AllThingsD » mobile platform

PlayPhone Creates $10 Million Ad Budget to Promote Other Developers' Apps

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:30:41 +0000

PlayPhone says it will spend $10 million to promote other developers’ mobile games. In return, the San Jose, Calif.-based company is hoping to attract more game makers to its social platform, which provides developers tools to integrate community features and virtual goods into mobile applications, similar to offerings from Ngmoco and OpenFeint. The shift to social is important for the the eight-year-old company, which historically is known for selling ringtones and other mobile content.

Want to Be Relevant Again, Nokia? Buy Palm.

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:48:00 +0000

Over the past few years, Nokia’s dominance of the smartphone market has been steadily eroded by competition from the likes of Apple (AAPL) and Research In Motion (RIMM). In its latest quarter, the company’s smartphone market share slipped to 35 percent from 41 percent.

With Motorola (MOT) and HTC building some compelling new Android devices and a new iPhone presumably on the way, there’s no telling what Nokia’s market share will be this time next year. The company desperately needs a worthy super-smartphone contender (it’s clearly not the N900 or N97) or it will end up reducing forecasts for market share and profitability in perpetuity.

So what should Nokia do? Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair has a suggestion.

Nokia should buy Palm (PALM)–for its webOS operating system and for the guy who quarterbacked its development, CEO Jon Rubinstein. And then the company should abandon its Symbian and Maemo operating systems–Blair dismisses them as “inferior” and “lacking polish and smoothness”–and build just a handful of smartphones, all based on Palm’s webOS.

“You need each other,” Blair explains in an open letter to Nokia’s leadership. “You have the manufacturing and distribution capabilities and global carrier relationships and Palm has the second best operating system behind the iPhone. Alone, it will be difficult for Palm to ramp globally and compete with the top players largely because it takes meaningful marketing dollars to ramp units across global carriers especially while you remain focused on R&D efforts. You, by yourself, will cede market share to your competitors each quarter as smartphones become a larger part of global handset sales and you fail to offer a compelling offering in that category.”

Continuing his evaluation, Blair says, “I know you said you expect flat market share in 2010 but that isn’t going to happen if you don’t act. I think you could lose 10% of your share by the end of 2010 to your competition, taking your global share under 30%. However, together, as a unified company the two of you would rock the foundation of the handset industry and create real worry for your competition because each of you bring critical elements to the table that the other lacks and you would be a powerful force complimenting each other’s strengths and addressing the other’s weaknesses.”

As Blair notes, stateside carriers might not have been so quick to dismiss the N900 and N97 if they had run webOS. And developers might not be so hesitant to write apps for webOS if the market for them was as vast as Nokia’s. Finally, with Palm’s market cap at around $1.6 billion and Nokia’s at nearly $50 billion, the Finnish phone maker could easily figure out a way to finance an acquisition.

Interesting proposal, yeah? Tough to see Nokia adopting it, though. The company has been pushing Maemo pretty hard lately. And it wasn’t so long ago that it invested some $410 million in Symbian and released it as a royalty-free open mobile platform. It seems unlikely that the company would simply dump it now. Even more unlikely when you consider that Symbian is by far the world’s leading smartphone software platform.

But you never know. Anything’s possible. And remember, it wasn’t so long ago that Nokia was making rubber boots.

UPDATE: Looks like Blair’s assessment of Palm’s market cap is off, and by quite a bit. The company’s fully diluted shares number at least 236 million. With Palm shares trading at $11.73 as I write this, the company’s market cap is $2.7 billion, not $1.6 billion as Blair suggests.

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Nokia Buy Palm? Riiiiight.

Intel Inside Nokia Someday

John Paczkowski — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:42:06 +0000

“We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers,” Intel CFO Stacy Smith told Bloomberg earlier this year. “We’re lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line.”

Well, the ambushes to which Smith referred appear to have finally paid off: Intel (INTC) has landed a deal to develop chips with Nokia (NOK).

During a conference call this morning, Intel senior mobility VP Anand Chandrasekher announced a deal that will see the two companies developing something they ambiguously describe as a “new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks.” Under its terms, they will work together on several open-source mobile Linux software projects and Intel will license Nokia’s high speed packet access technology.

“This Intel and Nokia collaboration unites and focuses many of the brightest computing and communications minds in the world, and will ultimately deliver open and standards-based technologies, which history shows drive rapid innovation, adoption and consumer choice,” Chandrasekher said in a statement. “With the convergence of the Internet and mobility as the team’s only barrier, I can only imagine the innovation that will come out of our unique relationship with Nokia. The possibilities are endless.”

The deal is a big win for Intel, whose last dalliance with the cellphone market ended in ignominy. The computing landscape is shifting from PCs to mobile devices and Intel must shift along with it in order to grow its business. And right now, 90 percent of its sales are PC-related. With the global market for cellphones at 1.2 billion units per year and growing, according to ABI Research, the chipmaker must figure out a way to dominate cellphones the way it has PCs. Allying with Nokia is one way of achieving that. But when will we see the first Intel-powered Nokia device? Intel and Nokia won’t say. “This is about technology collaboration and a licensing agreement,” Chandrasekher said in reply to repeated questions on the matter. “We are not commenting on specific products today, I’ll leave it at that. When we are ready to talk about products, we will.”

