by amol on May 15, 2012 in The New Mass Market
Baidu announced their own fork of Android today.
Alibaba already has theirs — complete with phones.
So does Amazon.
Why do they do it? Because, as the Baidu guy says, to reach the mass market you want to low-price your phones, and to make money “You don’t need a lot of power, just the ability to connect to the Internet because we are shifting the computing from the terminal back to the cloud.”
Peek is there. The question for emerging OEMs like ZTE and Micromax and MyPhone who seek to topple Nokias and Samsungs — where are they?
permalink →
by amol on May 8, 2012 in Peeky News
That was 2006 on that chart.
Today a lot of those names are dead. Mediatek is bigger, perhaps by half, and Spreadtrum has doubled, and there is Mstar.
The last few days they’ve been telling us how the Global China Ecosystem is doing as they release earnings and guidance.
The answer: Team China is killing everybody
Mstar — the smallest — beat by a lot
Spreadtrum — beat and raised
Mediatek — notwithstanding lots of competition — is up on volume and revenue — their smartphones in particular are already double the projections from a year ago and up 50% from 60 days ago
This is all because the mobile market keeps growing so fast, and because the middle-pack players keep losing. Sure Apple and Qualcomm are riding high — but middling players like Nokia or LG and TI or Infineon are falling further behind.
permalink →
by mazen on May 2, 2012 in Peeky News
At the end of 2011, Android had nearly 70% (68.4%) of the smartphone market share. This came mostly at the expense of Nokia’s Symbian. With Nokia rolling out it’s Lumia series and now that Apple finally has a deal with China Unicom, we might see these numbers change… but I doubt it. Android simply owns the low-end and Apple and Samsung with split the high-end. All that would be left are scraps for Nokia and the other players.
permalink →
by mazen on April 30, 2012 in Peeky News
Our partner Micromax who just launched a sub-$100 Android phone… and it is surprisingly capable for a phone this price!
Meet the A50
- $95
- 3.1″ screen
- Capacitive screen!
- 650 MHz processor
- 2.0 Megapixel camera
- GPS
- HSPA
- Bluetooth
- Wifi b/g/n
This phone would have been able to go head to head in the market with the HTC Magic which came out less than 3 years ago (3.2″ screen, 528MHz processor, 3.0 Megapixel camera, HSPA, Bluetooth, Wifi b/g only). Here’s the difference, the Magic launched at a price point ~5x higher than that of the A50.
We’re witnessing what happened to the PC industry repeat itself here – except the changes are happening at a significantly quickened pace:
Nokia’s ASP declined 18% from 40 to 33 Euros for featurephones. Those numbers also not indicative of end-consumer prices which are usually 50% higher. One could argue Nokia is ailing and is not representative of the industry. I’d argue that that’s exactly why they’re a good example: It is the likes of Micromax that have been inflicting blow after blow to the largest players – and winning.
Using the power of the cloud and services like Peek, they’re coming after your fat margins in the smartphone space.
permalink →
by amol on April 30, 2012 in The New Mass Market
There have been a few waves of Internet players pushing to the ends of the Earth.
When Yahoo or Google were the rising kings of the web, there were lots of projects to put them on basic phones — it gave us the WAP browser for visiting a basic Yahoo homepage, and the search box for using Google. AIM was promoted widely via SMS or Java app at some stage. Email made it onto all phones, mostly via terrible email clients and partly through really good Blackberry, Apple, Android (and Peek) clients.
The present wave is social — so it makes sense that Facebook is pushing to have its interface installed on the phones at the far reaches of the world. People in these places want it too — the only missing ingredient has been a technology that made it possible.
That’s where our apps and cloud platform have been busy. We do the hard work in the cloud and put native, ultra light apps onto basic phones, some costing as little as $15 for a simple bar phone with color screen, 2G data and a camera. Pretty amazing how inexpensive these have become.
A perfectly usable little social app for bar phones:
permalink →
