Linked List: January 8, 2013

Tuesday, 8 January 2013

‘Sorry, Stela, We Need to Get Our Name Out There and It’s Your Turn to Say Something Completely Insane.’ ★

John Moltz, on an analyst’s prediction that Windows Phone will overtake Android in smartphone market share — in 2013.

Worth a re-link, regarding yesterday’s item pondering why Samsung has become the only successful (i.e. profitable) maker of Android handsets: they spend an astonishing amount of money on advertising and marketing. How much? At least 10 times more than Apple — and more than Apple, Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola combined.

The Perennial Less-Expensive iPhone ★

Élyse Betters, writing for 9to5Mac, points out that this isn’t the first time the WSJ (among others) have claimed Apple is working on a less-expensive new iPhone model.

Show Us the Pixels ★

Everyone’s favorite rumor rag, DigiTimes:

Some sources claimed that they have seen the sample of the low-cost iPhone, which will come with a larger display, meeting the prevailing trend for the adoption of 5-inch displays for high-end models. They added that the low-priced iPhone will also have a brand new exterior design.

Any story claiming a new iPhone screen size needs to specify pixel counts. Same pixel count as existing iPhone but a bigger screen? New (higher) pixel count? Makes a huge difference for developers. Color me skeptical that Apple would introduce another new screen size of any sort. Even the minimal shift from a 3.5-inch 960 × 640 to a 4-inch 1136 × 640 has taken months for developers to catch up with.

WSJ: ‘Apple Working on a Less-Expensive iPhone’ ★

Jessica E. Lessin, reporting for the WSJ:

The cheaper phone could resemble the standard iPhone, with a different, less-expensive body, one of the people said.

One possibility under consideration is lowering the cost of the device by using a different shell made of polycarbonate plastic; in contrast, the iPhone 5 currently has an aluminum housing.

Many other parts could remain the same or be recycled from older iPhone models.

Apple’s strategy for lower-priced phones for the last four years has been to sell one- and two-year-old models at a discount. But perhaps the glass-backed iPhone 4 and 4S (and, come next year, the aluminum-backed iPhone 5) are inherently too expensive to produce to hit certain lower price points. Maybe Apple just wants to get rid of the last remaining products using those old grody 30-pin adapter ports. But whatever the reason, this would be a significant strategic shift.

Update: I think this is a misleading way to describe Apple’s market position:

Apple now faces greater pressure to make the iPhone more affordable. An onslaught of lower cost rivals powered by Google Inc.’s Android operating system are gaining market share.

In the 2012 third quarter, Apple held only 14.6% of worldwide smartphone shipments, down from a peak of 23% in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, according to IDC.

This makes it sound like Apple’s iPhone sales peaked in 2011, but that’s not true. They continue to grow. What happened is that “smartphones” were but a sliver over the overall phone market when Apple got started in 2007, and now have reached over 50 percent of the total phone market. So Apple’s share of “smartphones” dropped from 2011 to 2012, because even though iPhone sales continued to grow, they didn’t grow as fast as the entire handset industry’s shift to smartphones (which shift, was, yes, almost entirely about Android).

Apple’s share of worldwide phone shipments has done nothing but go up since 2007. I doubt many WSJ readers are aware of that after reading this article. (Although it may well be true that Apple needs to introduce new lower-cost phones for this to remain true.)

Tradeshow Tailgating ★

Nice piece of gonzo-style CES coverage by Trent Wolbe for The Verge:

The one time I let my steely gaze drift I was ambushed by a goatee’d representative for a “Flipboard competitor” with a specialized algorithm for social news gathering. Unfortunately for the rep, who was just trying to do his job, I don’t use Flipboard, I don’t think the world needs another social news gathering tool, and, worse, I’m really bad at disguising my contempt for boring new software. He could sense my heart growing colder as he pitched and, in a valiant attempt to score a new media ally, he offered me exclusive beta access to the product (I wasn’t interested) and, finally, the chance to win the Samsung LED display at his booth because it was cheaper to buy than rent it and they needed an efficient way to unload it after the event ended. While my brief relationship with the rep ended amicably, the whole thing left me feeling like a mostly-empty jar of Hellmann’s left to sour on the kitchen counter: tapped-out, tepid, and slimy. I speed-walk-of-shamed to the nearest chili bar in a hopeless attempt to cleanse my soul of the aborted hookup.

Not a Fan of the Movies ★

Christopher Tolkien granted a rare interview, with Le Monde:

Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”

HTC Profit Plunges 91 Percent ★

Sky News:

HTC is losing the smartphone sales war, with its devices continuing to be outsold by Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy range.

The Taiwanese firm, whose phones include the Butterfly, said net profit in the fourth quarter of 2012 had missed forecasts and plunged 91% year on year.

MG Siegler:

The Android ecosystem isn’t alive and well, the Samsung one is. Expect to hear a lot more out of this story in 2013.

Qualcomm’s Insane CES 2013 Keynote ★

What is wrong with these companies?

Rory Cellan-Jones, writing for the BBC:

Why, when Android devices now have a much bigger share of the smartphone market than Apple, does the iPhone get BBC apps first? Why does the iPlayer run more smoothly on the iPhone and iPad, and when will Android users get the same ability to download as well as stream programmes? These and other questions fill my inbox and my Twitterstream.

But as I said, this is not my job, so I asked Daniel Danker, the BBC’s head of iPlayer, apps and all that stuff, to explain. […]

“If you look at the amount of energy we spend on Apple, it pales in comparison to what we spend on Android. […]

“People write to us saying just that, why bother supporting older devices, why don’t you just start with - and then they insert whichever model of phone they have. But more than a quarter of our requests to iPlayer come from devices running Gingerbread. And the number one device contacting us is still the Samsung Galaxy S2, which can’t handle advanced video.”

He seems optimistic that 2013 will be a turning point for Android.

CES Is the World’s Greatest Hardware Show Stuck in a Software Era ★

Mat Honan, reporting from CES:

Sure, hardware is very important. Faster processors. More and better sensors. Radios with better transmission capabilities, running on more frequencies. Pixel density. Delightful chamfers. These things matter. A lot. But the bottom line is software — or it should be. While atoms may indeed be the new bits in terms of production, bits remain king when it comes to consumption.

Even “hardware” features are defined by software, and can no longer be judged on their own. Consider, say, mobile phone cameras. The camera itself is important — the sensor, the lens, the physical size — but ultimately what matters is the quality of the images it produces, and software is a huge part of that.

1998’s Most Intriguing OS, 15 Years Later: Hands-on With Haiku Alpha 4 ★

Jeremy Reimer, writing for Ars Technica on the newest release of Haiku, an open source recreation of BeOS.