I really like this Stumptown coffee place, this one is in mid-town NYC. It is so much cooler than Starbucks. Don't you love the way the people dress? And the coffee is good. uses organic milk and organic coffee, and is cheaper than those expensive ones. who needs hostile coffee snobs first thing in the morning anyway, even I am in NYC. I hope they stays cool while they become popular. OK this post is not about coffee, it is about Smartphone.
It is funny people still refer some phones as smart phone and some not. Not only the lines are blurred and the market for phone-only phones are shrinking. I think the market are moving into a new segmentation as user behaviors will determine the emergence of different categories of phone/users. In the meantime, there is the IPhone, Balckberry, Superphone, Designer phone (Rolex phone coming), Andriod phone and just phone.
In the meantime, IDC today reported a record level of smartphone shipments for the fourth quarter of 2009, when vendors shipped 54.4 million devices. That's up 39% from the same quarter a year ago, the company said. The handset company with the largest growth in 2009 was Apple. Apple's unit shipments for the year were 25.1 million, up from 13.8 mil units in 2008. The company's market share rose from 9.1% in 2008 to 14.4% in 2009, an 81.9% year-over-year increase. Blackberry finished in second place with 34.5 mi shipments for 2009, an increase of 46.2% over 2008, and a 19.8% market share.
In the latest mobile competitive game, every company is trying to take a page out of Apple's "we design and control the customer experience" playbook, and many don’t understand this is not a game for everyone. Their needs to be many preconditions and one need to understand the behavioral economics of their consumers. Google has finished working on a phone that they want to control the total customer experience, It is a super phone (either produced by LG or Samsung I think) and competing with HTC?
The coming battle of the superphones will be joined by Sony Ericsson Xperia 10, what they have in common are large screens and plenty of horsepower. The HTC Bravo resembles the Nexus One, except for a few changes. It has a 3.7-inch screen with 800x480 pixel resolution and a 5-megapixel camera. For these phones, battery life is an issue. So bigger screens, higher pixel and higher quality camera, Wi-Fi and what else? At what point it stops being a phone?
Today AT&T said it will start allowing SlingPlayer to work over its 3G network on the iPhone. So you can watch your TV program redirected by SlingPlayer. The inability to use Slingplayer over 3G on the iPhone was one of the big issues with the iPhone and now iPad.
Being able to leverage my already expensive cable bill to provide content onto a portable device makes far more sense than additional subscriptions, video purchases, etc. The Slingbox Solo only costs about $140 and with that I cab watch Flashpoint on my iPhone, may be not, definitely the iPad.
