Screen size of a smart phone

The Android phone industry just hands out one oversized Android phone after another.

Let's look at these big phones.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus 4G, 135 x 67.9mm with 1280x800 pixels (aspect ratio 8:5)
Samsung Galaxy SII 125.3 x 66.1mm with 800x480 pixels (aspect ratio 5:3)
HTC EVO 3D 126.1 x 65.4mm with 960x540 pixels (aspect ratio 16:9)
And Samsung Galaxy Note trumps all of them at 146.9 x 9.7 mm with 1280x800 pixels.
(For reference, iPhone 4S 115.2 x 58.6 mm with 960x640 pixels)

I don't understand why all the obsessions with a gigantic screen on a phone.  Without a big hand, one can hardly wrap his/her thumb around to touch the right spot on the screen with one hand.  A purse or bag is required to carried it around.  Putting it in a pocket is possible but it takes away too much precious real estate of a pocket. And a big screen burns battery much too fast.

Another problem is the aspect ratio of the screen.  It already presents a design challenge for me when designing a universal game for both iPhone (3:2) and iPad (4:3).  But I can make an excuse between a phone and a tablet.  Stretching images into a different aspect ratio does not make it picture perfect.  The other choice is to fill un-used space with background color or image. There are many blogs and articles discussing techniques dealing with this issue.  But none has talked about how to test and see the user interface on different screens without buying all of them.

Bigger screens will not make those products more appealing to consumers, when human factors are taken out of product design. I also wonder whether Samsung and HTC care to tend Android application and game developers.  The two leading Android brands behave like pure hardware manufacturers that don't seem to appreciate the importance of consistency to the ecosystem which adds value to Android phones. At the same time, I heard it is the carriers who drive product specifications.  Well, carriers have never had a love for third party developers.

Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire is not the champion for Android tablets, but it is the right product for Amazon.

I watched review and comparison videos on YouTube as I have not bought a Kindle Fire yet.  From those videos I had the impression that Kindle Fire is not as fast as Apple's iPad 2.  The page loading and refresh speed is slower than that on iPad 2. The touch response does not seems to be as smooth.  By most measures for a web browsing device and a game console, I doubt it can compete with iPad 2.  Nevertheless, I still think it is a good and smart product.

I have complained about last generation's Kindle reader earlier this year. This new generation of Kindle answered my complaints. The touch screen takes away the clumsiness for users to interact with contents. Compared with the previous generation, Kindle Fire provides all the needed improvements in terms of color display, faster page flipping and rendering. It also provides a comparable video experience as iPad 2. Given its price, it is an adequate tablet but an outstanding content viewer. It is exactly right up Amazon's alley for all the digital contents it wants to sell.

Kindle Fire is a smart product with a right compromise and feature focus. I may buy one for my daughter to read on. But I am sure she will ask for my iPad when it comes to Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Young users do not settle for their game experiences.

Will HTC have its own OS

Rumor has it that HTC is contemplating on buying an OS for itself.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/50859.php

"We have given it thought and we have discussed it internally, but we will not do it on impulse." HTC Chairwoman, Cher Wang said in an interview.  She went further on, "Our strength lies in understanding an OS, but it does not mean that we have to produce an OS."

It takes approximately 40 to 50 million dollars annually to maintain a team of 200 for mobile OS R&D.  It is quite affordable to today's HTC.  But what will be the strategic position for this OS? If the new OS is to replace Windows Mobile OS, an annual operating cost of $40 million can justify some $70 to $100 million royalty paid yearly for Windows Mobile licenses.  But Windows Mobile OS is not the one making HTC feel naked.  It is Google's Android, which does not have a royalty based license.

