Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

[Mort Walker]

When I said Chipanda is snapping at the heels, I ain't kidding. Just follow for example, what folks like Foxconn are up to, it will make you dhoti shiver.

And the CE industry has to blame themselves for that. Nokia did it in the early 00s when it shifted a bunch of its production facilities from the US and EU to China. Aside from manufacturing, the chipandas are also making fake electronic components with fake serial numbers for critical applications, and now in the US defense-aerospace industry, they insist to have traceable components for critical systems. If components are made in the EU, Japan, and SK that is okay. China - no. For that reason the chipandas are not going to dominate the component industry no matter how far commoditization goes. See this.

[Raja Bose]

Then there is all this mental masturbation of "convergence". Sure sounds like a good idea on a powerpoint, but users dont seem to care. Neither do developers.

A note about "convergence". People keep mistaking it for "convergence of UI" which while being a holy grail is a wet dream as far as I am concerned (just like the holy grail). Blame should be put on the HCI research community for perpetrating such BS. That is not to say you cannot have a consistency of certain UI elements across platforms (example Metro UI across PC/tablet/phone/XBox) but in essence convergence of UI is impractical becoz one size does not fit all.

Rather by convergence, what is implied is a convergence of the underlying platform and that is happening today (example WinRT). If it is done properly, users do not need to care (right now they do - will my XYZ app run on iPad but not on OS X). For developers it becomes more streamlined to do apps across multiple device categories but the biggest benefit is for the platform vendor who can push some new feature once and it goes across multiple device categories. Their development and maintenance resource allocations scale down by many factors which frees up more resource to do new features/improve UX etc. rather than maintain legacy tails along multiple parallel variants. FruitCo didn't do iOS completely separate from OS X by choice or some chankian forward-thinking - it was out of compulsion. Now behind the scenes they are moving to converge and so is Mickey. Whether they are successful in nailing it 500% is another question and depends on good architecture, product management and execution.

HW is converging already not in terms of architecture but in terms of capabilities - this provides impetus for convergence of platform. To the developer, platform is the abstraction layer hence, you bet they benefit from convergence of platform. This is one of the factors which may lead to some fundamental shifts in CE device trends in the next 3-5 years.

[Raja Bose]

And the CE industry has to blame themselves for that. Nokia did it in the early 00s when it shifted a bunch of its production facilities from the US and EU to China. Aside from manufacturing, the chipandas are also making fake electronic components with fake serial numbers for critical applications, and now in the US defense-aerospace industry, they insist to have traceable components for critical systems. If components are made in the EU, Japan, and SK that is okay. China - no. For that reason the chipandas are not going to dominate the component industry no matter how far commoditization goes. See this.

Forget Defense, thats a very small volume and very restricted market overall compared to CE. In CE component supply chain business, chipandas dominate today as we speak - so its not a question of if or even when, it has happened already. In early 2000s, GB never had factories in China on a large scale ever - its largest facilities were always in EU (Finland/Eastern Europe), India (Chennai), Vietnam and Mexico. The shift to China happened only post-2010.

[member_20292]

Would have been nice if HTC one came with stock android.

It takes precisely 5 minutes to put in a bootlegged stock cyanogenmod for the HTC one, which is being revealed on xda developers as we type.


And , I believe their SENSE UI is actually pretty darn good.

[Mort Walker]

^^^HTC was rumored to release another version of the One with an unlocked boot loader making it easier for custom ROMs. From what I understand the One has a locked boot loader, the S4 does as well except the version for TMO.

I suspect the ATT & TMO versions of the S4 will be identical to the Google Edition, so once the ROM becomes available for the Google Edition, then installation on the ATT & TMO S4 versions should be straight forward.

[Mort Walker]

Forget Defense, thats a very small volume and very restricted market overall compared to CE. In CE component supply chain business, chipandas dominate today as we speak - so its not a question of if or even when, it has happened already.

The volumes may be small, but margins are high, on the order of 300%, for components that service the defense-aerospace industry. They keep several companies in the bay area profitable who also do work for the CE industry. In the last few years, Anritsu (a Japanese T&M company), shifted a bunch of its operations to the Bay Area and are picking up business.

