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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (17427)	12/18/2001 6:24:50 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

Ramsey, << don't just listen to Nokia side of the story. common sense would tell you that while Nokia and GSM enjoys the economies of scale right now that has nothing to do with totally different products down the road.>> I pay close attention to the Qualcomm story and I also pay close attention to the Nokia story. I'm certainly not going to use the otherwise fine Qualcomm threads or the opinions of their inhabitants as the basis for any serious DD on either Nokia or GSM/3GSM, however. As you are well aware, their is enough misinformation and disinformation to be found there on either of those subjects to float a fleet. I've been following the industry, and worked in it long enough, to provide my own filters, and I choose to invest in both companies, and at this time I'm comfortable with holding a profitable wireless company to balance my large holding in a promising but unprofitable one. As for economies of scale and totally different products down the road, it is unfortunate but technology adoption by the carriers has not been overly favorable to cdma2000. << those 500 wcdma handsets that docomo is using probably cost more than all the 1x handsets in Korea combined >> Probably. whether 500 or the actual 15,000, and NEC and Matsushita combined last year and this probably spent more on R&D on those and related products than Qualcomm's total corporate R&D budget for the comparable period. Nokia (and Sony Ericsson and Motorola) have been quite astute to avoid early stage commercial pilots, IMO. We are however, talking about a very sizeable market, and possibly those investments will pay off for NEC and Matsushita over the long haul, and Motorola's similar early efforts with GPRS may do so as well. << As for contents, do you know there are over 150 brew apps in Korea right now? >> That is not exactly a truckload, now is it? ... but even though it is very unimpressive it is a start. << How many are there for GPRS? >> I don't know. I imagine considerably more than 150. I've never paid a visit to Club Nokia since right now it isn't available in the US, and won't be fully on stream till next year, but if you wander around you can find a number of sites with downloadable apps. Nokia alone has a development community of 500,000 developers in Nokia Forum. I would venture to say that by this time next year the number of Java apps available for GPRS will outnumber BREW or BREW/Java apps by a factor of at least 10:1 and a year later by 50:1. BREW is obviously going nowhere outside of the cdma2000 community, but is very important within it, and Java apps can be ported to BREW from the GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA environment. None of those comments are meant to belittle BREW. I view BREW is an extremely necessary and timely piece of middleware and business model that will stimulate application development, and eventually drive up wireless data usage. Caxton thinks Qualcomm will cover costs with BREW, I think it could eventually provide some meaningful if not significant revenue for the top line and perhaps a little boost to the bottom line. << Have you given it any thought as to where Sprint may be today if CDMA does not work? >> Sure. But from the time IS-95 initially standardized I personally never had any doubt whatsoever that it would work eventually, and since the Sprint decision basically turned on vendor financing rather than technology, their was significant mitigation of risk on their part. << They had invested their entire company future in cdma. Now it is a similar situation for AWE and Cingular. They invested their future in a dead end, knowing today that the best they can hope for is an inferior product while being a few years late to market. >> You are entitled to your opinion, but it certainly is not shared by Stephen Carter or Rod Nelson, ... or by me. Their decisions were not made in a vacuum, and a lot of decision factors came in to play. Had Qualcomm and CDG focused more on vendor to vendor and network to network interoperability earlier on, on international roaming and services, or had an answer to TDMA/CDMA interoperability along the lines of GAIT, the outcome might have been different, but they were not playing with a full deck, and attempting to market through the press was, as it generally is, disastrous. << that is the type of bonehead management which brings down US icons such as Xerox, Polaroid and soon ATT >> That statement doesn't do much for me. Neither Xerox, or Polaroid met their demise because of the technology platform they adopted to run their business. AWS will not be brought down because they failed to adopt the one, true, revered, proprietary, flavor of cdma favored by Qualcomm investors. They (and Cingular) do face a challenge getting out from under IS-136 and supporting two technologies as quickly as possible. They would have faced the same challenge with cdma. Best, - Eric -

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (17427)	12/19/2001 6:17:39 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

Ramsey, In fact, those 500 wcdma handsets that docomo is using probably cost more than all the 1x handsets in Korea combined That might be a stretch... [Cingular and AWE] invested their future in a dead end, knowing today that the best they can hope for is an inferior product while being a few years late to market. First of all, the majority of the users in the US only use their phone to....... Drum Roll please . . . Make phone calls. Remember when sprint offered its PCS subscribers the option to purchase "stuff" from amazon, etc. Well, I don't see those ads anymore. Therefore, one of two things happened. Either, (1) It was so successfull that Sprint's Data network is loaded way beyond capacity or (2) That it failed. I believe that choice (2) is the logical answer. the question then becomes, if my answer is correct, why did Sprint's Data initiative fail? Could it be that people do not like surfing a small portion of the web on that tiny screen? The majority of Americans do not trust the internet? That people decided, hell, I'll wait till I get home and long on with my computer? Although, questions 2 and 3 somewhat conflict one another, I do not see people feverishly trading stocks on their PDA via a wireless connection. Therefore, it is unclear on the effect(s) of a CDMA network v. a TDMA/GSM network on a provider. Users can still make phone calls, and engineers will do what engineers do best...solve problems. UMTS/W-CDMA will be implemented in the US. Instead of getting your panties in a wad, you should, as a Qualcomm investor, hope that UMTS/W-CDMA is implemented sooner, rather than later. Remember, Qualcomm gets their cut regardless of whatever flavor of CDMA that is used. In conclusion, I ask one simple question.... If users in the United States only expect to use their cellular phones to make phone calls, why will AWE and Cingular be late to market? Instead, it sounds as if, if these TMDA/GSM operators are late to market, there will be a delay in Qualcomm's royalty growth...