Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 24 Aug 2013 03:37

^^^Does it have real (as in HW) OIS or just the SW crap?

In a year or two from now, you get a new phunwa, that's what happens.

All in all good review.

nachiket · Post by **nachiket** » 24 Aug 2013 03:44

Raja Bose wrote:^^^Does it have real (as in HW) OIS or just the SW crap?

Do any phones besides the two PureView ones have that?

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 24 Aug 2013 03:56

Raja Bose wrote:^^^Does it have real (as in HW) OIS or just the SW crap?

In a year or two from now, you get a new phunwa, that's what happens.

All in all good review.

OIS is in h/w. Poorly implemented in my opinion, and interestingly enough Sammy I believe does it better in s/w. The low light capability comes at an expense of loss of detail and white balance.
Now I await the Lumia 1020 at some point.

Thanks for compliment.

I will say this, the audio is really keeping me hooked to this phone. I was listening to Simon & Garfunkle Mrs. Robinson via streaming Google Music through my car stereo and I could hear detail that made the whole song very pleasant. At the end of the song I had a big smile on my face thinking of Lal mullah and his MILFs. That's gotta be worth something?

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 24 Aug 2013 05:40

Ballmer tried to buy Yahoo for ~45 Billion $. Thankfully (for M$) that deal fell through. Any evaluation of him as a CEO shouldn't overlook that.

Most of Yahoo's value now is derived from 2 things (1) Marissa motorma as CEO (2) Yahoo's stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

Imagine what would have happened if M$ yahoo deal had gone through.

Suraj · Post by **Suraj** » 24 Aug 2013 06:14

Anujan wrote:Imagine what would have happened if M$ yahoo deal had gone through.

Ballmer running around stage dripping sweat while Ms.Mayer desperately ran around trying to avoid him ?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 24 Aug 2013 07:18

^^^that would make for a new animated gif with marissa replacing the pie

Under Fester Mickey has grown and remained stable despite billu leaving..

most ITvity companies cannot even claim the same even on a smaller scale. And we can see how hard it is when the original founder leaves. I would bet Bawarchi would kill to get some of Mickeys stability into FruitCo. Chacha should have that unless Larry pulls some major boogers in next 5-7 years. FB....only Allah knows....

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 24 Aug 2013 07:34

Not sure why this huge hate for Bawarchi. He is doing just fine.

As I had pointed out before, FruitCo has taken anywhere between 3 to 6 years to introduce new product lines -- and they have waited till the products are just right. For example, they could have introduced iPad along with iPod touch -- but then you wouldnt have had performance, size or apps for both platforms.

FruitCo has a supply chain that is the envy of everyone, a retail operation more profitable than tiffanys, an Online marketplace that does more transaction than most mid sized banks and a developer ecosystem which is #1 in monetization and developer attention. With assets like these, they are best positioned to introduce new product lines.

People who claim that innovation has stalled under Bawarchi -- do you remember the long gap between iPod and iPhone where everyone and their grandmother wanted a wide screen iPod married with a Phone and were losing it when quarter after quarter, Mahdi appeared and simply bumped up the specs of the iPod, made it thinner, smaller and flash based?

And then anyone remember the collective insanity of iFanboys when they shouted themselves hoarse requesting a tablet and Mahdi just added features to iPhunwa like 3G? And then do anyone remember the collective "Meh" when iPad was introduced? This image sums it up:

And the "innovation has died" hysteria even back then?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 24 Aug 2013 08:11

Anujan wrote:Not sure why this huge hate for Bawarchi. He is doing just fine.

Its too early to say he is doing fine and preliminary indicators are not exactly great. Like I mentioned before, currently FruitCo is still moving under the momentum of stuff which happened under the Mahdi. This is common behavior in large corporations. They don't just collapse and die suddenly one day except in rare occassions....its a gradual decline. What have the Bawarchi's achievements been after he became CEO and was no longer under the Mahdi's gaze? And FruitCo is not Sammy or GB, so its supply chain, retail operation all depend on the desirability of its product more than the other companies. If that falters, FruitCo dies. Plain and simple onlee. And the Bawarchi is no products guy like the Mahdi and the same Ive who made the iPhunwa/iPadwa made grey boxes under Amelio before the Mahdi came - that is the primary concern.