[member_20292]

^^^HTC was rumored to release another version of the One with an unlocked boot loader making it easier for custom ROMs. From what I understand the One has a locked boot loader, the S4 does as well except the version for TMO.

I suspect the ATT & TMO versions of the S4 will be identical to the Google Edition, so once the ROM becomes available for the Google Edition, then installation on the ATT & TMO S4 versions should be straight forward.

already retailing on the htc website for 575 and 750 USD for 32 and 64 gb.

unlocked bootloader does not matter much.....clockwordmod recovery will get there !

[member_20292]

BTW, which company is Netzilla?

[Raja Bose]

This one

Mortullah, comparing CE with defense is like jackfruit vs oranges - they are not comparable. Nobody in their right mind would expect chipanda (or Sammy or <insert any furrin non-Oiropean company>) to be a long-term dominant supplier of defense electronics components to massa - there are geo-political considerations against that and last thing massa needs is a taste of its own medicine. No such hang-ups in CE hence, chipanda has free reign and is making hay in sun and rain!

[Mort Walker]

It is interesting to what Sammy is doing. They're saying OK, you don't like OEM skins like TouchWiz, fine. Here you go with a plan android version. Now the question is, will Sammy continue this trend in the future? Where they release the future Galaxy S with all the bells and whistles (or turds as RB unfairly calls them) and one that is plain android?

[negi]

BTW, which company is Netzilla?

Cisco.

[Raja Bose]

Except Sammy didn't piously remove TouchWiz from the GS4, Chacha did. And knowing Sammy, they did not use their leverage against carriers to push the stock Android GS4 to carriers to either which is why you have to shell out $650.- to buy the GS4 with stock Android (same as buying an unlocked GS4, rooting it and loading stock Android on it later). Sammy is treating the GS4 with stock Android the same way it treated the Galaxy Nexus. Sorry, but spinning it as somehow an example of Sammy's large heartedness doesn't stick.

[Prem]

http://techwhack.co/google-field-trip-l ... dia-44497/

Google Field Trip launches in India!

Google has just rolled out a major update of their Field Trip app. The app is now available in 30+ languages. The big news is that it is also now available in more than 80 countries and that includes India!Other changes:
- Automatically translate cards that are not in your native language.
- New zoomed-out view of map that aggregates cards to make discovering sights and stories easier.he app basically runs in the background and alerts you if you are near an intere

[Mort Walker]

Mortullah, comparing CE with defense is like jackfruit vs oranges - they are not comparable. Nobody in their right mind would expect chipanda (or Sammy or <insert any furrin non-Oiropean company>) to be a long-term dominant supplier of defense electronics components to massa - there are geo-political considerations against that and last thing massa needs is a taste of its own medicine. No such hang-ups in CE hence, chipanda has free reign and is making hay in sun and rain!

Actually, chipanda did become a frequent component supplier over the last 10-15 years. It created a lot of trouble on a number of different platforms. The Russians blamed chipanda counterfit SRAM from Shenzen province for the failure of their Mars probe last year. Sammy (like the rest of SK), Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore are all ok. It's about traceability of the component from the manufacturer, wholesaler/retailer, to end user. You don't get that from chipanda.

[Mort Walker]

Except Sammy didn't piously remove TouchWiz from the GS4, Chacha did. And knowing Sammy, they did not use their leverage against carriers to push the stock Android GS4 to carriers to either which is why you have to shell out $650.- to buy the GS4 with stock Android (same as buying an unlocked GS4, rooting it and loading stock Android on it later). Sammy is treating the GS4 with stock Android the same way it treated the Galaxy Nexus. Sorry, but spinning it as somehow an example of Sammy's large heartedness doesn't stick.

Then there is no reason to sell it through Google? Why should Sammy sell stock Android when they are interested in making money through the various S-stuff services they push? It has nothing to do with large heartedness, but more development on the S4 which is the best Android device out there.

[Raja Bose]

Mortullah, comparing CE with defense is like jackfruit vs oranges - they are not comparable. Nobody in their right mind would expect chipanda (or Sammy or <insert any furrin non-Oiropean company>) to be a long-term dominant supplier of defense electronics components to massa - there are geo-political considerations against that and last thing massa needs is a taste of its own medicine. No such hang-ups in CE hence, chipanda has free reign and is making hay in sun and rain!

