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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kech who wrote (17507)	11/1/1998 2:14:00 PM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 152472

I actually almost believed this "American consumers don't care about weight, size and standby time" theory. Then I came here and witnessed the tsunami of Finnish high tech washing over grateful American consumers first hand. It has been a majestic, humbling experience. I can't believe anyone can walk into any three randomly chosen US phone stores, ask around and not be profoundly moved by the powerful testimonials of American Nokia users. It's not about the standby time. It's not about the displays. It's not about the intuitive user interface. It's not about the small size. Nor the design. It's about the integration of all these elements into one seamless, organic entity - it's about the way some rare consumer products can acquire a timeless quality, transcend their genre and become icons of their era. The problems other manufacturers have in facing this challenge are very real and should be addressed at least four times a year on this thread. That is why I'm here. On this thread the patent discussion have been raging on for weeks now. Meanwhile, the crucial question of what happened to Qualcomm's early edge in CDMA handset manufacturing is not even mentioned. How come Motorola's Startac has specs so much superior to Qualcomm phones? How come the new Q-phone launched into 1999 has basically the same specs as the much older first model (apart from the dual mode function)? How come the annual improvements in talk time, standby time, size, weight and design seem so small? Is the handset profit margin really around 3% and doesn't this have catastrophic results as soon as real competition breaks out? Isn't the current Qualcomm model line-up a sitting duck for 1999 competition? Can these phones ever compete in foreign markets? If not, is there a future in domestic handset manufacturing if all the other domestic mobile phone companies in the world have been run to the ground? These would be interesting issues for all mobile telecom investors. But they are brushed under the carpet. There are no small and succesful handset companies. All of the early promise of Siemens, NEC, Panasonic, Lucent, Alcatel, etc. has faded away. The differences between the phones of these companies and Big Three models may not have seemed big... but they were enough. The volume is king these days and R&D effort demanded by diverse technologicl challenges of handset manufacturing is sky high. The idea that people don't mind one-day standby times, because they sleep every night seems absurd - Nokia market research clearly shows that this is one key issue affecting buying decisions. There is data about this... anecdotal stories about people preferring inferior specs do not have any weight. Likewise, the weight is an issue in America. Why do you suppose Motorola's GSM phones stopped selling the same week as the Nokia models arrived in USA? If US consumers are so interested in specs of computers (266 MHz versus 230 MHz, etc.) why would they not care about the specs of their phones? Why would they be different from consumers in the rest of the world? OK, that's about enough. See you in January. Tero