I hate going to large trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which was held last week in Las Vegas. Hate it in the worse way. You get tired – really bone-dead tired – walking for what seems like 100 miles going from one meeting to another. Did I forget to mention that I actually also love shows like CES, because when I get home from major shows like this I realize that they were so valuable that I’m happy that I put up with it.
CES was one of the best (and most tiring) shows I’ve attended in many years. CES issued a press release that reported total registration was the highest ever at 153,000 people. There were thousands of booths and meeting rooms spread over the entire Las Vegas Convention Center and the Venetian. You’d never know the country was trying to recover from a recession. Mobile and wireless (and all of consumer electronics) is bustling.
The show demonstrated that innovation is alive and well. Here’s a summary of some of the things at CES that impressed me.
As I mentioned last week, Samsung has a hit product with their new Galaxy Note. It’s a “crossover” device that is part smartphone and part tablet, although I think most people will call it a “small tablet.” It includes a 5.3-inch WXGA display, voice and LTE data communications and has easy handwriting input via S-pen. Samsung has added handwriting and image creation software to make it very easy to use right out of the box. S-pen could be something that Samsung eventually will migrate and incorporate into their larger 7.3-inch and larger tablet systems. Many will recall that pens were the rage when the PalmPilot came out and then completely went away. We’re seeing a resurgence of pen-enabled devices to help users make full and better use of their mobile devices.
Intel and Motorola announced a strategic alliance whereby Motorola will incorporate Intel’s latest low power x86 Atom processor in a number of future Motorola products. This is the first successful major mobile device manufacturer to support a CPU other than those based on ARM. It will be challenging for software developers to migrate their applications to a new platform but Intel promises to help. The bigger question is how “Intel Inside Mobile” will affect overall user experience.
Research in Motion (RIM) demonstrated their next generation BlackBerry PlayBook tablet with 7.3-inch display. What’s important is that the next generation of the operating system software finally (finally!) includes native email. Very few enterprises were going to roll out the PlayBook if it couldn’t do email like the BlackBerry smartphone. Native email will also enable the QNX operating system to be more easily migrated to BlackBerry 10, the future version of the smartphone OS that will be rolled out at the end of 2012. RIM is having a number of challenges, but the improvements to the PlayBook will reduce anxiety with customers.
Last year, CES must have had 100 vendors showing off their Android tablets. What struck me this year was the maturing of the Android tablet platform, the frank realization by most vendors that Android is “table stakes”, and they have to offer more than just an OS and the Android Market apps store in order to be successful. Amazon clearly is finding success positioning their tablet as a service to provide access to interesting content. We’ll see more attention to the “content layer” on top of Android during 2012.
A good example was my meeting with the folks at Barnes & Noble (B&N). Their Nook tablet has a few extra features over the Amazon Kindle Fire (and a slightly higher price point at $249). But, B&N understands that its platform is about access to great content not just a good tablet running Android. You’ll see more content announcements soon from B&N.
One of the most interesting demonstrations I saw was by Wilocity. I met the management team at a private suite in the Hilton next to the LVCC to show off their gigabit wireless capabilities. Their customers haven’t announced their products using Wilocity chips, but just about everyone is going to have their technology embedded by the end of 2012: first in laptops and then in smartphones. It was amazing to watch a DVD movie transfer at lightening speed or the streaming of four movies back and forth between computers and monitors at the same time. Maybe – just maybe – through the Wigig Alliance companies like Wilocity will eliminate the complexity of all those cables to set up home theaters and enable rich media to be available throughout the home or office. This company has the backing of major VCs and a strategic investment by Qualcomm, and the company’s chip will include not only the new gigabit 60GHz wireless chip but also provide backward compatibility with 802.11 a, b, g and n.
I have attended a number of Nokia industry analyst meetings over the years. For a while, everyone used to have one of those candy bar Nokia cell phones until Motorola brought out the RAZR in 2004 and had sold 50 million units by 2006. It was a flip phone and very thin. Nokia kept proceeding as they had in the past, because they were the market leader. Nokia’s market share dropped. Then, Apple brought out the iPhone in 2007, and I remember folks at Nokia said, “Why should we worry about Apple? We sell more phones in a day than they sell in a year.” Nokia’s U.S. market share plummeted. Nokia kept saying the company would make a comeback. The company’s management said it time and time again.
Then, one year ago, Nokia announced its strategic partnership with Microsoft and said it would wind down its reliance on Symbian and focus future smartphone efforts around Windows Phone. Was this a glimmer of hope or the last dash before shutting the doors? At CES 2012,Nokia announced three phones around the Lumia brand – the 710, 800 and the eye catching 900 – all running Windows Phone 7. At $49.95, the Lumia 710 is being sold through T-Mobile and targeted at the first-time smartphone buyer who’s moving up from a feature phone. The Lumia 900 is a full-featured LTE phone with both front and rear-facing camera and custom services like ESPN SportsCenter feed. It’s targeted for technology aware individuals who want one of the most advanced smartphones on the market.