Actually, chipanda did become a frequent component supplier over the last 10-15 years. It created a lot of trouble on a number of different platforms. The Russians blamed chipanda counterfit SRAM from Shenzen province for the failure of their Mars probe last year. Sammy (like the rest of SK), Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore are all ok. It's about traceability of the component from the manufacturer, wholesaler/retailer, to end user. You don't get that from chipanda.

That's why I said one cannot expect chipanda's role in supplying critical electronics to Massa for defense systems to last. Defense in one area where price/reliability is not the only consideration and region being sourced from becomes very important. In CE it doesn't matter - if its cheap, if its reliable and supplier can commit to my projected volumes, why do I care where it comes from? Saying that becoz chipanda is not successful in dominating supply in defense implies it doesn't dominate CE is just plain silly. They already dominate in CE component sourcing and if you think Sammy somehow has a stranglehold on mobile IC design and fabs, think again.

Then there is no reason to sell it through Google? Why should Sammy sell stock Android when they are interested in making money through the various S-stuff services they push? It has nothing to do with large heartedness, but more development on the S4 which is the best Android device out there.

If Google wants to buy handsets at full price and sell them then who is Sammy to refuse? Sammy makes devices and will sell them to any supplier. Heck, if Microsoft Store wants to sell GS4 with Android, Sammy will be more than happy to supply them. Except one very important caveat - Sammy won't commit any significant marketing/advertising/distribution dollars behind selling the GS4 with stock Android as opposed to the GS4 with TouchWiz and S-crap. So as far as Sammy is concerned GS4 with stock Android is another Galaxy Nexus. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the way Sammy has been operating in mobile devices for the last decade or so regardless of what positive spin one puts on it.

[Mort Walker]

^^^I never said Sammy is dominant in mobile ICs. I said they were dominant in the entire semiconductor industry. World wide, Sammy produces 40% of DRAM and flash, 20% of all LCDs, and nearly 15% of all application processors (and that too at 28nm). It is an achievement. So you need to get over your irrational hate of Sammy. Nobody cares what they are doing to the mobile phone industry, what they do care about are the products they produce, yes they are flawed, but no more than the other guys.

Google went to Sammy for the S4, note that they didn't go to HTC or Sony. At least now we will see development of apps that utilize the S4 sensors. I am excited and will be getting one in June. Being with TMO, I get discounted prices for bringing my own phone for use.

[Raja Bose]

So you need to get over your irrational hate of Sammy.

Ulta chor kotwal ko daantay! I prefer to dwell on reality not some biased delusional love for any specific company, whether its Sammy, Mickey, Chacha, Takla, FruitCo, ZuckCo, NetZ, ChipZ....all these companies are faceless for-profit entities not cuddly benevolent beings

Nobody cares what they are doing to the mobile phone industry <snipped nonsense>

Really? Now nobody cares what they are doing? Suddenly they became unimportant overnight?! Tauba tauba.

Google went to Sammy for the S4, note that they didn't go to HTC or Sony.

Who buys Sony phones any more? As of yesterday's report, Sammy sells 97% of all Android phones and HTC/Sony combined sell 2.7%. Google went to LG for their Nexus after getting Sammy to build 2 Nexus devices back to back and getting deliberately nasty turds in return. At least LG and HTC are loyal partners and so is Asus. Chacha should buy Asus or at least do a long-term lock-in partnership with them - with Nexus 7 they have shown that they have good design and good HW which runs stock Android. As far as the GS4 with stock Android goes, don't expect any blockbuster sales from it. Frankly I would prefer Chacha to continue the Nexus4 model and bring one out with LTE support while keeping the same design and price point and improving retail availability and distribution - the latter is what is keeping it back from huge sales.

[negi]

At least 3 chaps in our office have now lost front/back panels on Nexus4s after a drop on the floor; it surely is the most flimsy phone in that segment.

