Category Archives: Mobile phones

Finally, a derivative that is actually useful

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As every mathematics student knows, what’s most interesting about variables is the rate at which they are changing — the derivative. This graph — from Business Insider — plots the derivative of smartphone sales in the US. As you can see, the rate of change has apparently peaked, which means that sales are slowing. So does this mean that the smartphone explosion is over?

Henry Blodget, with his customary certitude thinks that it is. The peak of annual unit gains, he says, occurs around the halfway mark of adoption and US smartphone penetration is now around 50 per cent. If true, this means that smartphone sales in that market will “become more dependent on replacements and upgrades than attracting new users”. And of course networks will have to find ways of screwing more revenue out of existing users.

I suppose we will reach a point in developed countries where nearly everybody has a smartphone — though having recently seen the old-style Nokia phones my kids got for going to music festivals, I wonder. After all, these ancient devices have amazing battery life, in addition to being tiny and robust.

Even if Business Insider and Blodget are right about the saturation of the US market, there are huge markets in the rest of the world where the smartphone invasion is just beginning.

Given the banking crisis brought about by complex ‘derivatives’, it’s nice to find a derivative that’s actually useful.

That “Apple Tax”

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Horse sense from Jean-Louis Gassée

Following last week’s verdict against Samsung, the kommentariat have raised the specter of an egregious new Apple Tax, one that Apple will levy on other smartphone makers who will have no choice but to pass the burden on to you. The idea is this: Samsung’s loss means it will now have to compete against Apple with its dominant hand — a lower price tag — tied behind its back. This will allow Apple to exact higher prices for its iPhones (and iPads) and thus inflict even more pain and suffering on consumers.

There seems to be a moral aspect, here, as if Apple should be held to a higher standard. Last year, Apple and Nokia settled an IP “misunderstanding” that also resulted in a “Tax”…but it was Nokia that played the T-Man role: Apple paid Nokia more than $600M plus an estimated $11.50 per iPhone sold. Where were the handwringers who now accuse Apple of abusing the patent system when the Nokia settlement took place? Where was the outrage against the “evil”, if hapless, Finnish company? (Amusingly, observers speculate that Nokia has made more money from these IP arrangements than from selling its own Lumia smartphones.)

Apple’s Big Patent Win: implications

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Interesting WSJ piece by Mike Isaac about Apple’s victory over Samsung.

If there’s one takeaway from Apple’s massive win over Samsung in the most-watched patent trial of the year, it’s this: If you copy our stuff, we’ll go after you.

That’s the message delivered alongside the verdict on Friday afternoon, in which the jury found Samsung guilty of infringing upon six out of the seven Apple patents in question. The result? More than $1 billion in damages awarded to Apple (or $1,049,343,540 if you want to get nitpicky about it), and of course, bragging rights in what has been Apple’s longstanding claim that Samsung devices were “slavishly copies” of Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

And now that Apple’s day in court has validated most of its patents and claims, the technology giant is armed to the teeth with enough ammo to go after any and every OEM out there.

The obvious implication is that Android OEMs need to be careful (as Charles Arthur points out). A less obvious one is that this might be good news for makers of Windows phones, on the grounds that they are less vulnerable to IP attacks from Apple than Android OEMs. Hmmm…

Ultimately, this patent verdict is bad news for everybody except Apple — as Dan Gillmor points out in his Guardian column. And it confirms the extent to which the patent system is broken.

Smartphones, clouds and control

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This morning’s Observer column about the latest Ofcom survey of the communications market.

The Ofcom document runs to 411 pages, so it is custom-built for empirical masochists. Given that life is short, and you may have other things to do on a Sunday morning, I will just focus on some findings in the report that leapt out at me, and ponder their implications. The survey shows that home internet access in the UK rose by 3% between 2011 and 2012 and now stands at 80%. So eight out of 10 people have access to the network. And the speed of that access is increasing: by the first quarter of 2012, for example, 76% of UK homes had a broadband connection of some description. Equally interesting is the discovery that the largest rise in internet access over the last year – 9% – was among 65 to 74-year-olds. So the idea of “silver surfers” as an endangered minority needs recalibrating.