Maybe the whole thing is just some psychological response to Google's buying Motorola Mobile. Or maybe it is because HP's webOS is available at this inopportune time. HTC did not express this idea in such a way as "We'd like to build our own team and our own OS". HTC actually had an small Linux team before. Without a strategy in mind and a concise goal to develop OS in a culture dominated by hardware business, acquisition will not add value. The interesting part is that, though everyone in the mobile industry thinks OS makes a difference, not many companies got it right or even bother to approach it.  If Google is to build its own hardware business, what can HTC do? Without an alternative, what HTC should keep an eye on is companies like ZTE, not Google's Moto.

Google Buys Motorola Mobility for its patent portfolio

Google is going to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/50468.php

The patent war in the cell phone industry has not ended but Motorola Mobility has benefited from it already. Google is an Internet service company, a software company, but not a manufacturer, not an expert in logistics.  This is purely a acquisition for Moto's patent portfolio. I do not see Google running Motorola Mobility and producing Google phones vigorously.

Some analysts thought Microsoft might be a winner in this deal, because of doubts and distrusts towards Google among the Android licensees.
http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=467053
http://allthingsd.com/20110815/u-s-carriers-silent-on-motoroogle-but-france-telecom-gives-it-a-thumbs-up/
It is just a wishful thinking, in my opinion.  Microsoft was in the market licensing its Windows Mobile OS when Nokia had 60% of smartphone market share in 2006-2007.  The fact of dominant Nokia did not help Mircosoft to a strong second place.  Instead, RIM's Blackberry filled the gap and rose to the second place in 2008 and 2009. When Apple introduced iPhone in 2007 and made its stand in 2008, Android was still in its infancy.  Most vendors went to Google and invested their own resources to develop Android phones instead of diving deeper into Windows Mobile.  Why is that?  I have my thoughts on that, though without direct proof.  It suffices to say Windows Mobile is not attractive enough to OEM vendors given all the incentives and the business environment.

Maybe Google will spin off Motorola Mobility and share the patent portfolio with it once the acquisition is done. After all, it is all about patents and it is better for Google and Motorola Mobility to run separately.

Patent suit Nokia vs Apple

Nokia and Apple settled their law suits over patent infringement out of court.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/49560.php
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/nokia-likely-netted-600-million-plus-in-apple-patent-settlement/50590

It is said the settlement included a one-time payment between $550 million to $600 million. Apple and Nokia agree on some cross-licensing terms, with a patent license fee up to $11.5 per iPhone sold paid to Nokia. It looks like a victory to Nokia from the result. It is also in a way good for Apple to conclude this fight with Nokia. Based on the latest financial reports from both companies, as of Q2, 2011, Apple has $29.2 billion in cash or cash equivalents, while Nokia has about $16.5 billion. The amount of $600 million is approximately 2 percent of what Apple can pull out of its pocket. With the quarterly iPhone shipment reaches 18 million units, the royalty payment to Nokia is close to $210 million. With Q2 2011 EBITDA income at $7.9 billion, this is affordable to Apple. It is though a boost to Nokia's quarterly EBITDA income of $778 million.

At this point, Nokia has lost one quarter of its global cell phone market share (from 36% down to 27%) and over 50% of its smart phone market share (from around 55-60% to between 20-25%). Nokia lost not just market share, revenue, but also the waning cost advantage associated with scale. Did its patent portfolio protect the company and its shareholders from those aggressive competitors? This patent portfolio did not even help Nokia executives to keep their jobs.

There are two other threads of events worth watching for. One is the patent fight between Chines vendors Huawei and ZTE. Will this domestic dispute result in any legal precedent or will it settle out of court? http://www.cellular-news.com/story/49538.php

The other one is the patent auction by Nortel and Google's intention in Nortel's patents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/technology/05google.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/us-nortel-idUSTRE75C5WT20110614

A complacent company sued an innovative company and get paid. Do patent laws really encourage innovations?

