Posted on February 18, 2009, at 8:51 am .
Recently, major mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola and Samsung agreed to produce a standardized charger for the industry. The companies will be switching to mini USB, the same standard charger as the BlackBerry. I know exactly how that meeting went:
“Guys, we need a standard char…McDonnel! Pay attention, we’re having a meeting here.”
“Sorry sir, my BlackBerry died and I’m looking for the charger.”
“Here you go McDonnel. I borrowed this from Frank in HR.”
“Wait a minute…”
[Via]
Posted on December 16, 2008, at 6:07 pm .
Samsung has made a play to improve their enterprise market share today, naming former RIM executive Marcus Stone as the head of Smartphones UK and Ireland. Stone had held several sales and marketing positions during his seven years at RIM. Derek Williamson, Samsung’s general manager, while announcing the new hire, also addressed the need to specifically target the enterprise market.
Williamson said: ‘As we grow more rapidly within the UK smartphone market, it is critical that we assign more time and focus on this sector. We already have an exciting smartphone portfolio with an extensive range, and we have plenty more to come with some incredible products planned for next year.’
I guess there is more than one reason why RIM is hiring.
|via MobileToday|
Posted on November 19, 2008, at 11:18 am .
File this under: interesting to follow, but not going to happen. Spansion, the number 3 worldwide maker of flash memory chips, has sued Samsung, the Samsung is the world’s biggest memory chip maker, citing patent infringement.
“Spansion has patents that are fundamental to flash memory. Samsung itself has cited these patents many times in its own patent filings, underscoring industry acceptance of the fundamental nature of Spansion’s (intellectual property),” Robert Melendres, Spansion’s general counsel, said in a statement.
This story gets interesting, however, when it is noted that Spansion also wants to block all U.S. sales of BlackBerrys, iPods and many other electronics because they use Samsung chips. Spansion claims more than “100 million mp3 players, cell phones, digital cameras and other consumer electronic devices” are made with Samsung flash memory chips that violate Spansion patents. While it is highly unlikely that we’ll see a hold in BlackBerry sales due to this lawsuit, it will be interesting to see how much Samsung will pay to make this go away, and if that cost will be passed down to the consumer — namely, us.
|via IntoMobile|
Posted on November 7, 2008, at 5:50 pm .
Posted on August 11, 2008, at 10:12 am .
Strategy Analytics (hey, we know those guys!) recently published a report saying RIM has captured a solid 10% of American cellular sales in the last quarter. A total of 41.9 million handsets were shipped, which is up 5.3 percent from last year, making it an expanding market that’s getting harder to fill. Motorola still maintains lead position, with LG, Nokia and Samsung hot on their heels. Those are a lot of competitors to chew through, but RIM’s continued upward trend could earn them an even bigger slice of the pie over time, especially if Motorola’s new boss can’t turn things around and Nokia fails to provide a solid alternative to BlackBerry Connect. LG remains the number two dog right now, and with the likes of the Keybo floating around, it’s easy to see them as a potential BlackBerry competitor.
(via Reuters)
Posted on January 24, 2008, at 1:50 pm .
A facelifted CDMA Pearl will be available on Alltel this quarter, alongside the LG Scoop and Samsung Muse. The original blue-grey one launched over the holidays, and I guess this red one’s just in time for the coming onslaught of Valentined-up handsets. For info on preorders, head on over to www.alltel.com/style.
Posted on November 14, 2007, at 12:46 pm .
Not that we’re biased towards covering this sort of thing, but User Centric has just finished a text messaging test which had iPhone, BlackBerry and Samsung E300 users send multiple messages from their devices. BlackBerry users had the best error rate, sitting at an average 2.1 errors per message followed closely by the number pad texter at 2.4 errors per message. The iPhone, however, suffered a wooping 5.6 errors per message. Youch. Expertise was a non-issue, as the error rate remained steady across all levels of iPhone experience. Speed between iPhone and BlackBerry typing was about on par, but that doesn’t do much to soothe the sting on the virtual keypad faithful.
Posted on September 21, 2007, at 7:25 am .
Metrico has recently announced that they have expanded their testing facilities sixfold, and are ready to continue doing testing for not only BlackBerrys, but for Samsung, AT&T and T-Mobile’s devices as well. Wireless testing is no small endeavor – these guys create simulated human skulls, complete with fluids, to test their effects on transmission quality. Some of Metrico’s dummies use $20,000 ears that mimic human characteristics. Yow, testing really is no joke for these guys.
Posted on September 14, 2007, at 2:38 pm .
Nokia, Samsung and a handful of other manufacturers announced yesterday that they’re looking to bring all devices together into one happy family known as Universal Flash Storage. One of the primary drivers of this new standard is to do away with the need for size adapters, which is a worthwhile cause in my books. Nokia’s setting the bar pretty high for UFS: “Today, users experience a three-minute access time for a 90-minute (4 Gigabyte) high-definition movie; with the new standard, this would be reduced to a few seconds.” Ultimately, the standard will encompass both internal and external memory across a wide range of devices. As flash storage users, BlackBerrys could very well get in on this action, at least once the standard is finalized in 2009.
Posted on June 6, 2007, at 2:42 pm .
Beatnik announced last week that they’ve come up with a way of crunching audio files down to a tenth of their previous size, making mobile audio downloads accessible to folks below the 3G line. These files can stream in faster than the playback, so they say. The big trick was finding repeated sections of the file and doubling them over on the playback, rather than downloading the duplicate section.
This service will allow more people to buy music, nailing a sweet spot between customers who can’t afford 3G phones but can afford a few bucks for music. It also means that anyone without an iPhone will have a venue for getting their tunes, and won’t have to worry too much about memory capacity. In addition to selling its software to Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and SAGEM, Beatnik’s opening up the doors to network operators, thus skipping the manufacturing middleman. Maybe Beatnik’s unnecesarily dragging out the death of older networks, but hell, anything that brings new service to a wider audience is good business.