Next, we find that two-fifths of UK adults are now smartphone users. Take-up has risen from 27% in 2011 to 39%. This is interesting because the mobile networks and the telecoms industry have in the past consistently underestimated the popularity of internet-enabled mobile phones. It’s also one of the reasons why Nokia finds itself in so much trouble.

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of the smartphone tsunami, especially when we see Ofcom’s discovery that more than four in 10 smartphone users say their phone is more important for accessing the internet than any other device…

Patent absurdity exposed at last

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This morning’s Observer column about Richard Posner’s landmark ruling.

What brings Posner to mind this Sunday morning, however, is not his views on obesity but on intellectual property. You may have noticed that in the last few years the world’s biggest technology companies have become lavish patrons of the legal profession. Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Amazon and others have being suing one another in courts around the globe, alleging that they are infringing one another’s patents. The resulting bonanza for lawyers has long passed the point of insanity, but up to now the world’s courts seem powerless to make the litigants see sense. As a result, judges find themselves allocated the role of pawns in what are effectively business negotiations between global companies.

Until now. What happened is that Posner, in an unusual move, got himself assigned to a lower court to hear a case in which Apple was suing Google (which had purchased Motorola in order to get its hands on the phone company’s patent portfolio) over alleged infringement of Apple’s smartphone patents. Posner listened to the lawyers and then threw out the case. But what was really dramatic was the way he eviscerated the legal submissions. At one point, for example, Apple claimed that Google was infringing one of its patents on the process of unlocking a phone by swiping the screen. “Apple’s argument that a tap is a zero-length swipe,” said Posner, “is silly. It’s like saying that a point is a zero-length line.”

The real cost of the smartphone revolution

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This morning’s Observer column.

For many years, the most assiduous provider of data about the ongoing revolution has been Mary Meeker, an industry analyst who once worked for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank that acted as lead underwriter for the Netscape IPO in August 1995 (and thereby triggered the first internet boom). She began making an annual conference presentation, “The Internet Report”, which acquired legendary status in the industry because it distilled from the froth some elements of reality.

Ms Meeker is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, but she has not abandoned her old habits. Last week she presented her latest annual report – now labelled “Internet Trends” – at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference in California.

It’s a whopping 112-slide presentation, which bears serious contemplation. Buried within it are some startling numbers…

Taming the email monster

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This morning’s Observer column.

Email has become the central communications channel of all modern organisations, to the point where none of them could now function without it. But there’s increasing evidence – both anecdotal and empirical – that it has become dysfunctional. It eats into people’s working and thinking time, for example, distracts them from doing “real” work and generates guilt feelings that ratchet up stress levels to unsustainable levels.

In the old world of desktop PCs, you could at least leave it behind when you left the office. But the advent of the smartphone changed all that. Email has now infiltrated leisure time, family time – even sleep time. It’s become a monster that’s destroying our lives.

Deep down, most of us know this. But we daren’t talk about it out loud, for fear of seeming inadequate…

Why txt is gr8

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s a question: what’s bigger and far more important than Facebook? Hint: it’s very low-tech and doesn’t need a smartphone or even an internet connection. And this year marks its 20th birthday, which means that in internet time it’s 140 years old. Oh, and it doesn’t involve LOLcats either.

Got it yet? It’s SMS – text messaging to you and me. Or txt msng, if you prefer. Two-thirds of the world’s population – that’s over 4 billion people – have access to it because that’s the number of people who have mobile phones, and even the cheapest, clunkiest handset can send SMS messages. It’s had a much bigger impact on people’s lives than anything dreamed up in Silicon Valley.

Interestingly, Silicon Valley played almost no role in it. SMS emerged on our side of the Atlantic and was the brainchild of the kind of European intergovernmental initiative that drives Ukip nuts…