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Technology Stocks : Smartphones: Symbian, Microsoft, RIM, Apple, and Others -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sylvester80 who wrote (1240)	1/21/2012 2:15:52 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1647

Facts and Opinions ... Please don't shout here in bolded text. A word or phrase and occasionally even a sentence for emphasis is fine but not paragraphs. I have old eyes and compute at relatively low 1280 x 720 screen res on 22" widescreens so extended bolded text renders in very garish fashion. It'll be even worse after a right eye cataract gets laser fixed on February 1. << Damn facts. Always getting in the way of a good story. ... in the rest of the world Apple is failing badly in market share compared to Android. >> Let us get three 'damn Facts' squared away up front ... 1. Apple is a branded handset OEM and Android is a platform. That is an apple and an orange (pun intended). 2. Market share is classically measured either in units or revenue. In revenue (not just in profit) Apple is now the global OEM revenue market share leader in smartphones as well as smart device platform (i.e. smartphones and MIDs) and perhaps in handsets, although I'll wait for final CY YE numbers to confirm that. 3. This board is not a battleground or a soapbox for promotion of one's favorite smartphone and MIDS platform and anyone who wants to denigrate Apple whose common finished the week a scant 2% short of its all time high while GOOG finished 14% off its 52 week high can simply go play tank warfare elsewhere. << I would disagree with the author. >> Why does that not surprise me. <ggg> You can disagree with the author all you'd like -- I certainly have on many occasions -- but I've been acquainted with him virtually for almost 15 years and in real life for over a decade since shortly after he first gave up his PhD in neurobiology a thesis shy of obtaining it because he didn't want to live his adult life as a lab rat and became a professional research analyst and journalist instead. The rather massive brainpower in his family is distributed between he and his M.D. wife out of Yale and Columbia Schools of Medicine who appears on TV more than he does but the looks are definitely on her side. The young giant who writes exceptionally well in his adopted 2nd language has an uncanny knack for spotting handset trends that is simply unmatched on these SI message boards since he departed years ago and only the current moderator of our Qualcomm Rules board comes close in that regard in my estimation. As for disagreements, one of Tero's great traits is that he's able to disagree with class and with humor and wit without disparaging someone who chooses to disagree with him. Tero's also managed to build a very good pipe over the years and as a consequence his opinions are generally based on a rather solid foundation. The nutball fringe of Qualcomm's army of loyal headbangers ranks Tero right up there (down there) with Vulture Central's former man in San Fran but that's a compliment and Andrew Orlowski who has chronicled the rise and fall of Psion and Symbian better than most happens to be a highly qualified tech journalist with considerable knowledge of the embedded systems that power smartphones and MIDS. Here's Tero's FauxG CES prequel to his Lumia Volkswagon piece I previously clipped and you just might be more inclined to agree with his perspective here ... >> Massive New AT&T LTE Phone Line-up Guarantees Pain for Vendors tinyurl.com AT&T announced a dazzling plethora of new LTE models at CES today. The variety and advanced feature sets of these models essentially guarantees that several vendors are going to end up with massive flops in their hands over the coming spring. It would seem highly likely that LG, RIM and Motorola are going to be simply mauled in the North American market over coming months. The amazing specs of the new cluster of Asian Android models for AT&T is going to put Nokia into a very tough place as it chases a US comeback with new Lumia models. Samsung is coming off a hot streak in the US market and launching two new devices that are going to mop up a lot of Android fans. The Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket HD has one of those deeply weird names you sometimes see from Asian vendors, but it’s a stunner: a 4.6 inch Super AMOLED Plus display with 1280×720 resolution, a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, apparently with a particularly thin build. Another Samsung model is heroically gigantic – Galaxy Note breaks the 5 inch display size barrier while offering 2 MP quality in the front facing camera and 8 MP in the back. Sony’s new Xperia Ion jacks up the megapixel count to 12 MP – HTC’s new Titan II takes the leap to 16 MP level. This is quite absurd – at this point, picture quality hinges on other factors than raw pixel count, but there you go. Non-Apple handset vendors are now trying to battle the iPhone behemoth by moving into extremes when it comes to display size, pixel count and camera quality. We know there is a technophile consumer base out there in love with extreme specs. But that geek crowd is now going to split between at least eight new major Android and Windows LTE entries by AT&T alone, just ahead of the next iPhone iteration. The iPhone 5 is expected to represent a substantially bigger leap in functionality and design than the 4S did in 2011. We only discuss AT&T’s LTE portfolio in this article – plenty of consumers will continue buying non-LTE smartphones due to the geographic limitations of AT&T’s 4G coverage. The LTE slice of the market is now facing hyper-competition totally out of scale from what we witnessed with early W-CDMA launches a decade ago. 3G phones debuted while the handset market was in the trough of a major downturn – which kept competition in check and margins decent. 4G models are debuting at the peak of the smartphone boom exuberance, luring big pushes from second-tier names like Sony and even Pantech. It is very hard to see how Motorola and LG can possibly keep up. The furious spec improvement in the Android crowd also puts RIM into a nearly impossible position; the next generation of Blackberries is pretty much guaranteed to be two generations behind the curve once it finally debuts. Today’s announcements by AT&T indicate that Samsung may be in the process of locking up the US smartphone leadership position together with Apple. HTC has fallen behind Samsung in the race to provide outrageous gimmicks like the biggest screen or auxiliary stylus support for notes. It’s very hard to see how Motorola and LG are going to keep up considering how Motorola was already slipping badly in 4Q11. That could mean steep discounting forced on second-tier Android vendors by spring. The level of competition combined with likely price competition by April means that Nokia must price its first Lumia models for AT&T with extreme aggression. We’ll find out soon whether that actually happens. ## Cheers, - Eric -