mobile phones

ᔥ NZ Herald

I blogged about the Chris Hipkins’ Standard with regard to Board Appointments. Well Chippie has been at it again, creating another level to “The Hipkins Standard”:

“The fact that these people are going ahead and downloading huge amounts of data suggests a certain laissez-faire attitude to spending public money.”

Hipkins said most hotels and airports provided free WiFi, which should be used instead of the internet on smart phones.

“If they are downloading a work-related app then that’s fine but if it’s the latest version of the Angry Birds then that’s not something they should be doing on mobile phones.”

Did Phil Goff use parliamentary services provided bandwidth to download his version of Angry Birds?

I might have some sympathy with Hipkins’ claims if he would open up the communications costs for Labour MPs. Yet again we see why the Parliamentary Services expenditure must be opened up to the OIA.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

David Shearer thinks we should be more like Finland…there are some appealing aspects to this…the hot chicks…the naked beer runs…and top rifles they make…but it isn’t all good news out of Finland:

Samsung Electronics has ended Nokia’s 14-year leadership of the global mobile phone market in the first quarter of the year, outselling the struggling Finnish handset maker for the first time ever, according to a Reuters poll of analysts.

The poll showed analysts on average expect Samsung to have sold 88 million mobile phones in January through March, surpassing the 83 million which Nokia sold in the quarter.

Nokia had announced the sales total on Wednesday when it warned of losses from the phones business in the first and second quarter. Samsung is due to release quarterly numbers on April 27.

Nokia has struggled for several years in the smartphone race, but its dominance in the lower end of the market has allowed it to keep its rank as the world’s largest mobile maker by volume.

The fall of the Finnish firm has been rapid over the last few months as in a similar poll in January it was still expected to stay far ahead of Samsung.

“After 14 years as the largest global mobile phone maker, getting knocked off the top spot will come as a bitter blow to Nokia,” said Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight, who has followed the industry since the 1990s.

“In contrast it will be greeted with euphoria by Samsung – they’ll be dancing from the boardroom to the factory floor,” Wood said.

ᔥ Boing Boing

A few years back all the cool kids had a Blackberry…they were so popular and addictive they were even nicknamed Crackberrys.

However now when people pull out a Blackberry those of us with iPhones look down on them with pity….sometimes you can even hear the pity…ahhh…ohhh. Likewise RIM’s stock has dropped and the company is now an also ran in the handset market. Basically they fell off a cliff:

I think there are three factors that help create The Cliff. First, there is the replacement cycle. The average replacement cycle for mobile phones in year 2000 was 21 months. By year 2006 it was down to 18 months. Today it is 16 months (all handsets). For smartphones it is even faster, at 11.5 months. A car is replaced something like every 3 or 4 years on average. A TV set once every 7 years. A personal computer every 3 and a half years. But mobile phones are replaced every year and a half, smartphones replaced every year (on average).

So if you have a bad model car, and your sales suffers because of it, you will not lose all your loyal customers in a year or two, because many of your customers have last year’s model and are happy with it, and will not even come to your car dealership until two years from now to consider the replacement model, by which time you have had plenty of time to fix the problems with your current car model.

In mobile phones we do not have that luxury. The pace is so fast. And note that the rate of the collapse due to The Cliff is actually accelerating. This also suggests the replacement cycle and The Cliff are related.

Apparently some genius German workers have cut a deal with their bosses to stop getting management emails on their Blackberrys after hours:

The tyranny of the out-of-hours email from the boss has plagued workers the world over ever since the introduction of the BlackBerry.

Now, after years of subjugation, one group of workers has struck a blow for freedom: 1000 employees of the German car giant Volkswagen.

In a move designed to restore the sacred Teutonic concept of “feierabend” – strictly no work out of factory hours – the vehicle maker’s works council, backed by its most powerful trade union, this year struck an agreement with the company that from now on email will be disabled for the selected BlackBerry-equipped staff when they are not in the office.

These employees now receive emails only from half an hour before the start of working hours and half an hour after they end. They can still receive and make phone calls.

Hans-Joachim Thust, a workers’ spokesman, suggested that mobile phones and BlackBerry handsets could disrupt family life and lead to employee burn-out. “The new possibilities of communication also contain inherent dangers.”

Volkswagen staff were said to have become fed up with being treated as if they were permanently available to their bosses. There were reports of employees having romantic evenings or a relaxing bath disrupted by infuriating management messages.

As is usual from a race of people who don’t even have a word for fluffy, they have over engineered the solution. Why couldn’t these cunning German workers simply have turned off the phone?

IWI = I Want It

Same as iwi.

This has a Whaleoil IWI rating of 5 out of 5.

from Mashable

So what does the PlayBook have to offer? It turns out, quite a lot. Featuring a 7″ screen (much like the newSamsung Galaxy Tab), the PlayBook sports a 1Ghz dual-core processor, has 1GB of RAM, and touts the ability to multi-task and run Flash 10.1.

To a large extent, the PlayBook looks like it’s a showcase of RIM’s acquisition of QNX. QNX Neutrino is the base of the new OS.

RIM is selling this as the first “enterprise-ready” professional tablet.

Check out the specs:

• 7″ LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support.
• BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing.
• 1 GHz dual-core processor.
• 1 GB RAM.
• Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording.
• Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV.
• Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA.
• HDMI video output.
• Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n.
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.
• Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts.
• Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe.
• Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java.
• Ultra thin and portable.
• Measures 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm).
• Weighs less than a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g).
• Additional features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook will be shared on or before the date this product is launched in retail outlets.

RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future.