[Mort Walker]

I prefer to dwell on reality not some biased delusional love for any specific company, whether its Sammy, Mickey, Chacha, Takla, FruitCo, ZuckCo, NetZ, ChipZ....all these companies are faceless for-profit entities not cuddly benevolent beings

No love or even admiration. Just respect of their technical capability. Just as we should respect Boeing's ability to produce, test and deliver the P-8i to the Indian Navy and will soon do the same for the C-17. Or Lockheed Martin delivering the C-130J on time and at cost to the IAF.

Who buys Sony phones any more? As of yesterday's report, Sammy sells 97% of all Android phones and HTC/Sony combined sell 2.7%. Google went to LG for their Nexus after getting Sammy to build 2 Nexus devices back to back and getting deliberately nasty turds in return. At least LG and HTC are loyal partners and so is Asus. Chacha should buy Asus or at least do a long-term lock-in partnership with them - with Nexus 7 they have shown that they have good design and good HW which runs stock Android. As far as the GS4 with stock Android goes, don't expect any blockbuster sales from it. Frankly I would prefer Chacha to continue the Nexus4 model and bring one out with LTE support while keeping the same design and price point and improving retail availability and distribution - the latter is what is keeping it back from huge saless.

Sony is trying. The Sony Experia ZR shows some real promise, but we'll have to wait and see. Neither the Nexus S or Galaxy Nexus were turds, they were failures of Google's marketing at a time when there was no Play Store. With the Galaxy Nexus, Google got wrapped up with VZW which got bloat ware on the phone. Google went with HTC, Samsung, and now LG. Having used all 3 brands, the Samsung's were the most reliable. The Nexus 5 is based off the upcoming LG Optimus G2. Hopefully, LG gives us better build quality and resolves the thermal throttling issue with the Nexus 5. By end of this year there will be 5 flagship Android phones coming out. The Note 3, LG Optimus G2, Nexus 5, Motorola X Phone, and Sony.

[krisna]

^^^^
I have the sony xperia tl. it is an awesome phone- fantastic camera, screen, battery life, fast and responsive.
love it.
I had HTC inspire 4g previously but this beats it easily.

[Anujan]

Sony does not have proper carrier agreements in the US. they could also have had real service differentiators like PS vita fame compatibility and so on.

[Singha]

Anritsu is a old company...not very common vs the likes of agilent, jdsu or sprirent but widely respected for quality esp in physical layer t&m

[Raja Bose]

If the Sammy Nexus phones were the best, then why is Chacha going with LG again for Nexus, hain ji?

Carrier relations are critical in US. You can go build the most innovative phone in the world with sooper dooper technology but if you don't have good relations with carriers your product is DOA. That's what happened with GB and the Meego N9 phone and basically killed any further development of Meego/homegrown OS option for them.

[hanumadu]

Since anmol mian is not here, I'll do the honours

Windows Phone outships Blackberry in Q1 2013

[Raja Bose]

^^^What it doesn't say is iPhunwa shipments are now growing slower than the market (i.e. their volumes increased but share decreased)....Bawarchi better do a dhamaka with iPhone5S. Rumour is the home button will have a finger print reader but is that enough of a gimmick to make people buy? I guess with FruitCo the faith of the faithfool is still strong.

WP share will grow slow and steady becoz Mickey has leverage in other areas which it can bring to bear unlike BB and has slowly but surely is managing to get missing major app vendors on board. Mickey and FruitCo are the only 2 vendors who have dominant offerings across multiple device categories. FruitCo will remain the stronghold of faithfool at least for now. Android should follow a Symbian like path and remain dominant for next few years - the only big danger is Sammy doing something funky and defecting. BB's future as a vertically integrated product vendor looks bleak. FirefoxOS/SailfishOS look DOA due to lack of muscle to convince operators in major markets to back them rather than any lack of technological chops.

[member_20292]

Mortullah, comparing CE with defense is like jackfruit vs oranges - they are not comparable. Nobody in their right mind would expect chipanda (or Sammy or <insert any furrin non-Oiropean company>) to be a long-term dominant supplier of defense electronics components to massa - there are geo-political considerations against that and last thing massa needs is a taste of its own medicine. No such hang-ups in CE hence, chipanda has free reign and is making hay in sun and rain!

