Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: smartphones

  • A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

    A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

    Yesterday communications vendors Qualcomm, Netgear, Ericsson and Telstra, unveiled their Australian gigabit LTE service that gives users high speed internet connections over the 4G mobile network.

    Billed as a world’s first, Telstra will offer customers the Netgear supplied hotspots that can connect up to twenty devices over WiFi.

    Listening to the Telstra spiel yesterday, it wasn’t hard to conclude the company is making a pitch for the market frustrated by the National Broadband Network’s tardy rollout and patchy service.

    The service doesn’t come cheap though, as Finder’s Alex Kidman points out, an hour’s movie streaming on one device could easily cost $4500 dollars on Telstra’s current plans with one of the company’s executives emphasising the product is “aimed at the premium end of the market.”

    Being aimed at the premium end of the market is shame for Qualcomm as their spokespeople were keen to show off the gaming, AR and VR potential of the Snapdragon CPUs driving these devices. It would be a brave or very affluent family that bought one of these devices for their kids given the data costs.

    While the Telstra Gigabit LTE service might be an NBN replacement for deep pocketed customers, telco veteran John Lindsay points out the mobile network can’t support too many people doing so unless many more cells are deployed.

    For the moment the Telstra service is going to be attractive for companies needing high speed. low volume connections in the central business district and as the gigabit LTE upgrades roll out across the country, it will be useful for travellers as well as frustrated NBN customers.

    Ultimately the gigabit LTE product is another step toward the 5G networks that we’ll be seeing appear at the end of the decade, something that both the Ericsson and Telstra PR folk were keen to highlight.

    The key message for consumers and businesses is the rate of innovation in the mobile communications market is not slowing and another generation of connected devices is coming that will change things as dramatically as the smartphone did.

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  • Inside Samsung’s exploding batteries

    Inside Samsung’s exploding batteries

    One of the most humiliating corporate crises of recent history has to be last year’s recall of the Galaxy Note.

    Airlines around the world started telling passengers that the devices were banned during their pre flight briefings, causing untold damage for the Samsung brand.

    Now Samsung have completed a review into what happened including an infographic illustrating the exact problem with the batteries.

    That review shows the design and manufacturing errors that resulted in the batteries bursting into flames. How Samsung are fixing it or putting in systems to prevent that happening again isn’t discussed.

    What the infographic does show is how complex the design, engineering and manufacturing is in modern technology – something that is often overlooked by many technologists.

    Battery technologies are particularly fraught as a lot of energy is compressed into a small space and the chemistry of Lithium Ion batteries makes them particularly dangerous should they be damaged or incorrectly used, as Boeing found with the early models of the 787 Dreamliner.

    Modern life and the devices that we take for granted are complex and that complexity though can easily come back to bite us. As Samsungs’ exploding batteries show, sometimes that complexity is difficult to manage.

     

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  • Google’s grab for the smartphone market

    Google’s grab for the smartphone market

    This week Google released its latest smartphone, the Pixel, to mixed reviews. Controlling the most popular mobile operating system, Android, isn’t enough for the company.

    As Microsoft found, just supplying the operating systems for smartphones isn’t enough to influence the market. Apple, along with Nokia and Blackberry before them, showed that the path to both controlling the segment and being profitable relies on having devices designed for their software.

    Given the Pixel’s price point, it’s unclear how well it will do against the iPhone, Samsung’s models or the plethora of Chinese devices but for all the Android ecosystem’s players, having its controlling owner running in opposition to them can’t be comforting.

    Again though Microsoft’s experience is instructive, and encouraging, for the broader Android community as Microsoft’s attempts to push out Windows CE devices failed dismally. For Google to be successful where Microsoft failed would require a degree of corporate discipline the search engine giant is not renown for.

    In the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft strength was licensing and controlling access to the operating system. Android’s strength in the smartphone world is that Google doesn’t have the same veto power. To be able to exercise control over the market, Google needs a big device share.

    Ultimately though the success of the Google Pixel smartphone will depend on how many users will adopt it. It may be time for another round of smartphone subsidy wars.

     

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  • Ditching the old tech – Lessons for the iPhone from the Apple iMac

    Ditching the old tech – Lessons for the iPhone from the Apple iMac

    “I’ve been betrayed, I’ll never buy another Apple product again!” was the cry in 1998 when the company announced their new range of iMacs and portables wouldn’t support the long standing Apple Development Bus (ADB) system and floppy disks.

    At the time Apple had been in decline, only the year before Microsoft had bailed the company out with a few conditions that had deeply irritated the company’s loyal customer base.

    Many of those customers – mainly in education and graphic design – had invested deeply in ADB compatible equipment and their irritation at abandoning that investment for USB based kit was understandable.

    Today we’re seeing similar protests about the rumoured dropping headphone jacks from the upcoming Apple 7 device, customers aren’t happy about the possibility being forced from a well established standard to a less reliable and likely more expensive system.

    Unlike the computer world of 1998 today’s marketplace is very different, Apple is no longer a quirky and niche product but the most profitable of the tech industry’s giants – as Microsoft was back when Steve Jobs swallowed his pride and accepted Bill Gates’ bailout.

    However most of Apple’s profits come from one product line, the iPhone. While the iPhone is probably the only truly consistently profitable smartphone, it competes in a fiercely fought for consumer market.

    Already in China, one of the company’s most profitable markets, the iPhone’s market share is falling in the face of good quality but slightly cheaper Chinese and Korean devices.

    Should Apple push those consumers too far by shifting the iPhone to a more expensive or proprietary system then the competing Android devices may well pick up market share and dent Apple’s fat profits.

    However history shows that these hardware shifts do happen and older technologies are supplanted by more expensive, but better, inventions regardless of how much users have spent on the status quo. A century ago the automobile started replacing a millenia of investment in horse drawn technologies.

    In the case of Apple abandoning the ADB back in 1998, it was the spur to adopt the USB standard which up until then had been buggy and unwanted as Bill Gates himself had found.

    As history shows, Apple thrived after ditching the old technology despite the complaints at the time and if the company resists the temptation to lock users into a proprietary system there is no reason to think the same can’t happen again.

    Apple mouse (with ADB connector) courtesy of Wikipedia

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  • Microsoft quietly buries its smartphone ambitions

    Microsoft quietly buries its smartphone ambitions

    Last week Microsoft quietly buried its smartphone ambitions with the announcement they would shed 1,850 jobs largely from the remains of the Nokia business they acquired four years ago.

    Microsoft’s Lumia exercise was expensive for the company but even more costly in terms of missed opportunities.

    Those opportunities are now in cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. Shareholders will be hoping the current CEO Satya Nadell executes a lot better on them than his predecessor did with smartphones.

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