From paanwallah's fourth cousin I hear that Bawarchi is more MMS while Ive baba is running a large part of the show.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 24 Aug 2013 09:08

Google reportedly working on its own car, considering autonomous taxi service

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 24 Aug 2013 10:20

glass has been made and remade for 100s of years. yet is there a screen glass that is shatterproof for a 4feet drop does not pickup fingerprints and oil ? why dont the makers create such a glass or coating and use it

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 24 Aug 2013 10:30

^^^there is but I doubt it will meet the weight and dimension requirements of light fluffy Mahdi approved iDevices.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 24 Aug 2013 15:10

well make it happen, make compact batteries happen....rather than ppi wars, metal cases, MP wars and app store wars. closes a big gap. people who make the hubble, sniper EO pods and L lenses should be able to do this.

btw is corning the sole owner and supplier of gorilla glass or does others like asahi and st.gobain also supply the cellphone & tablet industry? if gorilla2 is the onlee game in town, why isnt corning stock soaring into the higher reaches and that moribund HQ town in upstate NY the new makkah with a swank new city center?
or is it?

the youtube app for ipad has changed. it has the same horrid composer type window that gmail had got lately ... goes away in a picture-in-picture mode on a swipe. I suspect the same team from gmail has been reassigned to "fix" youtube and the boys/girls are hard at work

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 02:45

^^^Corning owns Gorilla Glass as a product. I am not sure if the process patent on that is still valid coz it was created in the 50s iirc. Otherwise anybody else can also make their "Gorilla" Glass.

iPhunwa doesn't use Gorilla Glass anymore (since iPhunwa4)...it uses some cheap crap glass sourced from chipanda.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 25 Aug 2013 02:53

well even gorilla glass 3 is not impact resistant.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 03:00

^^^depends on the impact

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 25 Aug 2013 03:04

perhaps layered or edged with rubber-silicon bushings it can.

perhaps not:

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 25 Aug 2013 03:39

Latest vogue. Which has set people to debate the no 1 issus affecting yahoo. Should Marissa motorma have posed like this.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 04:03

^^If it drives traffic to Yahoo web properties, why not?

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 25 Aug 2013 04:23

Suraj wrote:
Anujan wrote:Imagine what would have happened if M$ yahoo deal had gone through.
Ballmer running around stage dripping sweat while Ms.Mayer desperately ran around trying to avoid him ?

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 25 Aug 2013 04:26

Anujan, Bawarchi's problem is that he is not Mahdi. People loved the cult of Mahdi, not really the cult of Appil. Bawarchi can come up with create a foon which can teleport people and people will still yawn.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 25 Aug 2013 05:02

Yes and thats why Bawarchi is making pragmatic moves. Introducing a lower cost iPhunwa for example: Their margins on that is going to roughly be the same as the iPhunwa, it comes in colors to appeal to asians and women. Pretty much a market driven decision -- FruitCo is weak among first time smartphone buyers especially in emerging markets (where people arent as rich) and Cell phone companies are slowly moving towards cutting device subsidies.

If they can maintain good user experience and release products for all segments of the Market (unlike Mahdi who would release only premium products at premium prices) they can do well.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 25 Aug 2013 05:21

Not sure whats happening with M$. By all metric they are doing just fine, and will continue to do just fine. The re-org was totally unnecessary and the re-org is the reason Uncle fester had to go.

Bulk of M$ revenue is from Windows and Office divisions. Their lock-in is on corporates (not consumers) and thats why the businesses are stable, high margin and long term (remember that FruitCo lock-in is on consumers, who are typically very fickle and can change their buying habits very fast). Running a company which provides services to other businesses as a collection of divisions makes sense. Each division is focussed on their customers, what they want next, what features to ship, what timelines to follow, where money is to be made etc. Growth for M$ could come from new lines of business -- like Azure for example. There is a lot of money to be made there.

Instead they developed some kind of weird apple-envy and re-org'ed the company. There are two issues with this.

