Seton Hall University to equip students with Windows 8 tablets and Ultrabooks

TabTimes reports that Seton Hall University will give out Samsung Windows 8 tablets to all new science and honor degree juniors after the operating system ships this Fall; other new students will get Samsung Ultrabooks. The University will also give out Nokia Lumia smartphones to all incoming freshmen starting this fall.

Microsoft just made all Windows Phone 7.X smartphones obsolete

Earlier today, Microsoft gave a technical preview of Windows Phone 8, the new version of its phone operating system. There were two big pieces of news, one good for developers and future Windows Phone buyers, the other very bad for current Windows Phone owners.

The good news is that Windows Phone 8 will be based on the same kernel, and many of the same drivers, as Windows 8. That means that it will be much easier for developers to move apps from Windows Phone 8 to Windows 8 and vice versa. I suspect that it won't be quite as smooth as Apple's iOS environment, where the iPhone and iPad run the same operating system, but it'll be much better than Windows' current situation, where there's virtually no commonality between Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7.X.

The bad (really bad) news is that owners of Windows Phone 7.X devices will not be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 8. All those folks that bought Nokia Lumia 900s, 800s, 600s and any other Windows Phone 7.X device are out of luck--no Windows Phone 8 for you. Microsoft will offer them a consolation prize, Windows Phone 7.8, with some of Windows Phone 8's user interface improvements, but with no way to run Windows Phone 8 apps.

Apple's had this "make your new operating system compatible with your old devices" thing down for a few years now, and I marvel at why neither Google nor now Microsoft can do it. Microsoft will undoubtedly argue that smartphones need new hardware to take advantage of Windows Phone 8, but that doesn't explain why the company didn't anticipate the problem when drawing up the specifications for Windows Phone 7.X devices. Did the Windows and Windows Phone teams not start talking to each other until a few weeks ago?

When Nokia launched the Lumia 900, it ran commercials in the U.S. with a spokesperson telling people that the "beta test is over"--they could buy the first "production" smartphone, the Lumia 900. Unfortunately, Nokia and Microsoft customers who bought that line now know that they were merely participating in yet another beta test.

When "something for everyone" may be too much

On the cover of the current issue of "TWICE" (This Week in Consumer Electronics,) there's an ad for Nikon's cameras with the tagline "There's a Nikon for Everyone." It got me thinking about something I noticed at the Sony and Panasonic booths at last week's NAB conference. These companies have so many different camcorders and cinema cameras that even the people selling them can't keep track of all of them. For example, when I was in the Sony booth, I couldn't find the 35mm cinema cameras (NEX-FS100, FS700, F3, etc.) I asked one of Sony's salespeople where they were, and she said that all of the company's cameras were on display in the huge circular "camera pit" at the center of the booth. I'd walked around the entire pit and hadn't seen the 35mm cameras, so I went around again but didn't find them. It turned out that the 35mm cameras were in a completely separate section of the booth.

There are so many products that they overlap each other in price and functionality. The same is also true for still cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony and others, and smartphones from Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, etc. Makers of notebook and desktop computers have the same problem--just look at the proliferation of models at HP, Dell and Acer. Manufacturers make so many models in order to avoid losing a sale, but they wind up confusing potential customers. Each of these products costs a significant amount of money to develop, manufacture and support. Resources that could be used to develop entirely new products are instead used to create minor product variations to fit into every conceivable price point.

Apple is a great example of a better approach to the problem. At any one time, Apple has a single line of smartphones, tablets, and notebook, all-in-one, mini and full-sized desktop computers, each of which is refreshed once a year. Apple continues to sell a single version of the previous year's tablet and smartphone (two years in the case of phones) at lower prices. Each computer line has four or five models, which vary by display size and processor. When a new computer line is launched, the previous line is discontinued. It covers all the price points, yet it's simple for consumers to understand and for Apple to sell. It also works well with Apple's strategy of making product announcements into newsworthy events.

Sony lost $6.4 billion last year; Panasonic lost $10.2 billion. They no longer have the money to invest in endless product proliferation--which might explain the relatively paltry number of new products shown by Panasonic at NAB. They, and companies like Canon, Nikon, Samsung, etc., would be well advised to focus on fewer, better products that are clearly differentiated from competitors and from each other.

HP's WebOS opportunity

Update, August 18, 2011: HP just announced that it is discontinuing all its webOS-based hardware devices, including the TouchPad tablet and smartphones. According the The Wall Street Journal, it will hold on to the webOS operating system and will pursue licensing it to other companies.