Actually, chipanda did become a frequent component supplier over the last 10-15 years. It created a lot of trouble on a number of different platforms. The Russians blamed chipanda counterfit SRAM from Shenzen province for the failure of their Mars probe last year. Sammy (like the rest of SK), Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore are all ok. It's about traceability of the component from the manufacturer, wholesaler/retailer, to end user. You don't get that from chipanda.

nice perspective. given that I am for the first time in my career going to buy large amounts of good from there.

[member_20292]

so in the end....what should I get ? HTC one or sgs 4.

I have sgs 4 s grandpa.....the sgs1 t mobile vibrant. still works well does old Bess.

maybe HTC deserves a turn.....after all the good things I have heard written about it.

[Anujan]

Iphunwa is looking dated because they came first to the market and their UI is 6 years old now. The devices themselves are fantastic and top notch. The next version of iOS will get a UI refresh, FruitCo phones will look fresher then. I am sure that will provide a marketshare bump to them.

Also 30% of phunwas sold atleast in the US is pre-paid. iPhunwa is weak in that department. I am sure bawarchi is rectifying that with that polycarbonate iPhuna. Cheaper and faster to manufacture.

The biggest threat for Fruitco I see is from two sides. If chacha is able leverage cloud services to give a better experience in Android and if INTC comes up with better mobile chips. The former is a longer term issue, the latter is a medium term issue. If Intel gets its act together, atleast first in the tablet space, iPadwa might fall behind in performance and battery, they might then have to surrender and go intel way. The interim period will be the interesting one to watch.

The biggest threat for M$ is Nokia going under. Apparently Nokia shipped 85% of all windows phunwas shipped.

[Singha]

Appl is cash rich. They can hire the people needed to develop and test moving the iphone to a future intel chipset while keeping up with current chipset development cycle.

[Anujan]

Yes and there is no doubt about that. They have top notch talent who did it once and can probably do it again.

They could also introduce a compatibility layer like rosetta. The key difference is that when they moved their macs from PowerPC to Intel (main reason that resulted in more powerful and thinner macs with longer lasting batteries), the number of devices they sold was very less and there was no danger of losing marketshare when they made the move. However, in the iPad millions per quarter game, if iPad falls behind in performance for a few quarters, atleast in those quarters it will hurt their sales and marketshare. It will be interesting to see how their PA semi can face down Intel's engineers in terms of making low power and high performance designs.

By the way, here is a nice and interesting profile of Otellini: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... it/275825/

His key take away message is this: When Processor price was in the thousands of dollars, they sold millions of PCs. When it dropped to hundreds of dollars, they sold hundreds of millions of PCs. Now Intel should prepare for the time when processors are about $10, so they can sell billions of chips. Low margin per processor but billions of units shipped.

I think Intel has a real shot at this. Their new Silvermont will be a pretty competitive part for tablets. Their Medfield last year pretty much equalized Qualcomm's snapdragon. Now they have made greater advances. Benchmarks show that Silvermont performance is about that of a Core 2 duo of 2010 vintage. Imagine that kind of performance on a thin passively cooled tablet with 8-10 hours of battery life! Advances in semiconductor technology never fails to amaze me.

[Singha]

Has that other giant in semiconductor physics ie ibm ever expressed any interest in entering the mobile processor arena?

[Raja Bose]

Mickey can alleviate the threat of GB going under by simply pumping in cash (without buying it) - if its one thing Mickey has, its boatloads of cash. GB is also the only reason why Mickey doesn't make its own phones - it has the in-house capability to manufacture its own smart phones (probably even more than GB does at the moment). GB looks like it is finally getting in the groove of pushing out good products once more both in feature and smartphone categories so outlook on them is positive.

PA Semi may face down ChipZ on design arguably but when it comes to fabrication and manufacturing nobody comes close to ChipZ. Moving to x86 will require a herculean effort like when Macs switched to x86 but does Bawarchi have the guts and leadership abilities of the Mahdi to do a repeat of that effort?

[Anujan]

There is a nice article in Freakonomics blog on how too much emphasis is placed on CEOs and coaches, while most of the time the teams themselves have their own dynamic.