1. No company the size of M$ is run this way -- except for FruitCo. (In FruitCo for example, it is impossible to determine how much iOS brings in. It is clumped with how much iTunes store brings in and how much iPhone brings in and iPad brings in). But FruitCo has always been an outlier.

2. If they want to become a "devices and services" company organized functionally then it comes with pitfalls. Users for example are notoriously fickle. You have to keep iterating on products to keep them interested. M$ is weak along this dimension due to two facts (a) They should re-engineer product groups to make several releases per year rather than one major release every year or a couple of years. In fact they used to tout this as a "feature" as in they did not disturb businesses by changing features so often (b) They should constantly keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve.

So there is the double threat: (A) They have actually make the transition to a company that is run in a FruitCo-type manner (B) After the transition, they have to get on the innovation treadmill to keep things moving. Now there is one more threat: Ballmer has made this huge re-org and is leaving: Could be tomorrow, could be a year from now -- leaves him with uncertain amount of time to implement the re-org. Actually the re-org itself might have forced him out: He apparently has a photographic memory and encyclopedic knowledge of how the business is run in each division. If this is his skill then he is unsuitable to run a functional organization, which requires more strategic thinking at a company level and collaborative second-in-commands -- along the lines of how one product feeds into the success of another, even though by itself it might not make money. Also any successful functional organization can make only a few products. FruitCo is an example. If they make a lot of products it gets very complicated to run. Probably hastened his departure.

A new CEO if he/she is an outsider, would want to org the company the way the new CEO wants (according to his/her management philosophy) which may not be the same way as Ballmer wanted.

My point is why all this hullaballoo. Would you rather be a profitable, stable, growing business like IBM* or be exciting in-the-news business like Amazon and Yahoo (who by the way dont make much money).

Instead they could have worked on their cloud offering, made sure their services ran on all platforms and had installable software as well. Essentially served businesses in a way FruitCo and/or Chacha is not interested in serving. Instead they want to make magic pixie dust coated tablets that dont sell and only piss off their OEM partners.

*Bulk of IBM's revenue (They made ~100 Billion last year) is from selling Middleware to other businesses. Doesnt get any more unsexy than that.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 08:13

Anujan wrote: Instead they could have worked on their cloud offering, made sure their services ran on all platforms and had installable software as well.

They already do that, no? Thats probably the biggest change which went under the radar - all of Mickey's stuff is now in the cloud, has UX as good as the native versions and works well across all major browsers. The boys & gals at Gmail need to take a lesson from that - the UX there is going from bad to worse and sleazy G+ tactics by VickyG is not winning Chacha any friends among consumers.

Frankly, I don't know if the reorg by itself changes anything since all their business units are intact except WinPhone got merged with Windows which is logical since technology-wise their code base is getting more and more merged and WinPhone was existing as a special division for quite a while without any reason.

KJo · Post by **KJo** » 25 Aug 2013 08:47

The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography

vina · Post by **vina** » 25 Aug 2013 09:05

Anujan wrote:Their lock-in is on corporates (not consumers) and thats why the businesses are stable, high margin and long term (remember that FruitCo lock-in is on consumers, who are typically very fickle and can change their buying habits very fast)

Wasn't there another company which said exactly the same thing, we have an ironclad grip in the enterprise, especially in a niche that is incredibly important and no other product ever (including as of now) does that particular niche as well as that offering , and guarantees a vitally important thing in enterprise, namely security. They were smug, saying Fruit etc, is just Bull*it.

Guess, what happened, that company has put itself up for "Strategic Alternatives" (I am taking about RIM/BB and it's email and messaging thingy and lock in the enterprise).

I think someone at Mickey Soft got the memo about the "lock in the enterprise" and what happened at BB.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 25 Aug 2013 09:21

but BB was a one trick pony in a niche - email for people on the go. you never need BB just to work in the office unlike MS-office suite incl vital elements like excel, word and outlook. the installed base and users of MS will exceed BB by factors of 1000s. they are the IBM of the desktop, they are the desktop. who is their competitor - openoffice? zoho? google docs? none even come within miles.

btw how is HP doing - you had predicted they would wipe everyone out and own the cloud infra etc

is hurd sahib still around in the wheelhouse?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 09:33

^^^Hurd sahib is in Oracle, no? I heard he sometimes run on the Oracle Trail in the early morning but never caught him.