HP webOS for OEM to license

HP is entertaining the idea of licensing its webOS to other vendors. Or is this just an indication that HP has not sorted out its strategy for webOS?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/01/hp-ceo-idUSN0116927120110601

It can be a good news for the industry. One more contender means more choices. But this is just on the surface. Windows Mobile has shown that OS licensing is not a lucrative business in the mobile phone industry. If webOS can collect US$10 a piece, a volume at 3.5 million units a quarter, which is roughly Windows Mobile's 2011-Q1 shipment, makes US$140 million a year. It does not seem to be a reasonable payback for the US$1.2 billion paid for acquiring Palm. It may not even be enough for the operation cost for the business unit. Google Android makes money from advertisement revenue, not licensing fees. What is the leverage that HP can get by licensing webOS out? In the meantime, HP has to make it cost-effective for device vendors to invest in webOS. How many vendors have the extra budget and human resource to take on another OS, chipset, and board support package integration? HP did not talk or hint on intellectual property indemnification. With Microsoft onto everyone who is licensing Andorid, that is also an issue HP has to address when going to partners. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsofts-next-cash-cow-android/12998

The talk from HP's CEO seems to be a spillover of internal disagreement on future directions. It has been a year since HP acquired Palm. There can be some pressure built up over what webOS can do for HP. But it is clear to me, licensing webOS out will not help HP, only to create distractions.

Google mobile payment and PayPal

Google just announced it is entering the mobile payment market and PayPal responded with a lawsuit alleging Google misappropriated its trade secrets through hiring its former employee.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/49343.php
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/49351.php

I just blogged my idea that eBay should spend the proceeds from selling Skype's stake on mobile payment solution for its PayPal division. I believe money and brand name are very important for this emerging product. PayPal's suing Google seems to indicate that PayPal thinks the same way. There are a lot of mobile payment start-ups. I just did a quick search, and within 5 minutes, I got company names like Square, Corduro, Boku, Billing Revolution, Mobillcash, and Zong. But PayPal did not go after any one of them. Instead, PayPal cared about what Google is doing so much that it went to court to prove a point.

There is a quote in Bloomberg's report on this lawsuit:
“Silicon Valley was built on the ability of individuals to use their knowledge and expertise to seek better employment opportunities, an idea recognized by both California law and public policy,” Aaron Zamost, a Google spokesman. In a way, the series of events is a norm in the Valley between companies, employers and employees. I hope this lawsuit is a PR stunt by PayPal. Tomorrow, it can be Yahoo, Facebook, or Microsoft buying a mobile payment company to compete with everyone else. PayPal has so far enjoyed a perception of providing credit card/banking services without being regulated as a bank in the US. The benefit to its users, individuals and merchants, is that the money stays in PayPal's domain to lower cost. Otherwise, it is like a money transmitter business which has other costs associated with its products when the money has to go in and out. A segmented market will not provide such cost benefits and PayPal probably understands that.

Developers, Phones, and Applications

I recently read two articles that underlined my long-time viewpoint on applications, devices and developers.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/48888.php
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215832/Developers_not_phones_driving_mobile_banking_apps_

A lot of factors come in to the decision of whether to develop for a platform. It can be the accessibility to programming interface and talent poll, platform capability, application characteristics, cost and overhead, etc. Nevertheless, the dominant criterion is the volume of shipment. If a platform is sold like hot cakes, it is definitely worth taking a look. But the usefulness of this rule of thumb decreases dramatically from this point. The mystery lies within the percentage of addressable and target demographics among the user base of a particular platform.

As volume shows itself as an absolute number, yet it is a relative term. Look at this article from more than three years ago.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/11/whats-an-iphone-14-3m-windows-mobile-phones-sold-in-the-past-s/
I knew it had a wrong argument when I saw it three years ago. But I did not realize how wrong it was. In 2008, Windows Mobile shipped more than 16 million units of smartphones, roughly a quarter of what Nokia had shipped for the same category. Windows Mobile had more developers than iPhone OS or any other smartphone OS at that time. Microsoft was the number two smartphone OS provider and Windows Mobile was the number three smartphone platform. The number however did not carry it further. BlackBerry caught up from behind in 2008 and stood firm as number two smartphone platform (23M units in 2008 and 34M in 2009). It, too, lost momentum.