There was no "guts" vis-a-vis Mahdi. At some point they had to move to Intel if they wanted to make laptops. It was as simple as that. Intel was regularly beating them in performance, and later in power too. The future product map of powerPC was dead. How would you make a macbook air with a bulky low performance hotplate of a processor? I think FruitCo announced the switch to Intel in 2005 and Macbook air was introduced in 2008. They probably started working on the Air by 2006. By 2006, there was no powerPC part which could power the Macbook air. Too bulky, too hot and too slow.

At that point, it was a survival issue. FruitCo was dependent on a supplier who could not deliver. They could drown with them or jump ship. Remember that at that point even IBM had moved its servers to Intel. Their PC division was churning out Intel-based desktops and laptops. FruitCo was pretty much the only customer of PowerPC and that too not a big customer, given their marketshare.

Once they saw the writing on the wall, it was the job of the engineers in FruitCo to make the move. And they are among the best.

If the gap between what PA semi can put out and Intel can put out grows to a size where FruitCo cannot make the best products, they will move again. They still have the engineers and the cash to make the move.

Objective-C is compiled down to machine code and is not Just-in-time compiled from bytecode. It does have a garbage collector, dynamic typing and run-time linkage, but that doesnt mean that programs dont need to be recompiled, unlike say, Java.

[Raja Bose]

There was no "guts" vis-a-vis Mahdi. At some point they had to move to Intel if they wanted to make laptops. It was as simple as that. Intel was regularly beating them in performance, and later in power too. The future product map of powerPC was dead. How would you make a macbook air with a bulky low performance hotplate of a processor? At that point, it was a survival issue. FruitCo was dependent on a supplier who could not deliver. They could drown with them or jump ship. At that point, even IBM had moved its servers to Intel.

Once they saw the writing on the wall, it was the job of the engineers in FruitCo to make the move. And they are among the best.

That's actually over-simplifying what really took place. It was an effort which very much had the Mahdi's involvement day-to-day. FruitCo first of all is not a place run by engineers unlike ChipZ/Mickey/Chacha and is hardly a company which fits in that generic freakonomics article's model (those other 3 do, but not FruitCo) - every single time FruitCo had a run-of-the-mill CEO it suffered becoz its internal company dynamics are very different. So yeah in this case Mahdi does get the credit for pulling this off. FruitCo engineers are good just like engineers at any of the top ITvity companies but they are not unique geniuses either - thats just hyperbole. Large scale time-bound efforts like these don't hinge on individual contributors magically working together - doesn't happen. It requires very solid program management skills and excellent planning and if you ask a FruitCo vet who was around that time, they give the Mahdi a lot of credit for marshalling the masses to pull this off including personally getting involved in minute details of planning the whole effort. That was in essence the Mahdi's core skill which was his ability to extract the best work from his designers and engineers, frequently beyond their own expectation and his ability to focus. Don't forget those same FruitCo engineers and sooper-dooper designers (including our Sir Ive) were churning out turds before the Mahdi rejoined in 1997 and lately the quality of their output has again noticeably dropped. Hence, my questioning of whether they can pull this off again under Bawarchi with the same success as last time.

[Mort Walker]

If the Sammy Nexus phones were the best, then why is Chacha going with LG again for Nexus, hain ji?

Carrier relations are critical in US. You can go build the most innovative phone in the world with sooper dooper technology but if you don't have good relations with carriers your product is DOA. That's what happened with GB and the Meego N9 phone and basically killed any further development of Meego/homegrown OS option for them.

The idea behind Nexus was to showcase the different Android OEMs. GOOG is still with Sammy. Nov. 2012 GOOG gave us the Sammy Nexus 10, May 2013 the S4 Google Edition, Nov. 2013 the Nexus 11. If Sammy was a turd for phones and tablets, then GOOG would never have dealt with them for the S4 Google Edition. Speculation is that the after the LG Nexus 5, GOOG will select another OEM for the next Nexus phone in late 2014. It could be MOTO or Sony if either are still around.

Carrier relations are important in the US because of the forced subsidy.