Sriman · Post by **Sriman** » 25 Aug 2013 11:49

MS has quietly been revamping it's Servers and Tools business and i think they're making good progress. SQL Server seems much more mature and i see quite a few companies going in for MSBI stack as well. Data Integration and BI was never their strength but their latest offerings there are quite competent. Their pricing is very aggressive and they provide excellent integrated developer tools.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 25 Aug 2013 12:30

hyper-V as a virtualization platform is also starting to catch up with vmware...

last few years they have gone all quiet, no media splashes , no autonomous cars/ google glass /"this changes everything.again" type hype..but quietly in engineering mode.

when ballmer took over and had this famous chair throwing incident...people wrote him off if he could hold the ship together, but give him +ve points for not only doing that but making MSFT better.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 25 Aug 2013 12:34

OT, but where's the major sahib ?

https://twitter.com/majorlyp

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 25 Aug 2013 12:38

who is he? some ex-spetsnaz type now in omon leadership?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 12:50

Google Glass is good PR for Chacha to show they are still cool after almost decade and a half, that's essentially it. The technology is just not there and even if the basic technological challenges are solved, it still has a large number of HCI issues of which there are no easy solutions.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 25 Aug 2013 14:41

Singha wrote:who is he? some ex-spetsnaz type now in omon leadership?

haan.

kahan ho major sahib, waapis aa jao.

vina · Post by **vina** » 25 Aug 2013 15:06

Singha wrote:but BB was a one trick pony in a niche -

Okay. What is Chipzilla , but exactly that ?

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 25 Aug 2013 15:22

intll has made enough products, sufficiently different.

also they are an old school type hwre co......like oil companies...everyone needs processors

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 20:09

vina wrote:
Singha wrote:but BB was a one trick pony in a niche -
Okay. What is Chipzilla , but exactly that ?

ChipZ has the advantage that what it makes has a high barrier of entry for other folks. And it is not 500% secure there also....look at all the chipanda cos churning out processors left, right and center. If the Wintel stranglehold is broken, ChipZ is no less vulnerable.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 25 Aug 2013 20:21

chipz 14nm atom plans can make a kill.. amd is ways behind especially in single processor execution and hyperthreading model. long term, higher capable core makes a killing than those focused on multi-core specs.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 25 Aug 2013 20:43

Why Steve Ballmer Failed

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 25 Aug 2013 21:40

^^^Its pretty poorly written and researched for a hit piece.

This is the funniest statement from it:

When he took control, in 2000, Microsoft was one of the most powerful and feared companies in the world. It had a market capitalization of around five hundred billion dollars, the highest of any company on earth.

I wonder if the author ever heard of the dotcom bust?

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 25 Aug 2013 22:51

Raja Bose wrote: Frankly, I don't know if the reorg by itself changes anything since all their business units are intact except WinPhone got merged with Windows which is logical since technology-wise their code base is getting more and more merged and WinPhone was existing as a special division for quite a while without any reason.

It has become a functional org from a divisional org. That means sales/marketing/revenue is centralized (rather than split out as server & tools, business etc) and all products are cross functional. It is a good thing and a bad thing. Good thing because divisions will stop sniping at each other. Bad thing because it is easy for divisions to run many products each -- but becomes much harder for a functional org to run many products -- each product cuts across functions. Very few orgs the size of M$ is run as a functional organization -- because very few orgs the size of M$ produces few products. FruitCo is a notable exception. Instead you have companies like General Electric, which is more like a loose conglomerates of several different companies, each of which know their target audience well and decide on their own products and timelines.

Making a company into a functional org is inevitably followed by cutting down the product portfolio.

I think the decision to re-org M$ will be reversed in some way. I have no idea what their fascination with consumer products is. They should realize and cherish their greatest accomplishments -- giving businesses the tools and software they need. Instead they want to sell many shiny iThings to consumers.