Incidentally, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was a speaker at our D7 conference. A video highlights reel of his appearance, below.

[ See post to watch video ]

Does Android Dream of Developer Sheep, Redux

John Paczkowski — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:02:55 +0000

With the release of the first device to support Google’s Android mobile operating system less than a day away and a second already in development at Motorola (MOT), Google is making good on a promise it made when Android debuted: to make the platform available under a progressive, developer-friendly open-source license. This morning Google (GOOG) and the Open Handset Alliance announced the Android Open Source Project, which allows anyone to use, modify and redistribute the Android source code under the Apache license. By doing so, Google hopes to build a thriving developer community around the platform, one that will use it to build an ecosystem of applications and new devices. “Our plan is a launching point for a much more vibrant open-source community,” said Rich Miner, vice president of Google’s mobile platforms business. “For the past almost four years, this has been a large effort between Google and our partners. There have been a lot of people working on the code, but that’s going to be multiplied by several orders of magnitude.”

Of course, there’s a danger in that: code forking. With so many developers working on Android’s code–all with unique views of what it is and what it should do–there’s a possibility that the platform could fragment into multiple versions spread across innumerable vertical devices. A confusing prospect for consumers. Google aims to combat this with a nonfragmentation agreement that asks developers not to “modify [the Android code] in noncompatible ways.” While that should prevent some developers from forking Android’s code, it surely won’t prevent all of them.

[Image Credit: Rich Dellinger]

Android Invasion

John Paczkowski — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:00:08 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Devoid Android

John Paczkowski — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:36:09 +0000

Google’s Android mobile platform will become commercially available before year end, just as the company promised. But with one caveat: It will lack some of the features Google (GOOG) first intended. Seems that in order to get Android out the door in time for the holiday shopping season, the company has been forced to defeature it. Google has dropped planned APIs for Bluetooth and Google’s own GTalk instant-messaging service in Android 1.0, according to the Android Developers Blog. Seems there are issues with both APIs that need to be resolved before Google is comfortable releasing them into the wild, and the company couldn’t do that before the end of the year. “… We plain ran out of time,” said Android engineer Nick Pelly. “The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some cleanup before we can commit to it for the SDK. Keep in mind that putting it in the 1.0 SDK would have locked us into that API for years to come.”

Unless you simply kept it in beta for a few years like some of your other products. …

FCC Greenlights First Ad-droid Phone

John Paczkowski — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:14:59 +0000

The HTC Dream, the first handset based on Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile platform, has been given the Federal Communications Commission seal of approval. With that last hurdle cleared, the device is ready for market–though it now looks like it may arrive a bit later than expected. A short-term confidentiality request in the documentation HTC filed with the FCC suggests that the Dream will be released in November, not September.

What can we expect from this first Android device? Sadly, the HTC documentation doesn’t offer much detail. Those who claim to have seen it, however, say it will feature a trackball and a screen smaller than the one on the iPhone. They also believe it will offer access to an upcoming T-Mobile (DT) App Store similar to Apple’s (AAPL) App Store for iPhone/iPod Touch applications. The Dream will support push email, but only via Google’s Gmail service. Finally, it will use Google’s advertising platform to serve up ads based on user interests and location. Which, as far as Google is concerned, is the whole point here. “We can make more in mobile than desktop, eventually,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said recently. “The reason is because the mobile device is more targeted. Think about it: You carry your phone with you everywhere. It knows all about you. We can use that to do a very, very targeted ad. Over time, Google will make more money from mobile advertising.”

Android Invasion

John Paczkowski — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:24:57 +0000

T-Mobile will soon become the first carrier to offer a phone based on Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile platform. Well, that’s the rumor, anyway. Manufactured by HTC (HTC), the handset is said to feature a touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera and a full five-row keyboard just like the one seen in that YouTube video that’s been making the rounds (see below). It supports 3G connectivity, and, according to those who’ve allegedly seen it, the device is clearly intended to compete against Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, but is “big and bulky” in comparison.

The T-Mobile (DT) handset is expected to price out at $150 and arrive at market in September, as Digital Daily noted in June.

Apple: Wham, Bam, Thank You Fanboi

John Paczkowski — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:41:31 +0000

Holy cow! Despite some very unfortunate stumbles at launch, Apple sold one million iPhone 3Gs in its first three days on the market, according to a company press release this morning. “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.”

‘Course the original iPhone was available in just one country. Its successor is available in 21. And that broad availability makes peddling 1 million of anything, especially one of the hottest gadgets in recent memory a hell of a lot easier. A more impressive metric is the one Apple (AAPL) offered up for its new App Store today.

iPhone and iPod touch owners have downloaded more than 10 million applications since App Store debuted last week. Quite an achievement considering that App Store is the sole source of official iPhone applications, and one that suggests Apple is well on its way to establishing OS X iPhone as a powerhouse mobile platform.