (and I had to since the first few were very buggy) it meant going to the website, downloading the file, putting it onto an sd card, booting up, installing, clearing sd card and then reinstalling every app and setting I had. Compare that to HTC's notification on the phone, download, reboot done. But I think it will come and then the big boys will have to watch out. At least the US has already prepared: Ban that awesome phone from the US because it's Chinese spy tech!
Have to agree with your comments. I bought one of their small mobile phone handsets; really good price and it looked as if it would just what I needed.
But it was very buggy; lots of issues with the touch screen and some of the apps were very flaky, working well one minute and then suddenly falling over. The battery life was good and the call quality wasn't too bad, but after trying to use it for about 5 months, I finally gave up.
Would I buy another one? Not too sure. Having had such a series of issues once, it makes you wary of trusting them for a second bite of the cherry. The only real advantage was that it was cheap enough that I didn't feel too bad about sending it off to a recycling firm.
Can't fault the G300 on value for money. I searched around second-hand dealers for a cheap Android 'phone and couldn't find anything to match its spec for less than twice the hundred quid it cost me.
The ICS upgrade they and Vodafone rolled out was a complete mess for a lot of people (myself included) but sticking to Gingerbread it's a good device for the money.
Not sure I trust Huawei not to have installed a back-door in it, given their connections to the Chinese government, but I doubt I'm someone they're going to be interested in anyway. (And if I'd been mug enough to go for a Windows 'phone I'd be just as worried about a back-door for Uncle Sam).
I really like your last sentence for having two relevant interpretations.
Also, your "...awesome phone..." comment hit an issue I was discussing with some friends yesterday: when idly comparing brief experiences of the various 7-inch tablets available we found more freedom and flexibility in the cheap products from an apparently totalitarian and/or communist state* than in what we were offered by more commonplace commercial companies, which had limitations geared around target consumers or targeting behaviour in a broader selection of consumers.
Of course build quality, reliability and support were agreed as being difficulties with the cheap items, but if you're only looking at a product lifetime of six-months or a year, and making them cheap enough to throw away and replace...well, how does that weigh in the balance with broader functionality?
At the moment I see these companies as responding to what consumers really want to do with what they can spend, and see the more stodgy established companies as mainly keeping on offering limited choices when they hope the limitation will hold some appeal with ideas for safe walled-garden or cloud-backup/transfer.
*Disclaimer - This description is not to be taken as accurate or reliable. I have never been to China, nor do I know any Chinese people to a level where they would confide in me their experiences in China. I have sometimes listened to the bone-headed news in the MSM.
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... was a Huawei
The T-Mobile Pulse about three years ago.
It worked well and is still in use as a basic throttle for my JMRI-controlled model railway.
They never did release an Android update via T-Mobile that I could use successfully, however one of the modaco ROMs worked beautifully!
Good luck to them!
"If we insist on giving away intellectual property then the value built on top of it will go to more innovative companies that plan better, and produce goods that are every bit as good as the global brands but at a keener price."
I see the hidden message. Of course no-one is "giving away" "intellectual property" otherwise there would not not be weekly nukefests about ideas someone had while on the shitter. Systems may be opened up and not run like Alcatraz to attract third-party developers, partners and, yes, competitors.
If we insist on keeping our hallowed intellectual property then any potential value it has will just wither away while more innovative companies that plan better, and produce goods that are every bit as good as the global brands but at a keener price -- just build their own.
Apple's money bomb seems to belie this, but in reality this is just a temporary phenomenon with Apple unable to produce at acceptable cost out-of-Asia and targeting the relatively well-endowed locals, in other words, it repackages comparative advantages in production.
"To be brutally frank, Samsung's "innovation culture" is mostly about following trends rather than acting as a "first mover", in your humble writer's opinion, while Huawei's is about long-term planning and strategy."
Funny, with the Galaxy Note (I) and the Galaxy SIII (big screen) I'm pretty sure Samsung was a first mover. Even with the 7" tab. Look at Apple Andrew, they released the iPad mini...
To be brutally frank, stop with the bias.
Yes, it's simply disingenuous to suggest that Samsung just reacts to customer fashions: OLED screens, CPUs, etc. are all the result of a ten year plan at Samsung. Medical technology is the target of the next ten.
The role of the Communist party and the People's Liberation Army in many of the larger Chinese companies should not be discounted.
As for the "intellectual property giveaway". This is just another strawman to try and shore up the idea of Windows Phone as the pinnacle of innovation. Operating systems were commodified some time ago. Google understands this and the value of selling services just as well as the free-to-play game entrepreneurs throughout Asia.
As for eschewing Western approaches: Huawei in particular has been very busy setting up real R&D labs around Europe. Like Lenvovo, it seems to understand that despite the huge domestic market, really successful companies have to compete globally.
"As I looked around me at MWC, Android was everywhere. But even Sony could not differentiate its me-too Android tablet from anyone else. It's really there for Huawei's taking".
Ah, having slaughtered a calf and examined the entrails (extispicium), I have achievement enlightment. If you as a hardware manufacturer move to Android instead of, for instance Windows Phone, you risk having your lunch stolen by Huawei.
"If we insist on giving away intellectual property then the value built on top of it will go to more innovative companies that plan better, and produce goods that are every bit as good as the global brands but at a keener price."
I don't follow, how is building on top of other peoples 'intellectual property' innovation?
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