Posts by Catherine Keynes

iPad hits Asus Eee PC sales

or maybe

Everyone who wants a netbook, has one.

Nokia intros keypad, touchscreen combo candybar

Deja Vu

Just like the Sony Ericsson G900. Remember that? Quite.

Boffins authenticate Apple 'Antennagate'

It's a shame PA didn't test a real phone

I suspect that a cheap Nokia, a 6500 or the like, would have significantly better RF performance than any of the smartphones. They should also have looked at mainstream Motorolas and Sony Ericssons.

RIM certainly trade RF quality for price in their buying decisions, indeed all handset manufacturers do, but it's a matter of what you know and where you draw the line.

The Wrath of Jobs' latest victim: Motorola

Operator testing

What gets me is that the iPhone4 was clearly never properly operator tested. Things like this are precisely why handset manufacturers have to supply hundreds of samples to an operator before they are even announced.

They are taken on drive round tests, put in (radio) anechoic chambers, heated, dropped and then certified.

This was all done properly ten years ago when phones were about engineering. Today however they are about price and brand.

Testing today is a mechanism by which operators beat up handset suppliers on price. Everything is used to beat up suppliers on price.

But Apple is about a different kind of negotiation. Apple holds all the cards. What's the point in testing if that means you might not take the phone?

Marketing would never countenance that.

Basic testing with a base station simulator would have exposed the lie that was the signal strength indication. Perhaps it did and the networks who couldn't be without the new subscribers the iPhone would bring ignored it.

Antenna design is a dark art. It not surprising that a newcommer like apple hasn't learnt to do it.

Some of the blame has to lie with the networks who took the device without pushing back.

Everything Everywhere now something somewhere

Impossible to google

I though "Thus" was a name which was hard to google, but Everything Everywhere? 12million hits

Microsoft's KIN is dead, long live Windows Phone 7

Where does this leave Sharp

The KIn hardware was built by Sharp, I wonder if there was a kill fee.

The 3G coverage picture that can't be published

Not a defence but..

WCDMA cells coverage change as they get busier. This is known as breathing. But of course the networks know exactly what their coverage is, if only from knowing when they drop a call.

Jobs: iPhone sales spank Android

Don't mention RoW

This stats spat only looks at the US. If you look at world figures then Symbian still matters.

Sure Signal not so sure

What a load of wingeing

Just think what a Femtocell is: It's a full mobile basestation. In the box is the kind of stuff that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds only a few years ago.

T-Orange merger approved

Competition

The Orange T-mobile merger (merger? It's akin to Sky/BSB.) Isn't dreadful for competition. The pricing maverick is 3 and that's what keeps the others keen.

Next from Apple: The Pocket iPad

Haven't they already done something like that

With the Newton.

RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700

Not for us

The value of the Bold 9700 is that it does 3G at US frequencies. Otherwise the 3.2Mp camera (when there are plent of 5, 8 and 12Mp on the market) is pathetic. The screen a tiny imporovement and all the other things insignificant. The browser is rubbish.

More than half of touchphone users will go back to buttons

Touch is so 2009

I said as much back in August: http://catkeynes.com/CS00078.html

One cellphone for every ten lags in UK prisons

Cell phones

You'd need a pretty intense search to find a hidden Haier P7. Phones are typically charged from a laptop using a custom cable from the USB port to whatever the phone connector is, or else as someone mentioned chargers from corrupt guards.

I imagine there is pressure from those guards to prevent a system of legal intercepts which listened to the calls from inside the prison.

To block actively you'd need to own the spectrum

Cat.

Android to overtake iPhone in 2012 - analyst

Half the market to become smartphones?

>based on an estimated 522m smartphones shipping worldwide during the period.

This is a crazy figure. Smartphones might be growing as a share of the market but they are still under 20% and the growth is significantly slowed by contracts getting longer. When the iPhone first shipped 18 months was a long time, now it's the norm.

The vast majority of the 1bn phones sold each year are under $100.

So everything else in the reasoning is flawed. In Barcelona lots of people were showing Android phones that were 'shipping soon'. So far only HTC has handsets in the shops. Smartphones are dreadful for product slippage.

Predicting market shares and timescales?

ha.

Cat.

LG, Sony Ericsson Windows Mobile 6.5 phones outed

Slow to market in the US

Don't blame any of the handset manufacturers for the dreadful lack of new and exciting handsets in the US, it's all down to the power games the US carriers play. There is almost no unlocked market (if you must there is Expansys) but the volumes are too small for anyone to consider it as a route for a US specific - say 850/1900MHz - product.

You need to have a carrier deal in place to ramp up manufacture and the US carriers want to know that it's a successful phone before they will commit. This caused one US carrier to look very stupid when they told Motorola that they didn't want any phones from them, and particularly not that rubbish they were going to call Razr.

Microsoft gets smart with dumb phones

Just what the world needs. Anonther single standard

This is only re-inventing what Infusio, Rapid Mobile media or Ideaworks already do. An abstraction platform that provides a lowest common denominator for phone developers. We've also go OneAPI and Bondi, plus some 'single' web enviroments.

Remember the best selling phone in the world is the Nokia 1100 series. An abstraction platform, epscially one using Java or XML as this does, is far too processor heavy to achieve what is claimed here.

Cat

Symbian show struggles for identity

The phone show?

But really they should get a kindergarten focus group to decide, just like they did with the logo.

The death of mobile innovation?

"Good" Company

ARM

Sorry, there was a pause in that sentence

Apple is clearly not impoverished. Infineon is used by the impoverished and by the maverick Apple. I didn't mean that Apple is impoverished. Sorry.

Mobiles have to have innovation to sell to consumers, but that's not how networks buy them: they do it by a checklist of features against price. HSDPA? add $3, no AVRC? take off 50cents. If anyone except Apple had tried to sell the original iPhone (2G, no MMS, their own apps store) they wouldn't have seen any interest from the operators.

Thar's why making the OS and chipset a commodity is such a dangerous thing.

Cat