Displaying items by tag: Nokia

The Black Hat conference is happening right now in Sin City and already there is news coming out of the gather that should send chills down the spine of many smartphone owners. Apparently it is dead simple to exploit the NFC (Near Field Communications) found on Nokia and Samsung Products (this also extends to the NFC that will be in Apple’s devices when they are launched later this year). If you trot around with your NFC feature enabled someone can gain control of your phone by simply brushing a properly prepared tag against it.

As we near the launch of two new phones the rumors are building again around a Facebook phone (dubbed the Facephone by many). This is a rumor is something we have covered on more than one occasion and while we still think that it would be a flop (for many reasons) the rumors are interesting when we take a look at their origins and the companies they involve. The latest one involves HTC as the potential partner with Android as the base OS. It comes on the heels of new information about the team of developers that Facebook has picked up from Apple and Palm.

Nokia is laboring under some false expectations with their Lumia phones and the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8. It seems that despite the lack of market share and a dubious demand for Windows Phone in general they feel that building exclusive deals with carriers is the way to go. We find this very odd considering that the numbers they have now are only due to the proliferation of Windows Phone 7 based Lumias in the market. If they were restricted to single carriers in every market they would not have the 10.9 million units shipped that they have now.

There are a few laws that govern a modern market. One of the most basic is the law of supply and demand. If there is a short supply and a high demand prices will tend to go up. This is because the people that want these products are willing to pay more to get them. Apple is a master of this and calculates their launches to take advantage of this. On the other side of this coin is plentiful supply and low demand. Here, well you can imagine that people will do whatever they can to clear inventory.

We have been following Apple’s free run through the patent office for quite a while now (and I covered it long before starting this site). In the beginning Apple would patent advancements or refinements on technology they “borrowed” from others. Often these improvements were so noticeable that they were close to being a new technology. Even Steve Jobs once admitted to shamelessly stealing the ideas of others. What they were not doing at the time was using the patent system as a tool to stifle competition and they had not built the mythology that they invent everything just yet.

There is an interesting item that has popped up on the internet. It seems that Nokia is concerned about Asus and Google’s new tablet, the Nexus 7. What makes this very interesting is the timing for Nokia coming forward and bringing this to light. According to a statement made by Nokia (and originally reported by The Inquirer) Nokia is not going so far as to file a law suit, but they do encourage both Asus and Google to get in touch… soon.

Microsoft knows that it cannot compete directly in the smart phone OS marketplace. If you need any real proof of this just look at the sales numbers and the adoption rates of iOS and Android over Windows Pone in the business market. The problem is that Microsoft did not innovate fast enough as the market shifted. They had the leading product, but once there was real competition in the form of iOS and Android they failed to capitalize on it and instead embarked on a series of products that hurt them very badly dropping them down to a low of just under 2% for market share.

Despite the buzz over Google and Asus’ new Nexus 7 tablet there is still a lot of talk about Microsoft and their new Windows 8 combined push. Over the past week we have read a few very enlightening articles that tell us a lot more about the state of Windows 8 (RT and Phone) than is being publicly talked about. Right after surface there were several articles where analysts explored the possibility that Microsoft might be considering building their own phone in the same manner that they built the surface tablet.

Two days ago we wrote an article about how NPE (Non-Practicing Entities) are hurting the economy and small businesses. Our article was based on a report that was put together by the Boston University School of Law which showed that the use of NPEs in patent lawsuits cost $29 Billion in direct costs. Despite this many companies are moving to this model as a method of protection from patent lawsuits. We have seen Microsoft and Nokia do this and it seems that Qualcomm is splitting their business into two entities now too.

One of the things that has always bothered us is the continual lack of improvement in the smartphone market in the US. Although we get to read about new technologies for “world” phones and drool over the latest products from companies like Samsung and HTC which sport quad core SoCs (System on Chip) under their screens when they finally reach the US market they are shadows of what people are getting in other markets.