Google's decision to acquire Motorola Mobility has thrown the Android ecosystem into chaos: Will Google really treat Motorola no differently than any other Android licensee, or will it give Motorola priority for new features and new versions of Android? Will Google be able to stay focused on releasing new versions of Android that are competitive with iOS while dealing with the Motorola acquisition?

Google's acquisition opens the door for Microsoft to become an alternative operating system vendor for some of Android's licensees, but Microsoft's partnership with Nokia has spawned its own concerns: Nokia clearly has "favored nation" status in the Windows Phone ecosystem. As a result, Microsoft may be less able to capitalize on Google's decision than it would first appear.

The company that might have the best opportunity to capitalize on Google's acquisition is HP, if it can execute quickly and decisively (always a big if when talking about HP). WebOS is an excellent operating system, but it's been crippled by HP's indecision in launching new products, and its inability to run an effective developer program. AllThingsD reported yesterday that Best Buy has taken delivery of 270,000 HP TouchPads but has only sold 25,000 of them. Best Buy is reportedly demanding that HP take back its inventory of tablets. Now, HP is launching a new line of webOS-based smartphones in Europe, but the company's chances of success aren't much better in the smartphone market than they are right now in tablets.

A number of observers have suggested that HP should license webOS, but for this plan to be successful, HP has to follow a more radical course. Here's the approach that I believe HP should take:

1. Set up a Mozilla-like organization to run future webOS development, and in particular, run the developer program. This organization would insure that all licensees have a common code base to work from, and that webOS apps work on the widest possible range of devices. One goal would be to avoid the proliferation of versions that frustrates Android developers.
2. Give licensees partial ownership of webOS and the development organization. That would give the licensees a say in the future direction of the operating system.
3. Licensees would invest in the development organization rather than pay royalties. (There could be two classes of licensees: One that owns a stake in the development organization, and another that pays royalties in lieu of investing in the development organization.)
4. Once the development organization is launched and licensees sign on, HP would drop its smartphone line. HP would remain in the tablet business, and could use webOS throughout its product line. The company would have the option to reenter the smartphone business after a number of years.

I have to believe that a joint venture development company, with talent contributed by companies such as Samsung and HTC, as well as HP, could do a much better job managing and promoting the webOS platform than HP alone. You may say, "Isn't this what Nokia tried to do with Symbian?". Yes, Nokia established the Symbian Foundation and open-sourced the operating system, then brought it back in-house and made the license proprietary. The problem was that Nokia wanted it both ways--the company wanted to control the development of Symbian but also wanted its competitors to license it. If HP is to succeed in licensing webOS, it has to truly cede control to a joint venture with its licensees, and it has to (at least temporarily) get out of the smartphone business.

In the long run, if HP establishes webOS as an industry standard for mobile devices, its acquisition of Palm will have been worth it, even if the company gives up a minor revenue stream from smartphones

Mobile's impact on Microsoft: HP's out, Nokia's in

Two announcements--one yesterday, one tomorrow--mark a major realignment of industry support for Microsoft, and also underline the transition from PCs to smartphones and mobile devices. Yesterday, HP announced two new WebOS-based smartphones and its new TouchPad, but perhaps the biggest bombshell was held for the very end of the presentation: HP will make WebOS run on its personal computers.

As I wrote yesterday, WebOS isn't a true replacement for Microsoft's Windows 7, and it relies extensively on a touch interface, so it's likely that WebOS support will be confined to HP's touchscreen all-in-one PCs and tablets, at least initially. However, HP's move is very bad news for Microsoft, because HP is Microsoft's largest software reseller. Microsoft won't get any smartphone or TouchPad operating system revenue from HP, and its revenues from Windows on HP's desktops and notebooks are now at risk. In addition, HP's decision to port WebOS to its PCs may increase the market credibility of Google's Chrome OS as a Windows alternative (although I still believe that Google should drop Chrome OS and put all its efforts behind Android.)

Bloomberg reports and other sources have confirmed that Nokia will announce a partnership with Microsoft to use its Windows Phone 7 operating system tomorrow. Nokia has been struggling in the smartphone market, and a blunt memo from Nokia's new CEO suggests that the company's existing smartphone operating systems, MeeGo and Symbian, won't turn things around. Windows Phone 7, which has been floundering in fourth place among smartphone operating systems, could get a big boost from Nokia, especially outside North America. Microsoft is addressing the big structural holes in Windows Phone 7--copy and paste are likely to be added in March, and multitasking will most likely be implemented before the end of the year.