Many users of BlackBerry and Window Mobile phones are in for the access of corporate email. When the user population is so fixated on getting one thing, how can any application developer add any value to the platform? I had a colleague who said he could not get used to the touch screen of iPhone. He missed the qwerty keyboard of his old phone. When I asked what kind of applications he used on his phone most of the time. Unsurprisingly, it was the email. Being an application developer myself, I would not poll his opinion on user experience of a small device. Such a consumer is not among my target audience. This fact pretty much cut the majority of Microsoft's 16 million or BlackBerry's 23 million of 2008 out of the equation. After that, it hardly represented a volume of interest.

HP/Palm's WebOS would serve as a contrast. It has, in my opinion, an equally capable platform as any other OS, and a set of elegantly designed programming interface. But, alas, it has no volume.

Angry Birds and product packaging

I played "Angry Birds" on my iPod Touch. It is so far the most popular mobile game on iOS and Android platforms. And it is not limited to male players.

It is a touch-based game, using different birds as projectiles to crash pigs hiding in a structure or out in the open. It is rated for 4 years old and older (4+). After playing it for a while, it seems to me Angry Birds is an artillery and dive-bomber game packaged with cute cartoon-like graphics. The red bird is a typical projectile shot in a parabolic trajectory. The little blue bird resembles clustered warheads. The fat black bird penetrates building structures with delayed detonation. The bloated white bird is similar to a dive bomber or ground attack aircraft.

My point is not to call out those similarities or to upset anyone. It is a successful software product executed by a 12-member team from a company with 50 or so employees. If the product were delivered as an artillery and dive bomber game, it would have lost most of its female players, which is half of its current player base. More importantly, the viral marketing effect would dissipate with halved customer demographics. (The interview with the creator, Peter Vesterbacka. http://technmarketing.com/iphone/peter-vesterbacka-maker-of-angry-birds-talks-about-the-birds-apple-android-nokia-and-palmhp/)

I played another iPhone game, Metal Core. It is almost the same type of game as Angry Birds. I believe its sales number is far less than what Angry Birds has achieved. The bird-against-pig game is not about any brand new idea that no one has done before. It is all about packaging. It will not be surprising if copycats of Angry Birds show up on iPhone App Store, since the birds are not original either.

7-inch Tablets

A lot of new tablet products are coming to the market. And they have 7-inch screens.

I have a doubt toward those 7-inch tablets. In my previous experience with those 7-inch UMPC, the most troublesome experience is to browse Internet on such a screen. The constant zooming and page sliding are annoying, to say the least. The billion pages of HTML contents on the Internet were built for laptop and desktop screens. It has been this way for the most part of Internet and it will stay that way for quite a while. For Internet devices with smaller screen like iPhone, users understand its limitation and bear with the inconvenience in exchange for its portability. Constantly re-sizing and moving browser pages on a supposedly bigger screen is defeating the purpose. Now the manufacturers are hoping to improve the portability over 10-inch tablets, yet at the expense of user experience. Is this product differentiation worthwhile?

E-reader can get by with a 7-inch screen because its contents are tailor-made for it. For tablets with this form-factor and its use cases, I cannot clearly see a consumer segment for it. For business people who are always on the road, I think they will stick with their laptops. For consumers in the living room? I, for one, will stick with 10-inch iPad, especially when it has a forward-facing camera.

Android Phone Delay

The rumor had it that the Android phone could face delays, http://www.cellular-news.com/story/31963.php.

But wait! Google immediately re-confirmed that the Android phone will be on schedule for release by the end of 2008. With T-Mobile US preparing for the launch of its first Android phone, everything seems to be on track. Then why was the rumor in the first place.