I was (pleasantly) surprised talking to the executives of Safely, a division of Location Labs about their new “digital parenting” initiative that includes a number of services to help parents manage the entire digital footprint of their kids. The Safely suite includes: Phone Controls that manage use of the child’s smartphone such as prohibiting texting in the middle of the night or at school, Locator that enables parents to see where their kids are located with notification triggers to inform parents of things like when they arrive at school, Drive that prevents distractions via the child’s smartphone while driving and Social Monitor to keep tabs on the child’s behavior on Facebook (and other social networks soon). The company is run by industry veterans and is sold through wireless operators such as Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile. I believe this is going to be an important area in which parents want to help their kids deal with the use of the Internet and their smartphone. The service is not yet available on the iPhone because Apple does not enable remote management and control of the iPhone except for a number of enterprise mobile device management (MDM) providers. I hope that Apple will soon approve socially responsible consumer services that require remote device management like those provided by Safely.
Ford has done an excellent job creating a brand and services around Sync. They also have a number of challenges with the brand since ‘sync’ typically means synchronization and ‘Ford Sync’ is promoted as “Powered by Microsoft” which in this case is a misnomer because Microsoft Embedded (Win CE) was used simply to create the underlying platform.
Ford cleverly has developed a platform and API’s for all Ford vehicle’s basic radio and then provides a number of additional services (Sync Services) that allow third parties to build applications that can provide enhanced services. MyFord Touch (powered by Nuance and other third parties) provides voice input control so you can tell the radio to tune into a type of music. NPR has an app that enables drivers to request a specific NPR show. Ford AppLink enables smartphone apps to interact with the radio, e.g. Ford owners can stream Pandora music via Bluetooth from their smartphone to the Sync platform in the radio which then plays Pandora through the car’s speakers.
Motorola Mobility executives explained that they are developing specific smartphone and tablet products for each wireless operator. Motorola developed smartphone products for Verizon Wireless and its Droid line. Then, the company developed different devices for AT&T. Motorola is also staying away from the 7.3-inch tablet form factor as the company doesn’t want to compete at the “low end” of the market against Amazon. I suspect product strategy to change quite a bit after the Google acquisition is complete.
“An old friend of mine, Bob O’Keefe, has joined SanDisk as VP of Marketing. Bob and I worked out a promotion when he was at Duracell to help launch the Poqet PC back in 1989. We discussed that the rotating hard drive business is changing and that flash storage is dominating the smartphone and tablet market. Not too long ago, the iPod used to have a small hard drive. All iPods are flash storage-based now. With the introduction of thin Ultrabooks by PC vendors that use flash storage, hard drives are limited to higher end, larger storage capacity notebooks. There’s also been a move toward hybrid disk drives that use flash storage on the front end and a larger disk drive on the backend.”
While I didn’t have a formal briefing meeting with Sony, Dr. Jan Uddenfeldt of Sony Mobile was on the smartphone panel in which I was the moderator. He was proud to say, “I’m from Sony. That has a nice ring to it.” It will be interesting to see how Sony develops their line of smartphones and tablets now that they have bought out their joint venture partner, Ericsson. I expect to see a number of products and services integrated with other parts of Sony to be offered before too long.
Another interesting member of my panel was Steve Brown, CEO of Catch, Inc. They have developed a system to catch a person’s ideas on their mobile device and then organize them into what they call ‘steams’ that are followed via hash tags. The streams then become projects with others invited to join in on the conversation.
I met with two major mobile ARM-based CPU vendors: Qualcomm and Nvidia, both that had announced quadcore CPUs for smartphones and tablets. Qualcomm emphasized their product breadth with different models serving different segments of the market, while Nvidia emphasized their fifth “very low power” core to be used when demands on the system were very low.
Another interesting technology I saw at CES was the next generation of display technology called DisplayPort (DP) and their mobile counterpart, miniDP. Most PC video games and other segments such as financial analysis and engineering require the support of high resolution displays with, say, 4K by 2K resolution (8 megapixels) – four times what is displayed in HD on a TV. The VESA standards group has developed DisplayPort to provide compatibility for the new higher resolution displays and the ports that device manufacturers produce. The pervasive little VGA port that’s been on PCs and notebooks for years is going away by 2015. There’ll be adapters to convert DP to VGA, but only DP and miniDP ports will be incorporated into devices. By the way, Thunderbolt is a super-set of DP that handles high speed data transfer as well as video. Thus, you’ll see Thunderbolt logo on many high end systems that will drive external hard drives and DP-enabled monitors, while DP ports will be used to just connect with external monitors.
I also met with a few other firms including Amped Wireless (high power wireless routers for home and office including outdoor use), Rhapsody (streaming music service), Telenav (mapping and traffic) and Cellcontrol (dongle that attaches to the car, vehicle, or bus and uses Bluetooth to prevent texting while driving).
Getting to see all these great innovations is why I love working in mobile and wireless. It’s clear from attending the 2012 CES that the best is yet to come in mobile and wireless.
P.S. I had an interesting dialog with Alex Goldfayn, author of the new book, Evangelist Marketing, What Apple, Amazon and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn’t). He launched the book at CES because most of the people and companies he writes about are in high technology. Here’s a link if you’d like to buy a copy from Amazon. It’s a good read about marketing in the high tech, high touch world.
Written By:
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
Principal Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
MobileTrax LLC
gerry.purdy@mobiletrax.com
404 855-9494
Dr. Purdy writes a weekly column via eWeek, a leading online & digital publisher with millions of readers. Some of these columns are distributed via Inside Mobile with approval from eWeek.