HP's and Nokia's decisions make it very clear that Microsoft's future, as well as the future of information technology, is mobile. The problem for Microsoft is that it's moving from a position of strength (the desktop) to a position of weakness (mobile). However, Microsoft can't hold back the future, no matter how hard it tries.

Goodbye, Moto?

IDC's numbers for the largest mobile phone global suppliers by volume for the third quarter of 2008 are out, and Motorola has slipped to fourth place, down almost 32% from the same quarter last year. Nokia remains #1, Samsung is #2, and Sony Ericsson, which was once all but given up for dead, has passed Motorola to be #3. LG Electronics is #5 and could pass Motorola soon, and Apple is #6 in shipments and #3 in revenues.

At the same time, Motorola announced that it lost $397 million on $7.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, and has postponed its plans to spin off its mobile phone business until some time after 2009. They're undoubtedly facing the reality that they won't be able to get any reasonable price for their mobile phone division until the current recession lifts. The only question is whether or not they'll have a viable business to spin off by that time.

The Real News from Apple

Today's announcement of the iPhone 3G at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference has been rehashed and dissected by reporters and news anchors all day. However, the iPhone announcement itself was fairly anticlimactic; the new features had been well-covered in leaked reports prior to the announcement. (In fact, the lack of new features beyond 3G and GPS was somewhat surprising.) Even the dramatic price drop had been foreshadowed by widely-publicized reports.

I think that the real news wasn't the iPhone announcement, but what came before: A slew of application demos, plus the announcement of Apple's MobileMe service. Let's take the applications first: While they were being demonstrated, some of the live bloggers griped that they were tedious and just went on and on, but that was the point: In just a few months, Apple has built a bigger, more productive developer ecosystem than Symbian has been able to do in years, and no one else (including RIM, which just recently launched its own developers' program) is even in the same ballpark. Even Microsoft's smartphone platform can't deliver applications with the quality of experience of those designed for the iPhone.

Over and over again, the story was: "We've covered all the bases." Enterprise applications? Check. Exchange integration? Check. Desktop application support? Check. Location-based applications? Check. Games? Check. All of this was on top of the basic capabilities of the iPhone, now fortified with sufficient 3G speed to make heavily data- and media-centric applications work.

The other part of the story is MobileMe. At its heart, MobileMe is a centralized storage and synchronization application that allows iPhones, Macs and PCs to be synced to a single, central database that's managed by Apple. Now, all of the capabilities of MobileMe are available in some form from a variety of vendors, but they don't necessarily work very well. As a long-time ActiveSync user, I can tell you that getting my PC notebook to stay in sync with my old Windows Mobile PDA and current Windows Mobile Smartphone (let alone my MacBook) can be an exercise in frustration.

MobileMe is aimed at two targets: The large body of Windows Mobile users who are frustrated to death with ActiveSync, and everyone who has held off on buying an iPhone because it doesn't have the "it just works" syncing capabilities of RIM's Blackberry. It's far too early to tell just how well Apple has implemented MobileMe, and it may very have its own frustrations and limitations. However, it has the potential to be a very appealing alternative to Microsoft's and RIM's offerings.

The one big frustration that I have with the announcements is that the iPhone 3G still doesn't have video camera capabilities. A 3G iPhone with the video capabilities of, say, a Nokia N95, would be a multimedia killer product, and I'm still not giving up hope that Apple with do something in this space in the future.

On ZTE

ZTE,UTStarcom,Huawei,Ericsson,Nokia Siemens Networks,Cisco,IPTV

As I mentioned in some previous posts, I spent most of last week at an analysts' conference in Shenzhen, China, sponsored by ZTE Corporation. To folks like myself in the U.S., ZTE has been a fairly "invisible" company; this conference was an attempt to make the company, and its products, more visible.

ZTE is one of the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturers in China. Its largest local competitors are Huawei and UTStarcom. The Western companies that I'd compare ZTE to most closely are Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, and to a lesser extent, Cisco. ZTE is a wireless powerhouse; it has product lines covering GSM, CDMA, WiMAX, and the Chinese standard TD-SCDMA (where it's the market leader). It's also a large supplier of wireline access equipment (IP DSLAMs and xPONs) and routers.