Not sure! It can be just a small marketing PR skirmish. It may be a good idea to remind people of Android amid the iPhone hype. I wrote two blogs on Android late last year and earlier this year. All indications pointed to the year end of 2008 as the earliest time frame for Android phones to join the market. In a way and in my opinion, Google has the easier part of creating an Android phone. Linux is part of Google's culture and it is not the first time for the Android team to put Java on top of an operating system. The manufacturers are taking the hard part in providing the Board Support Package (BSP) which links Android software to the underlying hardware. After all, cell phone hardware is far from being standardized as that in the PC industry.

Base on the track records of HTC and Samsung, it is a tight schedule for anything to show up for this Christmas. Nevertheless this rumor validated the marketing success of Android as press and consumers believed the "2nd half of 2008" to be July not December.

Samsung Will Have a Google Android Phone in 2009

Samsung Electronics said it hopes to have a phone based on Google's Android platform by early 2009.

This was what I expected in my blog, Google Android Is Coming to Town: "Unless LG, Samsung and Motorola make some sizable commitments soon, Android will still be a very small player in the high-end market, even by 2010." And now, Samsung seems to feel more comfortable discussing its plan for the Android platform. I would imagine there is a hardware prototype floating around at Samsung, ready for review and software integration on top of it.

However, Samsung did not give any detail regarding the form factor, phone features, target consumer segment(s), price range, or geographical market focus. Samsung did not say whether it will be an Android for announcement or for sale by that 2009 time line, either. Usually, an announcement like this would have been accompanied by one of those details to entice the market or to distract competitors. Since it did not elaborate on any of these, I am guessing this prototype is really just a prototype to conceptually prove Android's capability.

I'd like to give Samsung more credit at this moment. Samsung was able to capitalize on Motorola's weakness the most during last year and that was a job well done. Like I said, if the market momentum shows for the Android platform in the near future, it is Samsung that has the logistics to ramp up volume, which is something the Android community should be contemplating.

Google Android Is Coming to Town

Google formally joined the cell phone industry by announcing its Android.

On November 5, 2007, Google announced Open Platform for Mobile Devices, so called Android platform. A week later, Google announced the Android Developer Challenge and released Android SDK.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Android is just a few words on paper right now and it is hard to make any comparison. This statement has certain truth in it than just a defensive spin. Among the one billion annual global shipment of cell phone handsets today, a little more than 12% of them are smart phones. It took Microsoft 10 years to reach the 12-month volume of 10 million Windows Mobile handsets in mid-2007. And for iPhone, Apple has to incorporate such a huge marketing effort hoping to achieve a similar volume target by sometime in 2008.

Now only HTC, one partner in the Open Handset Alliance, committed to ship Android based handsets in 2008. With its current capacity and potential expansion, HTC can probably ship 1 to 2 million of Android phones by end of 2008. This is assuming there is no porting and integration problem and Google has figured out all the distribution channels. Unless LG, Samsung and Motorola make some sizable commitments soon, Android will still be a very small player in the high-end market, even by 2010.

Why is that? The BOM cost of a smart phone is around $120 to $160 on average. Some really well equipped smart phones such as Apple iPhone may cost up to $200, according to street estimate. Comparing to software licensing cost, which is around $10 to $20, this industry is still a hardware and logistics play than software. If Android phones have to sell through distributors and carriers, the price will be at least $400 and hardly profitable. If Apple iPhone's price cut taught us anything, there is a price ceiling for a consumer-oriented handset. It also sets the limit on the premium that software can add. Of course, Google can always sell directly to consumer by opening its online store, Android Checkout. If that happens, it will speak loudly for Google's commitment to Android.

This is not a detraction to Android, but a reality check. If you are a developer and your focus is on Web 2.0 and the long tail, it may be worthwhile to consider Android. The Android platform may as well be the platform for Google's future consumer gadgets. In any case, it will be Google's commitment to Android that makes developer's effort worth. For the rest of us in the cell phone industry, there are too many things to improve and compete on. One more Android will not make the Borg cube collapse but more to assimilate.