[Raja Bose]

^^Where is the KLP/Nexus HD announcement which was supposed to happen during Google I/O? This Google I/O was a big disappointment in terms of new stuff getting revealed (exact opposite of 2012 Google I/O) though I liked the Glass hacking session.

Nexus is as much a showcase for Android as Surface is for Win8. Chacha had real strong ambitions behind launching the Nexus One namely, breaking the carriers' dictatorship in massa. But when those plans failed in a face saving move it was spun off as a reference/showcase since it became clear to Chacha why such endeavors would fail in carrier-dominated massa market. In retrospect, its funny how Chacha's move to sell an unlocked phone was applauded as being revolutionary and magical by the anal-e-cysts who conveniently forgot that GB had been doing that for a decade and did not succeed. So it was hardly a surprise when Chacha's plans to break the carriers' stranglehold in massa failed in 2010 (1st time it failed was during negotiations in 2008-9 when Chacha had to GUBO to VZW). They should have studied GB's experience and tried to evolve a strat-e-jee from its shortcomings but apparently they didn't.

On another note, Nexus Q is getting spun off as an experiment when in reality it was supposed to be a consumer product. ChromeBook Pixel will probably meet the same fate (my spider sense tells me it does have stamp of the Nexus Q design team on it going by the ridiculous BOM). Making one's own CE devices and getting people to buy them is not a trivial task and requires certain culture changes in the product design and development process vs doing pure software or web/cloud services. Pricing matters, BOM matters (both price and functionality-wise) and there is no concept of shipping beta HW to mass market consumers so there are drop-dead deadlines for freezing design, manufacturing specs etc. way before product ever comes to market. That is why when Chacha partners with device OEMs like Asus it succeeds but its own homegrown devices have always failed to take off. The only reason Mickey has been somewhat successful in its homegrown HW efforts is becoz it is an old school SW manufacturer which actually used to sell physically boxed software in floppies and CDs (vs web-based stuff which can be updated/fixed at will by vendor) which required conceptually similar design and development processes/deadlines as selling HW.

[hanumadu]

so in the end....what should I get ? HTC one or sgs 4.

I have sgs 4 s grandpa.....the sgs1 t mobile vibrant. still works well does old Bess.

maybe HTC deserves a turn.....after all the good things I have heard written about it.

Do you change phones every six months? This is the third time in probably a year you have asked this question.

[hanumadu]

The biggest threat for M$ is Nokia going under. Apparently Nokia shipped 85% of all windows phunwas shipped.

It is said M$ gets about 1b$ annually as license fee from android manufacturers. That alone should keep the windows phone going indefinitely till it becomes a success, GB or no GB .. just like XBox as RB likes to say

[member_20292]

that generic freakonomics article's model (those other 3 do, but not FruitCo) - every single time FruitCo had a run-of-the-mill CEO it suffered becoz its internal company dynamics are very different. So yeah in this case Mahdi does get the credit for pulling this off. FruitCo engineers are good just like engineers at any of the top ITvity companies but they are not unique geniuses either - thats just hyperbole. Large scale time-bound efforts like these don't hinge on individual contributors magically working together - doesn't happen. It requires very solid program management skills and excellent planning and if you ask a FruitCo vet who was around that time, they give the Mahdi a lot of credit for marshalling the masses to pull this off including personally getting involved in minute details of planning the whole effort. That was in essence the Mahdi's core skill which was his ability to extract the best work from his designers and engineers, frequently beyond their own expectation and his ability to focus. Don't forget those same FruitCo engineers and sooper-dooper designers (including our Sir Ive) were churning out turds before the Mahdi rejoined in 1997 and lately the quality of their output has again noticeably dropped. Hence, my questioning of whether they can pull this off again under Bawarchi with the same success as last time.

This is exactly right. In fact if I had a job offer with fruit co, I would probably refuse, because of this very reason. Its a communist dictatorship that has just had its cultural revolution due to Mao's death.
It will take some time to stabilize into a normal engineering company.

Chipzilla, not so much. It is an RnD guy's company and run like a huge ass lab. I believe the IN in the name stands for India. This is one place, where that "35% of NASA employees are Indian" type-forwarded -email might ACTUALLY BE TRUE.