C'mon... don't slander Bill, my old buddy. You know a lot of companies *do* have IPR's on W-CDMA. And no other company is making the kind of demands Qualcomm is making. It's highly unusual. And just this once, USA is not the key market in this high tech field. It's an important market, but not as important as China or European Union. That is why Japan has thrown its lot together with Nokia/Ericsson. Standard decisions in USA are not necessarily embraced by the rest of the world, as is the case in computers, software, peripherals, audiovisual products, etc. US market has splintered among four digital standards and that is why demanding that one of them gets extra consideration won't probably wash.
I now think it is very likely that Nokia is introducing a new CDMA phone, 6170, in the 1Q or 2Q of -99. There's more and more buzz about this. I expect it will have a standby time of at least 100-150 hours, weigh less than 160 grams and have that new display shared with other 6100 phones. It should be a very appealing product. I have noticed that there have been a string of CDMA product launch delays by Samsung, Motorola and Qualcomm... the built-up demand for a Nokia 61xx CDMA phone is fairly high, because at least three of Nokia's 6100 series phones are in the top ten list of bestselling US handsets (6160 will finish the year as number one).
Actually I don't have a lot of ill will towards Qualcomm apart from this W-CDMA issue... I genuinely hope they won't fall into the Alcatel trap by introducing a dozen handset models, all with mediocre specs. If a company does not have some real edge in consumer products, they should limit their exposure and stick to what they know. The most recent number for Philips handset losses this year is 500 million dollars. And one of their models (Genie) is actually good: voice-activated dialing, 100 grams, as cheap as 6110. Even so they're sinking. Nokia is introducing a new model every 35 days and companies that put out a new model every six months are ultimately doomed. Ericsson went from 40% growth to 1% growth in handsets in three months. Companies with aging model line-ups can be doing seemingly very well... as long as the competition stays low-key. But when the bough breaks it gets remarkably ugly remarkably fast.
The CDMA phone market is only now reaching a critical mass in USA... I think the real market share competition will begin in 1999. For some time Nokia pretty much ignored the US TDMA and GSM markets as far as its latest technology was concerned. They never launched the 1996 state-of-the-art 8100 series in USA, for example. But when Nokia judged that TDMA and GSM had reached sufficient momentum to warrant a big product blitz - then they unleashed the 6100 series. People are now disappointed with Nokia's 21xx CDMA phones (and perhaps for a good reason), but they have not seen Nokia give its best shot yet. I don't know whether Nokia's know-how translates completely into CDMA, but I know they will do a lot better in 1999. We can only pray that the CDMA Startac is the bug-infested, production-delayed mess it is in GSM versions... Motorola still has some die-hard fans who could make an impact in CDMA market. I'm asking Santa Claus this year that Motorola misses the Christmas sales with their CDMA and TDMA Startacs. So far, so good.
Tero |