In IPTV, ZTE supplies all the key system components except live encoders. Everything else--Video-on-Demand systems, Set-Top Boxes, Middleware and Content Protection--ZTE can provide itself, or integrate other companies' products into a turnkey system. ZTE's approach is closest to that of UTStarcom, a U.S.-based company with a huge presence in China, but the companies have two different strategies: UTStarcom prefers to sell complete, turnkey systems using its components, while ZTE will sell complete systems or individual components. This enables ZTE to sell to service providers that want "best-of-breed" products, as well as those who want everything from one company.

What both ZTE and UTStarcom have in common is that they're both focusing on China, India, and developing markets. In my opinion, this is a very smart approach for ZTE. While the company has some advanced technology, such as software-defined base station radios for mobile applications, it can best be thought of as a "fast follower." ZTE is unlikely to be the company to bring technology to market first, but when its products do come to market, they tend to be less expensive than their Western counterparts. This is very important for service providers in developing countries with very low ARPUs (Average Monthly Revenues Per User).

Even though ZTE isn't much of a market factor in Western Europe or North America, it doesn't mean that the Western equipment vendors can breath easy. I see ZTE, Huawei and UTStarcom much as Toyota, Honda and Nissan were when they entered the U.S. automobile market in the early 1960s. The first Japanese cars to reach U.S. shores were tiny, underpowered and not terribly reliable, which made it easy for both American and European manufacturers to ignore them. However, the Japanese manufacturers learned what American consumers wanted, and gave it to them with high quality and low prices, eventually driving American manufacturers out of the small car market. Even after Japanese manufacturers went upmarket and raised their prices, U.S. consumers still preferred their products.

I think that ZTE is going to be one of the world leaders in mobile, and possibly wireline, communications by the middle of the next decade. In fact, it may not take that long.

I'm now following cameraphones...

Mobile World Congress,GSM,Nokia,Samsung,Sony Ericsson,Microsoft,Danger,Android,Google,T-Mobile,Sharp,Motorola,Apple,iPhone

Given the content of my previous post, I've decided to start following developments in camera phones. (Yes, I know, it's about time.) This is a good time to start, as the Mobile World Congress, covering everything to do with GSM, started today in Barcelona. So far, the state-of-the-art seems to be 5 Megapixel phones, new versions of which were announced by Nokia (the N96 and 6220 Classic), Samsung (the G810) and Sony Ericsson (the G900 and C902.) (Note that I'm not including launches of phones with 3MP cameras; if I did, the list would include three new models from LG.)

You may have also heard that Microsoft purchased Danger, the company that created the Sidekick phone for T-Mobile and other operators. (Danger's co-founder now works for Google and manages the Android mobile phone operating system project.) Danger farms out manufacturing to companies such as Sharp and Motorola, but this acquisition firmly puts Microsoft in the handset, not just the operating system, business. However, Danger has a miniscule share of the overall smartphone market, so it remains to be seen if Microsoft will actually market its own phones (and go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone) or use Danger to create reference designs that it will then license to other companies.

Short-Form Video via Phone

jeff jarvis,beet.tv,nokia,n82,qik.com

I've been catching up with Jeff Jarvis's dispatches from Davos, along with an interview that he did with Beet.TV concerning his new video dispatches.

Click To Play

Jarvis has been doing video interviews with the Nokia N82, which has been customized by Reuters and Nokia to accept an external microphone; the interviews are streamed live to the Internet via qik.com. With the exception of the microphone adapter, everything is standard and is available today.

I've been unimpressed with the quality of pictures taken by camera phones, as well as the user interfaces used to control the cameras. I haven't been able to play with the N82, so I can't comment on either the camera phone's quality or ease-of-use, but Jarvis is quite enthusiastic. In any event, the N82 gave him an almost transcendent ability to get interviews with the likes of Sergey Brin, Bono and Hamid Karzai. The camera phone has become such an integral part of day-to-day life that it almost disappears from the conversation, in a way that even small camcorders can't. It reminds me of when I took one of JVC's first DV camcorders to Canada in 1996; it was so small and light that most people didn't even think that it was a camera, let alone a camcorder.

The output of these camera phones won't look like something that's been shot by a conventional three-person crew (camera/sound/reporter,) but it doesn't have to. Short-form video is developing into its own medium, one that has very different quality expectations than either film or broadcast television. Are these camera phones the "Brownie" cameras of this new medium?